Gaining Guards formations

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loki100
Posts: 11699
Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2012 12:38 pm
Location: Utlima Thule

Gaining Guards formations

Post by loki100 »

I thought this might be useful as this has become a bit of a topic of debate, and indeed links to the wider issue of balance in the 1941-2 period.

I think everyone accepts that WiTE has the potential to be come unbalanced, in that there a lot of rich get richer mechanisms and few dampening rules. I personally link this to the permissive logistics in terms of the binary importance of having a near enough rail line or not. I think the game does a good job at modelling off rail supply delivery.

The thing about Gds is they are a key part to the balance for 1942. Too few and a Soviet player will get overwhelmed as they will lack either the defensive tools to lock down an offensive or the offensive tool to do their own attacks. In 1942, the Tank and Cavalry corps are incredibly useful but lack the power they will have come 1943 and later.

My assumption is that in 1941 a Soviet rifle division with 7 wins (and 4 or less defeats) will be just enough, by 1942 the threshold is 8 (& 5 losses). More is obviously better.

I think you can split the Gds creation process into about 5 phases.

a) June-end July. Since a German player will need to push hard they will have to take risks with attacks, hasty to save MPs, not as many units to keep some fresh. In this phase, even if you can only rarely strike back, you will get defensive wins;
b) August. This is a key phase. If you manage the units with wins from the early period, are ruthless in prioritising your replacement flow, you can build 3-5 armies that can use the 1941b organisation to attack. Even when the +1 rule goes, this is still going to happen, you can, briefly build 9cv stacks, use them. [1]

Note that a+b militate against a run away strategy, you need to gamble and obviously relative player skill will inform just how close to the edge you can tip toe. Looking at the data that Wheat has published for his current game my suspicion (the very low number of Soviet PoWs) is that he basically kept running rather than looking to fight.

c) September - November. Get the units with wins out of the way. They will collapse to the 1941c OOB (ie 1 maybe 2 cv), if you can marry them up with the 50+ morale Siberians that trickle in.

My feeling is that in this period you will get few if any defensive victories. The fatigue that helped up to the end of August will be less a problem to the Germans, their infantry will be at the front, a competent German player will lose few if any attacks. In my AAR with SigUp I don't think I've won a defensive battle since October as he has been very methodical.

If you are used to playing the AI, this phase is going to be a shock. The AI clearly attacks on the margins, and given the vagaries of the WiTE game engine it makes progress but the Soviets get a lot of defensive wins on the way.

d) December - Get stuck in, using those armies you constructed out of the Siberians and the units that have a decent collection of wins, the newly arriving Shock Armies give you one framework here. You should win most battles and German responses will be limited, ie you can stack wins.

e) Jan-March 42 - the problem here, with the mild winter, is in a balanced game you run the risk of trading wins and losses, so on the main front you may struggle. All you can do is to manage those units with 5-7 wins to see if you can ensure they hit 8+.

Depends on the strategic situation, if you really feel you are making long term gains, then Gds creation will take care of itself (ie Oshawatt vs Stef78), if you feel that the reason to attack is to cause damage and get Gds think about hitting where the axis is weak (ie what I ended up doing).

On this basis, its the wins in a+b that are key, c-e is sort of given (december) or very contextual, but beyond the first phase of the game don't expect (in PBEM) to get many defensive wins. A German player will be hoarding their own morale too much to risk low odds attacks unless they see an overwhelming strategic reason to do so.

[1] as an aside to those who *favour* the German side, this is pretty close to what happened at Smolensk and the follow on battles with NW Front keeping up substantial pressure on AGC's northern flank.
carlkay58
Posts: 8770
Joined: Sat Jul 24, 2010 10:30 pm

RE: Gaining Guards formations

Post by carlkay58 »

Loki, this pretty much mirrors my experience with the game now. Version 1.08 actually magnifies the importance of b - especially since it fixes the Soviet ARM squeeze that came from the way the re-orgs were handled in previous versions. A Soviet player who does the run away without a strong counter attack attempt in August will suffer the lack of Guards and put the 42 campaign result in danger.
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