RED FRONT v 1.4 *****

[Leonidas]

July 1943:

I'm still hanging in there. My troops are close to capturing Novgord, and then it's on the offensive to liberate Leningrad...

The Battle of Kursk has begun. The Tigers and Panthers are playing havoc with my forces in the area...

Stalingrad: I managed to re-take Stalingrad, but in a violent counter-offensive, the Germans re-took the city

Now only the city of Grozny stands in the way of German domination of the oil-rich Caucasus...


Question: What triggers US convoy system? Is this an event trigger? Or do I have to research something in order to access the US city just above the UK one?

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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

[Leonidas]

Nov 1943:

In a series of brutal and costly battles I have managed to re-take the cities of Leningrad, Novgorod, Luga and Stalingrad, as well as several smaller ones.

It has been a brutal slugfest... but slowly my forces have been gaining the upper hand...

A word on "cheats":

Any cheat, such as moving fortified positions into key cities to prevent their capture is really destroying the whole purpose of this wonderful scenario. By not cheating, by trying to play and fight with just the cities you start with in the game, really captures the grinding give-and-take struggle that characterized this war in the east.

It has been a long time since a game has made me feel the highs and depths of emotion as my rag-tag forces have had to come from almost certain defeat, to regain the initiative, and then to actually start to win, by re-taking Soviet cities. It took almost two years before I was able to re-take Leningrad. The thrill and satisfaction of doing so, is completely lost if I "place a fortified fort in it" to prevent its loss.

The whole purpose of Red Front, is for the player to experience the desperate, and at times, hopeless, struggle that occurred in the east. Believe me, if you play without cheats, you will have a desperate fight on your hands; and with it the thrill of victory, and the anquish of defeat...

My forces have come back from almost total defeat, and have re-taken Leningrad and Stalingrad. I can't tell you the satisfaction that has given me. It took quite a while, and I lost many units, but in a sense, it helped me to realize what the struggle in the Great Patriotic War must have been like.

To truly appreciate this scenario, it has to be played without cheats; and building fortified positions in cities is a cheat. So the AI cheats a bit - well it is still the AI - you are the thinking player - not the AI - improvise and strategize, and beat it using your wits.

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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
[This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited August 25, 2000).]

[Leonidas]

July 1944:

In a major offensive along the entire front, I have managed to liberate 13 more cities! My victorious, but battered forces now stand at the doorsteps of Poland and Germany...

It has been a long time since I played a game in which I felt such emotional highs and lows. This is a tribute to the designer and to the playtesters...

What a wonderful scenario...



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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

[Wangshibo]

For what it's worth, I found it crucial to pillage just about every road, railroad, and anything else there was time for west of the Moscow/Dniepr line, and use partisans to finish the job. Then used LOTS of navy types to keep Sevastopol free. Labor brigades turned all the land surrounding Leningrad and as many of the choke points as I could manage into minefields. A couple of new cities turned up just east of Stalingrad. And tanks, tanks, tanks from every city in the east. Industrial ex-siege cities built the Shturmovok. This was sufficient to beat the Germans conclusively out of Russia, but I was never quite up to expanding further than poland. Or beating those bloody finns.

Any suggestions for what I was doing wrong?

[Case]

Pillaging all those roads must have really slowed down your counter offencive!
Personally, I never bother with minefields- those Labour Brigades are better employed building factories and roads on the oilfields

[Kull]

I think "road pillaging" is considered a cheat in this scenario. If you think about it, taking a few hundred miles of road and returning it to raw countryside in one month just wasn't feasible at that time (not counting the spring thaw!) If you were playing against a human, at least they're smart enough to rebuild, but the AI is far too stupid.

Still, there are right ways and wrong ways to destroy a road network. A few rules of thumb:

1) Pillage ever other square. This effectively shuts down the network, but rebuilding is MUCH faster, since placing a road in one square automatically links three.

2) Don't pillage in rough terrain unless you absolutely have to. Leave the roads in hills, mountain, forest, and even minefields alone. It just takes too long to rebuild in that type of terrain, and usually you can still employ the "every other square" tactic by pillaging only the grassland/plains roads.

[Wangshibo]

Thanks! I think I felt that partisans 'should' be going around blowing up bridges and stuff, but then I'm a bit romantic about these things. I restarted a while ago and I'm now in Spring 1944, and I'm already in west poland with a large force of tanks and a couple of shturmoviks.

Still can't beat those finns...

[Eternal]

quote: The whole purpose of Red Front, is for the player to experience the desperate, and at times, hopeless, struggle that occurred in the east. Believe me, if you play without cheats, you will have a desperate fight on your hands; and with it the thrill of victory, and the anquish of defeat...

Actually it may not be true to say Stalin ever felt that his defeat was possible.

[Leonidas]

Eternal: Stalin never felt that his defeat was possible? Oh, no? It makes for very interesting study, when we read about accounts of the struggle in the east up until November 1941. By this time whole Soviet armies had been destroyed or captured (some put the number at 5,000,000 soldiers lost in the opening weeks of the invasion). Tens of thousands of planes and tanks had been destroyed. And the undefeated German armies stood within a heart's beat of Moscow. If not for some incredibly stupid decisions by Hitler (such as diverting several armoured divisions from the central Moscow front, delaying Barbarossa, remaining fixated with Leningrad and Stalingrad, brutalizing the people in the Ukraine even though they welcomed the Germans as liberators, and not getting Japan to attack the Soviet Union in the Far East to keep those 40 elite Siberian Divisions tied down, etc), things could very well have been different.

When Barbarossa first started, Stalin was in such shock, he actually locked himself away for days, before he emerged to give his country any type of leadership.

In fact the entire world expected the Soviet Union to fold within one year of the German invasion.

The opening few months of the German BlitzKrieg is captured extremely well in this scenario; the loss of so many units and cities is very disheartening. It makes one realize what the real leaders and soldiers must have felt when they encountered the same things at the beginning of the war. This is what makes this scenario so special. It captures all the highs and lows of this epic struggle...

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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
[This message has been edited by Leonidas (edited August 28, 2000).]

[Leonidas]

Wangshibo: You don't have to beat the Finns. If you're in the Spring of 1944, you should be able to negotiate a cease-fire with them. Go to the diplomacy screen and request an audience with the Finns. They should immediately offer a cease-fire with you

If you accept, that should solve at least one major headache for you

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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

[The ANZAC]

Well, I signed a peace treaty with the Finns and they broke it 2 months later! Now I'm finishing up what the Winter War started.

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"We sought to throw a raging lion ashore; what we got was a stranded whale!" -Winston Curchill on the Battle of Anzio

"Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?" -Juvenal

"I can walk!!" -Dr. Strangelove

[Case]

Leonidas, I've read that Stalin was so shocked by the German attack that when Beria and Molotov visited him in the Datcha he had fled to, he thought that they were coming to arrest him

I think that Stalin did try to put out peace feelers to the Germans via the Bulgarian goverment in 1941, but the Bulgarians refused to act as go-betweens.


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If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error
-John Kenneth Galbraith
[This message has been edited by Case (edited August 28, 2000).]

[Leonidas]

ANZAC: When did you make that peace treaty? I made peace with the Finns in the Spring of 1944, and it has remained solid ever since. I think you may have to wait until a certain date...

Case: That is an interesting piece of history you mentioned. Those were dark days, indeed...

April 1945:

My Soviet forces have liberated all of the Soviet Union, and they now stand poised on the Polish and German borders.

I have met with fanatical resistance from German forces, and they have been hammering away at me for the past couple of months.

I am building up my forces, and come the Spring, I intend to launch a great offensive to drive back the defending Germans and seize the capitol of Germany: Berlin.


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Go tell the Spartans, passerby:
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

[Captain Nemo]

It is very nice to see that my scenario still has some life left in it... So many scenarios just dissappear into oblivion after they are released which is quite disheartening to the designers who spent so many hours on them.

I am thankful to all you scenario players who have kept Red Front alive for this long!

[The ANZAC]

Leonidas- The Finns were asking for peace in the spring of '44, but I wanted to retake the Karelia, so I waited and then I signed. 2 months later the sneak-attacked and luckily their attack forces got wiped out, and then I launched a major counter-offensive and now I have every single city, but Kuopio and that is surronded and empty, I just ran out of movement points.

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"We sought to throw a raging lion ashore; what we got was a stranded whale!" -Winston Curchill on the Battle of Anzio

"Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?" -Juvenal

"I can walk!!" -Dr. Strangelove