'Tanks, more tanks, Tovarish!' - Red Star Review and Discuss

[bebro]

If you lose the campaign ends (with few exceptions, but none in RS) but nobody stops you from retrying again from an earlier savegame of that campaign. If you win then the campaign goes on.

The game generates campaign saves between scenarios (before you progress to the next battle in the campaign), but you can save manually as well at any point.

Other than the core units staying with you the main difference is that resource management is much more important. That affects both what to buy/upgrade, and how you reinforce.

[PoorOldSpike]

If you lose the campaign ends (with few exceptions, but none in RS) but nobody stops you from retrying again from an earlier savegame of that campaign..

Thanks mate, I shall psyche myself up to take the plunge into the labyrinth of campaign play, unwinding a ball of string as I go..

[PoorOldSpike]

I just compiled these two charts to help me see at a glance which planes to purchase to take on the Luftwaffe..
(Anybody can feel free to copy/save them or print them out)

[bru888]

Now that I've cut my teeth on Red Star's 13 standalone scens and- ahem- won them all, I'm thinking of trying the campaign.
I dabbled in campaigns with some of the other DLC's about a year ago but didn't like the way the computer told me I'd lost the campaign early on, so I had to restart a whole new campaign from scratch, grrrr..
Don't all you campaign buffs mind when that happens to you?
It means you'll never get to play later scenarios doesn't it?

It's designer's choice as to what happens when a player loses a scenario. The designer can choose to go to campaign Defeat or he can have the player restart the scenario or go someplace else. Red Star's designer chose Defeat. Certainly we campaign buffs mind but there is something we can do about it.

This is an image of my SaveGames folder:

Image0023.jpg (228.75 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

Focus on the top three files for a moment. These are files that the game automatically generates; I believe "Auto Save" happens when the AI is finished with its moves and "Auto Save (Turn End)" is just that, when your turn is over and you have clicked the hourglass to end your turn. The file named "(Campaign)" gets refreshed when the scenario ends. (When you play a campaign, all of these files are appended with the campaign name; "[Red Star]" in this case.)

I have highlighted two of those files for a reason. At the end of each successfully played scenario, I have renamed those files in order to preserve them (the game makes new ones as necessary). So "Auto Save (Turn End)" became "Auto Save (Scenario X)" and "(Campaign)" became "(Campaign - Scenario X)." What's the point? Well, to your question, if I lose the current scenario, I just go back and call up the previous "(Campaign - Scenario X)" file.

So for example, if I am getting my head handed to me in the current scenario, I might go back to before it started by loading this file, the one that was created after I prevailed in the last scenario:

Screenshot 2.jpg (129.7 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

I could also choose to go back to earlier stages of the campaign and try to play the intervening scenarios better so as to have more goodies or resources. Note as well that I have two special-use saved files: "Deployment" and "Manual Save." I may want to save the scenario at certain points, one of which could be the deployment stage and another could be at a crucial decision point. Those you can just save manually as "Deployment" or "Manual Save."

There you have the flexibility of saving a campaign in such a manner as to avoid "so I had to restart a whole new campaign from scratch, grrrr. [sniff]"

While I am filling up the forum with a lot of gratuitous information, I might as well throw in these two tidbits.

First, don't use this option, in case you happen to see it, unless you want the game to auto-save every individual turn. That ends up being a lot of files:

Screenshot 1.jpg (68.55 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

Second, and this is important to you Spike as you contemplate whether to play scenarios independently of the campaign, this number here is critical in that regard:

Screenshot 3.jpg (73.27 KiB) Viewed 2609 times

This is the "Extra compensation resource points given to human players due to the absence of core units if the scenario is played in stand-alone mode outside of a campaign." I have seen campaigns in which this number is not even entered. In that case, it really is not possible to play the associated scenarios independently. OOB's DLC has always had these numbers but I would venture to say that they are somewhat difficult to calculate, and they can vary and seem arbitrary.

[PoorOldSpike]

Thanks for the Campaign clarifications Bebro and Bru but the "resource management" side of Campaigns dampens my enthusiasm, I still haven't a clue what that '1400' number is all about; I'm just a grunt wargamer not an accountant..

[Erik2]

Campaign scenarios usually need some editing to be playable as stand-alone.
The 1400 is the amount of resources added when playing this scenario as stand-alone.
There's no additional resource management as a player, just design-wise.

[PoorOldSpike]

Campaign scenarios usually need some editing to be playable as stand-alone.
The 1400 is the amount of resources added when playing this scenario as stand-alone.
There's no additional resource management as a player, just design-wise.

Thanks, I've played all 13 Red Star scenarios and they were very enjoyable, I won 11 at the first attempt but the other two needed more than 1 attempt.
In all of them I concentrated on the Primaries which meant I often didn't get all the Secondaries too, but now I'm going to play them all again and try to achieve ALL the Prims and Secs, sounds fun..

PS- Hey has anybody else played all 13 standalones yet? It'd be interesting to know how many victories/ defeats you got (level III med difficulty)

[PoorOldSpike]

RED STAR CHRONOLOGY

Aug 1938- LAKE KHASAN v Japs
Sept 1939- GRODNO v Poles
July 1939- KHALKIN-GOL Japs attack
Aug 1939- KHALKIN-GOL Zhukov's attack v Japs
Dec 1st 1939- KARELIA v Finns
Dec 22nd 1939- SUMMA 39 v Finns
________________________
Feb 1940- SUMMA 40 v Finns
Mar 1940- VIIPURI v Finns
_______________________
June 1941- RASEINIAI v Germans
July 1941- SMOLENSK v Germans
Aug 1941- YELNYA v Germans
Nov 1941- ROSTOV v Germans
Dec 1941- MOSCOW v Germans

[bebro]

Looks like you selected the time travel specialisation in 1939

[CoolDTA]

RED STAR CHRONOLOGY

Karelia is not on the list?

[CoolDTA]

I finished Red Star and here are some notes from the last missions:

11. Yelnya, first planned Soviet offensive of the war near Smolensk

The safest way to play this is to do the same as Spike did (see his earlier post) i.e. use you superior numbers to crush the enemy frontally. What I did was a large pincer movement from north (Suyetovo) and south (Saveyevo) with the pincers meeting in the western edge. This will give the Germans supply shortage which only gets worse as you occupy more supply sources. In the south I had an engineer to build a pontoon bridge over the river. The possible problem with this tactics is the secondary objective of destroying 3 armoured units in 12 turns because your tanks are in the process of encircling the enemy and not where the enemy vehicles are. So it may be a bit of a gamble. However, I was barely able to make it with a desperate push on turn 12 (sorry aux guys ). The rest was just mopping up and being a bit sad I didn't have Forced Labour -spec. Luftwaffe is weak here - use it to your advantage.

12. Rostov, first liberation of a bigger Soviet city, albeit only temporarily

Surprising to see a very easy scenario so late in the campaign. I deployed some elite forces near Rostov to eject the enemy out. The rest were deployed along the Debaltsevo (NW) - Shakty (SE) paved road which gives a good defensive line with excellent interior lines to move your units where needed. The enemy attack against Rostov is weak and you can quite quickly beat it back and start your own counter offensive to take the secondaries. Main enemy attacks are directed against the NW - SE line mentioned earlier, but these too are not powerful enough against your entrenched infantry, tanks and artillery. It doesn't take too long before you can take the initiative here also. There are not much enemy units in other parts of the map and I ended up doing "The Gabe", so Tabula Rasa it was. My fighters are beginning to gain on Luftwaffe's advantage though the Germans are still a bit better.

13. Moscow, player has to stop German attacks, then lead the Soviet counter-offensive

Grande Finale. It is good to play this from the other side (cf. Blitzkrieg). Neither is particularly difficult because you have elite troops at your disposal. I put more units in both flanks than in the center just like the briefing sort of suggests. In SE corner the idea was to quickly dispatch the enemy units thereby freeing units to be used elsewhere. This worked very well. The strongest enemy attacks come from Klin (north) and towards Kaluga ("southish") so your tanks can be put to good use in these areas. In the middle the attacks are sporadic and don't pose much of a threat. After a while you should have bled the enemy white and can begin your counter offensive. You get some CPs and RPs to help you and some of Moscow's defenders are put under your command. I'm sure I could have cleaned the map in the allotted 30 turns but the battle ended at the end of turn 19 (early victory) so I didn't. Luftwaffe has a lot of planes, but so have you. When destroying enemy armour, it is advisable to quickly take out one Pz IIIJ.

My core at the end of the campaign:

Infantry: 2 x marines, one each of heavy, guards, paratroops, engineers
Armour: 5 x T-34/41, 2 x KV-1/41, Pz.Kpfw. III J
Arty: 5 x 122mm A-19
Misc: BA-10 recon, 57mm AT, 37mm AA
Air: 4 x YaK-1 fighter, 2 x Il-2 tac bomber, 1 x R-5 recon
Not deployed: 45mm AT, Pz.Kpfw. 38 (t), DB-3 str bomber, R-5 recon

Red Star is a very good DLC and well balanced. It is also probably the first one in which all the objectives and rewards work without a fault so kudos to the devs. Using all those commanders to boost the AI was an interesting feature. I guess it will be used in parts two and three also.

Two wishes for the next parts:

A new commander:



New unit (I really liked the Gebirgsjägers):

[PoorOldSpike]

Looks like you selected the time travel specialisation in 1939

Karelia is not on the list?

It is now..
(Er...please don't mention it to nanny or it's the naughty step for me)
Hey you Campaign players, It's been about 2 years since I last dabbled in OOB's campaigns and I'm rusty but I just somehow won the first battle in the Red Star camp (Lake Khasan) by achieving all Prims and Secs, but I think it's going to get harder from now on, so remind me will you-
1- It's best to let our Aux forces get slaughtered rather than our Core units, right?
2- Unspent resource points carry over to the next battle, right?

Anything else I might need to know for when I have to hold jerry at the gates of Moscow?

[CoolDTA]

1- It's best to let our Aux forces get slaughtered rather than our Core units, right?
2- Unspent resource points carry over to the next battle, right?

Anything else I might need to know for when I have to hold jerry at the gates of Moscow?

1. Yes. But especially in Red Star it is also worth it to repair them with regulars to keep them in the fight for longer because a) it is cheap, b) you get 50% refund of the RPs used to repair aux units.

2) They do. Be mindful to have some - or rather more.

Well, I did give some tips in my two AARs earlier in this thread. Check out all of them as a matter of fact (Bru's, Andy's, Spike's ). Of specialisations the various Schools are not the ones I would choose (or did). Go for the ones giving you more command points first. Unused spec points also carry on to the next battle(s).

EDIT: A bit more:

Try to keep the amount of upgrades at minimum. For this dlc my recommendations are for tanks BT-7 or OT-130 (flametank) -> T-34 and for fighters I-16 -> YaK-1.

If you have the points, use elite reinforcements except for artillery. Highly starred units are more powerful and what is especially important more resilient -> less losses. Some ppl say just the opposite i.e. use regulars. Funny enough they tend to have problems with the amount of RPs... An exception: five star units. They won't get any better so it is ok to use regulars for them at that point.

Limit your losses. Use all the turns and don't rush. Suppress the enemy before attacking. Often you don't want to attack with a core unit if prediction is 0+ losses. Maybe using an aux unit first or waiting a turn (esp. if the enemy is cut off) makes the prediction 0 losses. Note that in case of 0+ prediction a highly starred unit often takes 0 losses while rookie unit takes 1. Resilience.

[PoorOldSpike]

KIEV or MOSCOW?
Here's some reading material for the weekend, Hitler and Guderian's differing views about whether to go for the Kiev encirclement or Moscow in 1941-

[PoorOldSpike]

BEWARE THE UNRELIABLE TRAIT
A guy said earlier that he bought a KV-1 and got a shock when it kept breaking down, and he later found out it was because it had the 'Unreliable trait'.
The good news is that only two Russian vehicles in the game have the trait, namely the 'KV-1 m1940' and the 'SU-76', so steer clear of them and buy the other versions, namely the 'KV-1 m1941' and 'SU-76M'
(Obviously our friend mistakenly bought a 'KV-1 m1940')

The moral therefore is to always double-check at the purchase screen (below) to see if a veh has got the 'Unreliable' trait, and it holds true for all other nationalities too, for example the Tiger H has got it, and so have sandbagged versions of Shermans.
If we're creating scenarios and no purchase screen is available, we can consult Mojko's excellent Navigator Tool to see which vehs have got the trait.

Note for newcomers- 'Unreliable' means a veh will randomly break down; it won't suddenly come to a halt, but it's efficiency will usually drop every time it moves, to indicate loss of fighting efficiency because a proportion of individual vehs within the unit have broken down.
Its efficiency rises again if it's kept stationary and avoids combat for the next few turns.
I've run tests and there's a random element involved in breakdowns, for example a veh's efficiency might go into the yellow after just one turn of movement, and go into orange and red if you keep pushing it, but at other times it might only go yellow and start to drop after several turns of movement.

[CoolDTA]

If you minimize the moves, you probably won't even notice it is unreliable. But if you don't pay attention, you're in a world of hurt. I wouldn't buy any of such vehicles, but you get one for free and it was actually very good because I used it as a pillbox mostly.

I've run tests and there's a random element involved in breakdowns, for example a veh's efficiency might go into the yellow after just one turn of movement, and go into orange and red if you keep pushing it, but at other times it might only go yellow and start to drop after several turns of movement.

Did you find any correlation with the amount of hexes moved in your lab tests (bigger efficiency loss if moved, say, four hexes than just one)?

[PoorOldSpike]

Did you find any correlation with the amount of hexes moved in your lab tests (bigger efficiency loss if moved, say, four hexes than just one)?

No mate, as far as I could tell it seems that whenever an 'unreliable' tank moves, the program will hit it with the same eff loss regardless of how many hexes its moved, so your tactic of using one as a near-static pillbox is a wise one.
For example in the test below I crawled this 'unreliable' tank up the map one hex at a time, and in the very first turn its eff dropped to '8' !
4 turns later it had dropped to '6' (as in this screenshot) and by turn 11 it had dropped to zero.
So the moral is that crawling around slowly doesn't seem to reduce the amount of eff loss a unit gets hit with, unless a dev can come in here to tell us otherwise.





PS- I first came up against the unreliabe trait a year ago when I accidentally bought several unreliable Tiger H's at enormous expense in PzKrieg>Operation Star, two of them in the shot below are orange and are just useless junk, so I'm having to try to pull them out of the town back towards Germany before they get encircled.
Lesson learnt, I've avoided the H model like the plague ever since.

[bru888]

Did you find any correlation with the amount of hexes moved in your lab tests (bigger efficiency loss if moved, say, four hexes than just one)?

Spike, good answer but Cool, I think it's moot. The Unreliable trait renders a tank useless in this game, IMO, because it takes away a key attribute: mobility. As you said before, the KV-1 is good as a pillbox and only if it's located at an important tactical spot on the map. I lost one scenario chiefly because I went with KV-1's without knowing about their unreliability when I should have stuck with the BT-7's. The best upgrade for them, IMO, is the T-34; slower but more powerful. Has anybody gone with the KV-2? That one is expensive as heck and slower than molasses.

[CoolDTA]

So the moral is that crawling around slowly doesn't seem to reduce the amount of eff loss a unit gets hit with, unless a dev can come in here to tell us otherwise.

Okay, thanks for the info.

"Wondering what that feature does exactly in OoB - Spike's OoB Research Lab® has the answer"

[CoolDTA]

Spike, good answer but Cool, I think it's moot. The Unreliable trait renders a tank useless in this game, IMO, because it takes away a key attribute: mobility. As you said before, the KV-1 is good as a pillbox and only if it's located at an important tactical spot on the map. I lost one scenario chiefly because I went with KV-1's without knowing about their unreliability when I should have stuck with the BT-7's. The best upgrade for them, IMO, is the T-34; slower but more powerful. Has anybody gone with the KV-2? That one is expensive as heck and slower than molasses.

I don't think the free KV-1/40 is useless at all, because you are playing in defense at that point of campaign. It really excels then. I like... correction, really like the speed of BT-7, but compared to KV-1/40 it is made of tin foil. Notwithstanding, I wouldn't buy any unreliable unit, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth, either. Until you can buy KV-1/41s, the T-34 is by far my weapon of choice.

No KV-2s for me because of the reasons you gave. Especially because of the molasses impersonation.