Plan Z revised No. 2 - Armistice signed!

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Our goal is that a normal game between players of equal strength should see the Germans drop below 75% efficiency late 1942 / early 1943. They should drop below 50% late 1943 / early 1944. And finally they should drop below 25% late 1944 / early 1945. Oil wise the Germans should get to 300-400 oil in 1943 and down to maybe 200 oil in 1944. Late 1944 they should run out of oil so they can only use the offmap oil generated to use for unit actions (about 15-20 oil per turn).

[gerones]

Now that the game is finished, let me make some comments about my decision of conceding the game.

First of all, congrats to zechi for a very well played game with almost no errors made. I have to recognize that he is becoming a good CEAW player!

Second, normally, I don´t like to use Dnepr russian defensive strategy (I feel that this strategy much disrupt the hard work the russians have in building a strong army in 1941-42) but this time I wanted to test it. All we can see in this AAR the results of this testing: we have had a more or less stabilized front in at the Dnepr in Russia for 2 years! So the conclusion for me about this was that when playing 2 players of similar level, the germans in 1941 were not able to progress deeper into Russia, as they historically did, if the allied player was determined to defend at the Dnepr. Even this was not comparable, in terms of game balance, with the russian armour blob issue we had before in BJR mod, this kind of strategy did not allow to simulate well german blitzkrieg campaign in Russia in summer 1941. So the development team decided to change this for making it more historical and right now in 2.00z (last update) it will be really very dangerous for the russians to defend at the Dnper since effectiveness penalty is applied not only over the russian units actually in the map but also over the units in the force pool so the russians will only be to able to recover completely from the effects of this penalty in october 1941.

Third, this was an AAR made from a test game and, as Borger has pointed, by late 1942-early 1943 I realised that something went wrong in the game regardless of how well zechi was playing so, even I was enjoying the game, I feel that the game was not being valuable in terms of play testing. I´m referring to the surprisingly excessive high values of german oil and manpower plus the unbalanced number of experienced units between Russia and Germany. So when I succeed in stopping the germans at the Dnepr I was wrong thinking that the war of attrition in Eastern front would be having a big impact in german manpower. Far from this, german manpower was up to 75% in mid 1943!! This surprised me much since I´ve never seen those german manpower levels in mid 1943. To make things worse, german oil levels were about 1000 in 1943, so what was the use in bombing german synth plants (with higher air defense values) no matter they were attacked by 5000 bombers?

So even I could have continued this game, I thought it was better to start a new game with 2.00z and this is what I pretend to do.

[Blathergut]

Was the high German oil level because of something in the beta version? Or from good play on the German side? Or from the tweaks to oil expenditure that have been made?

[gerones]

Was the high German oil level because of something in the beta version? Or from good play on the German side? Or from the tweaks to oil expenditure that have been made?

It was both because zechi made a good use of oil and because of the changes in oil consumption that were made in 2.00w that has appeared to give the axis an excessive oil level even in late years of the war. That´s why this has been changed in 2.00z.

[Blathergut]

k...looking forward to playing when it comes out! Sounds though like you might get to beta 2.0gg or such first!!

Thanks again to the team for being thorough!