Slitherine

What is the difference between the 2 scenario chains after Stalingrad docks except ingame briefing information that one seems to be defensive while the other one is a break out? Especially in terms of core survivability and prestige?

Regards,
Thorsten

I'd say breakout is by far easier and besides after Stalingrad docks I am usually tired of urban warfare. The breakout scenario has a lot of enemy planes so you need quite a bit of air defence otherwise the strafing fighters might eat up some of your prestige.

Okay, started the escape route. After Escape from Stalingrad (fluent but fairly easy, although I went through the middle and not southwest) the last one - Tatsinskaya - is by far the hardest scenario so far. Yes, harder than the Stalingrad scenarios. Lots and lots and then again lots of 3 star T34/43 and KV1/2. AND lots of fighters and bombers in several waves. I do not even mention the infantry hordes.

So far I managed to be in the middle of the scenario time frame, slowly starting to recapture lost terrain. But without a dozen 3 or 4 star PzIVG, PzIIIM and KVs backed by strong artillery I would not have made it so far. And the scenario will cost me heavy in replacements.

Regards,
Thorsten

Yeah Tatinskaya is one of the real hard ones but probably my favourite too. Most of your units will take quite some damage, that is just unavoidable. I still found Stukas to be really useful in getting those pesky tanks down.

If you think Tatsinskaya is hard, prepare yourself for Prohkorovka (middle of '43 E). This one is so hard that ended up cheating a loss so that I wouldn't lose my entire army (and then the rest of my 60k prestige) [only scenario I have ever raged at that much].

- BNC

I correct myself - the Tasinskaya scenario is far from being hard with the right equipment. I corrected several setup mistakes from the first trial, where I scored a DV at unacceptable cost, in the second run. Key is protective artillery with decent hard attack values in the first titanic clash with the dozen or more Soviet tanks behind your own tanks. That cried for K17, of which I had two but used these to protect the initial cities in the north and in the south in the first trial.

And the second key is surrender - but the surrender mechanics are bound to the artillery key . To field decent StuKas does not hurt either.

If you don´t follow deducters sound (you tube video) strategy to beat the Soviet tanks in the woods, you need of course to field the best German armour possible (Pz IV G and III L and M). And again field the KVs - they take very few losses attacked due to better ground defense than the IV G. Both sides will then clash in the middle, neither side being able to inflict much damage head on (12 strength 3 star T34/43 against an unsupported 12 strength 4 star Pz IV G is a draw with about 4 strength losses each). But the Soviets as the Germans will be so crowded that the side with the better artillery support wins because of the suppression/surrender mechanics. I concentrated 7 of my 10 artillery in the center of the map.

A small and unrelated side note: I totally agree with the protection and attack values of the various KVs and T 34s. They were that good that early in WW II. I totally disagree with their decent initiative values. Even a III F/G had a much better initiative value on the battlefield. Due to pure technics (the German 3 manned turret against the Soviet 2 manned, better German radio equipment, poor Soviet gun sights etc.). But also due to until the end of the war better doctrine, better leadership, better unit cohesion, better training. Realistic initiative values except ambush should nearly always give the German side the first shot.

Regards,
Thorsten

After slugging it out urban warfare style in 'Storming Stalingrad' and taking serious casualties I thought: Why bother taking those losses?

I mean, if you don't get a DV or MV is it really gunna matter???

At least your veteran units will still be intact.

I stay and fight and got DV and manage to wipe out all enemy unit and capture all flag in field Marshall level hehehe.

I follow orders so I didn't abandon stalingrad. You need good infantry and stukas to defend use fighters to cover stukas only do not engage enemy fighters or your stukas will die. The last objective be careful and do not Rush as the AI will suddently pop up new unit. Use 10.5 cm as artilerry that's a tip I will give you

Prohkorovka Is one of the greatest battles in Panzer Corps.. Not too many scenarios done better

With regards to the two paths, I'm currently playing through the campaign for the first time (FM of course, as I'm an old PG vet like so many other players here) and I have only tried the Stalingrad Ruins path two weeks ago, which was fairly simple and so were the following two scenarios.

So I suspect that the defense of Stalingrad's Ruins is the easy path of the two, or perhaps my force was just well suited for it.

For reference, I fielded:

Tanks: 5 SE, 5 normal
3 SE Panzer IIIL, overstrengthed to 11. (N would be better for actual fighting in the city blocks, but I only wanted tanks to clear the streets, letting infantry and artillery deal with the blocks, making high hard attack most important)
2 SE Panzer IVG, overstrengthed to 11.
1 Pzner IIIL, overstrengthed to 11. (The hero Albert Kerscher, aka. spotting tank.)
1 KV 1-B (r), overstrengthed to 11.
3 Flammpanzer II, overstrengthed to 11. These are simply awesome for city fighting. I cannot recommend them enough. Have flamethrower, will travel. Heinz Rondorf used one of them.


Infantry: 12
7 Pioneers with halftracks, most with 200+ XP and a hero.
5 Gebirgsjäger without any transport (basically, any infantry that gets +1 move gets promoted to a Gebirgsjäger troop which has move 4, 6 shots, and is extremely cheap to reinforce with elite replacements even if it is needed multiple times in a fight. Oleh Dir and Friedrich Pein join this august company by default)

Artillery: 10
2 17cm K 18, overstrengthed to 14
2 Sturmpanzer, overstrenghted to 14
1 Wurfrahmen 40 with range hero, overstrengthed to 14
2 Wurfrahmen 40, overstrengthed to 12 (these are usually shelved for missions, but the infantry fighting of Stalingrad called for all the artillery I could muster!)
2 Stuh42, overstrengthed to 14
1 Su-122(r)

Luftwaffe: 10
4 FW110A, three of them the heroes Nowotny, Bär, and Kittel, overstrengthed to 11
2 BF110G, specifically the heroes Hans Ulrich Rudel and Helmut Lent, overstrengthed to 11
4 He177A, overstrengthed to 14, all with heroes

simcc wrote:I stay and fight and got DV and manage to wipe out all enemy unit and capture all flag in field Marshall level hehehe.

I follow orders so I didn't abandon stalingrad. You need good infantry and stukas to defend use fighters to cover stukas only do not engage enemy fighters or your stukas will die. The last objective be careful and do not Rush as the AI will suddently pop up new unit. Use 10.5 cm as artilerry that's a tip I will give you

While I am with you on fielding good and/or at plentiful, infantry, Stukas are to my mind absolutely not necessary.

And I got an easy DV on Field Marshal as well with a systematic approach of first moving north with my core forces clearing behind me, so to speak, while the allied forces gathered together for mutual defense, then I split the core force in two, moving east and west respectively, and sweeping down the two flanks at high speed. That ensured that all corners and the top half of the map was under my control by turn 16 or so, at which point everybody congregated for the final battle at the victory hex in (16,25), the X on the map, in an orderly fashion.

Probably the best decision I made where core forces were concerned was already in 39 to ditch the entire dive bomber concept in favour of level bombers (based on having used dive bombers in the vanilla campaign and seen their weaknesses), fielding 4 He-111H2s in 39 and 40, upgrading them to DO217E in 41, and finally to He177A in 42. Arguably a waste of prestige going back and forth between development branches like that, but it got me used to learning how to make most out of the level bombers early.

The only dive bombers in my core are super Rudel and Lent, and Lent is benched in many scenarios. Artillery is king for suppression and minimizing casualties to one's core, and level bombers are the king of artillery, swiftly getting wherever they are needed. By the time you get to HE177A (with the accumulated experience and perhaps 100-200 kills from the earlier years, though kills are rare), they also start knocking off a few points of strength when attacking tanks as well as suppressing them and stripping them of ammo. And only air defense shoots back at them - the units that have [1] for air defense only shoot back at the low-flying dive bombers and fighters, not the level bombers.

In many ways dive bombers seem a trap to me in the grand campaign. A deliciously nice trap in the early years of the war, but a flying coffin whose value is highly dubious by 43 with the increased actions of the red air force and increased number of units capable of returning fire. I expect it to get even worse in 44 and 45, though since I haven't played those DLCs, I don't know if this is the case.

So that's my tip for Stalingrad and later on; level bombers are really, really, useful as a type of strong flying artillery that is much easier to shift where they are needed than the actual artillery. They have good ammunition supplies and fuel, good defensive stats, they trivialize any scenario that include sinking ships or landing craft, and the higher tiers also have good attack stats. Get one with + attack (and once you reach the 177A level, they will start racking up kills and get you a hero) and you've got flying artillery that is as powerful as heavy towed artillery with more ammo, no rate of fire penalty, and a heck of lot more mobility. (They also get better stats with experience; the same soft attack, hard attack, and air defense per 100 xp, but twice the naval attack and ground defense.)

I was impressed by dive bombers when I played the vanilla campaign, and there's no doubt that it can be fun using them to eliminate their natural prey - armour that cannot return fire - but using level bombers in the grand campaign has truly put the dive bombers performance in perspective, and they just don't measure up to the overall usefulness of level bombers.

EDIT: And I now see that the OP is two years old and I've participated in a necromantic experiment. Oh, well. These things happen.

@ Pi2repsilon, I did a mind brief calculation and your force seems to blow the soft cap limits and that hurts income. Did you disable soft cap? Below list my city fight task force

1. 3 SE tanks all pz4 Mac overstrength (SE DONT count towards soft cap) they clear the streets I any t34.

2. 2 infantry, 2 pioneer (truck transport-50 prestige) 4 artillery, 10.5 cm strength 14, 1 pz 3N, 1 pz flame. Hold center and push down south then turn west

3. 1 SE grenadier, 2 paras (Oleh), 2 heinkel. Hold north middle and swing west for objective. Para is awesome in city fights as per advice and suggested by Stephen an friends.

4. 2 grenadier, 2 sturm panzer I charge if clearing east.

5. 2 motorbike and 2 Wurfrahmen in charge of mopping up east starting from north

6. 3 stukas, 3 109s, 2 do bombers. Clearing mass tank west, north and south

I fully agree on your statement on strategic bombers I use them a lot, best friends in city fight and very usefull in other situation, 4 stars with +2-3 def heroes you can actively bomb AA without fear, combine with rudel stukas (I follow history so he is still in a stukas hahaha) just bomb AA then Rudel goes in next turn and AA is gone, mobile russian AA doesn't effect strategic bombers with experience and defence heroes.

After looking at your force my findings is that your artillery is too expensive Wurfrahmen 14 cost 850+- prestige and 12 cost 600+- prestige and these 3 stands at 2000+- prestige and it's 5 units average in soft cap rules for only 3 units! Way too expensive. Pioneer is good at those late area infantry as their entrenchment is high but para with high initiative is far better. And pioneer take heavy damage when being attack compare to paras.

I think with your force your income is badly affected since even winning DV is not worth it.

simcc wrote:@ Pi2repsilon, I did a mind brief calculation and your force seems to blow the soft cap limits and that hurts income. Did you disable soft cap? Below list my city fight task force

It does blow the soft cap limit. It gets even more slanted in open-land scenarios where infantry is less useful, as I replace some of the infantry (and two wurfrahmen) with mobile anti-tank units (got 4 Stugs that got changed into Elephants in 43 where I am now and will become Jadgpanthers in 44) and for some scenarios, more fighters.

It is totally worth it. Quality has a quantity all its own. Overstrength combined with experienced units is a very valuable combination so long as you know the prestige implications.

The flippant answer is that I do not care about the soft cap.The correct answer is that I do care as it hit me with a vengeance when I played the vanilla campaign, was unaware of it, and upgraded all units to the best types when I hit USA with little prestige left over. (Queue a lot of swearing about incompetent UI design once I realized what was going on after USA East - I imagine I might not be the only one with that response). So I examined the issue and now understand the mathematical implications, but honouring the soft cap limit is not the point of the game to me, winning is, and preferably with DV all the way to the end (works so far, no marginal victories or losses), while maintaining a prestige reserve that is enough to hedge against mistakes. (I still think it is moronic to include an effect such as the soft cap without clearly informing about it in the interface, but then, the interface is most definitely not one of the strong sides of Panzer Corps, being best described as adequate.)

I gain considerably less prestige from objectives taken at the start of the fight due to blowing the soft cap, then an increasing percentage as units get damaged (since it is recalculated based on the current unit strength values during combat). I haven't hit 100% prestige gain since late 41/early 42, and now by mid-43 I am typically running around 40-60%.

HOWEVER, because I overstrength so many units that tend not to be hurt in the first place and are key to preventing enemies dealing damage (artillery, strategic bombers), my forces as a whole take less damage, and the units that take the most damage are almost always the ones that are cheapest to reinforce. Since I also deal more damage and suppress more, I progress more swiftly through scenarios in general, taking less turns to achieve simple objectives, and have more turns left over to handle the tricky aspects where thorny defensive setups present themselves. It does mean that in scenarios that award prestige/turn, I typically have to sit out those last 5+ turns to gain all prestige before seizing the last victory hex, which feels rather silly, but so be it.

Or take overstrengthing all my tanks and fighters to 11; That single overstrength point costs me exactly as much as one point of elite reinforcement during combat, but given that I am willing to elite reinforce in combat in the first place if it should prove necessary - it usually isn't, but occasionally when I've underestimated the enemy forces, it is, I consider it much better to have my tanks and fighters perform just that bit better throughout the battle, while also reducing the odds that I'll need battle reinforcements in the first place.

The end result being, that I certainly don't get as much prestige as somebody who honours the soft cap, but I seldom need to reinforce anything but my cheap infantry or flammpanzers in combat, and repairing my units between scenarios is usually cheap even after intense actions because most tanks, anti-tanks, and fighters will typically end up with 8-11 points left of the 11 they start battle with, with a few, usually two or three, more heavily damaged.

By Prokhorovka in 1943, where I am now, I have 51.3k prestige at the start of the scenario after reinforcing everybody, 6.3k down from the 57.6k I had at start of 43 after 8 Tiger upgrades (6 SE, two normal). But I'm not 6.3k down due to prestige drain from losses and not gaining enough to cover, but because of 4 Elephant upgrades (2.4k), 4 Panther upgrades (2.6k), and changing 3 of the non-Stuh line artillery with range heroes to Brumbärs, so I have five of them (1.2k). I daresay I'll have enough left over to carry me through the campaign, even as the soft cap is going to hit me ever harder for the remaining 2.5 dlcs.

I am worried about your prestige using this force as I am in GC44 East with over 100k prestige IIRC as I am working now can't confirm the numbers hahaha still it drain prestige in GC44 so much that I find it hard to believe without a big saving you can survive 44-45! Even those fighters chipping away 1-2 points of my SE Panthers Tigers hurt hahahaha

Have you finish GC44-45?

First time playing through the grand campaign, and doing so blind.

Given that it is presumably possible to complete the grand campaign with the forces provided if you choose not to import a core, and that you get poorly composed forces with a small prestige budget to affect changes if you do so, I would be deeply surprised if the 51.5k prestige I've left by mid-43 isn't enough even if I only earn 20-40% prestige in every remaining battle. Should that prove to be the case, I'll just have to adjust tactics, start disbanding some of the many surplus core units I've been training to ensure I have a supply of trained replacements at all times, or restart whichever DLC problems crop up in with a higher player prestige gain rate..

And if I have to adjust tactics? That would be really sweet. It has been an easy ride so far, the best thing about strategy games are when they challenge me, and like so many other old time players real challenges are few and far between in strategy games for the obvious reason that most games are not designed for people who've been playing strategy games for decades.

But I expect to have few problems. If I do, I'll happily swallow my words, though!