If you are a fan of NGP'85 click the link below to check out a new article by HirooOnoda! :bow:
I would like to thank him for his work and remind you that we are always looking for similar articles for which there will be a points award for any posted. :)
HirooOnoda article.
A couple of comments:
1: In real life the 6th PzG had a danish division to work with, which somehow got left out of the NGP stock game (it is in the Germany 2 expansion though). This makes the defence of the peninsula somewhat more difficult than it would have been "for real". There is also a lot of Corps troops and other bits and pieces missing. A much better solution would have been to delete the 6th PzG division from the NATO OOB and cut off the map at the Elbe imho. But we must play the game as it is.
2: I was the opponent in the articles example 1&2. I quit in example 1 due to the "Explicit Supply" not working for this scenario (I had used up all available supply counters by the end of the 2nd day. Which suggests that this scenario was not meant to be played with explicit supply, and that it was added as an afterthought), not because the units were surrounded.
3: The nr. 2 example from the article is still a game in progress (using Virtual Supply Trucks instead of Explicit Supply). The jury is still out on whether it is a smart idea to leave 1,3 division to die in Hamburg. It does represent an awful lot of kill points, and dead units do not come back and they do not hold any ground either ;)
FWIW :)
I have played only Bolt from the Blue (1989) mod full campaigns, not D85 so my comments are directed to that. In the 1989 version you have that Danish Division plus Corps Troops so LANDJUT is much stronger.
That said, I have seen a "Festung Hamburg" approach a couple of times, trying it once myself. In all instances, the Warsaw Pact adopted what I believe is the correct approach, which is to surround a strongly-garrisoned Hamburg and leave it alone whilst making strong pushes north and west. In theory, NATO loses the services of a fine division cooped up (and this can be done using lower-quality Pact troops) while the remaining NATO troops struggle on. While the Hamburg Festung can launch some Leopard sorties, these non-TIS armed tanks are not a major threat.
It is a very interesting approach however, and can be effective if the Pact takes the bait and gets drawn into a second Stalingrad. But I think surrounding and bypassing is also a valid WP strategy and seemed to work when I saw it tried.
And so the game described in "example 2" in the article ended in an inconclusive "Draw" :P
-I used the polish 20th TD, 94th GMRD and the 36th Naval brigade (helped by a few regiments of 16th Tank passing through for a day or so) to smash the 6th PzG (plus the extra PzG brigade from the 3rd PzD) over a period of 3 days. Total wipeout and netting me welcome VPs plus taking a NATO unit out of the equation for good.
-In the short 56 turn "Initial Campaign" I would probably assault them just as I did here. The VPs are just too good to miss. In the longer 161 turn affair I would probably leave them to the polish 2nd Army following in 2nd operational echelon (and keep them bottled up using the 94th GMRD and the Naval Brigade untill then). They will be just as dead and you get to use the polish 20th TD for someting else.
-Absent the rest of the LandJut Corps the defence of the peninsula is impossible, so withdrawing 6th PzG into hamburg is probably the best solution to a problem that didn´t exist in real life (where withdrawing into Hamburg was an option dreaded since it would mean that the 2 divisions of the LandJut Corps would be split apart and the danish Jutland Division would be faced with defending the width of the peninsula alone). I don´t think that reinforcing 6th PzG accomplishes anything though. That PzG brigade from the 3rd PzD goes a long way towards NATO holding WAPA (temporarily?) at bay at the Weser and in "example 2" above my opponent definetely needed it there, not lying dead among the ruins of Hamburg.