MAIN EVENT VII! Ratzki vs Joonny....

[Joonny]

Well, Just read all of that : )

First of all thanks to DK for the fantastic as allways DAR. Apologies for not putting in as much comments in as ratzki.

When I was 7 or 8 turns in with 100% morale lets just say that might have got me a tad overconfident, from then on things started going downhill apart from a few lucky moments.

I'll break things down;

No shreks?

To be honest, If i lost all that heavy german armour I don't think a few shreks would have saved me ;), in the end they would have just been a waste of points.

No Anti-Tanks guns? You'd think 2 ATGs could have had quite a party up in those cliffs.

Not mobile enough really, besides ATGs make nice targets for mortars.

At least one FO with fast (1 minute) call down time would have been a must for me - an FO here could see across the whole valley and delay and confuse the Russian advance.

I would have liked some heavy arty, to bring down buildings etc but it was just too expensive.

Good call going with vet armor - good for long range shooting. (Although I'd have mixed some regulars in there for building demolition)

Yes, I think a plt of reg StuHs instead of one of the StuGs would have been a good idea.

I think that the SMG and Jager choice is not wise as even if they have some decent firepower still they cant match the Russian SMG teams and their limited ammo load will be a serius disadvantage in a 30+ turns battle.

They might not be able to match the russian SMG FP, but i thought i'd be coming up against plenty of them so i thought I should go for the best I had. The other thing to keep in mind is the german companies generally come with a lot of stuff that you don't really need on a map like this so that influenced my choice somewhat.

Yes, for 3000 points he doesn't seem to have got a lot.

That was exactly my thought when I first loaded up the map after purchasing my forces lol.

Overall I like this setup - except I would have put riders on the vehicles headed for town - he's going to lose valuable time getting them all there on foot.

The original plan was to hold the armour back until my inf had entered the town, but after seeing jeeps racing for the town I mini panicked and raced them ahead anyway.

Joonny chooses to run his troops the entire first minute towards the woods by the seatown. That is usually no problem, except they had to run uphill part of the ways, which is more tiring

Yup, totally missed the hills that were there lol.

But on the south side above the seawall, Joonny has neglected his men - he keeps them running the entire second minute. Now all of them are tired and could soon be pushed to exhaustion, making them almost worthless until they've rested....

Troops that have a fast order who become tired immediately switch to move, AFAIK they will not go past tired like this, you need to crawl them everywhere to exhaust them.

It certainly looks like it's going that way. Here in minute seven Joonny decides to have his AFVs blow down the church. This was actually a mistake, IMHO.

Reading the DAR i agree, i thought I spotted some MG teams in there but obviously didn't, in the end it took more HE shells than I was expecting and I was sorely missing those by the end of the match.

After a couple of forgettable minutes, Ratzki gets one of his T34/85s in great position for a shot on the German overwatch bullies from the North side of town. What a job positioning this tank!

Yes that was amazing tank skills, don't know if it was intentional or not but it was still brilliant.

In this shot from Joonny's view, we see the German infantry defense is not going so well. His lead squad with the cover arc can't see anything due to smoke from the fallen building - they just sit there. His platoon HQ also sits there. The squad that can see is being overwhelmed by russian fire. The tank hunter team in the rubble is down to one pinned man after the building fell on them.

yes this was pretty poor defensive positioning on my part.

More than the enemy forces, time is a much more potent enemy at the moment. Jonny has chosen to sit in the defence, not something that I would have done. If he would have came all the way forward, my move into the town would have been ruined.

Perhaps this was the case, but all those russian contact markers scared me into keeping still and not exposing myself to any more enemy fire.

I bet Jonny wishes that he had bought some more regular infantry instead of those SMG squads.

Actually a plt less of StuGs and a few more plts of SMG might have done the trick.

We'll start off with a shot to the Southern woods. Joonny has pulled his men up in a line here. They are all low on ammo and haven't made a move towards the Russian star icons in the woods at all.

I was actually just resting them, I was planning on sending them after the remnants of the force that I had just blunted, but by the time I got round to moving them again Ratzki had launched his counterattack and they were wiped out.

But for some odd reason the vet Panther picked up the approaching T34, even though it was buttoned and facing the other way, and was able to get his turret around. Consequently the crack T34/85 only gets a ricochet off of the front turret.

When i saw this turn, I thought my panther was screwed.

I think the reasons it got the T-34 are as followed.

Stationary vehicles have better spotting abilities than moving ones.

Higher quality crew

The Panther has a cupola which greatly increases all round visibility.

It certainly wasn't due to any order I gave.



So all in all I really enjoyed this game, and certainly was interesting to be on the other side of the glass so to speak having done a main event myself.

I certainly have sympathy for Ratzki as ive been in the same situation many a time before.