Really Rumbling on the Mius

[Dog Soldier]

Turn 9


Again the rocket artillery comes through. After another turn of pounding Gustafel’d into rubble, the rocket artillery in the bunker hex north of Petopolye (8,9) disrupts the village defenders. The long suffering assault engineers assisted by two battalions of the 347th ID clear the village of Germans. One of the engineers is disrupted. Sixteen men are lost to 39 Germans in the assault.

Repeated artillery barrages, direct fire attacks and assaults against the 336th ID unit in center at hex (8,7) failed to dislodge it. The same for the “iron men” hex on hill 164. The infantry of the 294th ID held. This limited my attack on the summit 150 VP location hex ((6,4). Direct fire from the rocket artillery and the assaulting battalions of the 387th ID coming up the eastern slope did not disrupt the 294th ID regimental HQ. A final last gasp assault by the KV tanks caused even more casualties to the German HQ unit. The HQ still held its ground.

As it is I have 410 VP, a major Russian victory.


In the German half of the last turn, the AI only added one VP to my total bringing the final game result to 411. The AI did not attack to retake any VP locations.

Dog Soldier

[Dog Soldier]

Epilogue
To break through a fortification zone like the one presented in Muis 43, the Russian player should adhere to these simple rules.

Choose your axis of attack with a narrow focus of only three hexes wide.

Use artillery to disrupt enemy units on your path.

Save your units with the largest assault factors for assaults only. Do not waste them in the front lines where they can be disrupted by enemy fire in their turn or where they will suffer low ammo penalties for defensive fire.

Assault with as close to maximum stacking limits. Avoid the temptation to try and figure out the minimal assault force required. You will usually be assaulting with a quality detriment. Quantity is a quality of its own.

Ignore or screen off enemy units not in your direct path to victory. You need the extra units in your order of battle to reinforce the drive along your attack axis. Units will gain high fatigue or disrupt and not rally. You need a constant source of new units to replace those no longer in top form. Keep your divisions together. The units of a division should stay within one or two hexes of each other. Any further away and you risk losing one full turn to return the wayward to the divisional stacks.

Keep your HQ’s close to your troops for command and control support. Try to not expose your HQ’s to the enemy LOS as a human player will target the HQ’s over combat troops. Disrupting an HQ affect every units below it.

Dog Soldier

[enigma6584]

Great advice. Thanks for posting those. Fantastic AAR as well. I very much enjoyed reading it.

[GerryM]

Thinking about getting into this series and I must say this article is very helpful in terms of strategy and tactics. One time it seemed to me that these games just involved moving counter stacks forward. The article does a nice job of explaining the thought process of a player and of the relative strengths of some of the units. Very interesting.

Gerry

[enigma6584]

DogSoldier is a master tactician when it comes to this series of games. I wish he would take up the CMBN games because he would have much to teach. It would be interesting to play him at that level.