Gotterdammerung Success

[Kanitatlan]

There was a thread not long ago questionning how viable it was to win the Gotterdammerung scenario and I'm afraid it made me want to have a go. I can't be bothered to do a proper AAR so here is how it went.

Firstly I played it on Normal\Furious as I didn't want to try very hard straight off considering the dire starting situation.

Production

I immediately sent all the Me109 fighters to upgrade in Me262 and then ordered 40 plain mechanised divisions. I reinforced all the air units and the 1% strength panzer divisions. Started some key technology. During play the most significant production issue is running out of resources and there is a good argument for moving to a man of the people security minister from the start.

Air

The air war starts off extremely unpleasantly. I moved all my fighters directly to a line of provinces in front of Berlin and tried to make six unit stacks. The non-fighters ran off to hide in the Czech area. Right from the start the allied strategic bombing forces come pouring in and the key tactic is to hold back and only engage in combat within the capabilities of your forces. The biggest problem is regaining org for your fighters. After a bit I found that I had enough org to ambush and half destroy deep penetration bomber stacks by attacking with two or more fighter stacks in different places. After a few months I found the bombing attacks stopped.

The allied air power in Italy is too concentrated and you cannot do anything about it. I looked for all the infAA divisions I could find and sent them all there to inflict attrition on the allied air forces.

On the Eastern front I initially did nothing but when the Allied bombers cooled down a bit I sent a stack of fighters over there. I had these rush out and intercept any Russian ground attacks and after a bit (quite a bit) wondered why they weren't attacking anymore only to find, when I checked the ledger, that it was because they didn't exist anymore.

Ground

Straight off I sent every mobile division (panzer, mech and motorised) to the western front. I withdrew every division in an allied country or the isolated Greek occupation zone. On the Eastern front I withdrew along the entire front and merged my infantry divisions opposite a vacant Minsk.

The mobile troops had no problem seeing of the allies in the west and once this was done I sent them all east. Meanwhile the Russians where moving very slowly but by this time they had arrived in Minsk and I had ordered some 50 infantry divisions to attack. They dramatically reinforced Minsk whilst my troops slowly marched there giving me a nice 60 division overtsack to grind up. When this battle started casualty rates where approximately 14:1 (in my favour).

The returning mobile troops then indulged in a similar series of convergent attacks with super casualty ratios. This went on for some time and I slowly ground up the Russians.

I dealt with Italy by sending my 24 best divisions to attack. They had little difficulty in crushing the allies and retaking the whole of Italy.

My progress was inhibited more by the weather than anything else but a quick round up for May 1945:

Approximately 300 air units, 700 divisions and a lot of US transports with troops all destroyed. I lost approximately 10 divisions and 5 air units destroyed. I held the whole of mainland Europe except for some of Norway (there were 24 armoured divisions heading south in Trondheim). In Russia I held everything west of the Urals apart from a little mopping up in the Caucasus and Finland. I had captured Magnitogorsk and therefore met the condituions for a bitter peace. Air patrols showed that the UK was completely unoccupied.

The answer is a definite "yes you can win". The only question I had was can you manage a world conquest before the time runs out.

I know my AAR audience would like a more detailed report of destruction on this scale but I don't think I will have time before moving on to HOI2. Sorry guys.

In support of the scenario, I would just like to say that it is one hell of a rollercoaster for the first 4 months or so. There are certainly plenty of enemy to fight.

 

[unmerged(15561)]

Great stuff.

My only questions are:

Try it again on a harder setting.
Try it with a less aggressive AI. Aggressive would be a good choice.
Do it without attacking the AI when its redeploying 50divisions in one go!! Really realistic that! <sorry, I flipping hate when the engine does this!>

Thx for detailing the main points. Of all the comments I have read about posters completing this, no one has quantified it to my satisfaction. From what you say, my final thought is that the AI doesnt attack continously on ALL fronts, or does it?

 

[unmerged(8319)]

Interesting, short AAR.

I myself tried out this scenario too some time ago. I never finished it, but it's there, waiting for me.

My playstyle was a bit different. Partly because I wanted a more historical approach and partly because I always play at v.hard (/aggressive or furious).

I lost a lot of airunits from the beginning becaus my fighters were dispersed. I used the production for AA units instead so I didn't upgrade any fighter (perhaps a mistalke?).

On land I only withdrew gradually as needed on the eastfront, expecting this would be the best way to slow down the SU. I sometimes won some defensive battles, costing them serious casualties. After about a year I was back to sort of the same line you were.

On the westfront this meant I couldn't oust the allies. But I held them at the Rhine. In Italy the allies made no progress at all and I deployed a lot of AA there too. I lost Norway and Finland readily.

It could be that that -20 efficiency penalty one gets at v.hard makes a difference, but ofc. the choice of whether to send everything to the west or not matters a lot. I've seen that strategy reported before and I suppose it would work, I just find it too screwy since it's too far from what history allowed.

I never noticed the AI would only attack at one point front at the time and frankly I think that is not true. But I will notice from now on.

 

[Kanitatlan]

Great stuff.

My only questions are:

Try it again on a harder setting.
Try it with a less aggressive AI. Aggressive would be a good choice.
Do it without attacking the AI when its redeploying 50divisions in one go!! Really realistic that! <sorry, I flipping hate when the engine does this!>

Thx for detailing the main points. Of all the comments I have read about posters completing this, no one has quantified it to my satisfaction. From what you say, my final thought is that the AI doesnt attack continously on ALL fronts, or does it?

You are quite right about trying it on a harder setting, I was just too scared to try it from the first try. Unfortunately I will probably move on to HOI2 so I don't think it will ver happen.

I didn't attack the ai when it was redeploying 50 divisions. What I did was launch a very slow attack from 4 provinces on a relatively lightly held Minsk. The ai then filled it up for me. This type of convergent attack is very important in HOI and the main reason that attack is far more effective than defence.

The key to this victory is understanding ai behaviour. What it does is deploy troops along its front based on the opposition faced. By withdrawing from the whole front I caused it to decide that the main opposition was Finland so it sent hundreds of divisions to attack Finland. On the main front it only advanced with limited troops. This is why the slowness of my counter at Minsk was important as it gave the ai plenty of time to bring back reinforcements.

The other ai characteristic is its relative slowness in advancing. This is not really affected by the strength of opposition and therefore unless you can actually stop an attack there isn't any point in even being there.

 

[Kanitatlan]

Interesting, short AAR.

I myself tried out this scenario too some time ago. I never finished it, but it's there, waiting for me.

My playstyle was a bit different. Partly because I wanted a more historical approach and partly because I always play at v.hard (/aggressive or furious).

I lost a lot of airunits from the beginning becaus my fighters were dispersed. I used the production for AA units instead so I didn't upgrade any fighter (perhaps a mistalke?).

On land I only withdrew gradually as needed on the eastfront, expecting this would be the best way to slow down the SU. I sometimes won some defensive battles, costing them serious casualties. After about a year I was back to sort of the same line you were.

On the westfront this meant I couldn't oust the allies. But I held them at the Rhine. In Italy the allies made no progress at all and I deployed a lot of AA there too. I lost Norway and Finland readily.

It could be that that -20 efficiency penalty one gets at v.hard makes a difference, but ofc. the choice of whether to send everything to the west or not matters a lot. I've seen that strategy reported before and I suppose it would work, I just find it too screwy since it's too far from what history allowed.

I never noticed the AI would only attack at one point front at the time and frankly I think that is not true. But I will notice from now on.

The first day is critical for your airforce. You have to get those fighters back to a deep defence line before they meet any bombers or else they are gonners. I have to admit that I am not sure about the need to upgrade fighters as the FW190a units had more or less eliminated the bomber threat before the Me262 units were ready. The main thing is to not worry about the bombing but concentrate on conserving your fighters (just don't lose units) whilst slowly destroying allied air units. I must admit I am a little scared about how this would be on very hard as it is bad enough on normal. If it was still worth commenting I would have suggested that the scenario was changed so that you didn't get the entire strategic bomber force attacking on day one, say be having them at a various levels of reduced org.

On the ground I would always recommend dramatic grand manouevers. This may be seen as exploiting ai weakness but there is no way to play the game without exploiting ai weakness. The redeployment to the west is only unrealistic because the Germans didn't do it but the whole point of the game is to change the outcome. The fact is that the german generals always wanted to get away from the 'stand your ground' strategy to recover their freedom of manouever. This massive withdrawal does that. I would still have been happy with it if the Russians came on in mass. In fact, if they hadn't thinned the front, I suspect I could have beaten them faster.

On ai behaviour see the previous post. In the actual war the Germans didn't maintain a continous front when they had the initiative and there was a dynamic campaign in progress. If you have to keep a continous line then you are trying to engage in static warfare and the stronger army will win.

I suspect your defence was relatively succesful because you were exploiting the ai's tendency to count divisions and ignore their type. This means you can do for it by reinforcing a defence with your best divisions. It will still attack and be vaugely puzzled when it doesn't work despite having 40 infantry divisions up against 24 mixed panzers with brigade attachments.

 

[unmerged(29738)]

Thanks Kanitatian, good post re Gotterdammerung, a scenario I have never played, but when I get round to it, as I will be with HOI for some time to come due to the limitations of my computer, I will certainly make use of it.

 

[unmerged(8319)]

For the record, the right name is 'Götterdämmerung'. You have to activate the composite characters by pressing the extra dots first (just left of Enter on a standard keyboard).

 

[Kanitatlan]

For the record, the right name is 'Götterdämmerung'. You have to activate the composite characters by pressing the extra dots first (just left of Enter on a standard keyboard).

I always have to cut and paste the names to get the accents and most of the time I'm afraid I don't bother.

 

[unmerged(29738)]

Me too! Besides dots and dashes mean morse code to me!

 

[unmerged(8319)]

Well, FWIW, I finally completed a game witht eh 1944 scenario (completing a game takes long for me because I usually only have ½ hour here and there).

Game setting: v.hard/furious.
Selfimposed rules:
* no military acces
* no voluntary surrender of provinces (ie.: no pulling back in order to catch AI in pockets as it advances. This is too easy and an exploit IMO).
* no 'evac-all' from the eastfront (standard suggested strategy from a number of players to send almost everything to the west to push the allies out, then return to the eastfront. This strategy, however, is too far from realism).

Result: a bloodly row of battles. And since this was my first time with the 1944 scenario, I was unprepared for the massive onslaught in the air. Consequently I lost most of my airforce before I figured out how to adapt to the circumstances.

On land, I was also pressed back on both fronts initially, but eventually I managed to keep the allies from crossing the Rhine (more or less) and the line from south of there through the french part of the Alpes. There was never any breech in Italy.

In short, the allied AI s unable to launch any effective attacks even after it has broken out of the beachhead. So the only real fighting was on the eastfront.

On the eastfront I was planning on taking the real fight on the line from the Romanian/Hungarian border and furhter up north to eastprussia due to the favourable defensive territory. The rest was sort of delaying action unitll I was back on the prepared defenseline.

My defense held untill about late 1945. The the SU launched massive attacks on Romania and moderate attacks on all other parts of the front. Eventually I was unable to hold Romania and in the following year all of Balkan was eventually lost.

By early 1947 SU had penetrated as far north as Munich and also captured eastprussia. At this time, however, I had accumulated a few nukes, which were used tactically. Also, the SU pressed their advance so hard that I did kill quite some units in encirclements (note that due to my selfimposed limitations, I did not voluntary let these pockets emerge).

Those two factors plus the fact that I at last sequered airsuperiority in 1946, cost the SU a lot of strength. SU ended with just below 200 divisions (which is a loss of more than 300). App. 100 of these divisions were attributed to nukes. Without the option to use nukes (another rule one might decide to impose on oneself), I doubt that I could have held out.

Ending situation (well, end september 1947, but I can't be bothered to do the rest since nothing major is likely to happen):

I consider the result a draw - neither side would be able to advance anything major and Germany should be in a position to achieve a 'white peace'.

 

[elbasto]

I want to see an aar.

 

[unmerged(19363)]

Its interesting to see that it is possible to win as Germany at a tougher setting. Playing as Russia is just so easy I can't imagine its possible to hold out as Germany against a Russian AI.

 

[unmerged(8319)]

I want to see an aar.

I'm sorry, but I didn't take notes and it took me like 6 months to complete this game, so my memory of the details isn't good.

If, OTOH, there's some particular part of the strategy you'd like to know about, I could probably fill you in.