Tonci87

Well there is already one very safe bet anybody can make. This game will have microtransactions and DLC all over it.

Rolling Thunder Oh this will be fun. I have three tank platoons and one combat engineer platoon. The enemy has a shitton of infantry and one T34 that is still unable to fight properly. Thanks to the foothold I gained during the last battle across the river I´m now able to deploy my troops on their side. Yakovlevka won´t stand a chance. My tanks will drive the soviet infantry before them. Even a small Panzer 2 is large enough to transport a whole squad. Select both and klick on mount in the lower right command panel. This way you can moove your infantry very fast and without exhausting them. The enemy infantry doesn´t stand a chance. I expect the enemy to retreat very soon. Enemies that are spotted die a quick death. And with that my men manage to capture the village. Look who we found! Aww yeah, one shot from close up, straight into the ammorack. The Soviets retreat, finally. One of my tanks was immobilised by AT grenades and one has lost two crewmembers due to Molotovs. Other than that my force is more or less alive. The Soviets have suffered terrible losses. And with that Yakovlevka is mine. Now I need to get more troops across and start pushing towards Tavrovo.

The last things I heard about the division were that it was in serious development trouble and had a significant downgrade in scope and graphics. Wouldn´t hold my breath for that game to be amazing. But yeah, if the map is open then it will be full of stupid fetch quests and busywork.

Potentially very interesting, but then it is an Ubisoft game.....They all look pretty amazing pre release only to end up broken and shallow when they are "finished".....

River crossing. I´ll start with this battle up north. I have a lot of infantry, some AT guns and three combat ready tanks. The Soviets have two AT guns and up to three unknown units. A defensive setup. Notice how one of the strategic points is called „to Maslovka“? Remember that German report about the Soviet tanks most likely beeing based there? I have the suspicion that we might be facing tanks in this battle and I´m not that well prepared for them.... I´ll try to clear the area up to the river and then stay defensive. If the enemy deploys on this side of the river I will stay put and observe their strenght. Green flares, a lot of them. I fear the worst. Wait a second, the enemy does have to cross the river, I assume. I have a battery of light infantry guns. Shooting them at the ford should do some damage. Sadly my guns didn´t have much ammo left and the enemy is on my side of the river. A skirmish unfolds. One of my tanks is beeing surprised by an AT gun and has it´s turret crew killed. A lot of soviet infantry is now caught up between my advancing soldiers, tanks and the river. We keep pushing the enemy back towards the river until they finally rout. No Soviet tanks in this battle after all :) A nice victory for us. That is that. The enemy up north seems to be done for.

Just say if the story is good and if it, contrary to the prequels, actually makes any sense.

Don´t you dare!!! Just tell us if the story actually makes sense this time

Dude, enjoy the movie, stop looking at your phone! :D

TURN 10 05.07.1942 22:00 Historical: At 20:30 German positions were attacked by tanks. The Soviets were forced to withdraw to their initial positions, having faced heavy AT fire and loosing several tanks. Report from 24 Pz Div, dated 05.07. 21:00: „Division attack forced the enemy back to the east as far as 3km to the north of Shilovo. Tank attack was carried out from the north, 12 T-34 and 1 KV were put out of action, their affiliation is not identified, presumably they are based in the vicinity of Maslovka station“ Well, I´m doing better than the germans did back then. I really do hope that I won´t meet any KV-1 tanks though. Those have so much armor that It is close to impossible for me to kill them with the weapons I have. My Panzer IV F/2s with their long 75cm gun are really the only things I have that can reliably hurt a KV1. Even those would have to get very close or on the KVs flank to do any damage. The next big objective is to get the Soviets out of Yakovlevka and Tavrovo. If only the damn bridge wasn´t destroyed. I fear I won´t be able to capture both within the timeframe of this campaign. First I need to reorganise my troops though. OK, here it is. Now let´s see what the Soviets will do. OK, a few counterattacks. Those coming from the east worry me.

The question is if this isn´t an attempt to get rid of the treassure hunters so that the pros can work in peace and unobserved?

I am really looking forward to this!

Soviet assault This is our final battle for this turn. Our force consists of a few AT guns, heavy AT rifles, a battery of light infantry guns, a platoon of combat engineers and a tank platoon. We will fight the few survivors of a mortar batalion, a rifle platoon, 3rd batalion command and a few unknown units. Our goal is to defend this strategic point at all costs. This is my setup. The defensive weapons are placed in a treeline, ready to defend towards the east and south. The combat engineers will sweep the edge of the forest supported by two Panzer 3s operatin from a road that runs along the edge of that forest. The other tanks are in reserve near a road. This will allow them to redeploy very fast. My LIG battery is in a treeline further back, ready to provide fire support. Although my Panzer3s all have long 5cm guns, I really hope not to meet any Soviet tanks. We make first contact, Soviet infantry is attacking out of the Dlinnaya groove. I order one of my tanks into a position from where he can flank the enemy soldiers. There is a lot of Soviet infantry rushing out of the woods. They will overwhelm my defensive line (mostly AT weapons) if I don´t do something fast. I order the two tanks that should support the combat engineer advance to speed up. Oh look, they have tanks. This little thing is a T60 and not that dangerous to other tanks. Its autocannon is devastating against infantry though. Even my heavy AT rifles have enough punch to deal with its armor. This shouldn´t be a problem for my tanks and AT guns. After a well placed shot from one of my tanks that broke it´s left track, this tank is jerkes around and presents it´s side to my guns. Immediatelly it gets pumped full of shells and starts to burn. This is something the Soviets didn´t expect. My tanks roll straight into the flank of their assault, breaking it. Without them the Soviets would have succeded in overwhelming my defensive line for sure. Oh look, another of these little things has been spotted in the forest driving towards the fight. This one has lazy Soviets on it. (Notice how the guy on the right has a SVT rifle while his comrades are armed with Mosin Nagant rifles) Oh crap..... My two flanking tanks are shot at by a T34 that suddenly rolled out of the forest. They immediately reverse out of there. I order my Tank reserve to attack towards the T34 as more Soviet T60s are puring out of the forest. The concentrated fire forces the T34 to face the new threat and retreat towards the forest. This allows my other tanks to get shots into his side. Very quickly the T34 has a track blown off and his fuel tank on fire. The crew abandons it, but not before immobilising one of my tanks and killing a crewmember inside. With their tanks dead and mine rolling up the Soviet infantry aborts the assault and retreats into the forest. My Combat engineers are now perfectly positioned in the flank of the panicked retreating soviet forces. My tanks show no mercy. The crew of my disabled tank starts with the repairs. I am sure that they won´t be finished before this battle ends. It takes a few hours to repair track and chassis. My command tank drives into the forest to support my combat engineers against a particulary stubborn bunch of Soviets. That is when we discover two ZIS-3 AT guns. My tank takes out the crew of one with an HE shell. And charges the other machinegun blazing... Chrushing it under it´s tracks. This was only possible because their crews were supressed by my infantry. Sadly there is one more AT gun off to the side. It manages to get a hit into the side of my tank before I can spot it. 3 of the five crewmembers are killed by the hit, the other two bail, only to be cut down by Soviet infantry. As my other tanks advance the enemy retreats. A win for me. This battle has gained me more territory wich will really help to secure the strategic point.

Bushwhacking Again we will have a battle across the river. This time I brought new units. Two panzergrenadier platoons with their halftracks, one panzergrenadier platoon without halftracks, one combat engineer platoon, and one Panzer 3 tank platoon. We will have to fight mostly infantry but the enemy also has one T34. I don´t know if that one is operational or still damaged from a previous battle. Defensive setup covering every part of the river that might be shallow enough to allow crossing. Later on I might try to cross myself if the opportunity presents itself. The enemy is advancing towards the river, my vehicles use their Machineguns. One of my tanks is positioning itself near the bridge, it has to get through a little swamp to get there. Please don´t get stuck.... Now he is in a very prominent overwatch position. A Shame that the bridge got destroyed, otherwise I now might be able to drive across.... although...who knows how stable that bridge was in the first place, maybe not stable enough for a tank. Artillery strike on my positions! I have to get my men out of there. I loose one halftrack along with almost a whole Panzergrenadier squad and one MG42 squad on top of that. At least the tank makes it out undamaged Somewhere else the Soviets are raining down white phosphorous shells on my men. This tank is immobilized due to a round that landed very close to it. My mortar returns the favour and the enemy infantry is much more exposed to it than a tank crew. The T34 appears and is shooting at my men with his MG. Shouting Urrah! at the top of their lungs, the Soviets are charging to get into the reeds beside the river. A Panzer 2 is trying to hold them back with his autocannon and HE ammo. Reinforcements are on the way. The tank reinforcements have arrived just in the nick of time. We are able to prevent a soviet crossing, for now. Fresh Artillery barrages rain down on my positions. One of my tanks has spotted the T34 and is engaging it. (You can order units to prioritize a specific enemy unit. Press T and drag a frame around the units you wish to focus your units fire on. They will be marked with a orange x) Use the check line of fire tool to meassure the distance to another unit. In this case the T34 is almost 700 meters away. If we open the penetration diagram we can see that our tank has a chance of penetrating the hull armor at ranges up to 890 meters when using the Panzergranate 39 APC round. However, this diagram doesn´t take angled armor into account. The real effective range is much lower. Unless we manage to hit a weakspot, like a viewport or the hull machinegunport, our chances of penetrating are actually very slim. After shooting it a lot with two of my tanks the T34 still isn´t defeated. We just can´t penetrate it at that range. The armor shows a few gashes but that is about it. The enemy offers a ceasefire and I accept. Yep, this one really is a draw. Both sides suffered losses and there haven´t been any significant ground gains. Well at least the Soviets suffered more. Just to give you an idea how tough a T34 is. With all those shells I only managed to damage a track and the chassis. I´m glad it wasn´t able to shoot back because its gunsight got damaged in a previous fight. No wonder the T34s were as effective as they were vs. the early war german tanks they encountered IRL. Look at this, I was actually able to throw back the enemy a bit and now I might get myself a foothold on the other side of the river next turn. Now to the battle up north.

Please guys, I beg you, NO SPOILERS!!!! Use spoilertags if you want to discuss something about the story.

Knock it off Pufu, the offtopic games and gaming forum is for all games....

I´d actually love to see this!

They see me rolling..... OK, this is the battle we will fight first. Nightime is approaching and the Luftwaffe won´t be able to fly sorties once it gets too dark. In this area I have two Air target spotters, so I will use their ability as long as there is some light left. I also have a HUGE tank force wich will also benefit from not having to fight in darkness....yet. This is my setup for this battle. I will advance eastwards and get as much land as I can. Do you see that huge tank force east of Shilovo? Nothing will be able to stand in the way of that! This battle has a new unit participating in it, the Panzer IV. Originally this tank was designed as a support tank for the infantry while the Panzer 3 was supposed to be the main battle tank of the Wehrmacht. However, evolutions in Armor technology quickly confronted the Germans with a huge problem. Their Panzer 3s couldn´t be upgraded to anything with more punch than a long 5cm gun. It simply wasn´t enough to deal with Soviet armor advances. So the Germans did this: Instead of the short 7,5cm gun the Panzer 4 ausf. F/2 was upgraded with a long 7,5cm KwK40 gun. This gun could penetrate Soviet tanks at high ranges and so the Panzer 4 became the main battle tank of the Wehrmacht up to the end of the war. Here we go, the tanks begin to roll. Artillery barrages start raining down on known enemy positions. I arranged those together with all the attack commands during the initial orders pahse. That way the attack is rolling and I´ll only have to invest command points if something is out of the ordinary The sporadic soviet resistance is beeing crushed by the advance of my tanks. And the Luftwafffe has joined the party as well. They are precision bombing the Soviet squads. My tanks don´t hesitate to shoot at enemy positions. The advance is going very well. The enemy simply doesn´t have the power to stand in the way of my advancing tanks. The Soviets retreat. Don´t mind that the statistics claim this was a draw, it was a crushing victory with minimal losses on my side. We gained another sector, could have been more but it´s OK. The soviets are crumbling.

How does that whole thing work?

TURN 9 05.07.1942 18:00 Historical: 21Infantry Regiment together with the 24 Panzerregiment started an attack between two woodlands to the south of Voronezh that were still occupied by the enemy in order to approach the city outskirts as close as possible. So, historically the Wehrmacht, after having been pushed out of Trushkino by the Soviet practice battalion of the 232 Rifle division, went for a concentrated attack into the flank of the Soviet advance. Of course, our situation looks a lot different. We already achieved the main objectives of this campaign wich were to secure Shilovo and the nothern road leading to Voronezh. Right now only one main objective remains. We have to secure the crossing over the Voronezh river by capturing Yakovlevka and Tavrovo. And of course, we have to hold what we captured so far. First I reorganise my Platoons. Take this one as an example. You see that two squads only have three men left in them. Like this they are both combat ineffective. I choose to disband the one that has a damaged APC by righklicking on it. You can see that those three guys have been sent to other squads inside that platoon. But I don´t like having one of the combat squads with only four men in it. I choose to reinforce that squad, again by righ klicking on it and selecting reinforce this time. Now it has five men in it because one member of the command squad got transfered to the Panzergrenadier squad. Five men is still not a lot for a combat squad. Usually I would consider disbanding it at this strenght, but the squad does have an APC and I consider this to be a large enough force multiplier. If you klick on one empty bracket you may have access to reserve squads (left side of screen). Double klick on one of them and it will be added to the platoon Now this platoon has a MG42 squad attached to it. One of the Panzergrenadier squads is out of ammo as can be seen by the red bullets. Selecting replenish ammo in the right klick menu will distribute the ammo across the platoon. So, this is our plan for the next turn....It´s basically all out attack across the whole front. We have to further secure the road up north and we have to push towards the two villages. I brought a lot of tanks to the area around Shilovo to assist in the attack. Let´s see what the Soviets will do. They are counterattacking in a few places. Up north they will try to recapture the road to prevent a fast advance of Wehrmacht troops towards Voronezh. Down south they will try to counterattack towards Shilovo from the east and the south across the river. I haven´t decided yet wich battle I will fight first.

Stream of bullets This will be a weird one. The enemy is attacking me but I´ll be deploying all my troops on the other side of the river and they won´t be able to cross since the bridges are gone. Are we just gonna shoot at each other across the river? I have two mechanised Panzergrenadier platoons, one mechanised recon platoon and the commander of third company with a few attached squads. The Soviets have one rifle platoon and at least four unknown units. I suspect it´s mostly infantry. Actually there are a few places that look shallow enough to allow infantry to cross. I will have to guard those. A look at the map reveals that indeed that place seems to be shallow enough. My deployment is very simple. A few scouts near shallow places with the bulk of my force near that very shallow place near the bridge. I will loose Diana 1, but I really don´t care. Use the initial orders phase to mark areas for Artillery bombardment. This way it will be very accurate and also arrive very fast. One of my Recon APCs is immediatelly retreating because it´s gun traverse has been damaged in the previous battle and the crew had no time to repair it. First enemy sighting near Yakovlevka. They are moving east. What worries me is that there are a lot of them and they seem to be moving towards that shallow passage I mentioned earlier. I move my mortar APC to a new position closer to that suspected ford. I call in a bit of artillery on enemies that try to hide in the tall grass. What I suspected could be a ford isn´t one after all. Or the Soviets just can´t get enough people across the open ground to attempt a crossing. And so we now have a standoff situation where the Germans and the Soviets shoot at each other across the river. Sadly I loose one Scout halftrack to AT rifle fire. Actually there are places that are shallow enough. Soviet forces just faintedthe attack on the large shallows. A large force has attacked in another place. The enemy is crossing! Reinforcements are on the way. These small scout APCs are really hauling ass. The enemy is unable to cross in sufficient numbers and has to abort that plan. The enemy offers a ceasefire and I accept because I am using up a lot of ammo that I can´t replenish as easily as the enemy. I have lost one halftrack and another has been damaged. Now I know that the enemy has a lot of infantry down in Yakovlevka.

Something some Russians in this forum really failed to comprehend in the past....

Nothern assault So, the attack up north is beginning, let´s take a look at the forces. Soviet: Akmetchins rifle platoon (Ereskij doesn´t count since almost the whole platoon has been wiped out in a previous battle) Shebennikovs Machinegun company 3-4 unknown units. The Machinegun company gives the Soviets a huge ammount of anti-infantry firepower. Especially since they´ll all be dug in. The unknown units might contain some more tanks. Germans: 1x Mechanised Panzergrenadier platoon in SdKfz 1x Tank Platoon consisting of 5 Panzer IIIs with the long 5cm gun. 2x light AT gun platoons armed with 2,8cm heavy AT rifles (Schwere Panzerbüchse 41) and a few 5cm Pak38 AT guns. 1x AT gun platoon armed with 5cm Pak38 AT guns. 1x 7,5cm light infantery gun 18 battery with four guns Our offensive capabilities are actually quite limited with the Panzergrenadiers and the Tanks being the only primarily offensive force. They will have to advance with a lot of support from the light infantry guns. However, should the enemy have tanks we can fall back into the cover of our AT guns and let them deal with the threat. I had concentrated a lot of defensive AT weapons up north because I feared the Soviets might try to use their tanks on the open fields up there. My defensive troops are deployed in the few available treelines, the Panzergreandiers and the tanks are deployed a bit to the back. Depending on where I spot the enemy troops the will advance along the main road or take the road up to Dolomite 2 in the north. When deploying a defensive weapon always use the "check area of sight" button to see if the unit has a clear field of fire and where it might have blindspots. The battle has started, I spotted a few trenches during the initial deployment phase and set up a few targets for my offmap artillery using my artillery spotter. I´m not sure if these trenches are occupied or not, but better be safe than sorry. There is a huge trench cluster in the fields near Dolomite 2 and enemy presence has been confirmed by a green signal flare....green signal flare? That is the sign for an attack, isn´t it? I abort the Artillery strike on those other trenches and start to move my Panzergrenadiers and tanks up north. Indeed the Soviets are advancing, this is actually very surprising. I think they don´t know what kinds of units I have up here. Well at least they are using heavy mortars to support their attack, but still..... I can use this! Those Mortars will be out of service very fast. Let me sing you the song of my MG42 And yeah, as predicted, that mortar is fucked. Oh look, a red flare. That must be a signal for „Abort attack“ There are a lot of Soviet soldiers though.... A convoy of SdKfzs is moving up my Panzergrenadiers to the treeline. Three tanks are also on the way. The other two tanks are needed on my right flank where the Soviets are currently moving into my flank. The tanks are rolling up. I´m constantly on the lookout for enemy mortars to give them the LIG treatment. Those things are just too dangerous to be left alive. I also call in some artillery on the Soviet infantry. The ammount of fire power I now have in those treelines due to the Halftracks and the tanks is just insane. The Soviet soldiers choose to demonstrate how fast they can run. I can´t blame them really. Panzergrenadiers are clearing out trenches while two tanks and their APC provide overwatch and supressive fire. We have a complete breakthrough situation, my Tanks can race on to chase down the enemy. Full speed ahead to new adventures. (By the way, vehicles get dirtier throughout the battle) The enemy retreats after having suffered insane losses. My guess is that the Soviets didn´t know about the tanks and halftracks I had since those arrived here only recently. They thought they could crush me in a mass infantry attack, wich maybe would have suceeded if it wasn´t for my tanks. They had the numerical advantage after all. When they finally realised what they are up against their soldiers where already out of their trenches and cought out in the open. I only lost one MG42 squad, one 2,8cm AT rifle and a few soldiers here and there. Every grey dot is at least one dead soldier Really a complete breakthrough. I managed to punch through all the way to the victory point. My men now control the road towards Voronezh. The enemy is still in control of the forest near the road though.

Aww that is a shame, I was hoping they would upgrade the old maps too....