@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:
assuming you are talking about both scenarios (as I still think the tournament scenario feels superbly balanced right from the start).
Assuming you’re calling the “Operation Uranus” scenario the “Tournament Scenario”. That was not the intent by the staff. “Race to Stalingrad” is the full game that is expected to be played. The Uranus Scenario is supposed to be a teaching/tutorial scenario for a quick game.
I don’t claim to speak for the rest of the staff, but we actually spent far more time working on the base scenario Vs. the Uranus one. If anything, the Uranus one is an afterthought. I’d be alarmed/surprised if Gen Con and the other “powers that be” are promoting it as the “official” scenario. IMO USSR is better there, but there is a lot of variance due to the cards.
Playing with awareness of and trying to take advantage of “No Step Back”
This one is critical for German success, which you already seem to understand.
Gaining some experience on approaching and attacking into the city from the 3 possible options
Gaining familiarity with the force multiplier ability
Speaking strictly from a High-level, I would generally recommend picking 1-2 entry points max and not all 3, since Germany will get its forces spread too thin otherwise.
Being sufficiently aware of the supply system to take advantage of attacking the Volga ferries on specific turns etc.
Another point about supply that I see potentially being overlooked (from what little I’ve watched of others playing the game, anyway) is the rules nuance that each ferry only supplies one section of the city (color-coded), and that you cannot draw supply from a ferry to a different point, even if there is a clear land connection.
Understanding how to play to the victory conditions
This could potentially be a trap if Germany is aiming for something like a minor from the word go. If they can’t be aggressive and actively deny the Soviets their IPC-producing spaces in the city they’ll just get drowned (like what you are experiencing in your games).
I’m going to throw in a few (again, general high-level points since there is no TripleA plugin I can use to illustrate and I don’t like “backseat gaming” too much) other points of interest that I see get overlooked:
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Germany needing to know when to sacrifice its air ball (or at least risk sacrificing it) to break down a position on the city map.
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Making the supply drop via air to the cut-off territory (I forgot the name sorry) on turn 1 to ensure (or almost ensure) a win there.
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Not overstacking the river IPC territories on the north flank of the map (and just using the once-every-two-turns INF to bolster the numbers there).
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Not attacking into the Soviet reinforcement zones on the Don map (since, if they are not contested or occupied, they can only produce one unit per turn).
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Abandon normal A&A high-level concepts like slowly INF-pushing and pursuing a mobile war where you race to get on top of some of the IPC tiles in the city as quickly as possible.
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OOL timing being much different for Germany Vs. what you’d expect from A&A. I was typically going Minor Axis (since they can’t force multiply) -> ART -> STUG -> INF -> MECH -> TANK.
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Abusing the fact that the other player must attack in contested territories during their turn. This means that attacking into INF-heavy USSR territories can ultimately work out in the long-term as they are forced to attack @1 during their half of the turn.
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Intentionally contesting territories to deny the IPCs to the Soviet player.
@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:
As for the Soviets getting 100s of RPs worth of units, I don’t see how the Axis can prevent it. The Axis can’t truly penetrate into the city until Turn 4 at the earliest; by that point the Soviets have already picked up ~50 RPs directly, plus another ~40 from the factories,
40 from the factories? In 4 turns USSR would have 2 ART and 2 TANK, for 20 IPC. Minor nitpick but that might make a big difference if you were missing that detail.
and they’ll continue to get a lesser amount depending on how the fighting in the city goes. That’s in addition to the easily ~100-150 RPs worth of units from Operation Uranus.
If Germany is playing properly they should be able to properly layer blockers outside of the city to make the Uranus forces irrelevant with regards to the fighting inside the city. How exactly they go about doing that would vary greatly based on the game state, of course.
There simply aren’t enough Axis units to push through the starting Soviet units, deal with these constant reinforcements, AND garrison the RP spaces so that the Axis can eventually get some RPs of their own.
The reinforcements from the Soviets take ~3 turns to reach a relevant point in the city, if not longer depending on where the fighting is happening:
1: USSR buys units, places them in Krasnaya, and moves them onto the ferry (at a rate of 1 INF per turn before the river freezes later). Also note that ONLY INF cross the river.
2: The INF unloads in its relevant rally point. If any of these territories are going to be contested by the unloading then Germany is probably doing very well.
3: The INF move up.
Even then, if Germany doesn’t go overly wide in their attack, speaking strictly about reinforcements, only 1-2 Soviet INF per turn should be able to actively make it to a relevant area in the city in the first few rounds of the game. The TANKs from the tractor factory are a strong point for the Soviet player, since they have 2 Movement and good stats, but in the initial, critical turns where Germany is trying to get its foothold in the city there will only be two of them. Additionally, if the German player is targeting the factories (another point of interest; once a factory is lost once, it’s gone forever).
My point with this wall of text is that the IPC counts you’re referencing do not reflect the full reality of how the game actually plays out if Germany is not playing a conventional, slow-but-steady INF push strategy.
@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:
You are correct that bidding was included in the rules as an optional rule, per page 28. I have not attempted this yet but it’s in theory an easy fix for boosting the Axis starting forces.
Reducing/Boosting the Axis starting forces is actually very delicate. Given how small the IPC count is across the board (16 in the city, 4 on the outside), if Germany takes even 6 IPC off of USSR you will see that they begin to completely collapse across the board due to lack of reinforcements. The Uranus forces are extremely powerful (the general idea is that, if Germany can pressure USSR to blow their Uranus deployment early (round 5/6), then Germany will be at a huge advantage going into the late game, but if USSR is able to defend well enough to deploy on the last possible turn (round 7), then Soviets will have the edge unless Germany somehow racked up a huge IPC count for Winter Storm.
@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:
. However it does feel like the entire box ix focused on a narrow popular view of the campaign rather than the full picture of what the Axis were trying to accomplish
Two Last/minor points: Even though I defended them from a balance perspective in another thread, I do wish the Minor Axis pieces had something else to them to give them more flavor (beyond being yellow for Romania, anyway). They were actually added pretty late in development and there was a desire this time to avoid making the game feel overly bloated with minor/one-off rules (since the complexity level of North Africa was divisive).
There was also some discussion to make the starting date earlier, as the in-game start date reflects a point where the Germans already took a surprisingly large number of casualties by attrition (meaning the battle was basically already lost), but that was also sacrificed because the feeling was that the game was already running long (which was apparently the correct call, since F2F cons are apparently talking about using the shorter scenario for tournaments with the game as-is).
Happy to keep discussing if needed. I apologize that I keep generalizing but I generally do better with this sort of thing when I can have TripleA open in front of me to show specific moves/battles/probability calculations.
EDIT: I misstated that there were only 14 IPCs in the city. That was a typo. There are 16.
