Lost Victory Study Book

Design Notes And Commentary

By David James Ritchie
Wargames are strange critters. We call them games, but few of them are. Mostly, they are puzzles; the fun comes from the solvingand from the learning that accompanies itrather than from the competition. Some arent even puzzles; theyre just historical discourse in the guise of a slightly dysfunctional model. The most dysfunctional of these models are what we call serious wargames. You certainly cant play em; mostly you cant even figure em out. So you know they must be real serious historical documents. Otherwise why did you shell out 40 bucks for them? In the end, though, the members of the design team choose the themes they want to stress, and concentrate their efforts on the systems that embody those themes. Lost Victory started life with several major themes squirreled away in its kit bag: r The Commander As Conductor. The operational art is much like conducting an orchestra. When and for how long an instrument plays is as important as where the musician sits. In military terms, when a motorized regiment exploits, attacks or bombards is as important as where its deployed. The commander is the conductor to his army, and has the same ability as a conductor to sequence events. r Managing Chaos. Battlefields are inherently chaotic places, and part of the art of command is preparing for and reacting to the unexpected. In any game that claims to model part of reality, the best laid plans of mice and men should always confront an element of uncertainty. r The Illusion of Strength. Unit size isnt always the best indicator of strength, and single-value approximations of combat capabilities are inherently misleading. Units actually have a multiplicity of very different combat capabilities, many of which have nothing to do with their size and some of which can be brought to bear only under specific conditions. When command and control or logistics break down, these capabilities degrade at varying rates. Just looking at a single Attack Strength on a playing piece shouldnt tell you what a unit can do on the paper battlefield, and a units size shouldnt say much more about a unit than how much space it occupies. r Control is Everything. Having and using are two different things. It doesnt matter how many tanks you have; if you cant get them moving in the right direction or pointing their guns at the right target, you might as well not have them. Controlling military formations and getting them to execute a plan is harder than it sounds, and the opposing armies in this campaign had very different command and control capabilities. Keep these themes in mind. Youll be meeting them again.

The Devil Is In The Details

Dont get me wrong. I like richly detailed games. What I dont like is games that put their detail in the wrong places. I dont want to be a clerk or a quartermaster; I want to be a field commander. And I dont want to spend a lot of time piddling around with someones sophomoric idea of how Hitler and Stalin each kept their generals from winning the war! Im the commander; I want to make the decisions. If there are limits on the scope of those decisions, build them into the game in the simplest possible way, and let me get on with maneuvering my army. Dont make me command navies in a ground campaign. Or manage a network of air bases when the air commanders werent even in the command chain of my historical counterpart. Or hassle with geopolitics when youve cast me in the role of operational commander. Clear out the underbrush! All I really wanna do is move and fight. Thats my taste in gamesserious and otherwise. It may not be yours, but I bet the same thoughts have crossed your mind more than once when trying to tame one of these stubborn beasts. When it comes to putting detail in all the wrong places, the games most likely to exceed are those set on the Eastern Front during World War II. My love affair with the subject goes back a quarter century, but I dont much like most East Front games. The early ones are either simplistic or embarrassingly inaccurate. The later ones (including my own Barbarossa design) are often baroque fantasies, more notable for their inclusion of inappropriate minutia than for their simulation or play value. Which is why, when Gene Billingsley asked me what subject Id like to tackle as a series prototype, my eyes turned east. Turned? Hell, you could hear the eyeballs click into place a block away. From Day One of the design process, my primary concern in Lost Victory was to get the details in the right places. I knew I was going to abstract logistics. I also knew that the air game would be simple and straightforward. Subordination, infrastructure, high level command and the like would be as vanilla as I could make them. All that was in the Out Group. Stuff that had to be there, but shouldnt be emphasized. And in the In Group? Moving and fighting. But more than that, I had a whole list of themes that I wanted to build into the rules for moving and fighting. Themes. Every game has one. Usually more than one. Even games that dont start out with themes end up having them by the time the design is published. The theme may be weak or badly presented, or it may be included inadvertently, but its always there. The subject doesnt necessarily determine the themes, but in a tightly crafted game, the subject does act as a filter to exclude inappropriate themes. The intended audience, component mix, playing time and price point also act as filters.

Time and Space

The earliest operational East Front games usually had division-sized units and a ground scale of 10 to 15 kilometers per hex. Two problems with that scale. First, realistic stacking limits demand that you let player mass up to six divisions (plus supporting units) in a hex that size. Thats not deployment; its high-rise construction. Second, at that scale, you cant really tell whats going on. For there to be a reasonable amount of movement on the map (essential for both historicity and player enjoyment), you have to use a time scale of several days per turn, which gives operations a jerky quality. You see the results, not the process. So the first critical decision I made was to use a ground scale of about 6 kilometers per hex and, at least nominally, a regimental scale for units. Actually, the division is the basic maneuver formation, but I broke everything down to regiments to allow more steps per division, permit realistic battlegroup formation, give a better portrayal of how combat support worked and let divisions extend or contract their front, as needed. Such divisions as are in the game represent burnt out units with the combat strength of brigades or regiments (but the larger infrastructure of divisions).

Lost Victory
Another benefit of my chosen scale was that I could easily build key characteristics of the opposing armies into stacking values. By giving units an SV from 0 to 4 and manipulating that value to get the right functional effects, I could allow units to concentrate, force them to disperse or encourage players to use certain units in combination. If youve played the game, you know what I mean. Generally, a stack can have one formation of any type (plus some supporting independent units) or two infantry/rifle divisions (with no independent units). But those unwieldy Soviet tank corps and over-sized SS divisions dont quite fit in a hex, so you cant bring their full strength to bear as easily as you can with smaller, more efficient units. Soviet cavalry corps, which were supposed to spread out and exploit breakthroughs, need up to three hexes to deploy when accompanied by their normal complement of supporting independent tank units. Nor are those independent units much use in the absence of a formation; the independent units have SVs similar to units that are part of formations, but they lack the share of divisional/corps assets built into formation strengths, making them comparatively weak and inefficient. This interaction of scale and stacking values gives a much better feel for how different unit types were used than would have been possible with a true divisional unit scale and a conventional ground scale. Though not readily apparent, this interaction makes the standard German panzer division (not the bigger and more powerful SS division) the most useful formation on the map; with only 4 stacking points, you can mass an entire panzer division (plus attachments) in one stack for maneuver and overrun. At my chosen ground scale, I could have reasonably used a time scale of anywhere from one to five days per turn. I toyed with a 48-hour turn when I was planning to use a conventional double-impulse movement system, but that quickly went by the boards due to a change in the sequence of play. The biggest dragon is a beast named WhatIDoNow?, who lives in the minds of the players. To conjure this beast, find an opponent who has never played Lost Victory, set up the game and ask for a reaction. Chances are, hell say something like Looks great, but what do I do now?and the beast is in full cry. The problem is that Lost Victorys course of play doesnt structure the turn so that its obvious what you should do next. Instead of holding you by the hand and leading you through a set of operational choices by means of a contrived structure, it gives you much the same freedom of action enjoyed by the historical commanders. Because were all used to being told by the course of play when to do what, this freedom can be a paralyzing shock. Dont feel bad if youve been in this boat. When the developer played this game for the first time, he used the Soviet players First Ops Phase to make set-piece attacks and move units up to the line, not realizing that the fluid situation east of Kharkov was better suited to wholesale use of overruns. Because he didnt know what to do with all the flexibility the game gave him, he wasted the phase (and would have lost the game if he hadnt started over after turn 2). Just about everyone who tried Lost Victory during development had a variation on this experience at some point. You, on the other hand, get to benefit from our mistakes. Hopefully, by the time youre done with this essay, youll have developed your own ideas of what to do now.

The Other Dragon

Theres another nasty dragon living out on the edge of the conceptual map where this course of play resides. Its name is Perceived Reality, and one doesnt challenge it lightly. Its an almost universal wargamer conviction that everything in a game turn is always supposed to represent events happening simultaneously. Unit A may move before Unit B in the game, but we know thats just a way of making things easier on the players; theyre really moving simultaneously. Uh Huh. You bet. Designer guys (including myself) cater to this perception when they blithely ignore the average nature of wargame movement and pen rules that describe movement allowances as representing the distance that a unit can move during a single phase. While true, that statement implies that this is some maximum capability representing full-bore boogie-down-the-pike time, and dont spare the horses, Ridley. Similarly, combat is usually thought of as representing a full day worth of fussin and fightin that is happening on one part of the battlefield at the exact same time that units not involved in that combat are maneuvering across another part of the field or conducting their own day-long battles elsewhere. Designers have devoted an incredible amount of time messing with systems designed to capture this perceived simultaneity. Time wasted, in my opinion. Units of this period and location generally did not march all day every day. They were mostly horse-powered, and the horses wouldnt put up with a regular exercise regimen that strenuous even if the men had to. Besides, supply columns couldnt rendezvous with units that were constantly in motion, nor could organic transport be used to distribute consumables at the same time it was carrying forward troops and equipment. Except in the midst of short surge operations, part of each day had to be spent resting and letting the logistical and command apparatus catch up. Even when they had to cover a lot of ground, units often spent hours waiting for the right conditions (clear roads, a planned breakthrough, etc.) to do their marching. In Lost Victory, I assume that a moving unit is spending only part of the day on the march. Its up to you, to decide which part. You do that by choosing the order in which units move. Units did sometimes attack continuously for an entire day, but that was the exception. During World War II, a unit generally made one attack per day. If it failed, the unit was done for that day; try again tomorrow

The New Order in the East

The move-fight-move course of play is one of the central paradigms of modern operational-level wargame design. You can ignore it if your topic predates World War I. After about 1930, you cant avoid it. That doesnt mean you must use this particular course of play. But its a basic starting point. Use something else, youd better have a good reason. So in Lost Victory, I abandoned this venerable institution, and went to an impulse system, where each player gets to do something different with each and every unit during each and every Ops Phase. The reason? Realism and flexibility. Armies dont all move at the same time and then attack together and then everybody move again. Thats an artificial convention meant to impose understanding on chaos. It works OK in an abstract way, but I wanted something that conveyed more of the feel of an unfolding operationsomething where the order in which you chose to move and fight could be part of your battle plan instead of being imposed by me. In other words, I wanted to showcase the commander as conductor. I also wanted a system that would let me recreate with equal realism any type of operationfrom a pursuit to a sustained assault to a classic kessel battle. Then too, I wanted to get as much of the necessary housekeeping activity as I could out of that part of the turn where you did the good stuff (moving and fighting). You shouldnt have to check weather or ground aircraft or hassle with logistics every day. Those things work on a different cycle from operational combat and maneuver. A prime reason that Lost Victory uses multiple Ops Phases within a 72-hour turn instead of individual 24-hour turns is that it let me limit the number of times players had to fuss with all those housekeeping chores. It was in the third iteration of my design outline that I abandoned the move-fight-move sop. It was great. It was terrifying. I felt like Chris Columbus. Sail on. And on. And on. Only watch out. Here be dragons.

Playbook
with a better plan and more support. If the attack met with initial success, then the unit probably kept advancing, meanwhile cleaning up incidental opposition, until it met enemy forces too strong to be dislodged without a new prepared attackwhich usually didnt take place until the next day. In Lost Victory, as in all other operational wargames, this situation is built into the combat results. The difference in this game is that everybody isnt attacking at dawn. Instead, think of each attack as jumping off at the moment that conditions are exactly right (except when you screw up or get SNAFUed). One final comment on the simultaneity dragon. This game is missing one rule that is important to any operational game that purports to use average instead of maximum movement capabilities. My initial design had a forced march rule that let units try to march distances way beyond their printed MA at the risk of becoming disrupted (e.g. leaving a trail of stragglers and lost subunits). Early in the development process, Gene the Developer suggested that we streamline the system by eliminating this and other rules. Wishing to appear agreeable, I said sure, no problem. Later in development, I kept meaning to raise the issue of reincluding this rule and never did. Dumb mistake. I plan to test a new rule for forced marching with the final version of the game, after which I expect that Gene will publish it in C3I. The tradeoff is that reacting units can end up disrupting themselves. Our idea here was that reaction is an unplanned, often spur-of-the-moment response, and is therefore more likely to result in confusion and dislocation than more carefully planned offensive activity. Units that are doing a lot of maneuvering instead of hugging a carefully chosen piece of ground are also more likely to be caught off balance by an attack or overrun; hence the adverse command check modifier. One aspect of reaction appeared strange to the playtesters (and maybe to you): there are no range restrictions on reaction. The reason is simple. With few exceptions, the basic reaction element is a formation, and all units in the same formation are going to be well within radio range of each other or of their formation HQ (abstracted in the game). The few exceptions are insignificant.

Timing Is Everything
Reaction aside, Genes big game saver was initiative. As you may by now have guessed, my first prototype didnt have this feature; the Soviet Player conducted his ops first throughout the game. The more we played, the more cockeyed this looked. The problem was all the games built-in friction effects. As units operate, they tend to lose capabilities. Your army is in the best shape of the entire turn at the start of the Ops Segment; its downhill from there until, at the end of a segment, half your units may be temporarily unsupplied, disrupted or unavailable. So there is a real advantage to being the first bull out of the chute. Its OK for that bull to be Soviet early in the game, but not after Manstein starts his counterattack. Late in development, Gene finally insisted that we address this problem, together with two other issues: game length and play balance. Simply put, the damn game was taking too long to playon top of which, thanks to some necessary changes in the supply and airpower rules, the Red Army was advancing with unaccustomed alacrity in the early going. Ideally, a single mechanism could both speed play and slow the pace of operations; with luck, we could build both of those solutions into an initiative system. So theorized himself, the developer. We spent a whole week burning up Ma Bells wires between Connecticut and California before finally implementing a variation on a system Gene had outlined to me at the start of the previous week. Anyway, it was thoroughly discussed. The initiative system in the published game is predicated on a few simple ideas: r Initiative means the ability, within limits, to control the pace and character of the battle. In game terms, going first lets you initiate a sequence of maneuvers and attacks to which the second player must respond before he can put his own plans in train. r Initiative is as much in the minds of the commanders as in actual battlefield conditions. That being the case, instead of trying to guess which conditions would force a change of initiative (and forcing you to count casualties or some other ridiculous thing), we left it to the players to evaluate the situation. The bidding system just forces you to put your money where your mouth is in that discussion. If your army is really in control of the battle, then you should be able, in most cases, to conduct more offensive ops (attacks and overruns) than the enemy. Bid accordingly. r The side with the initiative tends to keep it; initiative seldom flipflops back and forth between opposing commanders. In 1943, the initiative changed hands three times; that mirrors what happens in most games. r Initiative most often changes hands at that unpredictable moment when whoever has the initiative becomes so overextended that the frontline units cant maintain the level of offensive activity ordered by higher command. The game works pretty well in this regard. Generally, a player only gives up the initiative voluntarily

For Every Action...

Theres one aspect of the course of play that does bow to the idea of simultaneity. The Ops Segment has a conventional IgoYugo structure that assumes that both players battle plans are unfolding more or less simultaneously within each pair of Ops Phases. This aspect of the game was a source of spirited discussion during development. More than once, Gene broached the idea of using some variation on a consolidated Ops Phase in which both sides would conduct ops one HQ at a time, with the initiative shifting back and forth between the players during the phase. Its an attractive idea in that it seemingly replicates the ebb and flow of battle better than does the mannered artificiality of IgoYugo. This type of initiative-based system is also thought by many wargame cognoscenti to be the terminally cool coming thing. Aside from the fact that this proposed change would have added new mechanics to a game that already had lots and would have dumped a new record-keeping burden on players, I had one big objection to this idea. Its bogus! Alternating player activity has the advantage of allowing players to develop coherent operations without the enemy being able to react to battlefield developments with the perfect, god-like intelligence that is the curse of board wargaming. In other words, it better replicates the advantages of an offensive posture. In this regard, IgoYugo is more realistic than any initiative-based system Ive yet seen. Using IgoYugo rounds in the Ops Segment did leave me with the problem of how to give the inactive player some limited means of responding to enemy operations as they unfolded. After all, ops dont occur in a vacuum, and the enemy isnt (usually) asleep. My first prototype had an oddball interception system where trying to move between EZOCs gave the inactive player the option to shift his units to plug the hole you were trying to slide through. It was a neat little system, but not near flexible or powerful enough to provide the response I needed. Once Gene Billingski got the hang of things, the Red Army was routinely cutting off and killing Das Reich before the Axis could move! Reaction was Genes answer to the Das Reich death ride. As it turns out, this system is crucial to the games success. Without it, you cant conduct a mobile defense. With it, the inactive player can shift troops to reinforce critical locations, backpedal a short distance to avoid the heaviest enemy blows and even disengage completely while awaiting his turn to come roaring back with a coordinated counterattack. Reaction is a necessary counter to the increased power and flexibility conferred on the active player by the course of play.

Lost Victory
when he needs to regroup. More often, the player fails to make the required number of attacks and suffers severe consequences. r An initiative shift often catches the units whose side just lost the initiative off balance and unprepared for a change in posture (for practical purposes, disrupted). In the game, you usually dont suffer much from losing the initiative during bidding; consider such initiative losses as representing planned changes in posture. However, if you lose initiative because you failed to make the required number of attacks/overruns, this is an unplanned change due to being overextended. In this case, the most forward units (the ones most likely to be overextended) usually get chosen for disruption. Then the former Second Player gets two Ops Phases in a row; the unbalanced state of your army gives him greater freedom of action and offers good opportunities for high intensity butt kicking. Functionally, this works. The main brakes on a commanders ability to control the pace of a battle are the force ratio, surprise, weather, supply and unit readiness. In Lost Victory, the force ratios limited effect on the pace of operations is built into the strategic situation, as expressed in the replacement, reinforcement and bidding systems. Surprise played a questionable role in this campaign and isnt portrayed at all. The condition of the troops is already addressed obliquely by built-in friction effects; it is one of the factors you take into account when deciding how aggressively to exercise the initiative. That leaves weather and supply as the main factors directly affecting game pace. By 1943, both sides had learned how to conduct mechanized warfare in most weather. The one insurmountable difficulty was bad visibility that kept air strikes from flying; on the ground, everybody just soldiered on in shared misery. Oh, SS Totenkopf did manage to get stuck fast in a quagmire when a freak thaw caught it foolishly trying to march cross country, but that was a truly unique situation. Until the arrival of the spring rasputitsa brought the campaign to an end, the weather didnt much affect the pace of operations. Blizzards were the big exception. The one that savaged southern Russia the week before the opening of Operation Star left behind deep drifts that slowed ops into early February. Other storms not only made it harder to enter terrain (an effect handled by increasing various MP costs); at their height, they also forced almost everybody to take shelter. In the game, the time lost seeking shelter from the storm is represented by lopping a pair of phases from the Ops Segment. Supply also works as an operational brake by eliminating one pair of phases per Ops Segmentbut only during some of the turns when the Soviet player has the initiative. Since the Axis didnt suffer from the general supply shortages that plagued the Red Army in this campaign, it isnt subject to the same brake. The central problem with C3I is that most of what goes into it happens before the game starts. In the real world, C3I capabilities are built into training, doctrine, unit TO&Es and various command and staff organizations. In wargames, the effects go into charts, tables and unit ratingseven the course of play. For the most part, C3I isnt something that is within the players control except to the degree that he can attack enemy C3I capabilities. So why confront the issue at all? Aside from my conviction that control is everything? Lots of reasons: r The 1943 campaign was characterized by amazing feats of arms performed by units far less powerful than the forces arrayed against them; these feats were possible only because of superior operational and tactical command and control. I wanted to showcase that fact. r The quality of C3I in individual situations was usually a function of what superior HQ was managing the battle, and units performed differently when their activities were coordinated by different HQs. Some of the effects of C3I had to be invested in HQ capabilities. I couldnt just build them into individual unit ratings or into some general capability conferred on an entire army. r The essence of Blitzkrieg is getting into the enemy rear and assailing his C3I and logistics. Instead of attacking the sharp end, go for the blunt end. To show modern mechanized warfare in action, I needed to explicitly portray the blunt end. That meant more than using HQs as conduits for logistics and support. Supplied units whose rear area was crawling with enemy mechanized forces had to suffer appropriate handicaps. r Since I had already decided to use multiple units to portray individual formations, I needed a realistic way of rewarding players for behaving historically and keeping most of those formations together. Actually, I found two: the support rules and the command check modifiers. r If there is one central theme running through the operational history of the worlds greatest land war, it is the relative shift in the balance of C3I competence between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. Any game system portraying operations in this theater over time has to reflect how this balance changed and how it affected what happened.

Situation Normal...
Lost Victory explicitly portrays only a subset of C3I. Its a factor in half the games systems, but aside from the small amount of limited intelligence incidental to the stacking rules, all the explicit C3I in the game is built into the pre-combat command checks and the SNAFU system. A few items of note regarding command checks, HQ ratings and SNAFUs: r Until 1944, Soviet command and control was generally inferior to that of the Wehrmacht. Early in 1943, the Red Army command and staff wasnt as lame as in 1941, but it was still catching up. Thats why the Soviets have lower average CVs and are far more prone to SNAFUs. r Since the Soviets had severe supply problems during this campaign, I built those problems into the SNAFU system. So another part of the reason that the Soviets are more prone to SNAFUs in the game is that they suffered under an extra burden that offered additional opportunities for someone to screw up. r I didnt try to individually evaluate the command and staff of every HQ. What with frequent personnel changes and the difficulty of sorting out which factors were at work in an armys success or failure, the results would have been misleading. Instead,

A Buzzword For All Seasons

C3I. Command. Control. Communications. And Intelligence. Most designers of serious wargames talk wisely about the importance of these four horsemen of modern simulation. Then they go build some goofy new CRT or fiddle with a ZOCless movement system or do some other fun thing. C3I is something nobody really wants to fool with. The concepts are amorphous, the details are tedious, and the exact application to a given wargame is often vague. If you dont understand it, dont worry. Neither does anybody else. The main idea behind this almost-acronym is that information is power. If you know whats happening on the battlefield, have good intelligence from subordinates, can communicate appropriate orders in a timely fashion, and can count on your troops to act on those orders with dispatch, your army will perform a lot better than if none of these things are true. Now theres a news flash!

Playbook
I evaluated the HQs by nationality and type. The exceptions were SS Panzer Corps and Mobile Group Popov. The former got a lower CV to reflect its inexperience, but a higher CR to reflect how much of the battle it controlled. The latter got higher ratings to reflect the quality of its staff and the nature of its mission. r Army HQs are the units mainly responsible for the battle, and their CRs and CVs are my baseline. Front/army group HQs have a greater span of control (CR), but less of a command capability (CV) because theyre supposed to manage the supply net and provide overall direction, not run the battle; the number and type of personnel assigned reflect this mission. Except for Korps Cramer, the only corps HQs I included are panzer corps HQs, which were designed specifically to control mechanized forces, and had more and better assets for this purpose than a standard army corps. These HQs have a higher CV than your average army HQ, but their CR is severely limited. The AA Lanz and Cramer HQs have inferior ratings because they were staff shells that were beefed up and thrown into the battle as ad hoc HQs. Soviet tank army HQs get bonuses to their CR to reflect the reality that they had to control more dispersed forces (and did well at it in most cases). Guards army HQs get CV bonuses reflecting superior staff quality; this evaluation may or may not be valid for February-March 1943, but it is certainly important within a few months of this campaign. r In addition to the constants built into the unit values and game tables, I identified three main variables affecting the exercise of command and control in combat. These are reflected in the command check modifiers for weather, maneuver and number of formations. Perfect weather (fair skies and hard ground) tends to eliminate unpleasant surprises, making it easier to control events; stormy weather degrades communications and makes it harder for units to maneuver. Attacking on the fly (via overruns) and mounting a mobile defense (via reaction) stress a sides command and control far more than does a static battle. Most important, the more complex an attack and the more military units, branches off service and nationalities involved, the greater the opportunity for somebody to screw the pooch with real authority; small, singleunit attacks are inherently easier to control. Since the defending side is in a reactive mode and far less likely to rely on complex interaction between organizations, this consideration doesnt apply to the defender. r Three other variables (unit status, supply and terrain) could have affected command checks, but dont because that would have almost doubled the number of command check modifiers, making the process unnecessarily tedious. Besides, unit status and supply have far less effect on the ability to control a battle than the phenomena I chose to represent; they are more in the nature of incidental factors that offer extra opportunities for things to go wrong, and their effect on combat is already well represented in the rules governing supply, disruption and unavailable units. Except for cities, there isnt much terrain on the battlefield that might have seriously affected command and control. It seemed to me that attacking into a city was already tough enough, so I didnt add any command check modifiers for it. If you disagree with that evaluation, then I suggest adding modifiers of +1 (defender) and +2 (attacker) when any of the defending hexes has a city. Aside from command checks and SNAFUs, C3I impacts the game most dramatically through disruption. Disruption represents a loss of internal command and control within an individual unit, rather than at a command level accessible to the player. This is an important point. A lot of us unconsciously equate disruption with a good old-fashioned Napoleonic rout. But were not necessarily talking suave qui peut here. A unit can easily lose internal command and control without even being in contact with the enemy. If the unit tries to maneuver too aggressively, for example, it can become so disordered that command can no longer function sufficiently to fight the unit. Until the staff locates everybody, unsnarls traffic and restores communications, the unit cant operate effectively. If enemy contact occurs while the unit is in this state, it will likely be destroyed or dispersed. Before leaving C3I, a word is in order on the subject of intelligence. The big failure in this area during the 1943 campaign was one of interpretation. The Soviets assumed that the Germans were in retreat to the Dniepr, in part because it was so clear to Stavka that the enemy had no other choice. But both sides knew what enemy units were on the battlefield and even had some idea of where most of them were. Given that circumstance, it seemed to me that limiting the ability to examine enemy stacks was all the fog of war that I needed. Besides, the fluidity provided by the course of play offers enough surprises without having to fuss with heavy baggage like hidden movement and dummies.

The Battlefield Environment

When it comes to ground campaigns, terrain and weather are what I call environmental factors. Theyre the background against which the game playssomething outside the players control with which they must cope as best they can. Except in rare instances, these factors shouldnt be opponents in and of themselves and shouldnt be featured game elements. Russia at any time (but especially in winter) is an exception to this rule. In this part of Russia in 1943, terrain and weather worked hand in glove to fundamentally change the character of the battlefield from one week to the next and to determine the course of operations. Among the effects built into the game: r The severe cold freezes most rivers and marshes solid sometime in November. Generally, they stay frozen until the spring thaw; the marshes can be ignored and the river ice crossed with only moderate preparation. When warmer weather rots the ice, even temporarily, the rivers that were formerly insignificant considerations become major obstacles, and the wise tank commander gives marshes a wide berth. In warm weather, the larger rivers may still have ice, but you can move or attack across them only at bridges. r Most Russian bridges are flimsy wooden-construction jobs. Even the tanks of 1941 couldnt cross them without reinforcement. By 1943, the Germans have improved this situation, but most bridges still wont bear the weight of heavy tanks without strengthening. r There arent many roads, and the ones that exist are mostly dirt tracks that become rivers of mud when it rains and disappear altogether when it snows. Because of the excellent drainage provided by their grading, railroads often double as roads for both tactical and operational purposes in bad weather. When the ground is frozen, there isnt much difference between roads, tracks and clear terrain. r Not all of this battlefield is steppe, but the part that is is truly flat and featureless. Combat motorized units (the ones with lots of AFVs instead of a few trucks) have a real advantage over other unit types in this terrain. Except in the deepest mud, they can maneuver to advantage, and the guns mounted on all those AFVs have excellent fields of fire. At this scale, balkas (the deep ravines that cut the steppe) arent all that significant. I ignored them; so should you. r The wind chill factor on the open steppe is an important military consideration, and otherwise insignificant villageseven ruined ones become key objectives for the shelter they provide. A winter battle fought in the vicinity of a village almost inevitably becomes a battle for that village.

Lost Victory
r Marshes in southern Russia arent the tangled, wooded mazes found further north in Belorussia. They dont provide a lot of cover and arent much different from clear terrain in cold weather. During rain and thaws, though, they collect a lot of water, and it becomes almost impossible to maneuver in them. r Rain or melting snow turns battlefields in this part of the world into quagmires. Except for a loss of maneuverability and the decreased effectiveness of bombs and shells, combat isnt much affected, but movement especially over long distancesslows to a crawl. This effect is accentuated by the absence of good roads. r Artillery and air strikes arent as useful in mud because the shells and bombs tend to bury themselves before exploding. Covering terrain decreases the effectiveness of guns and planes for all purposes except defensive support because the cover makes it hard to spot targets and see results. This doesnt matter in the case of defensive support because the guns are usually sighted on preset killing grounds and the bombs aimed at enemy troops who have to expose themselves in order to advance; by definition, if you need the fire mission or air strike, then the targets are there. r The spring thaw proceeds from south to north, and the southern part of the battlefield thaws weeks before the northern part. Thats one reason Manstein favored attacking in the south first instead of moving immediately to smash Voronezh Front and retake Kharkov the way Hitler wanted. You can see in the Weather Summary, Movement and Combat Tables and Combat Summary how Ive incorporated all of these effects into the game. Gene hates all this weather and terrain jazz because he cant just memorize a few MP costs from a table and party on. I agree that having to refer back to the Movement Chart is a drag, but it does work rather well to show what was going on. nor air-to-air combat. Interception wasnt used during the 1943 campaign, so I left it out of my model. Air-to-air combat is simply netted outreflected in the number and strength of available air strikes and in the likelihood of an air strike taking damage while attacking. Air supply is also netted out. After their losses over the Stalingrad air corridor, the Germans didnt have capacity to burn, and besides the surviving auntie ju transports were fully occupied ferrying 50,000 troops out of the Kuban. Where do you think all those German personnel replacements are coming from, anyway? On the other side, I considered the limited use the Soviets made of air supply when I determined how hard a hit that side should take from various supply penalties; without air supply, fuel depletion and SNAFU supply effects would have been far worse. Which brings me to supply...

Counting Beans and Bullets

If youve played a lot of East Front games, youre probably not used to the idea of a Red Army that has to wrestle with logistics. Usually, its the Axis side that gets stuck with this problem. In this campaign, though, the Germans were falling back on their supply bases while the Soviets were advancing out of range of theirs. About the only problem the Germans had was a shortage of artillery shellswhich was becoming endemic to the German war machine as pitched battles began to replace sweeping maneuvers. The Soviets, on the other hand, were short of everything. Most of the workings of logistics seem pretty obvious. Supply ranges are a function of the availability of trucks at each level of command. The Germans have a well-developed rail net at their backs, so they can draw supplies directly from depots (which were usually spotted at rail stations for obvious reasons). The Soviets are bringing everything forward by truck for most of the game, so their ability to use the rails is limited. Both sides are short of ammunition, so depleting supply is a risk of combat. The Soviets are short of fuel, so Soviet columns can run out unexpectedly if they fail to rendezvous with a supply convoy. The Soviet generals have to conserve supplies, so the pace of ops may be slowed when the Red Army has the initiative. It is relatively straightforward, I guess. But note two things. r Most of the supply effects in Lost Victory arent even part of the supply system proper. They stem from each sides general logistical situation and are built into a variety of subsystems, from movement to SNAFUs and combat. They arent tied into the idea of individual units tracing supply lines to their rear area. r The actual supply system, with its rules on supply sources and LOCs, is fairly spare. Theres enough there to define the workings of a skeletal logistical network that can be attacked by the other side and to make it clear that defending your own network and wrecking the enemys is a good way to win the game. But theres not much chrome. I suppose a truly serious wargame would have represented fuel and ammo shortages by having you explicitly track Petrol Point (PeePee?) expenditures and units of fire and such and would have portrayed the logistical apparatus with a network of trucks and depots and cute little supply markers you could shuttle around the map. These techniques seem like they should be more realistic that the abstractions in Lost Victory. They arent. All that detail offers the illusion of a level of control and a precision of planning that was far beyond the capability of historical commanders or their staffs. On a real battlefield, the just in time style of planning permitted by such systems would have been overwhelmed by hoarding, pilferage, enemy action and plain old inefficiency. Which is why I chose a functional portrayal of supply that emphasizes uncertainty and surprise. I believe that as supply becomes tight, these two phenomena begin to intrude on the operational art, which is the subject of this game.

Aces High
Depending on the exact situation being modeled, airpower may or may not be an environmental factor in a wargame. When doing operational ground games I like to treat it as such. My main reason is that the roles in which the players are cast are typically those of front, army or army group commanders. These guys usually had little or no control over their air support. On the Axis side, the Luftwaffe was notoriously independent of the Army. Even on the Soviet side, frontal aviation was under the control of a separate air commander who actually fought the air battle. In Lost Victory, I wanted players to be as detached from the air war as their historical counterparts. I also wanted to remove any temptation to game the air system. So you get to decide when and where to mount air strikes just as your historical counterpart would have. But the strength of the strike (the number and type of aircraft that actually show up) is beyond your control. The air planners make their decisions, and the vagaries of weather, navigation and enemy opposition determine how strong a strike actually gets made. The number and strength of available air strikes gives you a fair idea of what to expect, but you never know for sure whats going to show up until you flip over the pieceby which time, youre committed. No more pre-calculating combat ratios and then tossing on exactly the right number of air units or air points to jigger the odds. And no more airbase management! The downside of this system in its current incarnation is that you have zero ability to influence how strong an air strike shows up. In other words, you cant tell the frontal aviation commander that a particular attack is of critical importance and his job depends on getting a suitable number of aircraft over the target. Since the rules went to the printers, Ive thought about how to do just that, but havent yet come up with a solution that makes me want to burst forth with glad little cries of glee. Ill keep you posted. As youve doubtless noticed, the air rules support neither interception

Playbook Kings of Chaos

One of the design techniques woven into the original prototype was what I call the King of Chaos effect. Basically, this effect consists of letting each player be the agent of (usually unanticipated) misfortune visited on his opponent. In other words, for that moment in time, he gets to be the King of Chaos. This is the opposite of how things are usually done in wargames. Generally, players remove their own losses, disrupt their own units and choose which of their assets are affected by game events. In this game I decided to turn all that on its ear. In Lost Victory, you can choose which enemy stack runs out of fuel and stops moving, which enemy air strikes get grounded, which enemy units suffer a variety of SNAFU results and which ones are disrupted by bombardment or as a result of losing initiative. And so on. Why is this stuff important? Consider the alternatives. Either you randomize these choices (and court repetitive stress syndrome from rolling dice), or you leave them to the player whose side is affected (and the slimesucker games the system by always picking the least damaging options). The general effect of the King of Chaos technique is that you will always choose the option that you think will throw the enemys plans into the most serious disarray. Except that you dont know what his plans are, and you may not even get to look at the unit you are picking before making your choice. This technique accepts that you will game the system, but recognizes that your ability to do so will usually be constrained by your limited knowledge. Where that clearly isnt the case, the game either uses a different technique or gives the opposing player a limited ability to trump your choice (think Ill just make a lil emergency fuel delivery, here). Is this technique gamey and contrived? You betcha. But it works, and its lots of fun. The main effect of this and other techniques that introduce uncertainty into play is to force you to expect the unexpectedand plan accordingly. How do you do that? By keeping your plans simple so as to reduce the number of things that can go wrong, by keeping your options open as long as possible and by always holding something in reserve. I am convinced that these are characteristics common to all successful practitioners of the operational arton all types of battlefields. Lost Victory takes pains to reward you for exercising them. touching the base combat strength, that rule reduces unsupplied/ disrupted units to 40% of strength, a reasonable reduction for the effects being portrayed and easier to manage than halving and quartering combat strengths. These effects give formations dimension. Thanks to the way unit bonuses interact with the supply, C3I and combat systems and with the restrictions on which units can be supported, unit capabilities in this game approach those of their historical counterparts more closely than would have been the case had the game used a featureless single value for combat. Ive taken the liberty of spreading around strengths and bonuses within formations to reflect the way subordinate units were used. For example, the combat strengths of German panzer regiments include an infantry complement drawn from their divisions motorized or panzergrenadier units. If a units ratings doesnt look quite right, there may be some attachments involved. Most units also share in those corps and army assets that arent portrayed as independent supporting units (AT brigades, sturmgeschutz battalions, etc.). I concentrated these invisible assets in the spearhead units that got them historically. Some attachments are netted out for convenience. The handful of guns that might be found accompanying an advancing tank column would have been used in a direct fire role or for short-range indirect fire, so giving tank units an artillery capability would have been misleading. Those guns became part of the units base combat strengths along with infantry attachments. And so on. The restriction on using GBs to support units from a different formation is historical. The Germans did sometimes strip the guns from a division in a quiet sector and use them to support operations elsewhere, but this wasnt common practice, and anyway, there werent any quiet sectors in this part of Russia in the winter of 1943. As a rule, divisional guns got used in direct support of the division or to bombard units on the divisions front. The same was generally true for the Soviets. Aside from the historical basis for this restriction, the rule works to keep formations operating together, which is a big plus in my book. Everything else about the unit ratings and bonuses is probably selfexplanatory. Except, of course, for Tigers. The Tiger tank was a new weapon in 1943. It had been tested previously on the Leningrad Front, but the Kharkov fighting marked the first time the weapon was used in large numbers. Even in this campaign, the Tigers werent available in units bigger than companies (which were a mix of the heavy Tigers and some medium battle tanks). At the games scale, giving the Tiger companies a Tank Bonus was a reach. For one thing, doing so made them way too useful against infantry. But the Tiger companies were importantas tank killers. When not plagued by breakdowns, a company of Tigers could do serious damage to a Soviet regiment. Hence, the Antitank Bonus, which is only useful against tanks.

Building Blocks of Victory

Units are the basic building blocks in the Lost Victory model of operational warfare. Thanks to yeoman efforts by John Kranz, the unit pieces carry most of the critical information needed to play the game. The most important data on most units is the bonus to the left of the unit type symbol. Ive called it a bonus, but in most cases, it really isnt. Its more in the nature of an auxiliary combat value. In fact, the original values for Gun, Tank and Antitank Bonuses were subtracted directly from each units AS and DS and then converted into shifts and modifiers. My purpose in using these bonuses was to arrive at a number that would reflect the special value and unique capabilities of particular weapons systems and unit types separate from raw combat strength. The availability of this bonus could then be independently modified for supply, terrain, unit status and other conditions. The workings of this basic idea become clearer when you look at an entire formation. Take 6th Panzer Division, which has the following combined values: AS = 22, DS = 24, TB = 3, GB = 6. If the divisions bonuses were translated into AS/DS factors, the TB would be worth 12 additional points of AS/DS, the GB 24 (out of a new total AS of 58). In other words, about 20% of the divisions strength is in its tanks and 40% in its guns. The guns (which inflicted half the casualties in this war) can project their 40% of strength out two hexes, and that strength can be used in a preparatory bombardment or to directly support divisional assets that dont themselves have any guns. Disruption or lack of supply make the bonuses (60% of the units strength) unavailable; without ever

Bringing It All Together

Opsespecially combat opsare where everything comes together. By now, you probably have a pretty good idea of why ops work the way they do, but a few observations are in order. r Overruns are critical to the success of offensive operations. In Lost Victory, overruns represent on-the-fly attacks in the course of movement. Period. They are not limited to motorized forces, as is commonly the case in wargames. This seeming oddity reflects my view that by 1943, the differences between how motorized and leg units operated had all but disappeared. The motorized units still had a maneuver advantage, but all units except for scratch forces were more nimble than they had been in 1939or even 1941. r The main purpose of bombardment is to disrupt enemy units so they can be killed or bypassed by friendly units that subsequently attack or overrun the target. A secondary purpose of bombardment is to disrupt enemy units that are massing for an attack in some

Lost Victory
upcoming Ops Phase. The Axis player needs to pay particular attention to using his Gun Bonuses for defensive bombardment (e.g., to forestall Soviet attacks). Historically, the superior German artillery was the backbone of the defense in the East during 194344. It works the same way in the game. r Combat and C3I interact to reward small, single-formation attacks because such attacks are easier to coordinate. If the attacker adds formations in order to pile on the combat factors and improve the odds the way we have all been taught, he runs the risk of disrupting his entire attack. Note in this regard that its usually better to attack with a couple of formations or a single formation aided by an appropriate independent specialist unit than it is to throw a lot of small independent units into an attack. Big stacks of independent units look impressive, but theyre so hard to coordinate that much of their strength is negated by C3I effects. Coordination problems aside, a lot of those independent units (especially Soviet rifle brigades) are weaker than they look. Their strength is all in their AS/DS; they have no bonuses. This is the real difference between a full-strength rifle brigade and a depleted rifle division. r Ive never been happy with units dying when they retreat into an EZOC. There are way too many accounts from this war (and particularly from this campaign) of units squeezing through a tiny gap in the enemy line and escaping to fight another day. The Soviets were especially adept at using cover to retreat, but both sides did well in this regard as long as units retained cohesion. Once cohesion was lost (as it often was when retreating units tried to cross rivers and bridges), a retreating unit quickly disintegrated. Terror of being captured by the enemy was endemic to both sides and tended to induce panic among isolated troops, but some units cope better with the terror than others. By most accounts, political soldiers (SS and NKVD) and Soviet Guards units were best able to turn the terror into desperate resistance and fight their way through the encircling enemy. This, and not some bogus elite unit status is the source of the favorable modifier those units get when retreating through an EZOC. Leg units suffer a penalty in this regard because they are slower moving. a major victory, but give up all hope of winning a decisive one. If you dont go for the major victory (or if you fail to achieve it), then the only way to win big is to drive the Ivans back across the Donets by games end. To do that, you have to string the Soviets out until they are overextended and then repeat Mansteins backhand blow. Holding a continuous line wont leave you with a big enough reserve to mount a strong counterattack, so if you want the decisive, youll have to gamble by leaving a terrifying gap in the line in order to scrape off an attack force. Finally, theres the booby prize. If you manage to keep the Soviets from winning big and also manage to retake Kharkov, you score a minor victory. Phffffut!! So who does the game favor? I honestly dont think it favors anyone. Both players have good armies. The Soviet player has more units, but the Axis player has stronger ones, backed up by better C3I. The Soviet player is hampered by supply difficulties early on, but Axis strength doesnt make itself felt until the middle of the game. There are a lot of pieces in play, but it doesnt pay to spread out any more than you have to. Theres a lot of good defensive terrain on the map, but few obvious places to build a strong line. Both sides have to concentrate their forces and learn to cope with open flanks. Neither side has any easy victory conditions. Taking this strategic situation into account, it seems to me that things are so fluid that the winner will likely be the player with the best feel for how to use his army.

Right, Wrong and Missing

I think we did a good job of getting all the important stuff into Lost Victory, but I always have questions about why some things arent in a game with this amount of detail (gee, its almost a serious wargame). Im sure you have your own questions about whats wrong or missing, and this is where I try to anticipate them. Here goes... There are no rules for building field fortifications, but neither side built anything very substantial in the winter of 1943 except for the forts printed on the map. The material and equipment to build extensive fieldworks simply wasnt available to most units. Nor was the frozen ground suitable for construction by anyone except engineers, who were in limited supply. So youve got a more or less permanent line defending the Donbas, plus the fortifications belatedly thrown up around Kharkov after Hitler declared it a fortress. You want more than that? Wait for summer when the ground isnt alternating between soup and concrete and its easier to dig in. There are also no Hitler Idiocy or Stalin Stubbornness rules to restrict what you can do. A whole body of myth has grown up around the High Command on both sides in the War in the East. Some is true; most is self-serving nonsense. There are always command disagreements, and autobiographers and chroniclers always put their own spin on them. Usually they make themselves and those who share their views look good at the expense of the dead, who arent around to rebut. It isnt pretty, but it is true. In any event, the operations covered by this game werent characterized by any top level decisions that a reasonable player might not make himself. Besides, the victory conditions already incorporate the views of Hitler and Stalin in a way that influences everything you do: to win big the Soviets have to gamble on driving way too far way too fast, while the biggest Axis win requires a risky static defense instead of a backhand blow. Anyway if you want idiocy, youll just have to provide it yourself. There are no range restrictions on air strikes. Given the size of the battlefield, there shouldnt be. The only problem with this is that it lets the Soviet player use all his air strikes, regardless of front, anywhere on the map. Frankly, this doesnt bother me a bit. Given the limited availability of Soviet air and the difficulty of isolating active operations on one front, Ive never found a way of consistently gaming the system to take advantage of this hole. But if it bugs you to have Voronezh Front air strikes operating in the Donbas, then give Soviet air strikes a range of

Strategic Victory
The campaign in southern Russia in the winter of 1943 was all about controlling large communications centers. The few cities in the region were where communications all came together and where the armies set up their main supply depots, from which they fed smaller depots close to the front. He who held those cities controlled the fate of Army Group South. Which is why the victory conditions in this game are all about cities. As I interpret the situation, Soviet control of Mariupol cuts off German forces in the eastern Donbas, a major victory. Alternatively, partial Soviet control of Dniepropetrovsk and Zaporozhe threatens the communications of Army Group South and probably forces a significant withdrawal, also a minor victory. Soviet control of those two cities cuts off the entire army group, and that is definitely a major victory. Stalins goal was to control both the Dniepr crossings and Mariupol (and, of course, take Kharkov along the way). As the Soviet player, you have to decide whether either or both goals are viable. If you dont go for one of them, then the best you can do is carve out a minor victory by trying to hold Kharkov; if you try for Poltava or Stalino, you might as well go whole hog and drive for the Dniepr or the Sea of Azov. These are nasty victory conditions, specifically designed to push you into doing what the Boss (Stalin, not Springsteen) wants. As the German player, your primary goal is to contain the enemy advance across the Donets. Hitler doesnt want to give up any ground and especially any citieslike, for example, Kharkov. So keeping the enemy east of the river and out of town is important; do that and you win

Playbook
15 hexes from the nearest HQ of the same front for bombardment purposes. The game ignores a major change in subordination that occurred late in the campaign. After Hoth ran the right flank of Southwest Front through the meatgrinder, Stavka shifted 3rd Tank Army over to Vatutin to plug the yawning gap west of Barvenkovo. But then Hoth wheeled north and smashed into Voronezh Front, and 3rd Tank Army ended up fighting for its life on the fronts open southern flank. As far as I could tell, the change in subordination never affected the campaign, so I treated it as if it didnt happen. Two notes on units. The German 19th Panzer Division was assigned to 3rd Panzer Corps, but seems to have done its fighting east of the map area. I felt that putting the division in the game would have unbalanced the situation in the Donbas and been misleadingso it isnt there. The Soviet 107th Rifle Division should have been in the game, but I thought I could leave it off the extreme northern flank of the action. I have been authoritatively informed that I was wrong. Sorry, guys. This 40th Army division (Voronezh Front colors) should be a 5-6-6 with a two-hex GB of 1, SV 3 and a ZOC; it arrives on Turn 3 in Entry Area E. Youll have to use a homemade piece until I get GMT to print one in C3I.

Whats Next?
Lost Victory is the first game in what I hope will be a series of operational battles on the Eastern Front. So far GMT has committed to do one more gameon the 1941 battle for Leningrad, from the Luga to the assault on the city. Beyond that, we shall see. Now every series needs a title, and Im not wild about calling this one the Lost Victory series. So Im dubbing it Dark Crusade until Le Grand Fromage de GMT says otherwise. (Ed. Note: After reluctantly giving in during the spirited debate over the title of the game, David just had to get the word "Dark" in there somewhere! Egads! - GB) GMTs C3I magazine is the main venue for news and views on Dark Crusade. Only its not a very good vehicle for two-way communication. So if you have relevant ideas, information, comments, questions, critiques, brickbats or whatever that youd like to share, you can reach me on Compuserve (73124,2526) or GEnie (D.RITCHIE5) or, in extremis, at 64 Tunxis Village, Farmington, CT 06032.

Example of an Ops Phase

By Gene Billingsley
StG /DR
II

1/2

DF /DR

1 SS PzK

3-3-12

III

4-5-12
Dtschlnd/DR
III

7-6-12
2 /DR
III

4
2 /DR
II+

9-9-12 5-4-12
Tiger /DR
T
1/2

This example should at least partially help you combat the WhatIDoNow? dragon, as it lays out the basics of how units move and fight. Of course, good decisionmaking and sequencing of operations are up to you and will absolutely make or break you in this game. Believe me. I speak from bitter personal experience. To make this as easy to follow as possible, Im including a computer-generated rough approximation of a portion of the actual game map as well as some mockup counters which show each side's starting positions. Please (!) take the time to set these units up on your map, and move your units as you follow this example.

1019

1018

1022

1021

1020

1024

1023

1026

1025

1123

1127 1226 1327 1426 1527 1626 1727 1826 1927 2026

1125

1124

1122

1121

1120

1126
15G /1GTK

1119

0
1 /LAH
III

4-4-14 0-[1]-8
16G /1GTK
X

1224

1221

1223

1222

1220

1225 1425 1625 1825 2025

1219

1218

6-4-10

9-9-12

StG /LAH
III

6-4-10
1G /1GTK
X

1/2

3-3-12

1324

1323

1322

1321

1320

1326
106
X

2 2

1325

1319

2-4-10

17G /1GTK
X

2
388 /172
I II

6-4-10
514 /172

1 /LAH

III

I II

2-4-6

2 1

1424

1 /LAH
II+

1421

3-5-6

2-4-6

747 /172
I II

10-8-12

1/2

The Situation
For purposes of this example, well assume that the weather is clear and the ground is hard throughout the play area. Figure 1 shows the situation at the start of an Ops Segment in which the Axis player has the initiative. Both Das Reich and LAH are ready to attack.

1420

1423

1422
1

1419

1418

4-4-14
1522 1521 1520

2-4-6
1524 1523 1526 1726 1926 1525 1624 1725 1824 1924 1925 2024 1519

2 /LAH
III

1623

1622

1620

1621

XX

1619

1618

4-6-6

8-9-12

1178 /350
I II

Axis Ops Phase

1719

1722

Figure 1-Unit deployments at start of example

1724 1823
1176 /350
I II

1723 1923
1 1

1721

1720

2-4-61180 /350 I II
1 1

2-4-6
1822 1922 1820 1821 1921

2-4-6

What to do? is the obvious question for the Axis player. Poised to strike to the southeast, he is faced with a Soviet front line that looks pretty strong. Because of the Axis advantage in air strikes, and because none of the Soviet units in this example are within the Command Range of an HQ, looks, in this case, will almost certainly be deceiving.

1819 1920 1919

1818

2023

2022

2020

2021

2019

2018

Lost Victory Das Reich

The Axis player decides to first use Das Reich to attack the 1GT in the west. Before moving or attacking with any ground units, he uses one air strike per hex to bombard hexes 1224 and 1324. For the air strike versus 1224, he draws a 2 air strike, rolls a 4, and achieves no effect. Against hex 1324, he draws a 6 air strike (!), then rolls a 7. Since 1324 doesnt contain cover, a die roll of 7 in the 6-7 column yields a 2 result. Both Soviet units in 1324 are disrupted. This is important because the units in 1324 now have no ZOC to trigger a reaction, they cant use their Gun or Tank bonuses in any ensuing combat, and their DS is no longer doubled when defending in clear terrain. Now that 1324 has been softened up by the air strike, the Axis player follows up by moving the stack from 1123 into 1223 (2 MPs-one for clear terrain, +1 for entering an EZOC). He plans to declare an overrun (+2 MPs to overrun, +1 MP for clear terrain in 1324- a total of 5 MPs spent thus far) against hex 1324. However, as he enters 1223, the Soviet declares that the adjacent 16G unit in 1224 and 15G unit in 1225 will try to react, and all other activity stops while the reaction is resolved. The units in 1324 cant react, as they are disrupted (and so unsupplied). The Soviet player rolls a 5, allowing both units to react with no disruptions. Since both are combat motorized (CM) units, they can react up to two hexes. The 16G unit reacts through 1325 into 1424; the 15G unit reacts into 1326. The Axis player can now announce and resolve his overrun against hex 1324. He announces that 1SS PzK HQ in 1022 is controlling the overrun, and that he will use an air strike, which he immediately draws. The Soviet player declines to use an air strike. Neither player can commit support, as none is allowed during an overrun. The Soviet player makes a command check for the overrunning stack by rolling the die. The roll is a 4, modified by -2 for clear weather/hard ground, +1 for one formation attacking, and +2 because this is an overrun. The net result of 5 is less than the 1SS PzK HQs CV of 7, so the Axis player is in control of his units. Now the Axis player makes a command check for the defending Soviets. He rolls a 7, modified by -2 (clear/hard) to a net result of 5, three greater than the Soviet nominal CV of 2, which must be used since there is no Soviet HQ in range of the combat. The Axis player chooses to take one favorable column shift instead of rolling for a SNAFU, since the already disrupted defenders couldnt be hurt much more by a SNAFU. The Axis player turns up the known side of his air strike, which is a 2, and the players calculate the combat ratio. All attacking CM have their AS doubled, as they are attacking into clear terrain. When doubled, the total AS of 18 becomes 36. The defending units have a combined defense strength of 8. So the base combat ratio is 4:1.Since the terrain in the hex being overrun is clear, the players find this column on the Clear, Marsh line. The combat ratio column shifts in favor of the Germans as follows: +1 Soviets failed command check +2 Axis 2 air strike +5 Total Gun Bonuses for Deutchland and 2/DR Recon. Thats a total of eight column shifts to the right on the Combat Table. The Soviets get no column shifts, as disrupted units cant use their GBs, and the Soviet player didnt allocate an air strike to the overrun. Applying the eight Axis column shifts moves the combat ratio to the rightmost (101) column of the Combat Tables Clear, Marsh line. The Axis player rolls one die, adding +2 for 2/DR Panzers Tank Bonus (TB). The die roll result is a 5, modified by +2 to 7. This modified die roll result in the 10-1 column yields a combat reesult of -/4D. The defender must lose one step, and then either retreat 3 additional hexes or eliminate three more steps (but not a mixture of both). All defending units are immediately disrupted. The Soviet player removes a step from the motorized infantry unit and retreats both units three hexes to 1625. Since the units sustained a disruption after having already been disrupted, the Soviet player places a No Ops marker on the stack.The Axis stack moves into 1324 (at no additional MP cost). The Soviet player again has an opportunity to react (this time with either or both the 1GT or 172 formations). Not wanting to risk disrupting any more units, the Soviet player declines to react. The Axis player then declares an overrun into hex 1423, using 3 more MPs. The overrunning stack is still within range of the 1SS PzK HQ. This time the Axis player doesnt allocate an air strike to the combat, but the Soviet player does commit one air strike, drawing a 4. Both sides pass their Command checks. The combat ratio is 9:1 (the attackers are still doubled to 36, and the defenders have a DS of 4). The combat ratio shifts 5 right for Axis GBs and 6 left (1 GB + 4 air strike +1 for the village in the target hex). After subtracting the lesser Axis value from the greater Soviet value, the net column shift 1 (65=1). The final combat ratio column is 8:1 in clear terrain. The Axis player rolls a 2, modified by +2 for the Axis TB to 4. The combat result is -/2. The Soviet player retreats his unit (514/172) two hexes into 1623. Since it retreated during an overrun, the unit is automatically disrupted. The Axis stack advances into 1423. The Tiger unit has used all its MPs (8), so it drops off in 1423, while the rest of the stack continues into 1524 at a cost of 4 more MPs (1 for clear terrain, +2 to leave an EZOC, +1to enter an EZOC). The Axis player places an Ops Done marker atop the Tiger unit and the stack in 1524. Since the Axis stack moved into the ZOC of units of the 1GT in 1424, any or all units of that formation can try to react. The independent 6 Rifle Division in 1623, whose ZOC was also entered, can also try to react as part of the same reaction. The Soviet player decides to attempt reaction with only the 16G unit in 1424. He rolls a 6, so the unit successfully reacts. Since the unit is combat motorized, it can react up to two hexes. It first reacts into hex 1525, so as to provide some protection to the disrupted stack in 1625. Since this hex is in an EZOC, the unit cant react any further (even though it had one hex of reaction left). The Axis player now finishes moving Das Reich units. Note that he does not have to complete one formations actions before starting another we just did it that way in this example to help you keep track of whats happening. Anyway, he moves the StG and DF/DR units from 1023 into 1423 (via 1124, 1224 and 1324). There, they stack with the Tiger company. The Soviet units of the 172nd in 1422 are eligible to react when the Axis units enter 1423, and the Soviet decides to attempt reaction for the units in that hex to prevent their possibly becoming encircled. Alas, he rolls a 1, and the Axis player chooses to disrupt 388/ 172. The Soviet player then reacts 747/172 one hex (the maximum for a leg unit) into 1522. The Axis player finishes Das Reichs ops by moving 1 SS PzK HQ to 1521 (trying to keep up with the advance and avoid any flanking attacks from the unhindered Soviet left).

LAH
The Axis player moves the stack from 1420 into 1521 (2 MP's). The Soviet player is virtually forced to attempt reaction, as his lone infantry unit is no match for the Axis CM units in clear terrain. He attempts reaction for just the 747/172, and succeeds, reacting into 1622. Continuing to move, the Axis stack enters 1522 (2 MPs). Again, the Soviet tries to react with the 747/172, but this time, rolls a 9 and fails. The Axis player declares an overrun into 1622 (2 MP's for the overrun, 1 for clear terrain). The Axis player declares that the 1 SS PzK HQ is controlling the combat, and commits an air strike (he draws a 4). The Soviet has no HQ, and decides not to commit an air strike. The Soviet player makes a command check for the Axis, rolling a 10, modified by a net +1 DRM to 11. This is four greater than the Axis HQs CV. Hopelessly

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Playbook
outgunned, the Soviet player decides to roll for a SNAFU in hopes that the Axis attack will self-destruct. He rolls a 9 on the Axis SNAFU Table, yielding a 1N result; the Soviet player gets a column shift in his favor, and there is a crucial no show for the Axis. After considering choosing the Axis air strike (whose strength is still unknown), he instead goes for the best of the known quantities; he chooses the 10-8-12 panzer unit as the no-show. Thhe Axis attack will have to go in with just the Recon unit and the Air Strike! The Germans roll an 8 for the Soviet command check, modified by -2 (clear/hard) to 6. This is four greater than the Soviet nominal CV. The Axis player also decides to roll on the Soviet SNAFU Table and gets a 6. The Soviet SNAFU Tables 4-5 column shows an L result; the defending Soviet unit is unsupplied. The Soviet 747/172 unit gets a No Supply marker; it cant use its GB during this (or subsequent) combats. Computing the overruns combat ratio shows the Axis with an AS of 8 since the Recon unit is doubled in clear terrain. The Soviet unit defends with a strength of 4. Thats a 2:1 ratio, before shifts, which include: +4 Axis air strike +1 Recon units GB -1 Axis SNAFU Table result Thats a net of 4 shifts right (4+1-1=4). The combat is resolved in the 6:1 column of the Clear, Marsh line. The Axis player rolls a 7. There are no die roll modifiers (the Axis armor was a no-show, remember?). The combat result is 2*/2R. Applying the defenders result first, the Soviet unit retreats three hexes (2 +R) to 1924, and is disrupted, because it retreated during an overrun. The Axis must take one step loss from the Recon unit, then either retreat one hex or eliminate another step. He chooses to retreat the stack into 1521. He then disrupts both units in the stack (they retreated during an overrun), and places his air unit in the Repair Box (since it was damaged by the * result). This stacks ops are now complete, and the Axis player places an Ops Done on it. Now the Axis player moves the stack in 1221 into 1322 (via 1222). He declares an overrun into 1422. The Soviet unit in 1422 is disrupted, so it cant react when the Axis unit moves adjacent. The Axis commits an air strike, but draws the dummy (zero strength) strike. Though the Axis player doesnt yet know it, no air support will be available for the Axis. The Soviet player commits an air strike and draws a 2. The Axis units pass their command check. The Soviets fail, but the Axis player chooses a column shift instead of trying for a SNAFU. The Axis AS is 12 (its not doubled, as the target hex is a woods hex). The Soviet DS (from the disrupted 388/172 infantry unit) is 4. The combat ratio is 3:1, with the following shifts: +4 Axis GB +1 Soviets failed command check -2 Soviet air strike The net shift is 3 (4+1-2=3) column shifts, making a 6:1 attack on the Combat Tables Woods line. The Axis roll of 10, is modified by +1 (tank bonus) to 11. The result is 1/4D. The defender immediately loses one step, then attempts to retreat to satsify the rest of the 4 result. Because the Axis units in 1521 are disrupted, the otherwise surrounded unit does have a retreat path without having to roll for survival through 1522-1622-1723. Since the retreating unit was disrupted while already disrupted, it gets a No Ops marker. The Axis player takes a step loss from the StG unit and advances into 1422. Having taken a bit of a pounding, it moves into 1522, and ends its ops. Finally, the 2/LAH Motorized Infantry in 1619 moves into 1721 (the Soviet chooses not to react) and stops, hoping to set up an attack during the next Ops Phase. The Axis player has used all his units to perform ops, but he is worried about the potential threat from the Soviet tank unit in 1326. He decides to bombard it with an air strike. He draws a 4 air strike and rolls a 6, disrupting the Soviet unit. Satisfied that the Luftwaffe has covered his flank, the Axis player concludes his Ops Phase.

Conclusion
Well, you can see the amount of damage that can be inflicted in just a single Ops Phase. The Soviet units, so bright and shiny at the beginning of the phase, are pretty much wrecked by its end, at least in terms of their being any sort of offensive force. The Germans, at some cost to their own formations, used maneuver and overruns effectively to create favorable combat situations. Players will note that the Axis air arm is incredibly powerful, and, if used properly, will save the Axis players bacon many times during a game. One note about overruns. Remember the downsides. They make passing your command check more difficult, and if you have to retreat during an overrun, your entire overrunning force is disrupted. Overruns are most effective using CM units in clear terrain with a lot of gun and tank bonuses. Finally, dont forget to bombard. Remember, the payoff is disruptions, and hopefully you just learned how nasty they can be. Sometimes its worth is to make several low percentage bombardments in order to soften up that key position or protect yourself against a budding counterattack. Well, as you can probably tell, theres a lot to this game, mostly in terms of how to become accomplished at integrating your forces and sequencing your actions. Ive played over twenty games now (though not all to completion) and still can't say that I have it down pat. I guess thats a big attraction that keeps me coming back to games like this one; the idea that maybe, just maybe, this time Ill do it as well as Manstein. Have Fun!

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Lost Victory

Suggested Reading
What follows is not a bibliography. I couldnt begin to list the hundreds of books that contributed stray facts to Lost Victory. Nor will I try. I can think of few exercises more useless than a assembling a bibliography studded with esoteric foreign-language tomes that you wont find in your local library and probably couldnt read if you did locate them. So Ill stick to English-language texts that I know are either in print or likely to be available through a library and that have something significant to say on the subject of the game. By far the best English-language book touching on the winter 1943 campaign is David M. Glanzs From the Don to the Dnepr. Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942 to August 1943 (London: Frank Cass and Company, Ltd., 1991). Glanz covers four Soviet operations (Little Saturn, Gallop, Star and Polkovodets Rumyantsev) from the period when the Soviets were developing the operational techniques that led to the great victories of 1944. There are also a fistful of general histories that contain information of varying worth on this topic. John Ericksons The Road to Berlin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983) has a pretty good chapter on events in southern Russia in the winter of 43, and his earlier The Road to Stalingrad: Stalins War with Germany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) makes an excellent backgrounder. Colonel Albert Seatons account in The Russo-German War 1941-1945 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970) is also worth reading. Earl F. Ziemkes Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (Washington: USGPO, 1968) is the weakest of the general histories when it comes to this campaign, but is still worth a look. Youll probably recognize the games title as coming from Erich von Mansteins autobiographical Lost Victories (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1984). This is an excellent volume that should be in the library of every East Front buff; just remember that the good field marshal was not above skimming over unpleasant facts when they cast him in an unflattering light. Manstein probably would have heartily approved of the brief account in F.W. von Mellenthins , Panzer Battles (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), which suffers from an element of hero worship. But if youre reading up on this campaign, you probably want to look over Mellenthin in passing. If youre interested in the opposing High Commands, try Colonel Albert Seatons Stalin As Military Commander (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1976) and Sergei M. Shtemenkos The Soviet General Staff at War 1941-1945 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970) for the Soviets. On the German side, I recommend Walter Warlimonts Inside Hitlers Headquarters, 193945 (Novato: Presidio Press, 1993) with reluctance. Its a classic and full of valuable information, but Warlimont is also one of the prime purveyers of the Crazy-Adolf-Cost-Us-The-War school of military history. For a general discussion of how the German war machine functioned, you cant beat Matthew Coopers twin volumes: The German Air Force 1933-1945 (London: Janes Publishing Company, Ltd., 1981) and The German Army 1933-1945 (New York: Stein & Day, 1978). Samual W. Mitcham Jr.s Hitlers Legions. The German Army Order of Battle, World War II (New York: Stein & Day, 1985) wont do for serious ob research, but its handy, readily available and full of interesting material. Roger James Bender and Warren Odegards Uniforms, Organization and History of the Panzertruppe (San Jose, CA: R. James Bender Publishing, 1980) is a valuable source of organizational and biographical information on many of the men and units involved in this campaign. I havent found anything comparable to these books on the Soviet side, but Albert Z. Conner and Robert G. Poiriers The Red Army Order of Battle in the Great Patriotic War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985) is a useful quick reference, if you dont mind the semi-refined nature of the data. Battle for Stalingrad (McLean, VA: PergamonBrasseys Interna-

tional Defense Publishers, Inc., 1989; Louis Rotundo, Ed.) combines a useful peek at the state of the Red Army at this time with a detailed account of the events that preceded the operations around Kharkov and the Donbas. This book is a translation of a 1943 Soviet staff study on Stalingrad. There are English-language histories of all four of the SS divisions involved in this campaign. Charles W. Sydnors Soldiers of Destruction (Princetown, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977) is a solid portrayal of SS Totenkopf Division but is weak on events after 1942. James Lucass Das Reich: The Military Role of the 2nd SS Division (New York: Arms & Armour Press, 1991) has more relevant information, but still falls short of a true day-by-day account. Peter Strassners European Volunteers (Winnipeg: J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, 1988) is much better on the role of SS Wiking; but that division wasnt involved in the main offensive. Fortunately, Rudolph Lehmanns The Leibstandarte (Winnipeg: J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, 1987-1993) fills many gaps. The third volume of this work has a detailed account of the see-saw fighting in the Kharkov area. Artillery may have done most of the killing on the Eastern Front, but the key offensive weapon was the tank. I probably looked at three dozen books on tanks and AFVs while designing this game. I kept going back to three. Stephen J. Zaloga and James Grandsens Soviet Tanks & Combat Vehicles of World War Two (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1984) is simply the best book you can buy on this subject. Dr. F.M. von Senger Und Etterlins classic German Tanks of World War II (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1969) is almost as good for the Germans. When it comes to the Tiger tank, Ive found no better source than Egon Kleine and Volkmar Kuhns Tiger. The History of a Legendary Weapon, 194245 (Winnipeg: J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, 1989). There are a slew of books available on German generals, but most are just drab recountings of the same events told better in general histories. I dont know of any that would add to your understanding of this campaign. Perhaps because we are less familiar with the personalities on the Soviet side, I have two books of Soviet military biography to recommend. Harold Shukmans Stalins Generals (New York: Grove Press, 1993) is a collection of excellent essays by various military writers, each dealing with a particular general officer. Gabriel Gorodetskys chapter on Golikov, the oft-maligned commander of Voronezh Front, is particularly worthwhile. As I was finishing these notes, Richard N. Armstrongs Red Army Tank Commanders (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1994) came to press. Most of the commanders in this book fought in Star or Gallop, and their biographies in this volume provide dimension to the accounts of Soviet operations in the winter of 1943. Of the three previous games on this subject, only Jack Radey and David Bolts Duel for Kharkov (Albany, CA: Peoples War Games, 1985) is likely to provide additional understanding.

GAMES

GMT

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