The computer game ALLIED GENERAL (AG) came out some 10 years ago, oriented toward WINDOWS 95… it presents all sorts of scenarios of the WW2 era, and around two weeks ago, we were looking at the AG content and came across the STALINGRAD set up. AG is a hex game, and you push lots of little tokens around, hex by hex, one at a time, which means that my patience factor goes to zero in around 10 minutes… I have no tolerance for this sort of thing… I’d rather push miniatures across the table. But the layout of the AG game gave me an idea for setting up a house-to-house, city-block-to-city-block combat game. It’s November, 1942, and the AG map shows Stalingrad spread out along the western side of the Volga River, which runs north to south. The map indicates that the city is more dense in its northern sectors… it sort of peters out toward the south. And that’s the type of map I laid out on my ping pong table. As shown on the map below, I set out some 15 city blocks, each about 6-inches-by 6-inches, along the Volga River, with each block capable of holding five 15mm tokens… each token either a tank or an infantry unit. Initially, the Russians hold the city… the Germans are advancing from the west. I defined each 15mm token as a full battalion… which means that a 5-stand unit represents a brigade. The brigade was the maneuver and firing element. The combat strengths of each token were assigned as: Infantry 1 Combat Point (CP) Tank 2 CP Aircraft 1 CP The AG map doesn’t show from where aircraft originate… there were no airbases on the map… the planes simply appear and fire away. I gave each side a total of 5 initial aircraft, plus an airbase. I divided the day into 5 consecutive phases, as diagrammed below and to the right, starting with the first morning phase, and flowing clockwise. 1. Morning 2. Morning 3. Afternoon 4. Afternoon 5. Night In each of the morning phases, there would occur simultaneous artillery fire, then the active side would advance, then there would be defensive fire, and then close assault would be resolved. The same would occur for each of the afternoon phases. Finally, during the night phase, Phase 5, both sides would receive reinforcements. This would complete a full days battle time. Jim Butters commanded the German forces, and on the first mornng phase of Day #1, after an exchange of artillery fire, his brigades moved 15 inches toward the outlying blocks of the city. Jim’s artillery dice rolls were atrocious… I had assigned the Germans 6 artillery batteries (each consisting of 1 stand of guns), and after each battery selected a target unit, we went through the following procedure: a Jim tossed an “attack” die (10-sided) and modified it by subtracting 1 b His opponent, Cliff Sayr, tossed an opposing, unmodified “defense” die c We looked at the difference, the delta between the attack and the defense die. If it was more than 2, the targeted token would be declared damaged, and be immediately removed to a repair zone. All of our combat procedures followed the above… a modified attack die, an unmodified defense die, and a look at the delta. Here, when artillery fires, the attack die was modified by a -1… in other cases, we imposed both positive and negative modifiers. As I said, Jim’s artillery couldn’t do a thing in his opening bombardment, while Cliff’s artillery was slightly more effective, and a couple of German units were placed in the repair zone. These units sat in the repair zone, waiting until the night phase of the day’s battle. When night arrived, each unit in the repair zone would dice to see if was fully repaired… there was a 70 percent chance that it was fully operational again and could be returned to the field. If it failed the “70 percent” test, the unit was destroyed. At the end of Jim’s initial movement phase, his advanced units had moved into contact with several Russian brigades placed in the outlying city-blocks. Now came a defensive fire phase, wherein all Russian defenders blazed away at the their attackers. Using the attack-versus-defend dice method, we refered to the following table for the results. The letter F refers to the attack total, while T refers to the defend total. F’s total exceeds T’s by 6 or more 1 btn destroyed, and 1 btn to repair zone (owner’s choice) F’s total more than 2, less than 6 of T’s 1 btn to repair zone (owner’s choice) F’s total within 2 of T’s No effect Cliff’s Russians blasted away, but weren’t too effective. After the defensive fire phase, we had an aircraft phase… each side diced for the number of planes it could bring in to combat… either 4, or 3, or 2. The planes fired at each other, and the surviving aircraft joined in on the immediately following resolve-close-assault phase. A listing of all the 5 phases within each of the morning and afternoon cycles is (a) Simultaneous artillery fire (b) Active Side moves its forces 15 inches (c) Non-Active Side fires defensively (d) Aircraft support (i) Active Side brings in aircraft (ii) Non-Active Side brings in aircraft (e) Resolve close assault Each day, we go through the above listing 4 times… two each for the morning and afternoon phases. If the final step above, Phase (e), is the final afternoon phase in the day (see Phase 4 in the complete daily sequence flow charted above), then a night phase follows and reinforcements are brought in and units in the repair zone are examined. By the end of the first day, the oncoming Germans had done fairly well… they occupied most of the outlying blocks in the city. But, most important, they had fought their way into the dreaded Tractor Factory block, upon which the fate of all Mother Russia depended. For close assault resolution, each side tossed a modified die, with the modifiers stemming from the size of its force. Thus for a brigade of 2 infantry stands and 2 armor stands, the modifiers would be: Infantry Each at 1 CP, equals a total of 2 CP Armor Each at 2 CP, equals a total of 4 CP Resultant total equals 6 CP to be added to the die Each aircraft would add an additional 1 CP to the total. One rather flukey procedure I added to the artillery fire phase concentrated on units in a given city block. When the opposing artillery fired into the block, the occupying player would place his stands on a grid measuring 6-by-6 inches (36 squares in all), and the firing player would toss two dice… one for the X coordinate of his blast, and one for the Y. Somewhat similar to the game BATTLESHIP. Any unit thus caught was destroyed. If you had a 5-stand unit in a block, occupying 5 squares, the chance of being blasted was 5/36, or a little under 14 percent. When night finally fell on the first day… each side looked to its repair zone. Jim’s German’s recvoered most of their damaged units (70 percent to do so). But Cliff’s Russians failed miserably… they lost around 90 percent of all the units in the repair zone (about a dozen of them)… an unacceptable loss. Each side also diced on the reinforcement table… each got a couple of tanks and infantry and so on. But the Russian repair zone losses proved too much for the Red Army... Stalingrad had fallen. A one day battle for Stalingrad seemed, if quick, rather unexciting… I think in future replays, I’ll limit the number of stands in a brigade to 4, rather than 5. This would lengthen the game because of the slightly reduced fire power. Back to PW Review July 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com