Top Player Invitational

[KG_AGCent]

Congrats to Koz as he edged me out in our 2nd round mirrored battle.

I am writing this in the hopes that Koz will write his own perspective in this thread as well.

As Russians, Kozinski played a little fast and loose in the opening turns with his infantry and subsequently had his infantry force gutted early on. However he was able to nicely preserve his armored elements from too much exposure to my faust-laden troops giving him a nice destructive punch against defensive points which caused me to displace earlier than I wanted to in many places. Having to fall back to avoid being caught in exploding buildings gave up precious space needed to prevent a flank turning. In the end , he was able to turn my left flank and make an (unsuccessful) rush for a second of three rear-area VL's. This rush was quelled by a rapidly displacing 75mm PaK40.

In retrospect, I held the center of town uncontested after Kozinski's initial boondoggle. I was able to divert the pressure to the flanks and preserve the center of town which allowed freedom of movement to reinforce the flanks basically where needed. After a fierce and bloody fight for the (German) right hand factory complex I was forced to concede the VL but was able to prevent a breakout with another intrepid 75mm PaK40.

My two fatal flaws were that I held forces in the center for entirely too long fearing a feint at the flanks and a renewed attack where I had had success early on. If I had displaced more quickly to the rear are VL's I could had put more of a hurting on his flanking force than I did.

In the end Koz held 2 minor and 2 major VL's with 1 in contest. I held 4 major VL's giving the defender (Germans) a 56-44 minor victory.

As the Germans, Koz had success where I failed. He was able to displace infantry in strength enough to hold 2 rearmost VLs. Also he deployed in much greater depth than I did. I had hope to be able to draw him in and and cut him down in a building fight with flanking fire as he attempted to negotiate my obstacles. Koz seemed to opt for traditional defense-in-depth, stalling rather than trying to stop. I also helped his effort a great deal by allowing too many of my tanks to venture too closely to some buildings and he made me pay dearly for the mistake with 5 dead tanks, 4 of them in the same turn.

I, however, was able to successfully occupy both factory complexes. The factory on the (German) right Koz inexplicably abandoned and the factory on the (German) left was taken after a brutal firefight in which decimated remains of an SMG/Recon company slogged it out with almost 2 platoon of Panzergrenadiers. I was able to overcome his infantry by driving 5 tanks right up to the factory walls, push the snouts of my tanks in and collapsing 2 center sections fo the factory on top of his troops with direct area fire. This victory came too late in the game for me to be able to capitalize on it by sweeping into the center VL behind the (German) left hand factory complex. My men were too exhausted and brutalized themselves.

On offense, where Koz opted to drop buildings on the flanks to make space for the remainder of his troops to move into, I preferred to assault them each at a time. My thinking was that I wanted those same buildings to stack troops in to schwerepunkt the next objective. Also the dust created do nothing to help lines of sight and spotting of displacing or routed troops that can be cut down in the open.

As the Russians I was able to only pull out a minor loss 42-58 giving a 2 point margin of victory overall.

Good games, Koz. Well played.