There are probably many constructive and (not so constructive) points of criticism to be levied on this scenario but since World War I is rarely represented in wargames - let alone the Eastern Front in WWI - I felt it might be interesting to make it all the same. Either this scenario or no scenario, I guess.
For as far as I'm aware WWI Eastern Front has only been featured in one other war-game namely D. Erza Sidan's `The War Academy' and that concerned the not very typical Tannenberg - the Austrian front has never been modeled at all.
Being an afficionado of World War I history since I was thirteen, I have always been disappointed in the scant interest in War-games in the `Great War' - probably because the game-makers feel that the linear attacks of World War I are of little interest. Sadly - because a game might give one the occasion to see whether one can improve on the proverbial `bungling' generals of World War I. And, as stated in the briefing, that is not so easy. Also - it is simply not true that all battles in World War I were straightforward frontal attacks. Warfare on the Eastern Front was always war of movement and so were the 1918 and 1914 battles on the western front.
So, I was overjoyed to see that TOAW - while not designed for simulating World War I warfare - in fact does a reasonable job in presenting some of the problems facing a WWI general. Certainly better than Norm Koger's earlier `Tanks' which as far as WWI was concerned was a lousy simulation because everything was way .... too slow (nor was the only ever WWI game I have seen Bluebyte's `Historyline 14-18' much better - great game - grandfather of SSI's best-selling `Panzer General' - but a bad simulation.) The problem, I think, is that war-game makers tend to focus on the tactical problems of WWI which can only be represented in a squad-level game while ignoring the wider strategic issues.
While it is very difficult to represent the tactical innovations on the battlefield in WWI in TOAW (say, the increasing artillery/infantry coordination, the use of storm troops, penetration-tactics, or the big problem how to achieve surprise while building up the enormous amounts of artillery and shells needed for a break-through) it is possible to give a reasonable impression of the BIG problem once a break-through was achieved. And, yes, it was not easy but major breakthroughs were occasionally achieved even on the static western front, say at Ypers in 1915 or at Verdun in 1916.
The problem was that immediately afterwards the attacking army would get further and further from its railhead and supply-depots in badly devastated terrain while the defender - who was moving towards his railheads - could rapidly fetch-in new forces and supplies by rail. Most battles in WWI therefore have a nightmarish `space raiders' aspect, where the attacking force is rapidly being depleted while the defending forces gets stronger much more rapidly - the more enemies you kill, the more you get in front of you. Because of the lack of motorized transport it was simply not possible to rapidly exploit breakthroughs. Also, isolated units in WWI could hold out for weeks because they had to be laboriously dug out of their positions.
There were two solutions to this problem. One was the `leapfrog' method used by the French and British army in 1918, that is an offensive consisting of a succession of small attacks in different sectors necessitating the enemy to constantly shift reserves from one sector to another. The other - first tried in this offensive by the Russians and then `imitated' by the Germans at Caporetto in 1917 and in the Somme offensive in1918 - was to attack over a very broad front so that the reserves could not be everywhere at the same time - the first wave would upon a breakthrough then ignore the remaining isolated pockets of resistance which were to be cleared out by the main wave later.
I find this aspect of the war can be reasonably simulated in TOAW as can the overwhelming importance of artillery. In this scenario it simply amounts to suicide to attack enemy forces, particularly entrenched forces, without massive artillery-support. Now, on the western front in 1918 it was risky to use massive barrages because of counter-battery fire and TOAW does not simulate this, so that it might be difficult to simulate 1918-1917 battles there. But luckily Russian artillery was not technically proficient enough to use this very often - a big difference with the western front where the British and the French had by 1917 elevated artillery-spotting and picking out enemy batteries to a fine art.
As all this artillery had to be fetched forward by horse - (if not men-) power this already tended to slow down forces. Trucks were widely used in 1916 (and, yes, also on the Eastern Front) but they were more used in fetching men and ammunition than guns. WWI was very much a horse war. Accidentally, this was one aspect where the Russian army was greatly superior to the Germans who by 1916 had a major agricultural problem because most horses had been requisitioned for the army.
The large amounts of artillery on the Russian side may come as a surprise but indeed by 1916 Russian factories, like the Petersburg Danilevsky works of revolution fame, were churning out more guns than the Austrian production and only marginally less than Krupp. Of course, this also had to be divided among two fronts, with the Western Front always receiving the bulk. Likewise about half the Austrian production was going to the Italian front. Thus the Russians in this scenario have a preponderance in heavy artillery throughout while the Austrians have a preponderance in light and infantry guns and particularly in light 45 mm. mortars - the infamous Minenwerfers which were the terror of the British forces in WWI. These crude - but very murderous - light mortars were also widely used by the Austrians. Infantry in WWI is automatically heavy infantry because of the huge amounts of gear carried - the main problem being the lack of easily transportable heavy machine-guns.
The two forces are roughly balanced in the amount of Machine Guns - with Russia of course buying large amounts of MG's in the USA among other places. Otherwise the two forces are roughly balanced in material which is not unhistoric. After the desperate shortage of ammunition and guns in 1915 Russian war production had more or less caught up and English credit allowed the Russians for example 150.000 rifles in the USA alone.
I originally intended to give a chemical OK to both forces as was historically the case - since the Russians first used chlorine gas in this offensive - but this made the artillery just a bit too powerful. Entire regiments were being wiped out in half a turn - artillery was powerful but not THAT powerful in WWI. Artillery could devastate infantry in the open but because of the general lack of high explosive ammunition in 1916 it could do little against infantry in bunkers and trenches. Also, while gas could inflict heavy casualties among the densely packed masses of the western front on the much less densely packed Eastern front it had nuisance value at best, at worst it inflicted more casualties on one's own force than on that of the enemy - gas clouds do not discriminate between friend and foe.
To be sure, though, artillery was THE killer in World War I rather than the more famous machine guns: 60% of wounds inflicted on the western front were caused by artillery fragment and only 15% by machine gun bullets and less than 1% by balionets. On the Eastern front the percentages would have been similar although rifle fire was probably more important there.
Version 1.4.8 simulates two new aspects of the war, which are quite realistic so that I would urge to play the update.
First, armies will now automatically try to entrench at the end of their turn. In this scenario this will basically result in the Russian player after breakthrough through the first line of fortifications running into a second Austro/German trench-system, roughly at the same places where the offensive bogged down historically. This does n't make for entertaining game play but we do try to keep our games in accordance with historic events.
Second, while WWII was run by politicians WWI was run by professional soldiers - and, indeed, in the central powers politics was run by the soldiers too. Unlike in WWII the soldiers preferred to rebuild regiments rather than create new ones for propaganda purposes as was the case with Germany and Russia in WWII. Regiments will now be reconstituted and will reappear on the map to plague you again. This is annoying to the gamer but in accordance with the historic facts: at Verdun for example the Germans had the same army (the Bavarian 6 th) throughout in spite of having suffered some 450.000 casualties. Yep, that is more than the US in the whole of World War II !
A note on supplies: I have set this percentage very low for both force which may be surprising given the huge stocks generally stockpiled before any offensive in the west for two reasons. First, both the Austrian and the Russian empire were by 1916 facing a crisis in railway-stock. There were simply not enough railway-cars around to supply both the armies and the cities. Consequently the armies in the field were constantly short of supplies while huge stockpiles were rusting at the provincial stations in stay Tver or Budovice. Second, roads in Galicia in 1916 were certainly nothing like roads in the USA today and trucks in 1916 were not like trucks in 1998. Even along the well entertained voie sacree to Verdun 30% of the trucks involved had to be discarded because of mechanical failures. Thus supplies came in at best erratically, often not at all, this accounts for the notorious lack of rifles in the Russian army rather than insufficient production or the Czarist system.
God willing, I hope to follow up this scenario in due time with another one on Verdun - appropriately called "judgement day".
