[updated 8 August 2023]
Theater of War Mission Pack: Victory at Stalingrad
Mission: Winter Storm
This has always been one of the toughest ToW missions for Russia, and somehow the devs with their tinkering always seem to make it tougher. Yet “Winter Storm” remains winnable.
What throws people when they play this mission—it threw me—is that CPU-Germany sometimes attacks with overwhelming and concentrated force less than three minutes in. This attack will be led by a vet-1 Tiger and several Panzer IVs, with support from half a dozen gren and panzergren squads, maybe a StuG or two, and multiple mortar halftracks. You as Russia have no chance of getting together an adequate defense against this much firepower, this early, if the attack is truly concentrated. Note that the map is covered with deep snow so your infantry units (which never choose an optimal path, e.g., clear road vs. deep snowdrift) move very, very, very slowly, even in retreat, making them extremely vulnerable to German vehicles and mortar fire.
The key to winning this is to understand that in most playthroughs this initial onslaught is not highly concentrated—for example, a Panzer IV may attack first at about 2:45, followed after another minute by a mortar halftrack, followed by the Tiger, followed by another couple of Panzers, and so on. If you can pin the infantry with your HMGs, and kill the armor and halftracks with your ZiS-3s, one by one and with reasonable efficiency, you can easily survive this initial onslaught. Also it is my impression that there is less chance of CPU-Germany’s hitting you early in a concentrated way if, in the first few minutes, you stay off the VPs and fuel points.
To handle the initial onslaught, you need at least three ZiS-3s (you start with two) and two HMGs, with some flamethrower-equipped engineers. The ZiS-3s go between the buildings on the S side of the road below the middle VP. The HMGs go in the building below the middle VP, and the building immediately W of the right VP. At least one of your infantry units should move up to the middle VP area to spot for your crewed weapons; otherwise the excessive fog of war will blind them.
Once the onslaught has passed, do your best to cap all the VPs and both fuel points. Get an M5 for reinforcement. Get a mortar for counter-indirect-fire, and some armor if you can. But keep control of the center and right VP, and keep sending units to cap the left VP so you hold that too as much as possible. CPU-Germany is not super-aggressive about capping VPs, so you usually can get its victory score to zero for the win in less than 25 minutes. In other words, unfortunately, it’s a mission that is unrealistically unbalanced, and often very unpleasant in that sense, yet also unrealistically winnable.
Note also:
- When unvetted, your ZiS-3s are very slow to respond to attack orders—if German tanks get behind them they will literally run circles around the ZiS-3s, wiping the crews with their HMGs. Often a ZiS-3 crew will fail to get off even one shot before being wiped out. They need to be kept in groups (to kill tanks before the tanks flank them) and protected by HMGs (and later, mortars).
- Conscripts upgraded with an AT package, and penals with sticky-bombs, are very useful against German tanks. But manpower bleed here is intense, so you may not be able to do more than bring in ZiS-3s, HMGs, engineers, an M5, and reinforcements.
- When unvetted, Maxim HMGs are slow to suppress attacking infantry.
- Unvetted T-70s are almost useless; they can take 5-6 shots to kill a mortar halftrack (which is always guarded by significant AT power, so the T-70 automatically dies in the encounter).
- CPU-Germany on this map has a tendency to spam mortar halftracks and concentrate them on you when you try to set up a static defense; so keep your units moving, and have units that can attack or bombard those mortar halftracks.
- The Germans get two more free Tigers (vet-3 Tiger Aces) plus accompanying vet-3 infantry when their victory score dips to about 150-175.
โ โ โ
