Norm has kindly reminded me of the importance of German control of the air over Kursk. I have been doing some more thinking about that and I now have some numbers to report on. Here is the basic data on German air sorties for the Citadel period on the Southern Front.
Making sense of this in relationship to the Soviet air effort and the ground fighting is next. Lots more to do!
I'm afraid that Norm has encouraged me to start thing about Kursk again by playing Dark July and assorted other Kursk related games. Although this is a slow burner (like most of my projects), I have been doing work on it in between doing other stuff. So, here is a really interesting question: what was the most powerful German unit on the southern front of the Citadel offensive? May be a great big SS panzer division? Grossdeutschland division? Well, OK. You guys are quite right. The panzer pushers' favourites are the biggest baddest units on the southern front.
I have been working on data about units strengths and the graph above shows the state of the German forces on the southern front on 4 July. What interests me is the strength of a couple of infantry divisions: 106 and 320. So not as strong as the big guys but not at all shabby. So why were these units so strong? These two units formed Corps Raus, part of Army Det. Kempf. They are strong because of the sheer amount of attached artillery units. All corps assets were allocated at divisional level. So things to consider in designing the game are around what these scores actually mean in terms of manouvre ability, fire effects and combat capability. Steel, Steel, Steel! will be a solitaire game with the players leading the German onslaught. It will be designed around the same sort of ideas as my Ramadi game (which is obviously why I have this in mind at the moment, as well as Norm's enthusiastic prompting!). More to come, especially around the source of the numbers and how they will be developed into a realistic game.
I'm currently working with a developer on the Ramadi game. He has come up with a Vassal module in the space of a few hours so is a bit of an expert. He did it more quickly than I could load Java and Vassal from scratch. Nevertheless, all done. Now ready for my first Vassal game. Very cool. BTW the cups are the ISIS resource pools for IEDs, fighters and assets. I'm just trying to see if I get genuinely random selections from them. Hopefully I will be back to normal by end July.
