View Single Post
  #4  
Old 05-21-2021, 03:18 AM
Ursus Maior Ursus Maior is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Sep 2020
Location: Ruhr Area, Germany
Posts: 327
Default

I'm going to one-shot gamemaster the new edition on my 40th birthday, which is on July 18th. Since that's the date of the "death of a division" in 2000 we're going to play into by birthday, starting on July 17th. The one-shot will be largely setting agnostic, too much background is not good in one-shots. But the general setting will be as published by FL.

I would like to transition parts of my regular gaming group into a proper campaign later on. If that happens, I will adjust the setting a bit, but keep the general idea of a resurgent USSR after a successful coup in August 1991. Points I would like to change are things that militarily seem unjustifiable to me, e. g. sailing a CVN into the Baltic to attack Sweden and counter the Soviet Baltic Fleet.

I will also have to rebalance Soviet might and personnel-power. In my opinion FL are overdoing it a bit. I think it's more likely that the USSR cannot escape its death-spiral on its own, but communication with the West fails somewhere around 1996 and the goal is to plunder the Baltics and then Poland to avoid running bankrupt. Of course this gets covered up in the usual spiel (i. e. "protecting Soviet citizens abroad", "pre-emptive strike against revisionist-fascist Poland" etc.). Since the West will still have had a Peace Dividend, though toned down from the historical version, the ensuing war goes more or less like written by FL.

The difference will be that as the arsenals gradually deplete, older material shows up. While the West can go back to M48s or in some cases M47s, the Russians still have some quantities of T-34s, T-44s, IS-3s, SU-100s, and ASU-85s that can be reactivated, though likely only on a 1:10 ratio (i. e. ten tanks can be cobbled together into one working tank). These tanks can be sufficient against NATO forces, if used against the mostly under-equipped light infantry brigades that remain. So the charge NATO that was Operation Reset will have come as a surprise to the forces of the USSR, but once reserves had been mobilized from the hinterlands and the 5th ID had lost its momentum, the offensive stalled and finally broke down, before reaching Łódź. Scattered survivors and remaining elements got mopped up by WW2 era tanks, which in turn could not go into a counter-offensive due to lack of fuel and being vulnerable to remaining NATO forces.

The storyline will end up, where it usually does in T2K, but I will be avoiding (hopefully) to make the USSR look like a super-power it could not have been in the Nineties. Not even with deus ex machina economic power and a military junta in control.
__________________
Liber et infractus
Reply With Quote