| Red Fortress:
The Siege of Odessa
A Design Overview
Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2007
At some point during the development of Red Parachutes,
I decided that the game system deserved a smaller game set
on the Eastern Front. Brian Knipple had designed, at least
partially, a huge stack of games set in Italy and a few elsewhere.
But Red Parachutes, with its massive armies generating
even more massive casualties, was a large game despite having
only one map and the large number of pieces in play extended
its playing time longer than I thought was warranted.
Brian offered an even larger game on the liberation of Kiev,
but I wanted something smaller. And about the same time, I
also became determined to do a game featuring the Romanian
Army. I've had numerous stupid ideas in the 13 years I've
run 119694_avalanche Press, too many to list here. One of them was
the notion to respond to a magazine caption that read, "Rumanian
(sic) troops on the attack. A rare photo indeed."
That now-defunct magazine often displayed a love for things
Teutonic, and that they ran such captions should not have
been at all surprising. That I thought it needed a response
in boxed-game format was, in retrospect, a very poor decision
at best.
Along that misguided line of thought, I wanted to do the
game I called Red
Fortress: The Siege of Odessa. I was curious to see
how the game system — designed for amphibious and airborne
invasions — would handle grinding, attritional combat.
We already knew it would do well with sweeping tank battles,
as the Alamein
game had already been designed and played a number of
times. And so Red
Steel became the choice, a game based on the tank
battle at Kishinev that preceded the siege of Odessa. Red
Fortress went into the file cabinet.
Play opens in August 1941 with the Romanian 4th Army surrounding
the city of Odessa, an important port on the Black Sea coast.
The Soviets have a long perimeter to keep the Romanian artillery
out of range of the harbor, and are short of troops to man
it. But they have managed to dig fortifications with the help
of local workers, and they have naval gunnery support.
One of the key facets of the game system is managing supplies,
both in general terms and of artillery ammunition. Odessa
presents a great case study of this situation. The Romanian
player is limited, especially in terms of artillery ammunition,
by the weak resources of the nation's war machine. Attacks
have to be chosen carefully, and supplies built up before
new assaults can be launched.
The Soviet player has much more available, but the Black
Sea Fleet has to bring it to the besieged city. The Romanian
player will lay mines and use aircraft to try to interdict
this flow, and can occasionally commit surface forces. I'm
sure at some point I'll write a variant using the pieces from
Black Sea Fleets to play this out in a series
of Second World War at Sea scenarios.
The Romanian player has some elite formations: the Royal
Guard Division, the Royal Armored Division, the Frontier Guard
Division and several cavalry brigades. The rest of the Romanian
forces are infantry divisions of varying quality. But the
will of the troops is not the problem; that would be the Romanian
artillery.
Almost all of the Romanian artillery regiments are equipped
with French-made 75mm pieces of World War One vintage (the
famed Model 1897 Soixante-Quinze). There are some Skoda 100mm
weapons and a few bigger batteries, but for the most part,
the Romanians are using very lightweight artillery to back
their assaults. On contrast, the equivalent Soviet units are
armed with 122mm howitzers that fire shells three times as
heavy as the 75's, and at much greater range. Plus the Romanian
artillery relies on telephone lines rather than radios, making
them much less flexible. Finally, there is a constant shortage
of adequate ammunition.
The Romanians have an armored division, but it is a small
formation and not really trained to operate in an infantry-support
role. The Soviets have no armor outside of their home-made
"Odessa terror tanks." They do have some very good
pre-war regular divisions in the garrison, Black Sea Fleet
marines, and a chance to drop a small parachute force behind
enemy lines.
The game system is the same as that in Alamein, and it's
designed as a sequel to Red Steel. The new formation
rules and air system from Alamein will be used in
this game as well, as they tie very nicely into the supply
situation. Axis air units will have the additional mission
of interdicting sea traffic, of course. The Black Sea Fleet
will have to get past them, and the Soviet player will have
to choose carefully among supplies, reinforcements and artillery
ammunition to load the blockade runners.
There will be scenarios covering the major operations, including
the Soviet amphibious assault on 21 September and the repeated
Romanian attacks on the perimeter. But the main event is the
campaign game, a massive affair but not as long as Alamein's
campaign scenario.
Red Fortress is exactly the sort of game for which
we intended the Classic Wargames approach. It's an unusual
topic, but a very intense one, exactly the sort of thing hard-core
wargamers will enjoy. If you want to see us doing "real
wargames" on a regular basis, get your pledge in for
it now.
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