Part 9: Turn 2 - July/August 1941: Where Do We Go from Here
The Soviets shift the Reserve Front to hold their southern flank. It deploys near Odessa to help prevent any major encirclements in the area.
Now the Soviet ZOC covers all the way from the sea to Kiev, meaning that the Axis will find it very hard to encircle the city this turn. It does mean, however, that Odessa is just surrendered without a fight.
With this we conclude Turn 1. Pat yourselves on the back, lads, the war has begun.
Made up bullshit statistics both sides are going to brag about :
Largest distance between a German Army and the Greater Germany-USSR border: 300 km
Smallest distance between a German Army and Moscow: 700 km
Estimated Soviet casualties this turn: 450 000, of which 75 000 killed or missing, 125 000 wounded, 250 000 POW
Housekeeping
It is now Turn 2. The Game Turn event is still Limited Rail Moves and the weather is still Clear and invariable. The Germans receive 3 new Blitz markers for this turn.
Axis VPs stand at 14, 1 of which is an Event VP (as denoted by the round VP marker). Event VPs are awarded for everything other than controlling places on the map (Cities, Finland, Oil Fields), such as unit surrenders or some card effects. They contribute to the total, but max out at 6, meaning that there is a limit to how far encirclements can get you.
The Axis have 1 card in hand, so they don't have to discard. They draw 4 new cards.
Everything is in order on both sides of the front.
No Axis units are eligible to be flipped (because the Germans still cannot receive replacements) in any way and there are no units to be replaced, but a bunch of new guys has just been released to the OKH command!
The Germans receive a new unit, the 2nd Army. It is a Panzergrenadier unit and is rules-wise completely identical to a Soviet Mechanized unit. It has to be placed in any City on the German side of the pre-war border or at a German-friendly map edge*.
This is also the point when Herp assigns new units to their commands and may shift units between commands.
The deadline for this is 8 PM GMT tomorrow. If I don't get it by then, the unit goes to Berlin.
*There are more restrictions, but as none of them would apply at this point I've decided that listing them out right now would just increase the clutter.