Well, I went through the next several turns of my first game of “The Third World War: Battle for Germany”. I made lots of rules mistakes and played through them as best as I could, gradually picking up the system until I had a fairly good grip on it. Three turns and several evenings passed by while I worked out where I had gone wrong both in terms of rules and overall Pact strategy. During my first play, NATO had kept the Soviets pinned tightly to the East German border and three weeks of fighting ended with only a trickle of Russian armor breaking out in the south before NATO plugged the gaps.
Several mistakes I had made:
1) Not counting movement points correctly when leaving enemy ZOCs
2) Not advancing units correctly after forcing enemy retreats
3) Not calculating terrain combat modifiers correctly (about half the time)
Those are some pretty big errors but pushing through the turns definitely helped to give me the chance to learn the rules better and incorporate the lessons in my next game, which I promptly set up and began again.
Here’s my turn-by-turn reports from my latest play of Third World War: Battle for Germany, starting over from turn 1.
Turn 2 report:
Turn 3 report:
Turn 4 report: