Korsun Pocket

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kvnrthr
Captain
Posts: 23
Joined: Sun Jun 14, 2015 12:50 pm

Korsun Pocket

Unread postby kvnrthr » Wed Jan 25, 2017 8:42 am

Recently I bought this old game during Matrix's Holiday Sale and tried it out.

UI issues aside (all these garish colors :cry: ) I think there were a lot of interesting differences and similarities between this game and UoC.

Playing through the game, some things struck me as quite interesting ideas, and I wondered if they would work in UoC. But if I recall correctly Tomislav cites Korsun Pocket as one of the influences on UoC, so there must be some reasons why some ideas from Korsun Pocket would not be brought over.

Some interesting mechanics/design choices that may work in UoC 2:

1. A cut off unit does not become out of supply through number of turns only, but must be attacked to exhaust it's ammunition before the real debuffs kick in. In UoC too easily are the cut off units annihilated after 3 turns. "Pocket" type scenarios don't seem to work properly because of this. The Stalingrad scenario ends after you cut off 6th Army. The "Korsun" scenario in particular doesn't really seem to end up with any sort of historical result as the airfield gives unlimited supply so there is no point cutting that pocket off.

2. Infantry seems much tougher in general both in offense and defense. Anti-tank shifts exist for infantry (I think these were supposed to come in UoC 2?) which doesn't make it too easy to roll over them. Soviet infantry in particular seems superhuman compared to its UoC counterparts! I think that's my biggest complaint about UoC. The UoC soviet infantry are only useful to sacrifice themselves in breaching operations with the artillery specialist, and to cover your supply lines. I wouldn't mind the higher losses if they could attack properly but even a full strength corps just evaporates (2-4 steps gone!) the moment it hits a German infantry division while maybe suppressing one step.

3. Non-linear combat performance with steps. Each individual step has a fixed value in UoC but in Korsun a unit might perform almost the same at 3 steps and 4 steps while drastically weakening at 1 and 2 steps. This could make some units really valuable even at low strength, or perhaps allow a unit to lose more attack capability but retain defence better as they lose steps.

Overall though I would say I prefer UoC for its much more polished and user-friendly experience (I don't want to bring up any more CRTs, and dragging artillery around was rather annoying). However Korsun was still enjoyable and made me think about ways to make UoC 2 better.

morookes4
Cadet
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Apr 08, 2017 11:39 pm

Re: Korsun Pocket

Unread postby morookes4 » Sun Apr 09, 2017 3:08 am

That what you pointed out is really a good way to improve the game :)