Lettos wrote: ↑2024-02-20 19:28, Tuesday
During creative discussions about the course of the Wehrmacht's Eastern Campaign, this observation suddenly came to mind: why does the gloriously great Wehrmacht repeat its 1941 mistake twice in Panzer General - these are the Moscow'42 and Moscow'43 scenarios?
Is this a special strategy - to attack Moscow only in the fall? Here it is obvious that if it didn't work once, we should try something else! This is the Wehrmacht, not a bunch of stupid sheep!
No, SSI said. We don't have time to remake the scenarios, we have a game release - that's a more realistic answer!
The vanilla Panzer General/PGF campaign has three scenarios that utilize winter conditions (Snowing+Frozen). I don't consider Moscow'42 and Moscow'43 scenarios to be original scenarios - they are mindless remakes of Moscow'41.
Let's take a look at the weather in Ardennes'44, Kharkov'43 and Moscow'41 and compare it to the real thing.
1)
Ardennes.
There's snow on the photostories. But there is very little of it on most of the photos. There is more snow on some photos. It was cold, but some small minuses are also typical for the second half of autumn on the Eastern Front, when mostly everywhere is impenetrable mud. The cold in the Ardennes does not give grounds to claim that Wehrmacht tanks could suddenly cross the Maas River on ice. Fantastic.
2)
Kharkov.
Scenario starts on either the 11th (according to the script description) or the 21st of February (according to pgscn) and lasts 22 days. In the story, the second date looks true. Photos of mid-February are already muddy. In diaries and memoirs it is already written about February 26th that it is damp and foggy. On March 1st it is already thawing. No more snow than in the Ardennes.
3)
Moscow'41.
Scenario begins on October 2nd. 3 days per turn, 22 turns. The date of the last turn is December 4th.
There are two periods of Snow and Frost in the Scenario:
On the 8th-10th turns, Oct. 23-29, and on the 15-18th turns, Nov. 13-22. Panzers on the frozen Moscow River break through to the rear of the Red Army.
No, it didn't really happen because it was freezing cold! That's what the generals say!
But both generals and soldiers note the fact that with the onset of a little frost, the mud froze and it became much easier to move around! (Dry conditions in the PGF). The fact that the frost created a problem because of the lack of warm winter clothing is no longer relevant to the weather types and surface conditions in the PGF model.
Let's check it out!
In fact, it was like this:
Snowed in the first decade of November. Then snow was melted. Snowed again. The snow cover from November 10 to December 10 was about 5-10 cm.
Air temperature (for those who use the Fahrenheit scale - water starts to freeze at 0 degrees Celsius)
From October 10 to October 20 - minus 2-3 degrees Celsius.
From October 20 to November 10 there were literally a few days with temperatures minus 5. All other days were plus temperature, up to plus 5 degrees!
Since November 10th - several days with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius. Then the frost remains at -5 to -8 degrees, with no thaws.
And only on December 8th was the first hard frost of minus 20 Celsius degrees (= minus 4 F).
But the scenario ends on December 4th! And if you're going to use the winter freezing weather in the scenario as bridges over rivers everywhere, it would be logical to do it not on November 13-22, but starting somewhere around November 25th... by the way, the PGF weather model partially allows this (on its own weird terms!).
To summarize, my opinion is this:
either make scenarios on the Eastern Front in the Moscow-Leningrad area in the real cold winter months (January and February), or the conditions of "Snowing-Frozen" for the moment are
easily and truthfully replaced by Rainy-Muddy, and turn out to be completely free for other modder's tasks.
Graph from the archive of observations of weather conditions in 1941. The name Petrovsko-Razumovskoye is now a suburb of Moscow.
Lettos,
Incidentally, in an ideal world, the software's programmer should be the one to tell the "hobby". Yeah, right... 
More precisely, its replacement with new one 
on which I can run this game and, for example, test some things in test scenarios. It turned out that the joy of playing PzC2 will cost me at least $600 (and I don't need a desktop computer and large LCD display at home!). Or if I like better comfort with laptop - about $800-1000. That's quite a lot for the cost of one game! 
