Kaliningrad - NATO prepared

 We had another crack at the Kaliningrad game, this time scenario 3 which has  a higher level of NATO preparedness. There are some NATO units already in the Baltic States and NATO has tac nukes available. Belarus is still 'neutral', but Russian units can pass through the country.

As before, Russia aims to open up a land bridge to Kaliningrad, both sides get points for enemy units destroyed, occupied capital cities and big points if the land bridge is open (or not). Use of tac nukes risk nuclear escalation and the end of the world. I missed the Tuesday night session which ended in a nuclear WW3, and lined up for Wednesday starting afresh. Mark and I were NATO and Jim was the Russians.

Starting positions. You can see the extra NATO units in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and there are already the first Swedes and Poles in Finland and Poland respectively. The NATO reinforcements schedule is also accelerated. NATO has roughly 50% more forces in this scenario at start than the first one we played.

The Russians made use of Belarus to mass forces in safety, while the Kaliningrad garrison utterly annihilated the Poles and tentatively pushed into Lithuania. NATO pulled back where appropriate to improve local force superiority but did have a little push towards St Petersburg.

Reinforcements began to roll up and we pushed them onto requisitioned car ferries heading for Latvia.

The Russians now pushed hard into Lithuania and Latvia. Vilius held out but we had to fall back to Riga. The NATO offensive towards St Petersberg also petered out and the Finns fell back to Helsinki. There was now a regular conveyer belt of NATO units sailing across the Baltic into Latvia and the Russian Baltic Fleet seemed very reluctant to intercept. Masses of Russians were now marching west though. 

Perhaps a bit too massed. A big stack of Russians in southern Lithiunia suddenly found themselves turned into radioactive dust, which cleared the way nicely for a NATO counteroffensive to isolate Kaliningrad again. WW3 didn't break out (phew) and the force ratios were suddenly looking a bit more favourable. Ideally we woudl have nuked the troop concentrations marching through Belarus, but that would have made the Belarussians hostile.

Meanwhile we were careful to avoid stacking more than two units together to avoid presenting a juicy nuclear target. There was now a nice mass of NATO units in northwest Lithuania and Latvia, while Estonia had actually repelled the Russian invasion.

The Russians came on into Lithuania from Belarus, but rather more dispersed this time, which led to a vicious series of small battles along the border with Belarus. NATO units were also operating in eastern Poland now and the Kaliningrad garrison looked a bit thin on the ground. 

We ran out of time at that point with NATO ahead on points.

That was certainly an easier fight than the first scenario for NATO, but Russia is still terribly strong, and the early NATO first use of nuclear weapons probably wasn't going to go down well on the world stage. I'm still not convinced about the penalties for using nuclear weapons, the way the game is structured it doesn't make much sense not use them at the earliest opportunity, it just gets a lot more dangerous after the initial exchange. 

Still, it was another  interesting outing to a potential flash point, which like so many others, could kill us all very quickly.