Researching a Scenario's Terrain
The Krasny Krym is back! I love it when I'm surfing around looking for history to read and something I kind of know about stands up on its hind legs and says: "Dobray Dyne, Tovaritsch!"
Looking through some works by amateur Russian historians, I found this very rough account of the landing at Grigor'evka. I say rough because it seems like some of the account can't possibly be accurate (more on this later.)
But I thought I would use this as a way to detail where ideas for scenarios come from and to give an idea of the amount of historical detail which ASL players expect and what is possible to find without making yourself crazy.
This is a good action to try to bring to ASL because of the size of the units. While the landing was affected by a Naval Infantry Regiment, this breaks down to a battalion based on the classifications other nations use. Historically, it was important because the attack led to the destruction of a great deal of Romanian artillery that had been pouring fire into the dockyards of Odessa and generally making the evacuation of that city a pain.
Now, I am hardly an expert on the Russian language, but realize when you are looking at maps it is often essential to transliterate the Cyrillic characters to Roman. Even if they are (as is the case with Google Maps, transliterated for you, there is no guarantee that they do so, well, if not accurately, lets say in the same way the people describing the history are doing so.
Thank goodness I found one reference which matched... Fontanka, a small beach town to the north and east of Odessa. This effectively matched the Google Maps version. However, the landing place, Grigor'evka is shown here at the right hand side. The Cyrillic matches OK, but the Romanization of Grigor'evka doesn't match at all, being spelled "Hrynonka." Very probably, this has something to do with the difference between Russian and Ukrainian.
Also, on the extreme left, there is a gulf, but this is listed in the historical account as a "lake." There is also a small town listed as "Chebanka" which has, apparently, disappeared completely from the map. Further, there is a Hill 57.3 listed as the site of a paratroop drop, but as far as I can see from the Google Maps walking around feature there is no hill approaching that size (about 180 feet tall.) Chebanka may have been wiped off the map during the fighting, or may have some Soviet-era connotations I don't know about which stimulated a wholesale name change.
Given all this, how do I know I am in the right place? Well, there is this...
It's also available from the Google Maps walking around feature. It's a monument to the men who died to attack the guns shelling Odessa.
You can also see some of the old gun pits (along with some Soviet era defenses, in an aerial view nearby.
The row of gun pits in the lower right are aimed directly at Odessa.
As a scenario designer, you have to take this geographical vagueness in stride. Things change after seventy years and the aerial photographs you see today don't match up with what was going on back then. Historical accounts will frequently mention villages that became ghost towns somewhere between 1941 and 1944. Besides, all of this has to fit on a geomorphic map board, so there is no point in killing yourself with details.
Next: The units in the scenario.
Looking through some works by amateur Russian historians, I found this very rough account of the landing at Grigor'evka. I say rough because it seems like some of the account can't possibly be accurate (more on this later.)
But I thought I would use this as a way to detail where ideas for scenarios come from and to give an idea of the amount of historical detail which ASL players expect and what is possible to find without making yourself crazy.
This is a good action to try to bring to ASL because of the size of the units. While the landing was affected by a Naval Infantry Regiment, this breaks down to a battalion based on the classifications other nations use. Historically, it was important because the attack led to the destruction of a great deal of Romanian artillery that had been pouring fire into the dockyards of Odessa and generally making the evacuation of that city a pain.
Now, I am hardly an expert on the Russian language, but realize when you are looking at maps it is often essential to transliterate the Cyrillic characters to Roman. Even if they are (as is the case with Google Maps, transliterated for you, there is no guarantee that they do so, well, if not accurately, lets say in the same way the people describing the history are doing so.
Also, on the extreme left, there is a gulf, but this is listed in the historical account as a "lake." There is also a small town listed as "Chebanka" which has, apparently, disappeared completely from the map. Further, there is a Hill 57.3 listed as the site of a paratroop drop, but as far as I can see from the Google Maps walking around feature there is no hill approaching that size (about 180 feet tall.) Chebanka may have been wiped off the map during the fighting, or may have some Soviet-era connotations I don't know about which stimulated a wholesale name change.
Given all this, how do I know I am in the right place? Well, there is this...
You can also see some of the old gun pits (along with some Soviet era defenses, in an aerial view nearby.
As a scenario designer, you have to take this geographical vagueness in stride. Things change after seventy years and the aerial photographs you see today don't match up with what was going on back then. Historical accounts will frequently mention villages that became ghost towns somewhere between 1941 and 1944. Besides, all of this has to fit on a geomorphic map board, so there is no point in killing yourself with details.
Next: The units in the scenario.
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