Korean War: Pusan Perimeter, scenario #2: General Attack

Ok started with scenario #2 for a number of reasons; it’s a large scenario, it’s the larger part of the day one invasion of South Korea with lots of NKPA armor but mostly it is the scenario that I was most worried about, balance wise as the NKPA (North Koreans) have a huge edge in unit numbers and strength over the ROK (South Koreans) in this scenario, so I was worried about it being a cake-walk for the NKPA.

Keep in mind however the NKPA have two victory conditions they must meet; exit 60 steps off the south edge of the map and eliminate 20 ROK steps, so they can’t just blow 60 steps of the south end of the map or they won’t have enough strength to eliminate 20 ROK steps. The NKPA basically have two armies entering the map, one on the very rough map #95 and the other on the more open map #92. If the ROK player is smart he will clog up map 95 with just enough units to delay Elements of the NKPA 4th Infantry Division and 107th Tank Regiment to keep them at bay for many turns, as terrain on map 95 is terrible and just a few enemy units can make a mess of things. On map 92 they shouldn’t try and defend the whole map as the NKPA will find many holes in the open terrain on this map to blow through and exit south, so setup one very good defensive position and dug-in and use your terrain to your advantage and make the NKPA come to you. Unfortunately I did not adhere to this second part of the strategy but will in my next game as I spread-out my ROK units too much to support each other.

In my game the NKPA on map #95 were bottlenecked in the rough terrain most of the game but the NKPA armies entering map #92 found open terrain and attacked the spread out ROK units on this map with some difficult but once they were free, they helped their sister armies breakout as well for a NKPA victory!

I would say after playing this scenario that it will favor the NKPA 70% to ROK 30% unless you use my suggested strategy above. There are two fixes to make this a closer balanced scenario; one give the inexperienced player the NKPA side on this one or two simply shorten the turns to 20 instead of 30 turns which will put a lot of pressure on the NKPA to eliminate 20 steps and exit 60 steps.

Either Way a fun scenario to play for my first Pusan Perimeter scenario on the finished version of the game and pushing all those invading T34/85s, SU-76s and BA-64s across the 4 maps with a horde of Infantry against an assorted ROK force was a blast, win or loss!