The Last Hundred Yards: Volume 4 – The Russian Front

The Last Hundred Yards Vol. IV: The Russian Front is the fourth game in The Last Hundred Yards series. It covers major campaigns and missions from the second half of the war in the east, introducing the Russian army to the series for the first time. A series of missions simulates actions from the October 1943 fighting in the Ukraine near Krivoi Rog, while others feature fights during the Russian 1944 summer offensive, Operation Bagration. All major Russian armor from late 1942 onward is covered, plus some additional late war German armored vehicles.

The unique feature of this module is how Russian army behavior is modeled at the tactical level, particularly in its lack of local command-and-control flexibility and general indifference to casualties when fulfilling its missions. Make no mistake, playing the Russians will require a different mindset. The challenge will be in understanding the Russian behavior modeled in LHY and transitioning that into solid tactical applications. The Russians need numbers to make up for their lower tactical flexibility, but "quantity has a quality all its own,” and they generally do get those numbers. While the period of the war covered by the module was one of overall Russian initiative, it still featured numerous German counterattacks, and module missions feature plenty of German attacks against Russian defenses as well as the reverse. Another set of new tactical challenges in the module stem from the frequently more open terrain found in the western Ukraine.