Might that be of the Hearts of Iron brand of strategy game...?
I have both 2 3 myself - 3 is really something, much harder and thought inducing gameplay - good for creating alternate what-if scenarios; if you massage the tech trees along the way.
Weather by design, stupidity, ego, or what ever else, the battle for Stalingrad was a meat grinder for all whom were tasked there, it immobilised the Germans mobility even more-so than the environmental conditions did, and it gave the Russians a patriotic southern anvil anchor.
In some sence, were it not for this ill-fated attempted 'siege', the war could have been fairly different in many other ways...
we will never actually know. germany's whole 1942 campaign was dodgy, given the manpower shortages.There have often been claims that the Germans should have renewed their attacks on moscow or even Leningrad, but I disagree. it would have been even worse for the Germans in that direction. in the Moscow MD alone according to Madej and nagorski, there were more than 300 Divs, dug in, of which more than 100 were combat ready and experienced. What these formations lacked in the early months of 1942, was sufficient transport and logistic support to be committed to an offensive battle, but in a defensive situation, they would have been very dangerous to the Germans. The Germans committed to a southern ofensive as much out of expediency as anything. This was where the Russians had done least well in the preceding winter counteroffensive, were not well dug in, and had suffered some serious losses at Kharkov and elsewhere. It was wherer the oil was as well, but this was never a priority for OKH. it was for hitler, but Germany was never going to secure much oil from the caucasus during wartime cnditions.
The germans had suffered serious manpower losses that they had great dificulty in rreplacing. They were beginning to suffer serious tank shortages as well, though to be fair, the artillery ammunition famine was being overcome, finally, not least because large amounts of artillery had been lost over the winter. To kick start the summer offensive, the germans stripped out 2/3 of their front of both manpower and equipment most notably MT for the Infantry. At full dtrength, an Infantry div had 9 combat Infantray Bns, and around 900 trucks, along with about 6500 horses. After the winter and the reassignment of much manpower and equipment to bring AGS up to strength, the majority of Infantry were down to about 40% manpower strength (often reorganised on a 4 bn 2 reegt TOE, with reduced comany strengths for the Inf bns) , about 50-60% artillery strength, and about 20% MT, and around 2000 horses. This robbed about 60% of the german army of much offensive capability, though they remained quite potent defensively. And, on the eastern front, they remained at that level, or even worse as the war progressed.
in my olpinion, the germans desperately needed a rest after the winter 41-2. They needed to start thinking defensively, probably behind the rivers in Western Russia, whilst consentrating on building, or rebuilding their mobile counterattck forces. They never really adopted that strategy, with Hitler always wanting to either attack, and/or, forbidding much in the way of defensive prerations ( referring to the latter as "defeatist"). as always, the whole 1942 offensive was inadequalty resourced, and bore all the typical german hallmerks of opting for optunistic tarets, rather than thinking things through on what actually needed to be done. Stalingrad was one result of that approach,but if the german high command reamned true to form, and played out its typical unthinking opportunism,there would have been a stalingrad played out somewhere.