. This game is, simply, brilliant.The quality of the troops is telling. Airborne forces infiltrated into Arnhem kept me occupied for the entire course of the campaign - "oh look, another useless battalion has routed in the face of twenty men......". But they never took the bridges!
My main defensive permiter for XXX corps ran from south of the railway bridge along the highway through Elden to the crossroads north of Huissen. Central defensive perimeter in the urban area immediately south of the main Arnhem highway bridge were meant to catch any leakers. Having decided not to defend Huissen I was surprised by a flanking manouvre across the ferry to the east of Huissen and north towards Arnhem. I was lucky in that the 506th Heavy Panzer Battalion arrived just in time. I moved them to hold the bridge north west of Westervoort >>after<< the Brits had crossed it and annihilated them by surrounding them north of the bridge. It still impressed the hell out of me. If I hadn't of lucked out most of my artillery, stationed in east Arnhem, would have been hit and hit hard which would significantly have altered the course of the battle.
Two ferries west of Oosterbeck casued problems with the Allies crossing a number of decent units to flank me from the west. Quantity rather than quality saved the day.
I spent quite a lot of time trying to organise and "outer shell" around the northern circumference of where I thought the Allied airborne forces were in Arnhem, the intent being simply to squash them up against an inner core more closely centered on the bridges themselves. Knowing where the enemy was was difficult but when you found one artillery fire often got them moving which gave my dug in / entrenched forces just enough of an edge even though they were poor(er) quality troops. It wasn't actually until the last day of the campaign that I eliminated all of the airborne forces in Arnhem itself.
One particular mortar battalion (?) was heroic in it's defense south of Huissen (I forgot about it....). It allowed me to stay in contact with a significant force coming up on the right hand side and bombard the hell out of it at every opportunity as well as alerting me to the forces crossing the ferry to the east of Huissen. Luck. Simple as that
.Mistakes made - movement, always think about how you want your units to get somewhere. Assume that they will take the ferry and they will actually take a round trip via Arnhem of approx 13km! Artillery saved me, but I haven't mastered it (a lot of it seemed to be resting a lot of the time). Movement again - reinforcements arrive at the edge of the map, how do you know what time they will arrive until >>after<< they have planned out the order? This sees them moving through the night which results in fatigue. And if you don't like the timings you have to reorder which loses valuable time..... I probably shouldn't have counterattacked down the highway to the south. I got carried away with a desire to see lots of gold crosses littering the battlefield. I also definitely failed to time things properly on the counterattack which doesn't bode well for when I play the allies. If you look at the respective tallies for guns killed it's particularly telling in the light of the overall numbers. Looks like the AI takes any and every opportunity to hit artillery!
I'm exhausted. Time to start another game I guess
.Patrick
