Battle cooperation of Allied Countries?

[Romdanzer]

Hi Everyone!

I'm kinda new to this game - so maybe it's obvious and I'm just not seeing it - but I wanted to ask how is it possible to coordinate the attacks on land units of Allied contries if as a human player you only control one country?

i.e. for example how can the Germans and Italians in Afrika in 1941, 1942 conduct a mulit-directional attack together on one unit? Or also Germans and Romanians in Russia 1941? (assuming the German is human controlled)

The same goes of course for US and British in France 1944 or British and French in 1940 etc....?

At the moment I can only see the units taking turns seperately when it's their country's turn with the result that all land units move and attack seperately. ???

Romdanzer

At the moment I can only move a countries unit

[cpdeyoung]

Your analysis is correct. It reflects the difficulty even the best of allies have operating together. The Germans and Italians has issues with this all through the war, and even the British and Americans had problems. "The Day of Battle" by Rick Atkinson, about the Italian Campaign, has many examples. It takes some subtle play but you can have allies work together, but not in multi-unit attacks. This is a nice feature for realism, but takes some good play on your part.

Chuck

[Romdanzer]

Hi Chuck!

Well thanks for the info! That you can't control AI allies is somewhat ok for realism BUT it has it's caveats though....

see also thread: "Axis Alllies Overall Strategy" for the problems associated with this....

i.e. if the AI is not really good enough, they can end uo doing really STUPID things which are not only downright unrealistic but also extremely annoying - ending up with a lot of people using the F11 function to avoid such situations. In that case you might as well build a function into the game whereby allies can "loan" units to you - i.e hand over control over certain units.

One possibility for "loaning" of units from Allies would be to incorporate an additional diplomatic feature for alliance diplomacy. i.e. you have to pressure your alliances members and expend diplomatic points to be able to "loan" you units. If you did that then there would of course have to be a framework within which you can then use these "loaned" units. Only a certain amount/type, Only for a certain timeframe, only for a certain area/front etc...

An example would be for a "loan-menu" which comes up when you "ask for loaned units" that depending on these factors the amount of diplomatic points required increases or decreases according to these factors.

i.e. higher amount of DP's for more or better units, higher amount of DP's for Tanks or Aircraft or Navy, more DP's the longer you want to use them and the larger the area you want to use them in....

something along these lines - would make DP-expenditure for alliance-interaction more interesting as well.

Romdanzer

[cpdeyoung]

Good ideas. The use of allies is a tough nut to crack, and was in the war too. The Germans at Stalingrad could testify that bad things can happen when you simply assign a big section of a front to allies, and them forget about them. In this game you need to be very careful where you put an allied unit. A weak ally in an important city is big trouble once the enemy is in range. You cannot move it out because your phase is over and the hole would be there for the enemy to exploit. Just what you do with them is an operational, maybe even a strategic problem. I have solved it in some unusual, very ahistoric ways, but your usage is your decision.

In any case always set each ally to human control ASAP. No ways can these blunderers be allowed to interfer with the master plan.

Chuck