Just Starting

[loki100]

its worth bearing in mind that the historical use of paras at Sicily was a disaster.

I suspect if the Allies hadn't invested so much they would have given up (as the Soviets did after the Kanev operation). What they learnt was you either drop small (=partisans) or big (=divisions) and that is the message from WiTW.

In the campaign, I merge the brigades into divisions and give them targets on the mainland depending on where I am going to invade next. Purely in a Sicily context, I'd use them as highly mobile infantry, fly them to a captured airbase and they can secure it and your tanks can risk a deeper exploitation.

Come France, I keep a couple of divisions (+ the British airlanding force) and the regiments in the UK. While I constantly reset targets their most likely use is for the regiments to grab an airbase here and there and the divisions land on one which I can't actually move onto - I've got bridgeheads over the Rhine with this trick.

My personnel view was that airborne operations in WW2 were mostly badly flawed. The exception might be D-Day but for eg Varsity was a slaughter of the British paras and that was deemed a success as it secured the objectives. On balance the game captures this - they are high risk/high cost/marginal reward operations but that margin can make a critical difference

[cfulbright]

Historically only one regiment brigade from each of the two airborne divisions was dropped in Sicily, and they both scattered badly and were shot up by Allied ships. That's why I don't use them in turn one.

If you combine the subunits into divisions, you lose all your prep points. If you want, you can use the editor to combine the units into divisions and reset their prep points. You might need to do some of that in exported CSV that you reimport, but it's not that hard.

My advice for this scenario:

1. Set the target for one of the AB divisions at the hex that contains the Barcellona air base. When you get a unit within a hex of that base, you can airdrop the AB division onto it, it only takes two turns to get enough AB prep points.

2. If you take control of a hex with a division's zone of control, but it didn't quite have enough MP to move into the hex itself, you can air transport one of the AB units into that hex to occupy it. You don't need prep points for that.

Cary

[cfulbright]

Yes, what Loki said!

Cary

[MPHopcroft1]

Historical question: Has there ever been a significant airborne invasion since Arnhem?

[cfulbright]

Yes, see Operation Varsity, March 1945 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Varsity

Cary

[loki100]

As Cary says, Varsity was the last divisional operation with a conventional mix of paradrops and glider landings. Losses to 6 Br Airborne were horrific due to flak.

In effect by 1945 everyone had learnt the hard way that a then conventional paratroop operation was flawed. The Germans had the experience of Crete and the Soviets the Kanev operation. What they had all learnt was that what we'd now call Special Operations missions using Paras were potentially very successful. The widespread use of helicopters from the early 1950s then changed the options for how you actually delivered behind the lines insertion of airborne/air mobile formations.

Roger

[MPHopcroft1]

OK, getting back to the game in question, my progress has been a bit limited. I'm going to try Sicily again tonight and see if my play is improving. I got in no practice this weekend, so I would say not.

[Novaliz]

ORIGINAL: loki100

some good news (imho), you can actually get up and running just using Red Lancer's One Page Guides. Everything you really need are in that pack - I printed them (and only them) when I first got the game and still have them to my side when playing).

Where can I find the Red Lancers Guides?

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Novaliz

ORIGINAL: loki100

some good news (imho), you can actually get up and running just using Red Lancer's One Page Guides. Everything you really need are in that pack - I printed them (and only them) when I first got the game and still have them to my side when playing).

Where can I find the Red Lancers Guides?

in the back of the Player's Manual for the original set. If you have the Torch expansion, then the extra ones should be in the folder with the rest of your manuals.

[MPHopcroft1]

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: Novaliz

ORIGINAL: loki100

some good news (imho), you can actually get up and running just using Red Lancer's One Page Guides. Everything you really need are in that pack - I printed them (and only them) when I first got the game and still have them to my side when playing).

Where can I find the Red Lancers Guides?

in the back of the Player's Manual for the original set. If you have the Torch expansion, then the extra ones should be in the folder with the rest of your manuals.

I printed those out, but I seem to have misplaced them -- that I really wanted them laminated (but I can't get them punched because the margins are to slim).

I had another go at Husky yesterday and ran into an issue strategically -- those Panzers in the mountains are taking disproportionate forces just to contain, and they are very hard to destroy. I'm also thinking I should shift into planning my own it initiatives if possible. The ones the AI are making are somehow not covering it -- even though they do take a lot of work out of my hands. And if this is of Easy, I can't imagine what Impossible looks like!

[cfulbright]

What do you mean by "plan my own it initiatives"?

Cary

[MPHopcroft1]

The AI*'s air planning ability Seems to reduce the complexity of the game, but the results on ground m4hky are not worth it. The air war is one of the most complex things to manage in the game, but rewarding to master.

Ehsat does the ten-page thing say about ai??

I still wan to know why those panzers are doing in the mountains, and why it's so hard to get them away from where they can threaten my supply lines.

[MPHopcroft1]

Back to Sicily again today. I hope to actually win the scenario this time. Any final thoughts?

[cfulbright]

I may have mentioned this before:

1. On turn 1 naval move the 7th US Army and 8th BR Army to Panetelleria or somewhere like that that is a friendly port.
2. On turn 2 land those two army HQ's on Sicily, unload them, then transfer support units from 15th AG and AFHQ to those two army HQ's.
3. On turn 3 those SU's will be available to your ground units in Sicily.

Cary

[MPHopcroft1]

I don't know that I saw it before, but it definitely;y sounds good.

[cfulbright]

The reason I tell you this is because the alternative is to naval move the army HQ's with those big support units, which both take up a lot of naval movement/transport points, and also make it much more likely the army HQ will get hit and attrited by naval interdiction while moving.

Cary

[MPHopcroft1]

Completely non-apropos to any of this, my printer is not printing the One-Page Guides properly. The colors it prints are washed out and significantly less sharp than those in the manual. This is to the point that much of the guides are barely-comprehensible, (EDIT: I found out what was wrong with my printer -- one of the cartridges has a block print head. So I ordered a cleaning kit and we'll see what happens./)

What I'll probably have to do, alongside my other projects (I'm in the final stages of publishing my first novel) is going to a Kinko's and finding out what it would cost to have them print the Handbook in color and get it coil-bound. That way I should have it ready, the colors will be bright, and the lessons will make a lot more sense.

I looked online about four that it would be about a $5 job to print and twenty bucks to ship. And that's even without getting the pages laminated.

[MPHopcroft1]

I still have not given up. But I still have so many abortive plays from the conclusion that I am unclear on the basic systems. I'm going to agree with the cuncultions thatletting the AI managwe the air is simnjething I need to stop doing.

Most of all, I must disabuse myself of the notion of a "quick" game. This is a game where a pace of a turn a day is convincing -- possibly a turn every two or three days (I have three days of snowed in, two of them without power, to recuperate from). So when I pic it back u ion a couple of days I should know better (I need recovery time from this week, which has been pretty bad in a lot of places in the US).

[loki100]

The good thing is after a while you come up with your own air OOB (& that is what consumes the time) that makes sense. Once you have that in place, it does get quicker.

I tend to go for functional commands, so at the start in Italy its only 4 Eng bombers in the strat command and the rest go to tactical air. Equally in the UK I make sure I separate out the tactical recon assets from the strategic ones. Over time I then create geographical distinctions so I might use Malta Air to control all the islands and tactical air just on the mainland of Italy or Malta Air on the Adriatic.

I also do things like group the British Liberator bombers with the US B-26s, they are actually the same plane and have the same benefit of very long range but the same problem of being fairly fragile. So that becomes an element in my air planning separate to the B-17s.

Its all about creating clear clues to yourself as to what is where, and how you originally planned to use it.

But T1 (for both sides) is time consuming as you start to put this together [;)]

Its not till quite late in 1944 that moving the ground assets really involves too much time.

[CrackingShow]

I'm completely new to the War in the X series.

What do I do with the elements attached to various HQs? I see they have AA/Tanks etc attached to them, do I want them attached to divisions? Do I want them attached to HQs and have those HQs near the front line?