WA not defending Afrika and India

[mjswoltjer]

I am playing my first game as Germany (now in Fall 1944) and I noticed that the Western Alliance does not try to defend Afrika and India. I could take those regions without much problems in 1941/1942. The regions are poorly defended by me now, cause I need my troops in Europe, but they do not take any attempt to retake them.

I find this pretty strange. Does the WA not need those areas? We are talking about quite some resources and a few factories.

Marcel Woltjer

[Svend Karlson]

Well, I find that even if the WA has transports bordering African provinces early on, it quickly withdraws them either perhaps because

i) it needs those transports to replace those lost in more important areas
ii) it realises how vulnerable transports around Africa are to lone U-Boats and prefers not to lose them

Having never played as WA - does it even need the resources it could pick up from Africa? Because if the answer is no, then there is not much value in reclaiming the provinces other than for denying their use to Germany. Possibly that is achieved by retaking Cairo via the Middle East rather than moving around Africa (supply intensive)

[mjswoltjer]

Maybe the WA does not need the resources and factories in Afrika, The Middle East and India, but Germany can really use them. So I would expect that the WA tries to prevent Germany from getting those, just to bugger Germany.

BTW, I just won my game with Germany at the end of Fall 1944 on an Automatic Victory cause I had 70 production points. I would never have reached that many points if I could not get the countries from the WA so easy. Maybe the programmers should rewrite some WA AI, cause to my opinion you can win easily with Germany this way.

Marcel Woltjer

[Uncle_Joe]

Early in the game, the Wallies have way more resources than they can possibly use. As the US multiplier goes up, they need every resource they can get. If you can cut off Africa after 43, do so. It will really put a dent in their production!

[Graymane]

For the PAC theatre, the WA have 2 factories total in India and 1 in Oz. Resources are rarely a problem. The only country that has resource issues is the USA after all the combat multipliers are in effect. Then they tend to run 10-20 short per turn if they don't have all transports out and all areas connected.