WOO! Marginal Victory!
A lot of units exited in the last 15 minutes, but I was extremely disappointed to see the Auckland Btn. camping on the plains in front of Larissa. Seems they got too tired, then started resting. And continued to rest well into the "we're feeling fine now, mate!" stage. Thus, when I re-issued the orders to leave the map it was far too late. Nuts! A marginal, and a moral victory? Well, even though not all got off the map, checking the objectives I did get full points for the "exit at Larissa" objective, so the only way to have done better would have been to kill more Krauts or to hold the objectives longer. That's tough!
Here's the final map.
One thing I noticed was that in the North some of my back-stop units seem to have got extremely confused about their orders. They my have abandoned them altogether actually. I noticed on AT unit move, and then deploy overlooking the road, whereupon it held up the enemy column for a while. Unfortunately in COTA you have no idea at the end of the game what unit achieved what (eg, people/units shot up) but I would like to think this brave unit (ok, so it's currently routing, but you get the idea) helped save the day for the team slogging off the map. The other northern force units are a mix of panicked and terrified coys, mostly at around half strength. Poor buggers.
Post thingy run down thing
Ok, well I think my original plan mostly worked out as planned. My big mistakes were waiting too long to issue retreat orders, which resulted in move orders that dragged on too long (in a bid to make up time) and tired out troops. Perhaps I should have started ordering the withdraw as soon as it was clear the enemy were going to get across the river. I might thus have been able to set up a second blocking position with a Btn. sized unit and then leap-frogged them back to Larissa. As it was the tidy move became a bit of a panic.
Also, I could have got more points by "killing the enemy", which comprised about 30 of my potential 100 points (the other points being 30 in exiting the map, followed by a smattering of "hold this place until xyz hour", for which I got more of the available points the longer I held the position. In any case, I think I'm pretty happy with a "marginal victory".
I wish I was better at killing the enemy. It's pretty hard in COTA! I think I got about 3.5 of the available 30 points!
Never mind, it was a good, fun game and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed playing. I might start another AAR next week I reckon. Maybe something where I'm on the attack.
