My second AAR (again)

[yvesp]

Stopping this AAR.

Too many mistakes on the axis side ; I have no fun playing now.
Obviously the allies are going to win: they are now having a strong foothold in France. This event happening before 1943 is not good at all for the axis, while Russia is prepared to attack with a strong army.

On the Japanese side, I now clearly see many differences with the boardgame (scale change), and my next game will very likely have a very different setup and strategic choices: fighting in China is utterly worthless, except to lose precious troops (well it happens that was historicaly true), and anyway, too often, you just cannot use the resources you're holding, either because a partisan comes and holds it (your troops are too busy elsewhere), or you just cannot bring them home for lack of railway (southern resources for exemple, or once again, partisans) ; distances are awfull too. In the boardgame, a single corps would for exemple be able to keep 7 hexes free of partisans (at half scale) ; that would be 19 hexes at the current scale : so you need 3 times as many troops... also, preventing Chinese infiltration behind the lines was easy, since lines where twice as short. And of course, a larger scale much helped concentrating troops... I have two ideas that I'll have to check as next strategies.

In Europe, it is clear that whatever naval units Germany has in the force pool are for show. I knew it from the guts before; but now I have "the proof". if ever one thinks about building them, it's certainly not before 1942, when everything else is rolling like a railway. Unlikely! But even though, what are you going to do with a few carriers/battleships ? Better to have a non imaginative build strategy: land troops, fighters, bombers, some subs... You're predictable, but you're awsome. Attacking Spain is a bad strategy, even though on the boardgame I had better experiments than the current one. It handles free factories and resources to the Commonwealth ; if done, it must be done smartly. In this game, I did it because I felt I had no other choice but otherwise playing fortress Europe ; it was unprepared and badly timed. It came back as a time bomb. Spain is as far from Germany as is Russia, but it has mountains, and the Commonwealth has an easy time reinforcing it... And while attacking Egypt may look possible (considering that the Commonwealth cannot defend everywhere) given the right conditions, Gibraltar looks out of reach except in games where Germany succeeds exceedingly well (I did it once on the boargame.)

Its also clear for me that I appear to defend much better than I attack. Or possibly that's an effect of the game ? who knows... Anyway, the choices I made for the commonwealth (nav, convoys, fighters) paid off. In much the same way, China always stands well ; but there, terrain helps!


The game lacks essential tools, such as correct ordering of the previous saves (whatever side) so as to easily come back when one forgets something important, or when the game just comes amiss for some reason. Loading old games is also a chancy business, as more often than not the answer is: exit the game. It seems clear that some improvements are due in that regard. I could even advance that, considering that a game's data being so small (certainly less than 100k to hold a game position) the game should even be able to store a whole turn data in RAM so as to even go back faster... wishes, wishes...

[yvesp]

mistake