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Well I have two very tough opponents this round.
Avatar47 playing the Axis and
Forwarn45 playing Allies.

I am shooting for marginal victories in both but will be happy with draws.

Anyway this game started pretty normal with the whole Poland, Denmark thing on turn 1 (I did not replay turn 1 until getting trade with Turkey like some do...sarcasm intended[:-])

Took LC in Winter, then suffered a counter attack in LC by Forwarn who nailed all my artillary.
Thus the attack into West France was without Artillary which gave me a few more casualties than would be normal.
Did I mention losing both HBs on one Bomb run into Scotland on turn 2 I think it was? Dam bombard evasion 1. Ouch that hurts.

But now it is Summer 40 and things just got very interesting.
Spain with a %1 chance to join the Axis has decided to do so!
I sure was not expecting that.
We welcomed them in with open arms and imiediately set about grabbing Gibralter. I lost 2 mil in the attack but another was promoted to infantry making up for it.
Much Brittish navy is tied up in the Med now, including the carrier. Oh how I wish I had placed my CAG in W France last turn (I remember considering it) as that would have made a wonderful op to hit the carrier via Spain this turn.

Japan is doing all the usual airieal practice thing with so so results.
Not much else to report but happy to have Spain on my side.

One other thing of note.
Soviets are stealing teck like mad even though I have security cranked higher than I ever have before. Must just be some bad rolls from the Gestopo.

-MrQuiet

Hi all

Have you ever noticed the video when Spain joins the war, the troops shown are from the Republican side not the Nationalist one, why do I say this, if you take a close look you will see that the soldiers have their left arm raised with clenched fists, instead of the fascist salute, also the flag in the submarine is the Republican one even with black and white you can see its the red yellow purple flag of the Republic and not the Nationalist one.

Just a curiosity [;)]

toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo good luck. axis would be much stronger! normally it is not repeatable......

Axis Spring 1941

Barb has officialy kicked off!
No sense waiting around for SU to get stronger so we push a attack on Mother Russia knowing full well this 2 front war will be the Death of Germanys Glory days.

On the suprise battle we do pretty well in East Poland taking only damage to a Romainian Fighter group.

Later in the season I cut Caucus off from any retreat and push my way into 10 delicious stored resources.

This is how the East Front looked near the end of the season.
Its a pretty good start but something tells me it will not be enough to hold the likes of Forwarn45 back long enough to get a decisive win.

I may be a little sporadic with updates - but here goes. In Spring of '41, the Soviets had some nice counterattacks against German forces in Kiev and Grozny, and Kiev was temporarily recaptured. This prompted a nasty counterattack by Germans that retook the area and inflicted heavy losses against the Red Army.

My own summer turn is fairly quiet, as I consolidate my forces for defense. Here is a screenie showing forces near the start of my turn. I thought it was a good time to show it as intelligence revealed German builds. Note that the SU and WAllies subsequently built up their forces a bit during their production phase - so I am a bit stronger as of the end of my turn. I will probably take more screenies to show the current situation when Fall comes around.

Axis Fall41

Well, allies have established a lend lease route in the north that saw 30 fresh supplies dropped on RU soil. RU is sitting pretty with about 80 supplies, that cant be good. We did make WA pay a price of 2 transports destroyed.

The biggest attack this season was in the Hotley contested Karkov. I was pretty sure I would not be able to take it due to being outnumbered in both units and arty but I was hoping to hurt a lot of the still weak RU infantry. The results were not the best but it could have turned out much worse. All of the auto hits were achieved by the enemy, looking foward to my turn to get autohits. I lost more arty than I wanted to but at least we cut down the stack of RU infantry. I cant complain about my expierence rolls though much of my armor went Elite in that battle!

Greece is still in a ballanced state of neutrality, I am a bit surprise and expecet them to turn on me soon.

Another turn of few battles on the Allied side. Stalin orders more fodder -- er -- solidiers to reinforce the front. Here's the position sometime during the Soviet Turn.

And Monty arrives in the desert of..... Iraq!

Axis Winter42

Germans dig in for Russian winter.
More of my bombers are shot down, this time by Heavy Fleet flak.
The subs make there debut this war and come out to play a little.
Lend lease transport sunk off N Rus.

More building, researching resupplying.

Japan just sits back reading the newspaper.

Check out what my spys found in the Screen Shot.
Looks a little extreme.
Do others play the spy game this hard??

Those spies MrQ mentioned are busy this turn (but no screenshot). [;)] Otherwise, it's pretty quiet. A glorious air offensive by the Reds fails to achieve much. And there is little hope for a real offensive as MrQ has redeployed much of the German army to Belorussia.

The Brits bide their time - but they do strike back against the uboats and shuttle more supplies to the Soviets.

Just got done watching the playback and wanted to post the screwing I just took on another naval bug.

The rules say this:

8.3.1 COMBAT PHASES
Combat is divided into Phases to govern the firing of each unit. The combat phases are listed
below in the order that they occur:
Air vs. Air
Ground (or ships) vs. Air
Air vs. Ground (or ships and subs, and includes airfield, port and infrastructure attacks)
Ship vs. Ship
Sub vs. Ship
Ship vs. Sub
But I have noticed many times ships doing asw before the sub gets to fire at the ship.
In the following screenshots notice the ships fired first and the sub had to fire with supression penalty and damge/destroyed penalty.

The first screenshot show LF 66, 100, 55 fireing before ASW.
Sub 11 should have fired first and I would have damaged LF66 thus making the subs evasion 9(already fired at by a cag in previous battle) due to LF66 being damaged.

Had the sub fired first this would be a hit because LF66 would have evasion 12 and firer would not be as surpressed (had suppresson 1 from cag attack in prev battle)

Well, I wouldn't say you got screwed - you had great luck during my turn and the shot against the light fleet would have just been more good luck for you (as the subs don't usually fire against ships and a hit was less than probable anyway)! [;)]

But your point is well taken - I have never noticed this before! I haven't tested it, but I think it works as intended when subs initiate the combat - the problems is when the opposing side goes sub-hunting. I emailed wanderinghead and 2x3 so they can take a look before the next patch.

Without looking into this further, I think it's working as desired. I can't recall all the rules without looking back, but I seem to recall there were instances where the subs get first shot and others where they don't. I could be wrong though since it's been awhile since I've worked on this.

I can find nothing in the manual that says the combat phase order is changed if subs are on the defense.
It certainly is not game breaking but it does make patroling subs much weaker if they have to suffer damage and suppresion before they fire.
 
 
-MrQuiet

This is an interesting point about the rules. At the beginning of the War the U-Boats were quite succesfull and hard to be tracked down by ships (not planes as needing to travel on surface a lot) unless they would made their presence known by attacking first. Now in 1943 it changes with new improved technologies in radar , sonar and new weapons like the Hedgehogs (front firing grenade launcher) and acoustic torpedoes. UBoat losses per year: 1940: 24, 1941:35, 1942: 86, 1943: 242, 1944: 250, 1945 (5 months): 120

If rules are revised might be best to consider subs vs ships first till 1943 when it becomes ships vs subs first. Or make a variable event like 75% chance from Winter 1943 onwards.

Now the problem is that it would work for both side unless attack phases are different by nation [&:]

When "drived deep" would a sub still fire if being attacked again during the same round? If not then keeping subs vs ship first at all time would be more accurate I think. You would just need a plane to drive the subs deep and then making him vulnerable to further attacks without giving him a chance to fire back.

Wow I just had a bit of a hair pulling expierence. (not directly AWD related)

After litterly spending a couple hours on my turn and being at the very end of Japans turn I went into paint and tried to save a screenshot. My mouse froze up and would not move for anything. I fumbled around in task manager and finaly got paint to close, got AWD to come up, pressed S to try and save the turn but with no mouse I could not get past that point.

Took a breather to cool down and think the problem through.
Went back into the game pressed E for end turn then Y to confirm and here I am at the save screen again with no mouse.

Then I finally notice this fancy new cordless laser mouse battery has extinquished itself and I need to swap it out.
DOH!
problem happily solved.
(before you ask, yes it has software to warn you when battery low but I uninstalled it yesterday because I have been having irritating problem with mouse freeze for 10-30 secs every couple mins, very random and on some days it is fine)

Ok now that that saga has been relayed its on to the AAR.

Axis Spring42

Not a lot to report.
Forwarn is a very tough opponent and we are mostly just Jockeying for position on the East Front. Time is ticking but Allies get stronger with every turn.

The ss I was trying to get when mouse died showed the insane allied steals in tec.
The ones against Germany I can understand he did invest heavily in Spies, but I do feel Japan should start with Higher security for 2 reasons.
1) They cant afford to spend precious supply on security.
2) I think the US would have a very difficult time getting someone on the 'inside' of Impeiral Japan

Just my 2 cents