They say Schlieffen plan can't work? - I beg to diffAAR! (mod 1914)
Ever since 1914, historians and military strategists have been arguing whether the Schlieffen Plan--the German plan to defeat France within 40 day since the war's beginning--could have worked. Some say it was too ambitious and therefore unrealistic. They say it was impossible to make the soldiers march the planned distances, let alone keep them properly supplied. They say the changes made by von Moltke Jr. effectively doomed the plan to failure.
Well, who needs them when we've got hearts of iron?
Reading Kurt_Steiner's excellent "The Great War" AAR reignited my interest in WW1, so I decided to try to re-enact the Schlieffen Plan in a semi-realistic manner (at least as far as the game allows). I've named my armies accordingly, given them their historical leaders (where possible) and deployed them to their proper staging areas. In this AAR, you'll see how it went.
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A few notes on the mod itself: this isn't the 'vanilla' 1914 mod. I've made many custom changes to it and I've installed the Panda's AI files (which greatly improve the mod's AI, but it still leaves much to be desired). The changes mostly concern the combat times. I've increased defensive values of all land units and tweaked the combat mechanics, so the battles should now look more like the real WW1: they'll be long and VERY bloody.
I've also disabled air units, since I find them EXTREMELY annoying in this mod and given the rather small combat role they played in WW1, I think we can do without them. Neither I nor the AI will build air units in this game.
Another change is the manpower availability. In the vanilla 1914, you get a lot of it; in fact you are probably never going to run out of men. I don't like that, manpower was a huge issue in WW1 and so I more then halved the manpower-per-province-per-day modifier. This will ensure than a few bloody battles on the front will really drain my manpower and force me to conserve it as much as possible.
This is related to the other changes in difficulty settings I've made: I hate IC penalties, so I get none of those. On the other hand, the AI needs help to overcome its inherent disadvantages (like the inability to think ) so I've given it various bonuses -- IC, research, manpower, combat effectiveness, etc. -- to make the game more challenging for me. I will also limit myself to roughly 10 field armies (usually 1 army is about 12-16 divisions in my game).
Oh, there's also a problem with the surrender events when you're using Panda's AI, so I made little changes there to keep the game from crashing.
As for the style of this AAR, this will be strictly gameplay+pictures+a few occasional pseudo-funny remarks. Whenever I attempt to write a story, it gets out of hand and I end up with so much that I get overwhelmed. I've failed to finish all my previous AARs, so yeah... I'll try to keep this one simple and hopefully it will be completed o If you want to read more about WW1, there's the other AAR I mentioned.
Without further ado, let the Schlieffen Plan commence!
EDIT: The image links seem to be broken. Nothing I can do about that, but if you still want to read this AAR, download this PDF version of it
Ever since 1914, historians and military strategists have been arguing whether the Schlieffen Plan--the German plan to defeat France within 40 day since the war's beginning--could have worked. Some say it was too ambitious and therefore unrealistic. They say it was impossible to make the soldiers march the planned distances, let alone keep them properly supplied. They say the changes made by von Moltke Jr. effectively doomed the plan to failure.
Well, who needs them when we've got hearts of iron?
Reading Kurt_Steiner's excellent "The Great War" AAR reignited my interest in WW1, so I decided to try to re-enact the Schlieffen Plan in a semi-realistic manner (at least as far as the game allows). I've named my armies accordingly, given them their historical leaders (where possible) and deployed them to their proper staging areas. In this AAR, you'll see how it went.
---
A few notes on the mod itself: this isn't the 'vanilla' 1914 mod. I've made many custom changes to it and I've installed the Panda's AI files (which greatly improve the mod's AI, but it still leaves much to be desired). The changes mostly concern the combat times. I've increased defensive values of all land units and tweaked the combat mechanics, so the battles should now look more like the real WW1: they'll be long and VERY bloody.
I've also disabled air units, since I find them EXTREMELY annoying in this mod and given the rather small combat role they played in WW1, I think we can do without them. Neither I nor the AI will build air units in this game.
Another change is the manpower availability. In the vanilla 1914, you get a lot of it; in fact you are probably never going to run out of men. I don't like that, manpower was a huge issue in WW1 and so I more then halved the manpower-per-province-per-day modifier. This will ensure than a few bloody battles on the front will really drain my manpower and force me to conserve it as much as possible.
This is related to the other changes in difficulty settings I've made: I hate IC penalties, so I get none of those. On the other hand, the AI needs help to overcome its inherent disadvantages (like the inability to think ) so I've given it various bonuses -- IC, research, manpower, combat effectiveness, etc. -- to make the game more challenging for me. I will also limit myself to roughly 10 field armies (usually 1 army is about 12-16 divisions in my game).
Oh, there's also a problem with the surrender events when you're using Panda's AI, so I made little changes there to keep the game from crashing.
As for the style of this AAR, this will be strictly gameplay+pictures+a few occasional pseudo-funny remarks. Whenever I attempt to write a story, it gets out of hand and I end up with so much that I get overwhelmed. I've failed to finish all my previous AARs, so yeah... I'll try to keep this one simple and hopefully it will be completed o If you want to read more about WW1, there's the other AAR I mentioned.
Without further ado, let the Schlieffen Plan commence!
EDIT: The image links seem to be broken. Nothing I can do about that, but if you still want to read this AAR, download this PDF version of it
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