First of all – thanks for all appreciating comments. Means a lot to me. I’ll do my best to give you some proper dusty, gunpowder-smelling, steel-busting action.
Secondly, I have tried to limit my answers to some of the direct comments as it would become a story in itself to answer all of you.
Damn, wanted to see you playing Japan, but with the no-rebasing of fleets it might get boring, while USA does not enter the war. Italy would be a challenge, to know what they suffered against you with their crappy commanders and low leadership.
Stay calm, Reis. This will not be the last AAR
Bound by honor?
Are you kidding me?
No. Some things are hard to HR properly so we just have trust each other on this one. And needless to say, the language have to be grandiose when dealing with this kind of grand issues
GER may lend ITA 2 divisions. Player countries cannot lend each other troops in any other way. But why?
Why not simply turn the automatic convoy management on?
If the Allies will be allowed to play as Nationalist China, it may be interesting
It’s simply as we had a ban on lending troops before – so now we wanted to open up this field carefully. In the modd, this is likely to change alltogeather.
No, automatic convoy would have killed me/UK in the last game. I had to prioritize down to a few convoy routes, choosing carefully which to guard heavily and which to shut down when raiding was at the worst. You gotta leave the player with some flexibility here but still HR against exploits.
We wont play Nat China anymore as we will fast forward through 38 and early 39. Instead, the Allies get to prepare Poland a little better.
Does this mean that in your previous AAR axis would have had to secure a port in south africa and possibly one more at the coast of west africa to move JAP fleet to the med? And been forced to hold on to Sri Lanka etc.. hmm sounds more fair. If so the scheme Axis pulled in "Jolly Carnage" would still have been possible but less sneaky and require more planning?
Exactly. It is still possible but need a lot more hard work from the Axis side – and is likely to take a lot more time. I think that’s fair.
But once more - most of MP games are decided long before USA could bring into battle their might. So there should be mechanism for more historical gameflow (France in 1940, SU in 1941) or there should be mechanism for faster pulling of USA, as USA is half of Allied victory.
In the modd we’re working at we have discussed, except making life a lot harder for Axis, to give them some “goodies” if they stick to the “historical” time table. One such goodie could be an increase in US neutrality… but there might be something more suitable as well. We’re not finished by a long shot.
But i must say the no reserves rule is crap.
Hehe… Why? I think the reserve rule, as it works in HoI, is crap. In reality it takes so long time to call in the reserves, arm them and get them organized. They are also bound to have lost some skills as they have been away from the military since boot camp. This is not all reflected in HoI which makes reserves too good, IMO.
Sudden Carnage... I wonder what that might say about your strategy Cpt. Easy...
Good call, there. Or to use a suitable movie title – “There will be blood”.
I've never actually played China or any other minor country with leadership shortages, so I may be completely wrong here. But based on what I observed when playing against countries that had apparently run out of leadership, just giving them new divisions won't solve the issue.
Good point, Dain. We will take that into consideration.
I don't think that NatChi should get a big LP boost. They shouldn't lack MP, but they should lack LP. It's realistic. China should be capable on defence - their offensive capability should be limited, as it historically was. It's especially true for fighting in harsh terrain. They should build high-MP, low-LP units (militia, garrisons) and only some INF. The AI should get an artificial boost through strategic effects and decisions if you don't want to bother with extensive rebalancing.
Sounds fair to me. Might be a suitable solution. Still, it doesn’t solve the fact that it would be nice to give China a boost half way in, to avoid making them too good early but make certain they last a little longer – giving japan a headache well into 1940. If new divisions is not the best solution, what would (that can be easily modded)?
………………..
Things have progressed. The AAR is written to early October -39 so I guess I can start post soon. It’s just that the first months will go pretty fast (the carnage is not THAT sudden). We have a game-session tonight and after my re-installment of the game (due to multiple crashes) it has run perfect, so I think we can move on steadily – spilling blood. In that case, I will make a first post on Tuesday.
Cheers