The British Empire, an AoD plus CORE AAR

cyberpunkdreams said:

Well, yes, the key point here is the "more" (more detailed too). They've done a lot with events and balance, but ultimately once the player and the AI start having at each other it's going to go off-track. My own goal is to play a roughly historical game, but accelerated. I'm aiming to beat Germany by the end of '43, so invading Italy and opening up a second front in Austria before attempting Overlord will be important.

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I'm definitely eager to see if your plans will work!

cyberpunkdreams said:

To answer your question though, yes, I have tried this before, although I'm not sure I did it quite as early last time (can't remember). Getting a toe hold in Southern Italy (pun intended) will be easy, but things will become a lot tougher once Germany starts to pour divisions in. My basic problem is strength, and that's what makes attacking early difficult (tech and doctrines are okay). I just don't have that many divisions, and those that I have are spread pretty thin, especially as I've committed to holding Norway.

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Hehe, pun recieved! How about using troops from your allies as well? Can Brazil and other South, and Central, American countries join the Allies in CORE?

cyberpunkdreams said:

Italy is a good example of where it would be hard to make something truly historical anyway. In reality, the Italians agreed to an armistice before the invasion of the mainland, leaving Germany to defend Italy alone. In the game, you have to conquer a lot of Italy before they'll surrender. You could tweak things to have the Italians surrender much earlier, but then you'd have Italy's (largely) undamaged mainland forces for attacking Germany, which would also be very a-historical. It's an interesting situation... maybe it would be possible to mod something more sophisticated.

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I guess I'm guilty of nationalistic exaggeration in saying this: but IRL throughout WWII the Italians failed on every account, they couldn't even surrender properly! On vanilla, even when facing all of the Italian army, the Allies (USA and UK) can still push through Italy so game-play wise it's probably best that the Italian army isn't deleted in the surrender event.

cyberpunkdreams said:

Yes, pretty much! You have to remember I'm not a power player. Although really even a long list of infra builds doesn't take up a lot of IC.

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Fair enough, but I guess I am a "power player" in the sense I like to use my IC with up-most efficiency, which is definitely needed when playing online (which is the only form of AoD gaming I do anymore).

cyberpunkdreams said:

Me too . I've just played a very eventful four months, so I have a lot to write up.

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I look forward to reading about it!

cyberpunkdreams said:

I'm not sure; possibly. I've never tried it in the past, as I've always assumed they wouldn't offer much. I'm also a bit weary of using foreign divisions, as I've never understood the whys and wherefores of when the AI gives them to you and takes them away. If I'm given them, I use them, of course, but usually for secondary purposes. For example, the Free French, Belgium, Ethiopia and South Africa have all given me divisions for the African campaigns I've been fighting, but I'll probably leave them in Africa to defend against coastal assaults and Vichy, should they enter the war.

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You can just Military Control your Allies and have full control over their entire military.

cyberpunkdreams said:

True; the Italians needed bailing out by Germany in Greece too. I suspect that they may have fought more effectively on home territory, especially as part of their problem in North Africa was that Mussolini wouldn't release all the equipment they needed from homeland defence, but I guess we'll never know.

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Possibly, but as well as failing in Greece there's also Abyssinia (which was a failure in that it took 8 months even when the Italians had air supremacy, and they also used chemical weapons); their attempted invasion of France in June 1940 took extremely high losses then compared to France's; their navy lost control of home waters by late-1940; North Africa just exposed huge inadequacies in the Italian as as hundreds of thousands of Italians surrendered to tens of thousands of Commonwealth troops; their surrender in September 1943 failed miserably as German forces took over the country in a matter of weeks.

But saying all that, I do commend the Italian partisans who fought against Germany from September 1943 onwards, especially considering the brutality of German forces in the country where the explicit rule of the Heer was to kill 100 Italians for every 1 German killed.

cyberpunkdreams said:

Sure, that wasn't intended as a criticism of that play style at all! I'm sure I'd be the same if I were playing on-line.

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You should try playing on-line sometime, I'd definitely be up for a game, although it would have be using vanilla or the Improved 1936 mod. I'm sure there are plenty of AoDers who would play CORE online though too.

cyberpunkdreams said:

Ack, it's been far too long!

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Better late then never!

cyberpunkdreams said:

I still have the screen grabs though, so I'll be able to put something together from those.

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Please do