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RikD

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Sep 24, 2009
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Title: A Case Study: King Carol II
Nation: Romania
Start Date: 1 januari 1936
Difficulty: Very Hard
Style: Narrative, Gameplay
Version: TFH v4.02

In-game date: 14 december 1936
Last update: 05-07-2013
Status: gonna stick to the small updates and ill do details on other parts of the kingdom later.

Short Description
An a-historical story about king Carol II of Romania going mad. His madness will give me certain restrictions and obligations to reflect his state of mind. This AAR is mainly to entertain you while you match me struggle to make the best of somewhat unlikely and tricky situations. I don't expect to last until the end of the war.

About me
This is my first AAR ever. I have played strategy games my entire life and have entertained myself with AAR's for several years now. I have planned to write several but never actually managed to. Hopefully this time things will go different.

PoV
The main narrative will be written from the eyes of a history student who is doing his thesis on Carol II. In between, gameplay reports will show my actual progress and will be accompanied by comments from involved characters. Since this is my first AAR i might experiment a bit.

Madness
The choices I will make in the game are based on a couple characteristics that my version of Carol II has. I made a small set of obsessions, delusions and visions and let dice indicate which ones I will use. This final set will then be combined into a set of restrictions and obligations that I will follow, besides not cheating, reloading and general over-unrealistic power-gaming (unless it fits the profile). I might add more during the game depending on the progress and input from readers.

Here is the info on Carol's madness (WARNING could spoil the narrative):

Are you really sure you want to read it? You can't unread it!
Perhaps read 1 or 2 chapters first :)

Obsession:
Burebiste and the Dacians.

Delusions:
  • He thinks that the story of Helen of Troy is true but that actually it was his wife Helen of Greece and Denmark who was abducted by the Greeks with aid of Troyan traders and that the Greeks had spread the myth of Helen of Troy as a diversion.
  • There is a cold-war like situation where spies and intel are everything and there are hidden threats everywhere.
Visions:
  • Romania's military future is aviation
  • Europe will be dominated by armoured vehicles
  • Democracy will prevail over fascism and communism
Result:
  • Declare war on Greece before 1 January 1937
  • Can only annex lands once belonging to Dacian tribes (mainly lands surrounding Danube), try to reclaim these lands asap.
  • Focus on Italy as biggest enemy until they are defeated.
  • Spend at least 10% of LS on spies and at least 25% for 1 month per year
  • Not allowed to align to Axis or Commintern unless government switches drastically.
  • Research air 1/6 of tech unless not of this time. Build air unit as long as IC > 40.
  • Division composition and doctrines should emphasise mobility and versatility.
  • 1 on every 3 divisions should contain at least 1 Arm, Harm, AT or TD by 1 January 1940

Gameplay
My gameplay will be focused on Carol's visions first and optimization second. The decisions I make should reflect the actions of government officials resulting from their interpretation of Carol's mad rantings. This will probably lead to some bad gameplay decisions a long the way either because Carol sometimes makes bad decisions because he focusses on the wrong thing or because of personal ambitions of government officials that might try to use his delusional state of mind for their own ambitions.

CGM
I will use a custom game mode, this will mainly be to reflect Carol's influence in the past 6 years, so nothing drastic.

Diplomacy
Neutrality set to 61%.

Technology:
(Rules: remove nothing before 1930, add nothing beyond 1936)
  • Mil and Cav -1 (1934 -> 1918)
  • Inf small arms +1 (1918 -> 1936)
  • ind eff, ind prod, supp prod +2 (->1926?)
  • elec and mech eng +1
  • census tab +1
  • Op level org +1 (->1918)

Units
Removed:
  • 1 nav base (St. Georg)
  • 1 nav bomber
  • 1 sub (unintentional)
  • 1 destroyer (unintentional)
  • 1 cav
Added:
  • 2 air bases
  • 2 fighters
  • 6 mnt inf
  • 2 at-tank
  • 4 art

*** Disclaimer ***

Almost everything I say about Carol II and Romanian history is fictional and I don't claim that this story has any historical merit. Any references found to historical events are meant as such, a reference, and are not supposed to be accurate. I try to give a nice feeling to the AAR and I will use wikipedia, online translators and other unreliable sources. Any feedback that could increase the feeling of the AAR is welcome but accuracy is not my goal so there is no need to point out any discrepancies. Same goes for gameplay efficiency.

Other then that, I welcome all critizism (writing, style, plausability, ...), either through post or pm.



 

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Awch, a Romania AAR, a mad king and airplanes... Sounds like the perfect combination for me!
 
Count me in ;)
 
Welcome all, nice to see some experienced AAR's join in right away.
I got some spare time today so hopefully i can finish the prologue.
Else ill do it this weekend, as long as i can refrain myself from playing any further untill i did some updates ^^
 

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The first time I heard about King Carol II was in my freshman year during a course on WW-II. Part of a lecture was dedicated to the influences of the “Mad King” of Romania on the early years of the war. I didn't think much of him other then another nut job in charge of an army during WW-II playing at war with the other big leaders, while millions died.

It was probably a year later that I encountered him again while working on my final paper on the battle of Troy for the course "Merits of myths". I was doing some research in the archives when I ran into a copy of a letter, signed by King Carol II, that was filed under the subject "Troy":

letter1fina800l.jpg

Although it was obvious this wasn't going to help me write my paper I was somehow intrigued by this letter. I remembered from my lectures that Romania invaded some countries in the Balkan during the onset of the second world war, it had something to do with land disputes and control over the black sea. This obviously was a totally different matter. I felt an urge to walk over to section on Romania but it would have to wait, as the deadline of my paper was in a week. Unfortunately, by the time I had finished my paper, celebrated the end of the semester and got rid of my hangover the next day, I had completely forgotten about the letter.



 
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Interesting take! You may want to change the color of your text. If you leave out all of the color information, everybody can read it. (I, for example, have the EU3 theme, and it's very difficult to read black text.)
 
Interesting take! You may want to change the color of your text. If you leave out all of the color information, everybody can read it. (I, for example, have the EU3 theme, and it's very difficult to read black text.)

Something like misterbean's tutorial AAR? I don't know, I use the "vb4 blue 2" myself. It works quite cool and helps me to buck up after my bell rings early in the morning...
 

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The second semester passed by quietly. I picked up my passed time activity of cartography and since that is a pretty time consuming activity, I ended up doing not much else until summer. Our last project was supposed to be our first real research project and we had a lot of options. My focus was on tribes in Eurasia during the late bronze age.

During the second week I was working on Geto-Dacian tribes when I ran into Romanian military organization plans, most of the names of armies and corps related to tribes from the Danube region. I made a picture of the files for possible references in my project and went on with my work.


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Later that week I was looking for some nice graphics to finish of a chapter on the Trajan war. I had a hard time finding what I wanted until I ran into some old posters for a radio play of Radio Romana called something like: “Dacian Tribes – Champions of Burebiste”. They contained some nice graphical illustration of Dacian warriors going to work on some Roman soldiers. It looked like they were a set of three.


yn9j.jpg


There was something about those posters though, other then their origin. Besides taking a photo of the bunch I made a bigger copy of the middle one.

I was staring at my wall at the Dacian warrior sinking his falx into the shield of the poor roman soldier when my eye caught a little detail on the captain standing behind him, or at least I had assumed he was a captain. It was a little ornament on the front of his helmet, which, on closer inspection, showed two outward facing C's, crossing each other in the middle. While I was trying to think of where I had seen those before I noticed the same symbol in the top right corner of the poster, it was very faint like it was originally embossed into the paper. The photo revealed a bit more detail then the poster, specially under the magnifier. As I was looking at the picture when I noticed the symbol again in the corner of the magnifying class, this time on one of the pictures of the army organization of Romania.

The next morning was today and today I woke up convinced that I saw that same symbol on the letter written by King Carol II. Well, I got out of bed after doing an exercise for several hours where I: Laid in bed, tried to picture the letter I saw almost two years ago, mixed up that little bit I remembered with other arbitrary images, got frustrated, walked around my room for a bit, started over. So, after breakfast I went to look for the letter. Two hours later I was on my way back with a copy of the letter and some books on Romania during the WW-II.

That afternoon I informed my supervisor that my subject would be King Carol II, he who ruled his kingdom trying to imitate the Dacians, rather then writing it on the latter themselves. More so, because Carol decided to do this a couple years before the whole world would go to war. So now it was time to start from the beginning.



 
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Conspiracy time!