For King Haakon and the Fjords!

[El Pip]

The 17th of March 1940.

It is a Sunday and King Haakon was not in a cabinet meeting. Because it was 4am, so he was asleep in his bed in the Royal Suite in Oslo Palace. Or at least he was, until a messenger burst in to awaken him.

"Your highness, you must come to the War Cabinet there is urgent news!" The messenger announced.

"Is it Oslo being attacked?" The King asked

The messenger shook his head.

"Then it can wait." The King decided, before rolling over back to sleep.

The door was kicked in again, by a different messenger.

"Your highness, you must come to the War Cabinet there is urgent news!" The second messenger announced.

"Not war in Oslo, can wait." The King mumbled drowsily.

"But it is about Oslo being attacked!" The messenger shouted.

The Germans finally make their move on Oslo. That sentence is both desperate and deeply optimistic.​

Slightly later that day, in War Cabinet Bunker #7, the King is being briefed more thoroughly.

"What is the latest news General?" The King asked.

"We lost." General Laake summarised.

"But I can still hear shooting!?" The King said.

"Not the battle of Oslo, the Battle of Hegoland." Rear-Admiral Diesen explained.

A pair of ancient submarine flotillas had failed to stop the Kriegsmarine. Perhaps Norway should have licenced built a boat from someone who knew how to make proper submarines (and torpedoes that worked) rather than the inter-war USN?​

"I didn't even know that had started." The King admitted.

"We sent you an urgent messenger." General Ljunberg looked disappointed.

"Anyway lets not get bogged down in those details, what news from the land war?" A guilty looking King Haakon tried to move the meeting on.

"We lost." General Laake repeated himself.

Well that's not gone well. At least the defeated Norwegians don't march into the sea CK3 style. Instead they turn into French tanks and then evaporate.​

"Bugger." King Haakon sighed.

---
Can the King and his cabinet escape? Will they even try? Can the vital Herring reserves be smuggled out or will they fall to the Germans? Is this the dark revenge of Plywood? Can Plywood even take revenge? Will Norway even last long enough for their to be a Norway Debate in the UK? Some, all, less or none of these questions will be answered next time on For King Haakon and the Fjords!


Bonus Royal Bedroom Photo Link -

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/373939575303001425/

- It's not what I expected from King Haakon to be honest, but apparently that is his suite in Oslo Palace.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Yes indeed, but I fear that plan will not make for an entertaining work. But even if it doesn't it will be a surprise to most people and perhaps that counts for more?

If we've learned anything from the collection of El Pip AARs in recent years, it is that the quality of writing is what truly carries the AAR. Certainly it is not Paradox's approximation of gameplay under the circumstances presented, save perhaps in a satirical sense.

The Germans finally make their move on Oslo. That sentence is both desperate and deeply optimistic.

Truly the spirit of Tiso and Tuka lives on in this AAR.

A pair of ancient submarine flotillas had failed to stop the Kriegsmarine. Perhaps Norway should have licenced built a boat from someone who knew how to make proper submarines (and torpedoes that worked) rather than the inter-war USN?

Perhaps, but that would require time-traveling to the late war when anyone knew how to make proper submarines, besides I suppose the Germans who I suspect were not selling, after all why give away the secrets of just about the only thing your country did marginally in the vicinity of correctly?

Well that's not gone well. At least the defeated Norwegians don't march into the sea CK3 style. Instead they turn into French tanks and then evaporate.

Here we have another example of the classic rhetorical device, repetition for emphasis.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

It worked, so you cannot criticise it's effectiveness.

Ah yes, the Banker's Defence. Classic.

Cut off by land certainly.

Hmm. Reminds me of a series of victorian adventure books for boys where the aristocratic hero always escaped from being cut off and surrounded by...um...various words we no longer use to describe people...by 'covering himself in fish slime and swimming to freedom!'

It would actually mean Herring had a use, against all odds.

Either you missed an 'of' from that sentence, or the penalty is 10 Wikipedia points. They do sound like penalty points so I'm going for the later.

Whatever, you think.

Those are answers. But they are not the correct answers.

I invoke the Banker's Defence.

But it is too familiar to be a relaxing Fjord,

That sounds like dirty travel agent talk.

Yes indeed, but I fear that plan will not make for an entertaining work. But even if it doesn't it will be a surprise to most people and perhaps that counts for more?

How many AAR plots do you have?

King Haakon does bring a certain Je ne sais quoi to the proceedings it is true.

An expression that never made all that sense to me. Literally, and linguistically: I do not know, or I don't know what (again, laid out beautifully on Faulty Towers). He is certainly incomprehensible, yes.

Well that's not gone well. At least the defeated Norwegians don't march into the sea CK3 style. Instead they turn into French tanks and then evaporate.

...je ne sais quoi.

Here we have another example of the classic rhetorical device, repetition for emphasis.

And taking the chance to throw two shots at paradox at once. Not sure which is funnier either. The pure insanity of hoi is compelling, but the dedication of the Irish to the Eternal Mother Sea cannot be denied.

...

Well, there's another El Pip AAR soon to be wrapped up. If anyone needed further proof that 2020 was a supremely messed up year.

 

[Bullfilter]

War Cabinet Bunker #7

They have at least seven War Cabinet bunkers? A pity they weren’t so thorough with the rest of their defensive preparations.

Instead they turn into French tanks and then evaporate.

A fate worse than death, is at least two ways.

Can the King and his cabinet escape?

Let’s hope so. But for the exiled the King, the Fjord-pining will be sad and debilitating. I trust we will be spared a part 2 entitled Vidkun Quisling and the Fjords!? No amount of herring sauce could remove that foul taste from the figurative palate.

 

[El Pip]

If we've learned anything from the collection of El Pip AARs in recent years, it is that the quality of writing is what truly carries the AAR. Certainly it is not Paradox's approximation of gameplay under the circumstances presented, save perhaps in a satirical sense.

You are too kind.

Truly the spirit of Tiso and Tuka lives on in this AAR.

The fictional versions of T&T will always have a place in my heart.

Perhaps, but that would require time-traveling to the late war when anyone knew how to make proper submarines, besides I suppose the Germans who I suspect were not selling, after all why give away the secrets of just about the only thing your country did marginally in the vicinity of correctly?

Your suspicions are somewhat incorrect. At the time Norway started looking for submarines to licence build there were all sorts of weird design contracts going around; Krupp got a contract to design+supervise 10 subs for Argentina (Argentina then ran out of money, as is tradition), Italy and Spain damn near brought some German designs and Japan did buy some and a few engineers to oversea the Kobe works building them. Had Norway wanted, German sub tech was there for the buying. If dealing with Germany wa a bit too dodgy then go Dutch, Germany had set up a firm to do that - NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (Dummy corporation for designing and building submarines in Holland to sneak past Versailles in a way that fooled literally no-one. This translation may not be word-for-word correct).

Here we have another example of the classic rhetorical device, repetition for emphasis.

Generally the classics are the classics for good reason.

Ah yes, the Banker's Defence. Classic.

Has been used by people to justify decisions long before banking was a concept. It probably pre-dates money as well.

That sounds like dirty travel agent talk.

King Haakon is a Fjord connoisseur. He has exacting requirements from a Fjord.

How many AAR plots do you have?

Too many. As of right now, and not counting currently running works, I have five plots in various states of contemplation. And several more beyond that are mostly a title and a vague idea. For instance;
* King Cricket, an Albanian Tale. Famed cricketer CB Fry is appointed King Charles I of Albania (as damn near happened in OTL) and is able to secure a British guarantee on Albanian independence and get Anglo-Iranian to develop the Oil Fields properly. Then see what happens when Mussolini blunders in regardless (because Munich probably still goes off as OTL so he thinks Britain is bluffing) and Britain is dragged to war in April 1939 against Italy.

An expression that never made all that sense to me. Literally, and linguistically: I do not know, or I don't know what (again, laid out beautifully on Faulty Towers). He is certainly incomprehensible, yes.

The difference between what the original speakers meant the words to mean, and what the British decided it meant when they borrowed the phrase, has rarely been more stark.

And taking the chance to throw two shots at paradox at once. Not sure which is funnier either. The pure insanity of hoi is compelling, but the dedication of the Irish to the Eternal Mother Sea cannot be denied.

There are so many targets on the Paradox side you can often take down a whole host of them with a single badly aimed shot. I'd agree the HOI is more entertaining to watch, but I think the CK3 is the more intellectually entertaining - Paradox have been doing this a long time and yet still manage to cock up such basic things in an amusing fashion.

Well, there's another El Pip AAR soon to be wrapped up. If anyone needed further proof that 2020 was a supremely messed up year.

After a rock start the enforced working from home has finally allowed me a bit more writing time, so some good has come from this. I'm also fairly sure nobody at work is going back to the commutes we used to do so hopefully this extra time remains a welcome part of my life in the future.

They have at least seven War Cabinet bunkers? A pity they weren’t so thorough with the rest of their defensive preparations.

Oslo has a mighty coastal fortress, as does Bergen. Just no land forts and the German very inconsiderately landed elsewhere and then attacked overland. Frankly it's cheating and King Haakon is minded to send a letter of complaint to the League of Nations.

A fate worse than death, is at least two ways.

Indeed.

Let’s hope so. But for the exiled the King, the Fjord-pining will be sad and debilitating. I trust we will be spared a part 2 entitled Vidkun Quisling and the Fjords!? No amount of herring sauce could remove that foul taste from the figurative palate.

Definitely nothing on Quisling, partly for the reasons you highlight and partly because I've done 'powerless Axis Puppet waiting for defeat' with Slovakia and wouldn't want to repeat myself.

As for escape, let us see when we next return to Norway in... shortly. Ish.

 

[Bullfilter]

As for escape, let us see when we next return to Norway in... shortly. Ish.

Perhaps to New Zealand? Milford Sound, etc could provide him some relief in exile.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Has been used by people to justify decisions long before banking was a concept. It probably pre-dates money as well.

Now THAT is certainly communist talk and must be punished to the full extent of a crazed mid-century mob.

King Cricket, an Albanian Tale. Famed cricketer CB Fry is appointed King Charles I of Albania (as damn near happened in OTL)

A fascinating what if, and I was enraptured by it as soon as Steven Fry related it on QI. Certainly bears some similar ideas to Butterfly (instigating but limited war with just Italy), but big differences to (the british getting into a Med war just after Munich...Well, it probably can't go as badly as OTL but still, what a mess!).

I think the CK3 is the more intellectually entertaining

Not that I really want to explain it on that thread but as it happens Paradox intentionally put this into the game. In part of their bone-idle campaign to deny the existence of medieval naval warfare (see past bemoaning of that in various places), in CK3 navies now no longer exist at all.

Period.

They just magically appear whenever an army wants to move over a body of water. You pay an amount of money, the boats appear and away you go.

There is so much wrong with that I'm not touching it. Yet. However, the funny comes in when you realise that the devs didn't make the boats spawn immediately as soon as the army commits to sea travel. This means whenever anyone travels over sea (such as when you lose a battle in Ireland and have to retreat that way every time), you're walking into nothing. And of course, the boats vanish as soon as the shore is reached, so you're walking onto land over water too.

I have no idea if paradox intends boat dlc at some point but I may well delete my copy if they do. And since there is no provision for them anywhere in the game, it'd have to be a major expansion. Which basically means no chance.

In CK3, there is no such thing as boats.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Your suspicions are somewhat incorrect. At the time Norway started looking for submarines to licence build there were all sorts of weird design contracts going around; Krupp got a contract to design+supervise 10 subs for Argentina (Argentina then ran out of money, as is tradition), Italy and Spain damn near brought some German designs and Japan did buy some and a few engineers to oversea the Kobe works building them. Had Norway wanted, German sub tech was there for the buying. If dealing with Germany wa a bit too dodgy then go Dutch, Germany had set up a firm to do that - NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (Dummy corporation for designing and building submarines in Holland to sneak past Versailles in a way that fooled literally no-one. This translation may not be word-for-word correct).

Ah, so when I assumed Germany was smart enough not to sell off the only thing they had going for them, I was once again wrong to underestimate Nazi disintellect. A lesson learned.

* King Cricket, an Albanian Tale. Famed cricketer CB Fry is appointed King Charles I of Albania (as damn near happened in OTL) and is able to secure a British guarantee on Albanian independence and get Anglo-Iranian to develop the Oil Fields properly. Then see what happens when Mussolini blunders in regardless (because Munich probably still goes off as OTL so he thinks Britain is bluffing) and Britain is dragged to war in April 1939 against Italy.

While this sounds like a fascinating setup, I do wonder if the "El Pip plays a minor with barely any military to speak of and makes awful puns" genre is perhaps starting to get a bit packed around the gut there. Though I suppose in this scenario, the alternative is another entry into the "El Pip plays British alt-history and cocks everything up somewhat less than OTL" genre which would be even more redundant.

Oslo has a mighty coastal fortress, as does Bergen. Just no land forts and the German very inconsiderately landed elsewhere and then attacked overland. Frankly it's cheating and King Haakon is minded to send a letter of complaint to the League of Nations.

This is one of my milder irritations with the HoI game design. Why have separate fort types, from a game-mechanical standpoint? The only way separate coastal forts make any sense is if you design your game mechanics so that landing adjacently and attacking over land isn't the far-and-away best tactic, otherwise coastal forts are near-useless to the point of being anti-flavor if left in the game. Better to abstract everything as one kind of fort if you're not going to fix the damn naval landing mechanics anytime in this century.

To say nothing of the fact that coastal fortifications don't even accomplish their intended purpose of defending the harbors from enemy ships, and are implemented solely as a defense against landings, particularly given that "control a sea tile by building a coastal fort" while perhaps exploitable would be a quite flavorful way of implementing straits compared to the singular sea tile/land province correlation we have.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Ah, so when I assumed Germany was smart enough not to sell off the only thing they had going for them, I was once again wrong to underestimate Nazi disintellect. A lesson learned.


While this sounds like a fascinating setup, I do wonder if the "El Pip plays a minor with barely any military to speak of and makes awful puns" genre is perhaps starting to get a bit packed around the gut there. Though I suppose in this scenario, the alternative is another entry into the "El Pip plays British alt-history and cocks everything up somewhat less than OTL" genre which would be even more redundant.


This is one of my milder irritations with the HoI game design. Why have separate fort types, from a game-mechanical standpoint? The only way separate coastal forts make any sense is if you design your game mechanics so that landing adjacently and attacking over land isn't the far-and-away best tactic, otherwise coastal forts are near-useless to the point of being anti-flavor if left in the game. Better to abstract everything as one kind of fort if you're not going to fix the damn naval landing mechanics anytime in this century.

To say nothing of the fact that coastal fortifications don't even accomplish their intended purpose of defending the harbors from enemy ships, and are implemented solely as a defense against landings, particularly given that "control a sea tile by building a coastal fort" while perhaps exploitable would be a quite flavorful way of implementing straits compared to the singular sea tile/land province correlation we have.

Ah yes but you forget, paradox really hates navies.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Ah yes but you forget, paradox really hates navies.

You'd think this would lead to coastal forts having 9,000 km firing range and 69,420 ship attack, but no, because the only thing Paradox hates more than navies and historical accuracy is, apparently, actual work.

 

[Wraith11B]

69,420 ship attack

*Childish chortling ensues*

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

You'd think this would lead to coastal forts having 9,000 km firing range and 69,420 ship attack, but no, because the only thing Paradox hates more than navies and historical accuracy is, apparently, actual work.

Well we all know that

 

[El Pip]

Perhaps to New Zealand? Milford Sound, etc could provide him some relief in exile.

If he wants a truly isolated and desoalte Fjord he could try Staten Island. Not the New York one, but the desolate rock at the very tip of South America. It is a pleasing reminder that explorers of all nationalities were entirely unimaginative and liked to recycle names.

Now THAT is certainly communist talk and must be punished to the full extent of a crazed mid-century mob.

Do I get to pick which century the mob is from?

A fascinating what if, and I was enraptured by it as soon as Steven Fry related it on QI. Certainly bears some similar ideas to Butterfly (instigating but limited war with just Italy), but big differences to (the british getting into a Med war just after Munich...Well, it probably can't go as badly as OTL but still, what a mess!).

While this sounds like a fascinating setup, I do wonder if the "El Pip plays a minor with barely any military to speak of and makes awful puns" genre is perhaps starting to get a bit packed around the gut there. Though I suppose in this scenario, the alternative is another entry into the "El Pip plays British alt-history and cocks everything up somewhat less than OTL" genre which would be even more redundant.

I love the idea of exploring a famous cricketer and proper old-school eccentric becoming King of Albania, it would be the oblivious Brit abroad ambling through the pit of vipers that was Albanian politics. But as @nuclearslurpee rightly points out it would be a tad derivate at this point, hence why it is has never got past that summary. Luckily there are several alternatives available that are not that or another British AAR, so I can do one of those instead.

Ah, so when I assumed Germany was smart enough not to sell off the only thing they had going for them, I was once again wrong to underestimate Nazi disintellect. A lesson learned.

This was all happening under Weimar. The cross-over between the two eras in terms of devious policy (and rampant stupidity) is much larger than you might first suspect. Submarine selling started as a desperate scramble for cash by exporting anything they had, but soon became a way to sneakily re-arm and maintain design and engineering skills.

In CK3, there is no such thing as boats.

It was the logical endpoint of their hatred of work and water. As I've mentioned before if a Paradox developer loses a shoe they just chop one of their feet off, because that avoids the effort of having to go and buy a new shoe. Admittedly they often chop the wrong foot off, but the principle still stands.

This is one of my milder irritations with the HoI game design. Why have separate fort types, from a game-mechanical standpoint? The only way separate coastal forts make any sense is if you design your game mechanics so that landing adjacently and attacking over land isn't the far-and-away best tactic, otherwise coastal forts are near-useless to the point of being anti-flavor if left in the game. Better to abstract everything as one kind of fort if you're not going to fix the damn naval landing mechanics anytime in this century.

To say nothing of the fact that coastal fortifications don't even accomplish their intended purpose of defending the harbors from enemy ships, and are implemented solely as a defense against landings, particularly given that "control a sea tile by building a coastal fort" while perhaps exploitable would be a quite flavorful way of implementing straits compared to the singular sea tile/land province correlation we have.

I wonder if it was Oslo that in part influenced this thinking. The fortress in Oslofjord sunk the Blucher and utterly derailed German plans, allowing Haakon, the government and the gold to escape. But said fortress was useless when the paratroopers landed behind it, so I can see why they wanted to separate the functions. As you say they then ballsed up the wider mechanics so it became pointless, but there was at least some logic behind the choice. It's unfortunate as there was a way of fixing the game mechanics; Arsenal of Democracy added in 'beach' tiles as being the only type of coastal province you could launch amphibious landings at. Naturally Paradox scorned this innovation but it was quite elegant in it's own way.

You'd think this would lead to coastal forts having 9,000 km firing range and 69,420 ship attack, but no, because the only thing Paradox hates more than navies and historical accuracy is, apparently, actual work.

*Childish chortling ensues*

It is the meme-iest number.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Do I get to pick which century the mob is from?

You can lodge a preference but, as we all know, that may not impact anything.

The fortress in Oslofjord sunk the Blucher

and the gold to escape.

Ah, the most important bit.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

I wonder if it was Oslo that in part influenced this thinking. The fortress in Oslofjord sunk the Blucher and utterly derailed German plans, allowing Haakon, the government and the gold to escape. But said fortress was useless when the paratroopers landed behind it, so I can see why they wanted to separate the functions. As you say they then ballsed up the wider mechanics so it became pointless, but there was at least some logic behind the choice. It's unfortunate as there was a way of fixing the game mechanics; Arsenal of Democracy added in 'beach' tiles as being the only type of coastal province you could launch amphibious landings at. Naturally Paradox scorned this innovation but it was quite elegant in it's own way.

The entirety of the Norway campaign has a strong argument for being the most out-of-place campaign in a Paradox HoI3 game in terms of being utterly impossible to mimic via the game mechanics. Sinking ships with coastal guns is only the beginning; we've also got the fact that Germany, lacking proper transports, ferried their troops to Norway via destroyers and cruisers, a situation which among other things meant that only individual battalions of infantry or mountain troops landed at a particular location at a time where in HoI games single brigades are the most granular unit and these are not even combat-effective in most cases.

Indeed, the only accurate aspect of the campaign is the British AI being too stupid to stop anything from happening, even then the AI frequently gets lucky and a random battleship fleet stumbles into the German landing party at sea, sinking all of Germany's transports and causing them to then stack up 3 million troops on the SWE-NOR border for three years trying to collapse the Norwegians by dint of angry glaring.

 

[Wraith11B]

To be frank, that's the problem with much of the Pacific campaign as well: most landings conducted by the Japanese were battalions and until the Americans started conducting amphibious assaults on Guadalcanal, division-sized landings didn't really occur. Not to mention, for quite awhile, landing vessels were older destroyers which had been converted to fast transports. Just doesn't work with much of the other mechanics of the game.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

To be frank, that's the problem with much of the Pacific campaign as well: most landings conducted by the Japanese were battalions and until the Americans started conducting amphibious assaults on Guadalcanal, division-sized landings didn't really occur. Not to mention, for quite awhile, landing vessels were older destroyers which had been converted to fast transports. Just doesn't work with much of the other mechanics of the game.

It's a problem there too, but given the brigade/division level of granularity it still works as a reasonable facsimile as long as one doesn't let the AI anywhere near it, if largely because even if individual landings were at battalion scale you broadly had troops from the same division operating in the same place at least for major campaigns, i.e. you didn't have one regiment from one division at Guadalcanal, one in New Guinea, one on garrison duty in Australia, etc. whereas with Norway you had battalions from the same Gebirgs division in five different places 100s of km apart. Of course the island garrison forces were often brigade or battalion sized and fought hard against invasion forces 10x their size, frankly this is something the fortifications modeling should have handled but doesn't. To sum up, certainly there are numerous problems with the Pacific war, notably the entire AI, but if one thinks at brigade and division levels it still broadly works as a concept.

At any rate, the takeaways from this whole line of discussion are clearly that (1) Nazi Germany had no clue how to properly plan a naval invasion and only succeeded through sheer dumb luck, and should be ridiculed as such; (2) Paradox has no clue how to properly plan a naval invasion and only succeeds through sheer dumb luck, and should be ridiculed as such. Any corollaries to these two conclusions are left up to the reader to draw for himself.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Paradox has no clue how to properly plan a naval invasion and only succeeds through sheer dumb luck, and should be ridiculed as such.

They haven't gotten any better. I've just gotten to the crusading bit of ck3 and the no boats thing means all of europe very easily gets to the Holy land, only to be immediately slaughter by muslim armies waiting to gut us on the shoreline (tbf, happened in otl too). They weren't all that great either though, since when I finally got there and landed south of everyone else, Jerusalem was defended by 1 Knight. He killed two peasants and then ran away.

 

[El Pip]

The other sort of Blucher horse

Ah, the most important bit.

Exactly.

The entirety of the Norway campaign has a strong argument for being the most out-of-place campaign in a Paradox HoI3 game in terms of being utterly impossible to mimic via the game mechanics. Sinking ships with coastal guns is only the beginning; we've also got the fact that Germany, lacking proper transports, ferried their troops to Norway via destroyers and cruisers, a situation which among other things meant that only individual battalions of infantry or mountain troops landed at a particular location at a time where in HoI games single brigades are the most granular unit and these are not even combat-effective in most cases.

Indeed, the only accurate aspect of the campaign is the British AI being too stupid to stop anything from happening, even then the AI frequently gets lucky and a random battleship fleet stumbles into the German landing party at sea, sinking all of Germany's transports and causing them to then stack up 3 million troops on the SWE-NOR border for three years trying to collapse the Norwegians by dint of angry glaring.

To be frank, that's the problem with much of the Pacific campaign as well: most landings conducted by the Japanese were battalions and until the Americans started conducting amphibious assaults on Guadalcanal, division-sized landings didn't really occur. Not to mention, for quite awhile, landing vessels were older destroyers which had been converted to fast transports. Just doesn't work with much of the other mechanics of the game.

It's a problem there too, but given the brigade/division level of granularity it still works as a reasonable facsimile as long as one doesn't let the AI anywhere near it, if largely because even if individual landings were at battalion scale you broadly had troops from the same division operating in the same place at least for major campaigns, i.e. you didn't have one regiment from one division at Guadalcanal, one in New Guinea, one on garrison duty in Australia, etc. whereas with Norway you had battalions from the same Gebirgs division in five different places 100s of km apart. Of course the island garrison forces were often brigade or battalion sized and fought hard against invasion forces 10x their size, frankly this is something the fortifications modeling should have handled but doesn't. To sum up, certainly there are numerous problems with the Pacific war, notably the entire AI, but if one thinks at brigade and division levels it still broadly works as a concept.

At any rate, the takeaways from this whole line of discussion are clearly that (1) Nazi Germany had no clue how to properly plan a naval invasion and only succeeded through sheer dumb luck, and should be ridiculed as such; (2) Paradox has no clue how to properly plan a naval invasion and only succeeds through sheer dumb luck, and should be ridiculed as such. Any corollaries to these two conclusions are left up to the reader to draw for himself.

An excellent Norwego-Pacific amphibious landing discussion with some fine work pointing out the many failures of Paradox and Nazi strategic military thinking. Thanks to all involved.

They haven't gotten any better. I've just gotten to the crusading bit of ck3 and the no boats thing means all of europe very easily gets to the Holy land, only to be immediately slaughter by muslim armies waiting to gut us on the shoreline (tbf, happened in otl too). They weren't all that great either though, since when I finally got there and landed south of everyone else, Jerusalem was defended by 1 Knight. He killed two peasants and then ran away.

That is an impressively Paradox outcome. Inept mechanics, a hatred of Navies and the sea, laziness, an obvious failure to ever beta test a mechanics, the occasional glimpses of historically sort-of correct outcomes (that have slipped in by mistake or through a combination of other failures) all resulting in a disappointing and unsatisfying conclusion.

At some point a rival firm will make a game in the grand strategy market using less lazy staff and game mechanics that allow for the existence of water. When they do they will.. probably not do that well sadly. CK3 hits the vital 'pretty' and 'meme worthy stupdity' buttons very well, and that appears to be where the mass market is.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

An excellent Norwego-Pacific amphibious landing discussion with some fine work pointing out the many failures of Paradox and Nazi strategic military thinking. Thanks to all involved.

There comes a point in every pip AAR when the conversations come back around again to the same topic and the same people make the same points and its great but also hell. This is hell. Nothing but nazis, Swedish programmers and us. Locked in together.

At some point a rival firm will make a game in the grand strategy market using less lazy staff and game mechanics that allow for the existence of water. When they do they will.. probably not do that well sadly. CK3 hits the vital 'pretty' and 'meme worthy stupdity' buttons very well, and that appears to be where the mass market is.

Well...AARland also seems to like memetastic idiocy and pretty images. At least I hope so, cos thats all I got for Ged.

Paradox was the company that undercut and then murdered Total War for their awful and lazy games on the swedes rise to power. I guess this just comes in cycles. At least the grade strategy genre gets one or two great games out every decade or so that can last literally thousands of hours. If you were a fan of space sim, eventually you just give up, settle for elite dangerous or are chained to star citizen until the sun reclaims us.

Tbf to paradox, strategy games in general hate water with a passion. Age of empires utilised it, and the HD remakes fixed a lot of bugs which means it works rather well now. But total war never understood moving armies by boat very much except for the very hardest of difficulties on Rome 1 and medieval 2. And you were so surprised that a computer knew how to land on islands that you lost half your land before you responded properly.

Ck3 making it basically open to everyone to use boats (just one time cash when you want to use it, no matter how long the journey) means that there is at least A CHANCE of paradox fixing this. Everyone seems to use them properly, and can sail around pretty freely. This is already better than ck2. Problem is its so easy that troops are disembarking, waiting a bit then getting back on another fleet (more money) to move a province down.

In a way, I do see some progress. It may yet allow the ai to be fierce in moving troops around etc. But no naval warfare, from the looks of it. Shame.