Action in southern Africa has taken off again with redeployed mobile forces advancing into southern Angola. The only action here in the last few weeks has been bombing of French units which has been quite successful.
This is an overview of the air zones in Siberia. The blue zone is Irkutsk and has only one enemy held province which holds the whole Russian army (what is left of it). Several divisions are well dug in so it cannot be bombed to destruction. The yellow and green zones are subject to complete clearance by the Luftwaffe and the enemy is currently unable to maintain any forces in either.
It is all but impossible to see the frontlines in this image but they are not important to its significance.
Another anti-dig-in attack is launched to winkle out the division in Imphal. The policy here is to attack and break off once the enemy is retreating. Once the forward areas are clear I will need to decide what to do next but it isn’t obvious. Little enemy opposition has developed so it is tempting to advance but it does feel like being sucked into a quagmire.
This is an air supported anti-dig-in attack in central Africa. I let the bombers choose their target and when it is too dug in switch to interdiction for a couple of days, add a ground attack and before you know it we have a new retreating target.
The armoured leader swearing to the east of the picture is the last remnant of a French armoured division eliminated by the strategic bomber force I have retained in theatre. They have been performing unit destruction over Belgian territory whilct the TAC fleet covers the Portuguese area,
The forward HQ has marched through the mountains far faster than anyone else and has been counter-attacked by the Russians. It is easily able to resist attack on this scale (in this terrain) and the Russians completely give up. If they attack with everything they have left they would be successful but then I would bomb them out of existence. As it is the HQ is allowed to continue unmolested and will be looking to close the pocket on its own.
I have managed to steal another technology off the Petal Throne and this time we have really hit the nail on the head. This is the most valuable blueprint I have ever stolen since it is a very expensive technology in the first place and I really don’t have a good matching tech team. The Petal Throne are busy completing their set of contemporary naval doctrines and will then be ready for the 1943 great leap forward. I am going to have to address this issue sometime or else take an even more conservative naval policy. I am a little concerned about this since I am currently working through my obsession with aircraft technology. I want to achieve a full turbojet air force as quickly as possible.
The intelligence estimate shows them losing 1 infantry division in the last 13 days. This rate of reduction is completely useless. Things are looking up but there is still no obvious prospect of defeating my enemies.
A corresponding Russian status report shows their army 33% smaller than a month ago so that is being steadily eliminated. Their technology is clearly lacking and they can easily be written off now as a minor enemy nation although they could still hang on for a long time.
We now have a quick status report and a little cleaning up. I have run through the save file and removed about 40 null fleets. This isn’t a very large number and I suspect they were not affecting game performance but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I am intending a bit of fleet hunting and I am well aware that null fleets interfere rather badly with attacks on ports so I thought I would make sure I was rid of them. Null Portuguese fleets seemed the most popular and it turned out there weren’t all that many in total (40 is many of anything for this game).
VladAnlerkov substituted for Guderian (normal traits plus desert fox, ranger)
A question was asked recently about total industrial capacity and it seems to be about a year since I looked at the total enemy capability
IC Germany
688
IC Allies
4540
of which
1486 = Petal Throne
1514 = USA
284 = Canada
268 = Brazil
198 = Australia
This shows an interesting balance with the allies having 20:3 advantage in production capacity. An interesting secondary issue is that about two thirds of this capacity is in two countries which are guaranteed to deploy good technology and another 50% of the rest is in countries with high capacity to deploy reasonable technology. This suggests that the hordes of rubbish from South America actually represent a relatively minor fraction of total enemy output. No comfort there then.
Losses (Naval) 2nd April to 12th May
This is a relatively short period but it is perhaps time to keep a closer eye on things since I am beginning to take losses.
Germany: 3 CV
Allies 62 DD, 5 TP, 3 SS 20 CL, 8 CA, 4 CVL, 8 CV
The ratio of CV losses is nowhere near good enough given the industrial advantage lying with my enemies. I need to sink about 20 CVs to compensate for losing 3 of my own and whilst all the rest goes some way to compensate I would have to consider the above losses to be something like a draw.
Current CV numbers are Petal Throne 39 and USA 67 against Germany 36. This isn’t any worse than it has been before but now I have lots of damaged ships just like the enemy does with significant numbers out of commission for some months to come.
On land the key figures to watch over the coming months are limited to mainland nations in eastern Asia.
Petal Throne 1035 divisions
Russia 14
UK 6
Obviously the Russians and the UK are spent forces so the real number to watch is the Petal Throne division count. It is my only real stated objective for the summer offensive and so we will be watching to see how much I can reduce this by.
