Like the Heroes, but Bad - A Joint German LAN AAR

[Myth]

No, Permanently Operating Factors isn’t over, or even anywhere near it. Yes, this is another AAR. Blame Discomb.

Lukas says:
liek when would you want to start lthbb?
Anton says:
tbh, as soon as possible

Though to be honest he’s been the one delaying it the past couple of days, wasting all his time playing Guild Wars instead

Yep, lthbb is Like the Heroes, but Bad, a short AAR. At least relatively short. This will be somewhat in the vein of Bayonets Made of Milk, mostly in that it will be a true joint project between me and Discomb. Except, if you can believe it, even more so—we’ll actually be coauthoring at least one fourth of all the updates.

It is based on what I like to call HoI2: DDAM, where ‘M’ stands for Myth. Mostly ‘cause it was me who did an enormous amount of modding on it, tweaking the AI, adding or tweaking hundreds of leaders, ministers and tech teams, and making the combat system more defense-favored. It is based off of the version I/we used for POF, except much more refined (but not enough so, honestly, I ran out of time and couldn’t be bothered to go late game to test certain AIs).

Anyway, with the boring preamble out of the way, let’s get to the juicy bits. Here is a screenshot of our LAN concept:

Except when officially sanctioned by Hitler, who did not appear during the course of our game (not even reincarnated as a set of dice), we could not cross over into each other’s theaters without going out onto the balcony and having a death-defying grapple defending our own honor.

Besides this concept, we also had a byzantine amount of house rules, as follows:

General Rules
- No puppets except via event
- No use of old guard removal event
- No research more than one year ahead
- Discomb will handle technology and trade, I will handle production and diplomacy besides trade

Tactics, Strategy and Policy Rules
- No military control (accepting expeditionary forces is fine)
- No offensive encirclements larger than 2-3 provinces
- Reserves of no more than 5 divisions per army group (a reserve considered any division behind the frontline provinces, not including the AGHQ)
- No premature or voluntary retreats

Flavor Rules
- SS divisions may only form corps with other SS divisions
- SS corps can only be commanded by SS leaders (see list below)
- Armed forces to be organized by hierarchy—2-5 divisions form a corps, 2-5 corps form an army and 2-5 armies form an army group
- Each army group requires its own HQ behind the lines
- If there is anyone who is both a leader and a minister, he can be one but not the other at any one time

SS Leaders
Bittrich
Deisenhofer
Demelhuber
Dietrich
Dirlewanger
Eicke
Fegelein
Hausser
Heissmeyer
Hildebrandt
Himmler
Hitschler
Kaminski
Keppler
Kleinheisterkamp
Kraas
Krämer
Krüger W.
Lorenz
Meyer
Mohnke
Phleps
Prieß
Rumohr
Stadler
Steiner
Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz
Streckenbach
von Scholz von Rerancze
Witt

An excellent selection of rules though, in retrospect, I should’ve mentioned something about CAS death stars…

We also tended to break a couple rules. Discomb tended to break the HQ one, I tended to break the involuntary retreat one. What can I say? My operational sense tends to trump artificial house rules, and I might even be able to pretend that my sheer eloquence managed to convince Hitler. Hah. Right. I think we also broke the last rule but since it only applied to one leader, oh well. He barely saw action anyway.

 

[unmerged(59108)]

Table of Contents​

01. We Are Definite (pre-game LAN update)
02. The Great Ascent (joint update)
03. Meet the Fokk-eers, the Staff (Myth), Staff of Staffness -5 (Discomb)
04. The Secret Meeting (joint update)
05. Drive (Discomb), The Grand Debate (Myth)
06. German Logistical Ninja (Myth), A Wormhole to Another Dimension (in Regenbogen’s head) (Discomb)
07. Feast of Excuses (joint update)
08. Dumb Luck (Discomb)
09. Regenbogen's First Attempt at an After Action Report (Discomb) (potentially offensive content)
10. One Who Bares Fangs at Gods (Discomb)
11. And Laugh at You (Discomb)
12. Cryptic Titles are Abundant Here (joint update)
13. Broken Shields (Discomb)
14. No Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice for Us! (Discomb)
15. Winning isn't Just a Hobby (Discomb)
16. Timing is Everything. Especially You. (Discomb)
17. Do Not Shake, Do Not Stir (joint update)
18. Planned Chaos (Myth)
19. Violating Yugoslavia (Myth)
20. Are we there already? (Myth)
21. What, we’re still in one place? (Myth)
22. Finally Jumped One Hurdle! (Myth)
23. The End of One Ride (Myth)
24. Pinpricks and Pizza (Myth)
25. Mistakes Were Made (joint update with guest author Kurt Steiner)
26. Days Like Winter (mid-game LAN update)
27. Gloriously Great Punch, Ahoy! (Myth), Rotterdam in Flames (Discomb)
28. Everywhere is War (Discomb), Surprise and forward, forward, forward! (Myth)

 

[unmerged(59108)]

01. We are Definite!​

Ah yes, I had entirely forgotten that the HQ rule existed. Sorry about that! In any case, let me welcome you to this new AAR.

We are indeed like the heroes, only we are bad.

As Myth forgot to mention, in this AAR we are share-playing Germany. Our main quest is the destruction of the state of USSR, which Myth had seriously overbuffed in his modding. We were supposed to experience defence in-depth, significantly cleverer AI that avoids encirclements, and generally a much tougher game given that the battles became longer, the strength loss of divisions much stronger, and the action delay after experiencing combat was bumped to two whole days. For the most part I’ll agree with that we did in fact see these changes, because the game was significantly harder than I remember it being.

This is the Box Art for the HoI2 version we were playing.

Since Myth (and occasionally me) is still writing Permanently Operating Factors, I will take most of the bulk for this one, which naturally includes this first post. I planned to make an introductory update before the start to explain a few things, because there’s a lot to be explained. Firstly, despite initially planning to play in separate rooms and only meet once an hour to simulate bureaucratic failure, we did in fact play in the same room. We also initially planned to simulate Hitler’s stupidity by either having my brother make decisions blindly, or by having a set of dice. Neither manifested themselves at the proper time, so

Most importantly, as you have read above, this AAR will be more joint than any of our previous AARs. That is to say, we won’t just be posting simultaneous updates from two different sides of the conflict. We’ll actually be writing some updates together, as if we were a single author.

Exactly.

What we’ll be doing is an interesting breed of co-authoring that we invented practically just before we started working on this. Essentially, we’re pretending that we are a single author, and due to the possibility of instant communication via the internet, we’re writing the update together, taking turns sentence by sentence, in MSN messenger. Then I take the bulk of text produced and edit it until it’s ready for posting. It’s important to note that as we write, neither of us knows where the other is going to take the story next, and since we can both write for any character except each other’s protagonists. Only in a few exceptional situations are we allowed to write more than one sentence at a time before passing the turn to the other, and only one of us is sane.

Also, before you ask, yes the game is already played and finished. Yes we already know what will happen next. We still want to write a good story about it. Presumably, there will be an update every three days, but we’ll post warnings should we choose to change our minds. That aside, I believe I speak for the both of us when I say that we’re really excited to get this, our least serious joint project ever, underway.

 

[coz1]

Very cool guys. I'll be curious to see how this brand of co-authoring works. I tried something similar in admittedly much younger years and me and my friends ended up with some gibberish poetry, but perhaps we meant to do that to each other.

Good luck!

 

[trekaddict]

So let me get this straight, just to make sure I udnerstood you correctly: You both command the Armies north or respectively south of that line and are not allowed to enter into the others area of operations? So whos doing Sealion?



Good luck anyways. I will be reading.

 

[Kurt_Steiner]

Better Bad than Bald...

 

[wilegfass]

This will be interesting. What about when you attack the US?

 

[unmerged(61606)]

Interesting concept, and good luck not driving each other insane...

What about the rest of the world, how is that divvied up between you two?

 

[Myth]

coz1: We've found coathoring to be all right so far, but we're trying to have presentable updates rather than gibberish poetry, so... And thanks!

trekaddict: Yeah. And Sea Lion would fall under the jurisdiction of whoever commands the northern theater. We won't reveal yet who's going to be commanding which part, that's for you all to figure or find out. You'll know by the third update

Kurt_Steiner: So true! Can you imagine a bald hero? Egads, he'd be no hero! Hmmm...but that is kind of the whole point, wouldn't you say?

wilegfass: Well, we were hoping for a relatively historical game in that the USA comes to us. But if we did happen to possibly attack it, we'd probably follow the Mason-Dixon line or something like that

rcduggan: We're both a little more insane than before already And as for the rest of the world, well, we'd probably just make it up as we go along

So we figure that we'd be updating about two or three times a week, at least to start. I have a bunch of other commitments (POF, university essays, other projects) that also vie for my time. So the next update will be we-haven't-decided-yet

 

[Kurt_Steiner]

Kurt_Steiner: So true! Can you imagine a bald hero? Egads, he'd be no hero! Hmmm...but that is kind of the whole point, wouldn't you say?

Just imagine how frustrating it would be a heroic colonel of the US Cavalry for an Apache... :rofl: To kill him, what for?

 

[unmerged(90778)]

Interesting! Hope you had a hard time fighting the russians

 

[unmerged(85800)]

love the new hair cut (s? - i cant remember)

ill be watching, sounds... interesting.

and also, what are you talking about, no bald heroes? havent you played timesplitters or hitman? and winston churchill didn't exactly have flowing locks

 

[unmerged(90778)]

Churchill wasn't a hero! Rommel was =D (You must remember HIS golden curls)

 

[dublish]

This looks like fun.

Nice house rules- did you take any SS events out of HSR/CORE/TRP? I seem to remember CORE assigning SS leaders to SS units automatically, and TRP includes handy little SS symbols on the SS leader portraits.

 

[TheExecuter]

Ah...more sarcastic updates from the twin-headed monsters!

Consider me subscribed...I'll be interested to see how your 'bickering' gets on with the grey hordes!

TheExecuter

 

[ColossusCrusher]

I'm interested.

 

[Myth]

Kurt_Steiner: Oh man, that would be horrible. And imagine if he was the best warrior in the US cavalry, but had no hair...the shame of killing him

Pinkspider: Yeah, we hoped so too. You'll see later on whether we did or not

BritishImperial: Not as much a haircut as lack of one, really. As for heroes, the hitman really isn't a hero even if he is the protagonist. And while Churchill is a hero in some ways, I'm not sure how well he fits into that archetype.

Pinkspider: Maybe, but then when you think of say, Guderian or Zhukov or someone, they don't have any particular masses of hair either...

dublish: It was fun, and the house rules we (I with some bit of input from Discomb) put together in the months leading up to the LAN. We didn't use any of the SS events though, just the vanilla system. So it required a bit more micromanaging to make sure they stayed in their own SS corps and whatnot, but really not a whole lot more.

TheExecuter: Yeah, it should be fun, I think

ColossusCrusher: Awesome

According to the decision reached with Discomb yesterday, this will be the second comment day and the next update will be tomorrow! Sorry for the wait, I've only got so much time and energy for stuff and I've got a billion other projects as well, including more important ones, like university assignments.

 

[unmerged(59108)]

Write, slave!

 

[unmerged(90778)]

Write master! But you have already played so the writing is probably done too...but one day isn't that long after all, is it? And this way you'll get more viewers and posts

 

[unmerged(59108)]

Um, we have a buffer of 2 weeks' worth of updates at this moment, and I'm currently working on the next one, so it's really not a matter of writing to meet the deadline, but rather staying well ahead. In case someone hasn't noticed, Myth and I are probably the most consistent AAR updaters out there, and we're pretty proud of that. Bayonets Made of Milk was always on schedule with only a few exceptions, though my moving to China caused a number of problems. Permanently Operating Factors has updated every 2nd day for 4 months, took a month's hiatus, and since then has been going at a once-every-3-days pace without fail. Given that all of our AARs have been colosally long, that's pretty impressive, at least to me. This AAR will mantain the tradition.