Megacampaign: Where the Raw Blood Flowed

[King of Men]

This is the AAR thread for part four of the epic multiplayer megacampaign, "The Widow's Party". Previous AAR installments are here:

Broke A King and Built a Road (Crusader Kings 2)
Where Our Bootheels Goed (Europa IV)
The River's Clean (sadly, no Victoria AARs were written)

We have a couple of slots open for people willing to play minor powers.

 

[King of Men]

1936 world map:

The countries listed in parentheses are open to new players; note that we have house rules meant to ensure that the majors won't gobble up the minors right away, so you will get a chance to do something.

 

[vaniver]

The steely gaze of Nigel Fisher, President of Great Britain (and thus The Federation). Born in 1870, he was a child when electricity spread throughout London, had finished his advanced studies in statistics and economic planning at the Academy when tanks began to roll off the assembly lines. He steadily advanced through the ranks of industrial administration; viewed as one of the most promising administrators of his generation, he had a national post by 40. Slowly building alliances, he patiently waited his turn, becoming president in 1931 on the retirement of his predecessor and easily winning reelection in 1935.

In CKII, the descendants of Asa Picard rose to prominence in northern France, gaining land through successful holy wars against the Aztecs that had invaded from the Americas. As they grew, the family split into three branches; one king of France, also holding the southern half of Ireland; another king of Pomerania, also holding Scotland; and one king of England. The English kings were renowned for their scholarly nature and focus on astronomy and intellectual pursuits. They also were notorious centralizers, only allowing ducal titles outside of England proper, to maintain a respectable distance between the king and the other nobility. This also allowed them to establish a succession system they called "One Man, One Vote"; Elective Monarchy in England meant that each monarch could hand-pick his successor. The Academy in London became one of the world's top institutes of higher learning, as well as training all of the officers of the English navy.

In EU4, this 'professionalized monarchy' converted as a Dutch Republic, with the Picardists favoring rule-for-life and the Fleetists favoring 4-year terms. The growing population and an educational system that increasingly brought highly talented commoners into the Academy elite meant that many English kings bore no relation to Asa Picard; after a time, the role of king was renamed 'president.' The War for The Isles was won, with the Pomeranians and French driven off the Isles, and a unification project left the islands completely English, rather than a collection of countries headed by the same monarch; those Scottish, Irish, and Welsh refugees who wanted to keep their language fled to the colonies in the Eastern Seaboard of the new world. Explorers found the Fountain of Youth (only slightly restorative, instead of a cure-all) and colonized bits of South America and Australia, as well as conquering Burma. Often the leader in technology, the country now known as Great Britain was the Naval Hegemon and considered the top Great Power--but this score was primarily due to the development of its many colonies throughout the world.

In V2, many of those colonies, while still in Great Britain's sphere, were no longer under its command. GB was now clearly a middle-tier power; Flanders, which held half of Africa and India directly, was the most populous country in the world, and Thuringia, the titan of Europe, struck fear into the hearts of all. The Academy's Observatory was the first and often the most advanced machine parts factory in the world, but British industrialization wasn't remarkable, often comparable with that of Scandinavia (and well behind that of Thuringia and Flanders). The Fleetists eventually came to dominate the government, tho the House of Picard is still well-represented among the British elite, especially in the military services.

Now in HOI4, Britain is in a peculiar position. Because of how our conversion worked, the vast majority of Britain's resources, industrial capacity, and population are in the home islands. We've decided that the top four players (Flanders, Thuringia, Great Britain, and Georgia) will be faction heads, with different diplomatic options unlocking at different times; the first two can't attack players until 1941, the latter two until 1940, the next two players (Tyrannia and Ar Adunaim) can't attack until 1939, and the remainder can attack beginning in 1938. Adding others to your faction is also limited, with the weaker two having a 2-year lead (roughly) on the stronger two, and also players not allowed to join the currently strongest faction.

The main change to diplomacy is that this shatters the long and strong alliance between Thuringia and Flanders; only one of them may win, and with borders in Europe, Africa, India, and South America, it seems unclear how a war between them would go. It also remains to be seen whether Great Britain or Georgia will assemble enough of a faction to rival them; while the Alliance of Georgia has six countries under Georgia's wing, they are so irrelevant that it seems boastful to call them minors. [Serbia, for example, begins with 6 industrial capacity, and a total population of 2.5M.] The Federation led by Great Britain doesn't fare much better: it consists of the loyal colonies of Australia, Mexico, Louisiana, and the vassals Portugal, Pueblo, and Burma. But of those six, the most industrially relevant is Australia with 9 IC. The true test will be which players can be recruited, and how the wars between the minors (who can attack AI in 1937, and humans in 1938) pan out.

 

[King of Men]

When does a zeitgeist change, and why? Not only by the deaths of elder statesmen and the ascension of hungry young bloods; many a man who negotiated treaties and pacific compromises in his younger days has found himself a high priest of war as a respected elder. It cannot be traced to the reaction of an artistic movement against the preoccupations of their predecessors; the predecessors themselves, ignoring their advanced age and the pastoral idylls they wrote twenty or forty years ago, are quite happy to extol the necessity of war and the cold bracing impact of battle. It is not a question of saturated markets, or a lack of colonial frontiers; the sons of the merchants who opened Africa to imports are greedily reinvesting their profits into the cheap-labour factories that will make the colonies an immensely stronger market for industrial goods, and as for the frontiers, they were quite amicably closed by treaty, compromise, compensation, and accord forty years ago; they cannot well be driving new conflict at this late date.

And yet, undeniably: the times, they are a-changing.

It has been a hundred years, and more, since any power of Europe seriously mobilised its armies to fight another: a century of trade, of cooperation, of minor colonial skirmishes quickly ended with a compromise border; of competition for spheres of influence and trade privileges, waged with paper and bribes, influence and charisma, and never, not once, with the thunderous impact of naval gunnery or the monotonous tramp-tramp-tramp of regiments marching to the front. A century of prosperity and growth; ten consecutive decades that each lifted millions from grinding poverty and expanded the middle class to undreamed-of size.

And still. Something is in the air; something other than the bracing coal-smoke of factories running three shifts to make consumer goods.

War. War is in the air.

There are no raving dictators, no resentful irredentist countries looking to overthrow a settled order, no overpopulated soils bursting with lean and hungry men; no obvious cause for which millions might march into the bloody cauldron. And, in spite of this fact, everyone knows it is coming.

In the Caucasus the is a flourishing of "youth clubs" - half militia, half mystical cults devoted to the ancient being said to rest under Gora Dzhimara, half dance halls where young men can meet young women for purposes not at all dependent on the zeitgeist; but their military exercises are quite real. In England the village councils now routinely put "fortifying the beach" on their agenda, right between "May Faire" and "Mrs Plaskitt's motion to close the pub". In Tyrannia, of course - but then, the alleged descendants of dragons have always been given to warlike posturing; the paramilitary "hatchling brigades" and "fledgling squadrons" go back at least two centuries, to when the local councils first attempted to defend by force the peasant autonomy that the Tyrannian constitution in theory gives them, and cannot be considered an example of the twentieth-century change. In Egypt, on the other hand, it is indeed a recent development when the fellahin grow their beards to their chests, swear to have at least ten children, and take mighty oaths to "avenge Burchard" (or sometimes, confusingly, "von Hentzau") by means unspecified, but presumably involving plots spanning centuries.

The examples could be multiplied; but there is no need, for the facts are plain to see. In each of the eleven Peer Powers there is - suddenly, without warning or obvious cause - a premonition of war; a movement to prepare for sacrifice and privation, a cultural trend to extol the glory of battle and the need for young men to prove their valour. The fact is clear, although the cause is not: In unison, almost sleepwalking, as though a switch has been flipped from "peaceful cooperation" to "last power standing", the people of Europe prepare for war.

It may be fairly said that they do not know what they are getting into: The last serious wars between the Peer Powers were fought with muskets and muzzle-loading twelve-pounders - all lovingly hand-crafted by weaponsmiths who had served seven-year apprenticeships. The capacity of industrial economies both to absorb punishment and to dish it out will, no doubt, come as a dreadful surprise to all involved. But then, wars always do, for populations who know it mainly by literature, after a long and fruitful peace.

What reason would they give for this sudden change? The young men whose eyes shine at the thought of martial glory, the young women who smile at uniforms and swoon dramatically at the militia parades, the poets whose works have suddenly turned to blood and sacrifice - what would they say, if asked why this year is so different from five years ago, why war is now suddenly on everyone's mind? Most likely they would be unable to say. A shrug, and perhaps a mumble about "the times" or, if educated, "the zeitgeist" - circular reasoning, appealing to what is to be explained, as the explanation itself.

One or two, it may be, would not even attempt an explanation, but would simply assert that "everyone knows it's coming"; and thereby explain it after all. Does not the expectation of war feed upon itself? If the thesis is "they want to fight", and the antithesis, "they know we know they want to fight", then is not the synthesis necessarily "we'd better be ready"?

If everyone knows war is coming, and everyone knows that everyone knows... then, assuredly, war must be coming indeed, with or without a cause. The first impulse of "what everyone knows" hardly matters; perhaps it was no more than an idle speculation, amplified by the chance fluctuations of gossip and radio into an unstoppable wave. It does not matter now; what everyone knows is coming, will surely come to pass.

Then again - does everyone know? For two countries yet sleep, and their people with them: Flanders and Thuringia, first among the Peer Powers, seem oblivious to the war that "everyone knows" is surely coming, and soon. In Germany no blackshirted militias march in the streets; neither red nor black flags wave over the canals of Amsterdam - though the red lights continue to do a roaring business. Do the two greatest Powers of Europe know something that everything else does not? Or is it merely the complacency of power, the obliviousness brought by three centuries of being unquestioned top dogs? It is clear, at any rate, that the two German peoples look to their vast regular armies for defense, and do not attempt to recruit their young men into people's militias, rifle clubs, scouting troops, volunteer corps, or any of the other paramilitary paraphernalia with which the lesser powers try to prepare their citizens for war.

Perhaps there is still a hope for peace; if the two largest powers refuse to be drawn into the madness afflicting their lesser brethren, may not the disaster be avoided through their steadfast example? Or if the two finest - or at least largest - armies of Europe are suddenly mobilised to intervene against any aggressor, perhaps the conflict can at least be kept small, not the world-consuming conflagration that the apocalyptic death-cults monotonously warn of. Perhaps Europe needn't grind nations and peoples into dust to be satisfied, only regimes and careers; perhaps the destruction can be at the level of regiments and divisions and mere hundreds of thousands of young men, rather than armies and fronts and millions.

And - who knows? - perhaps the horse will learn to sing.

 

[King of Men]

Last week's narration said, speculatively:

The first impulse of "what everyone knows" hardly matters; perhaps it
was no more than an idle speculation, amplified by the chance
fluctuations of gossip and radio into an unstoppable wave.

Now the war that everyone knew was coming has indeed begun; already
fifty thousand young men lie dead within the borders of Georgia, and
the steppe resounds, from the Dnieper to the Urals, with the thunder
of Cossack hosts. The horse has not learned to sing; but, by the
absent gods, it certainly can gallop, and carry a man with a lance, a
sabre, and a gun. For the time being there is no resistance; the
Georgian army, assailed by three Peer Powers, has abandoned the steppe
and retreated to its National Redoubt in the Caucasian mountains -
centered, of course, on Gora Dzhimara. When the Cossacks reach its
foothills, their horses, no doubt, will learn new lessons: "Machine
Gun Survival 101", that would be a good one, or perhaps "Emergency
Logistics: A Casualty Approach". It is quite unlikely that singing
will be involved, in spite of the chorus of "bring the good old bugle,
boys" that currently rises above the endless grassy plain.

But for all that we can, at least, identify the initial impulse, the
idle speculation that grew into an unstoppable wave; and in spite of
what the Georgian propagandists in voice chat would have you believe,
it did not say a word about "incentives":

Mark's words were, in fact, "I need to eat". He did not say, as he
claimed after the war was declared and some salt had been exchanged,
that he "had an incentive to eat [his neighbours]". Blayne mentioned
incentives; Mark did not. It was this image I used to gather the
alliance of Noobgorod, Japan, and Egypt (with Tyrannian backing)
currently attacking Georgia.

It is of course quite possible that Mark, as he now claims, was merely
dispassionately discussing the pros and cons of the scenario, and did
not in fact intend to do the eating he said he needed. Perhaps he was
announcing that he had no hope of victory in the road-to-war setup,
and his "need to eat [for survival]" carried the unspoken rider "but
obviously I'm not going to do that to my long-term allies like
Noobgorod and Egypt". If so, I think, perhaps, this qualification
should not have been unspoken, it should have been trumpeted to the
skies. When Blayne referred to this bit of chat as a "failure of
diplomacy", I think he may be said to have hit the nail on the head.

But, in any case, who was going to pass up an opportunity to literally
"Sing it as we used to sing it - fifty thousand strong / while we were
marching through Georgia!" in voice chat?

Everyone knew it was coming.

-----------------------------------------------------------

For the edification of those not playing the game, these are the
road-to-war rules governing when powers can attack:

There are five tiers of powers, referred to by analogy with OTL leaders:

• FDR (Thuringia, Flanders)
• Churchill (nobody)
• Stalin (Georgia, England)
• Hitler (Tyrannia, Ar Adunaim)
• Tojo (Japan, Egypt, Noobgorod, Grand Sicily, Brittany)

which have different timed restrictions on their actions.

1936: Truce year; nobody may justify on or DOW anyone, but everyone may send volunteers to any wars with only AI belligerents.
1937: Tojo-tier powers can attack the AI. Hitler and Stalin may send volunteers to wars with player belligerents. Churchill can send Lend-Lease.
1938: Hitler-tier powers can attack AI; Tojo may attack players. Churchill can send volunteers. Stalin may guarantee one power. FDR may send Lend-Lease equipment.
1939: Stalin can attack AI, Hitler can attack players. Churchill may guarantee one power. FDR can send volunteers.
1940: Churchill can attack AI, Stalin can attack players. Churchill may guarantee an additional power. FDR may guarantee one power.
1941: Weapons free; anyone may attack anyone else.

In handy table format:

Obviously this is intended to allow the lesser powers some expansion
before the Real War begins. The wars that in fact occurred were, to my
memory:

1936: Mass intervention in the Chinese Civil War, leading to a rapid
victory by Dali, much to the disgust of those Powers who intended to
drag the war out and gain massive army experience thereby.
1937: Noobgorod attacks Republic of Suriname; Grand Sicily attacks
Kebbi; Japan attacks China.
1938: Grand Sicily attacks Brazil. Ar Adunaim attacks Haiti. Noobgorod
(cough) finishes its conquest of Suriname, whose infantry divisions
with light-armour support, defending jungle and rivers, proved a
surprisingly tough target. Six months behind schedule, Noobgorod
finally allies with Egypt and Japan to attack Georgia. At Christmas, Ar
Adunaim (Scandinavia) joins on the Georgian side (technically
breaching the rules, but only by a week and in hindsight I had written
them slightly ambiguously).
1939: Who knows? The only Hitler-tier power not already engaged is
Tyrannia, who has sent volunteers to defend Noobgorod against the
treacherous attack out of Finland.

Finnish front. Between the lakes, Sauron's tanks have pushed me back
to my fallback fort-and-river line. It's no joke to fight in Finland
in winter, presumably. The last time Sauron and I fought in HoI, he
was attacking Finland and I was defending it; but then he had heavy
tanks and the battle cry "encirclements will continue until morale
improves!" This time, only light tanks. Perhaps it will go better for
me.

Ukrainian front. As Mark didn't have enough troops to defend all of
his very long border, he abandoned the Ukraine to me, much against my
expectation - I thought he'd put a good army there to crush me before
Egypt and Japan could help - and so the limit on my advance was the
speed of my troops and how much micro I could devote to making them go
places, the front AI refusing to move without written orders in
triplicate.

World situation. Note Suriname (red blob shaped like a salamander)
under Noobish administration, Brazil and Kebbi Grand Sicilian, Egypt
taking Anatolia and European Georgia.

 

[vaniver]

Sadly, no screenshots, either before or after the session; I forgot that without all the DLC, I wouldn't be able to load the save over the week. Oops.

The zeitgeist of war manifested in flesh and blood first in China; for centuries there have been two, Dali in the south and Shun in the north. While in other countries, the youth clubs prepare for war and wait for their leaders to tell them where to fight, in China their intentions were obvious, and the country was united in crying "one China!", and divided on which China it would be.

In the days of industrialism, British diplomacy saw both within the comfort's of Britain's diplomatic sphere; the other powers, on discovering that in fact it was possible to sphere the large uncivilized minors, quickly joined forces to throw Britain out. But Dali was where Britain decided to make their last stand, keeping the friendship for as long as possible, until finally the jealous lies of other powers drove Dali to neutrality.

And so in 1936, when war erupted, Britain was the first to pick a side, declaring for Dali. Nothing official, of course; the armor that was now the pride of Britain's land forces stayed at home, but twenty five thousand cavalry were shipped to the south. Nearly a thousand years ago, cavalry had been the pride of the Picards; as Norman transplants to England, they maintained the tradition of fine French knights, and even into the era of EU4 Britain fielded cavalry when everyone else had switched to men with guns. A horse made a man spiritually as well as physically bigger, once striking terror into the heart of the opponent; but now it was the horses who were more likely to be terrified by the explosions, and made a man a bigger target as well. Modern military thinking was that the horse was hardly worth the extra supplies it ate, and it's not like the cavalry had much in the way of aristocratic support; the modern British upper class focused more on machines that flew or floated than animals than ran quickly.

Nevertheless, the cavalry proved decisive; Dali and Shun were both wide countries, like the two slices of bread in a sandwich. Dali's capital was in the south, far from the front, but Shun's capital was in the populous East, well defended by infantry both Chinese and foreign. Stalemate lines had been set up throughout most of the country, but the border was too long to be completely defended, and the cavalry found a hole in the middle and thrust a spear right through it. Splitting Shun in two cut off the supplies for the western half of the northern army, including many volunteers, and then the trick was repeated again, and then the war rapidly came to a close. The country cried out "One China", tho for many it was with bitterness in their voices; and then within a year the cry became "One China Under Japan", with much more bitterness.

[Why end it quickly? Well, as mentioned earlier I'm a mid-tier power, which means I need to be on the lookout not just for opportunities that help me, but which things that help me help those above me even more. I'm not expecting my land forces to be of much importance this game, whereas they will be critical for the other three of the top four, and so cutting off an opportunity to grind experience hurts me but hurts them even more. As well, Japan, long Britain's ally, could expand into a unified China but not a divided one.]

As we are now in 1939, Britain may attack AI; sadly, my attempts to diplomatically induct British Columbia and New England into the Federation seem unlikely to succeed, and so I'm sending in the tanks. Similar expansion seems likely in the American northwest; the industrial development national focuses have made America slightly more worth taking, but it continues to be a sideshow compared to Europe, where the League of Desperate Minors struggles against the Alliance of Georgia in what turned out to be a much more fair fight than the minors were expecting. There's another year before Britain can join the fighting, and already debate clubs in London have heated debates on which side is more just, and which more advantageous for the Empire.

 

[King of Men]

Like all triage, the epistemology of war is necessarily somewhat rough; but nevertheless it is often useful to consider campaigns from the triple perspective of strategy, operations, and tactics. In this analysis, 'strategy' refers to the reasons why states wage war at all, and concerns itself with what they try to accomplish by resorting to violence; 'operations' is the large-scale movements of troops towards the fighting front, the management of immense columns of marching men and all the varied means of carrying their supplies; and 'tactics' is what those troops do when in sight of the enemy, or - on modern battlefields that may stretch for miles beyond the literal line of sight - how they maneuver with the intention of getting into a killing position.

In Noobgorod, which has for centuries been a lesser power that necessarily has had to content itself with second-best of everything, they say - especially of the recent Georgian campaign - "two out of three ain't that bad".

In particular, the strategic aims of the war are not easy to criticize: By means of the infamous "Cannibal Telegram", the Georgian state had publicly made itself into an existential threat to all its neighbours, and the governments of Noobgorod, Japan, and Egypt all reasonably believed that removing this threat was a requirement for the mere survival of their regimes - perhaps even of their peoples, depending on how literally one is to take the word "eat" in the Cannibal Telegram. In geopolitical analysis, the survival of the state is generally considered the foremost aim of all governments - since the ones who have a different aim will most often not survive long enough to be analysed - and a public proclamation by a powerful statesman, not disavowed or officially denied, that a major regional power intends to "eat [its] neighbours", is a clear and present danger to those neighbours. Moreover, absorbing Georgian industries and manpower, even with the known difficulty of administering such conquests, might have catapulted Noobgorod into a full regional power, much less vulnerable to the Great Powers on its borders and perhaps able to negotiate a lasting peace from a position of strength. Strategically, then, the Noobish government cannot be faulted.

Their operations, likewise, had at least the basic competence of military officers given a clear goal and capable of forming a plan to achieve it. The defensive Finnish Front, although driven from its initial fortified line on the border, was able to regroup on the secondary river line between the lakes, and to hold St Petersburg against heavy and sustained attack for the whole year the fighting lasted. The Crimean, Ukraine, and even the third-line Urals Fronts, similarly, were able to move to their assigned starting positions without major breaches of security, and then, when the expected Georgian attack did not materialise - Noobish prewar thinking had been that the Georgians would attempt to knock one attacker out of the war quickly, and Noobgorod of the wide-open steppe was the obvious candidate - to quickly change from a defensive posture to advancing in good order over the undefended black earth. Certainly there were timid peacetime officers who held up the advance, and troops who got confused at the lack of resistance and started firing on their comrades in different regiments; but such incidents are unavoidable when literally a million heavily-armed conscripts are on the move. On the whole, the advance to the Black Sea and the Caucasus went smoothly, and even provided a useful weeding-out of peacetime-oriented officers.

As for tactics... well, as the Noobish say, two out of three ain't that bad.

The problem lay in the increasing aggressiveness of the advance as mile after mile, day after day, of steppe was crossed, with no sign of Georgian resistance. In the necessary process of weeding out the too-timid peacetime officers, the ones who refused to advance through an open city without written orders, the Noobish army selected very strongly for speed, for the aggressive courage that leads from the front, and - above all - for being the officer reporting that such-and-such a place had fallen, for many different places. The officers who were promoted were the ones who led their troops forward the most rapidly, who searched the most aggressively for opportunities to write a triumphant communique; and those were also the officers who came to take Georgia's retreat to a National Redoubt in the Caucasus mountains, not as an operational measure by a cunning opponent defending his industrial core, but as a law of Nature imposed on a cowardly people by a just and martial God.

Consequently, when the counterattack finally did come, the tanks were many days' march ahead of their supporting infantry; the spearheads were out of supporting distance; and while the actual guns were at least in the vicinity of the ragged front line, their ammunition beyond the day's supply carried on their caissons was held up in low-priority trains far behind the line of occupation, since fuel for the tanks and grain for the horses had been given absolute transport priority after the fall of Sevastopol.

Crimean and Caucasus fronts, April 1939, with the counterattack in full swing.

Last stand of the remnant of my tanks. But note the Egyptian expeditionary force just landed north of the Crimea and about to drive east along the coast and encircle the spearhead of the Flandern volunteers.​

The result was, of course, disastrous. The armoured spearheads, isolated along the Black Sea coast, were encircled and defeated in detail; the following infantry, stretched on a ragged front from the mouth of the Kuban to that of the Volga, likewise found their spearheads too far advanced and unable to get support from the follow-on elements, and were torn apart by the Flandern tanks.

It was the good fortune of the Noobs, in these circumstances, to have allies: With the Russian front line in ragged tatters and the Flandern tanks weeks away from Vladimir, the Egyptians launched an immensely well-timed offensive into the Caucasus mountains that forced the Flandern "volunteers" south to contain it, and the Imperial Japanese Army finally poured out of the Central Asian mountains to threaten Persia, pulling Georgian reinforcements and attention to that front. Egyptian troops also crossed the Black Sea to counter-attack east along the Crimean coast, threatening the Georgian spearheads with the same fate they had meted out to the Noobish ones. Eventually a stable front line of sorts was patched up along the line from the Don to the Volga; but without any tanks on either side, the war degenerated into stale attritional warfare, complete with trenches, barbed wire, and rapidly-growing fortifications - as the soldiers' jest had it, more Ey, ukhnem than Marzhirovat' po Gruzii.

In these circumstances it was Georgian, not Noobish, strategy that came to the rescue. The Georgian state, attacked on three fronts, did not have an affirmative strategy for the war it found itself in, other than mere survival; the retreat to the National Redoubt, counteroffensive to the Dnieper, and retrenchment on the Don were all reactive, rather than attempts to impose a prewar vision on their enemies. However, they did of course have a prewar grand strategy, an attempt at mapping a path to survival and prosperity through the storm that everyone knew was coming, and which had come for them in the fall of 1938. And while that strategy may have called incidentally for the absorption of the less-powerful neighbours, that was never the core of the idea; the industries and armies of Russia and Egypt were means, not ends in themselves. The telos of Georgian strategy was resistance to the domination of the two European near-hegemons, Flanders and Thuringia. These two industrial behemoths, bestriding Europe from the Seine to the Neman, had - in Georgian thinking - been threatening to overshadow every other state since the beginning of their industrial expansion in the late 1850s; it was to combat this threat that Georgian statesmen had contemplated swift wars of annexation against their immediate neighbours, to "organise" and "unite" all forces that could possibly be mobilised against German hegemony, under Georgian leadership.

Now the Russian army and industry, such as they were, had indeed mobilised, but not under Georgian leadership; and with the freezing of the Don-Volga front, the last hope for a quick victory, for either side, had subsided. The Georgian leadership, therefore, commendably abandoned their plans for short, victorious wars, and instead attempted a diplomatic solution. Had they done so in 1936, even in 1937, they might well have been the acknowledged leaders of an Asia united against European domination, instead of a besieged regime of a country half lost and surviving only by the geographical good luck of the Persian mountains. But such foresight is rare and the Georgians should not be criticised for not having it; instead they should be praised for managing to keep their eyes on their overall strategic aim, and recognising that the war they had was neither the one they wanted, nor of any conceivable advantage to either side.

The savage purge of the "Cannibal Faction", the disavowal of the infamous Telegram, and the offer of a peace on the status quo antebellum - without even reparations from the aggressor powers - were all intended as expensive signals to the Russian and Egyptian governments that their strategic aim had been achieved: That Georgia was no longer an existential threat, and could indeed become an asset to their survival. To governments quite aware of how much they had needed a swift and overwhelming victory, and also sharply aware that their attack had punctured the complacency of the two sleeping giants and that immense industries were now rousing themselves towards an "interventionist" - in reality expansionist and hegemonic - foreign policy, these signals were very welcome; the Noobish government, in particular, had despaired of so favourable an outcome to the war since the destruction of the Crimean Attack Group in the savage August battles of 1938. The Georgian offer was accepted with alacrity, and what was left of the armies returned to their prewar positions - and then moved again, to new lines on the European borders.

For in Germany, sleeping dragons roused.

 

[Tazzzo]

How are Thuringia and Flanders expansionist Hegemons, we are the only countries that haven't declared an imperialist offensive war. Our build up of forces is purely a reactionary measure to the unprovoked aggression displayed from of other world powers.

Thuriniga denounces the baseless slander spewed forth from the Noobgorod government and press!!!

 

[King of Men]

Confucius him say, man that want peanuts on his side, better write own AAR.

That aside, the narration didn't say a word about expansionism, it said that the Georgian leadership regarded the two German powers as potential hegemons. Which, considering that either of these powers has about twice the industry of any other, not to mention the ridiculous manpower of ethnically-cleansed Africa and India, strikes me as very clear-headed, logical thinking by the Georgians. Not everyone needs a mysterious entity from beyond Known Space to see what's plainly in front of their noses.

 

[vaniver]

sadly, my attempts to diplomatically induct British Columbia and New England into the Federation seem unlikely to succeed, and so I'm sending in the tanks.

Through some mystery unknown to me, British Columbia decided to join the Federation diplomatically last session; perhaps it was all of the tanks on the border. Angmar, a former Scandinavian colony and British ally in V2, which had been buffed to be a potential player spot, joined soon after, and then a war on New England brought the state of New York into the British fold, changed the government of New England, which then later was willing to join the Federation.

In 1939 (last session), it seemed like the war in the East might be interminable, and Britain's intended ally Japan thus locked out of the Federation; plans were laid with Tyrannia to launch an attack on Thuringia, hoping that an early war against an unprepared foe might be decisive. When behind, playing the variance is on your side, after all.

But then, as described above, the war in the East ended suddenly, and Japan left the League of Desperate Minors and sought admission to the Federation; I accepted as a matter of course, and then only later realized that I had painted myself into a corner. Our rules against bandwagoning would make it difficult for Tyrannia to join, and a core part of our strategy had been superior British planes granting air superiority to the Tyrannian land forces moving through Germany. With an interminable Canadian war ongoing, Britain couldn't send air volunteers to Italian airfields, and thus couldn't help swing the Alps.

The most boneheaded decision I made, tho, was the decision to begin fabricating claims based on game-time instead of life-time; in June I said "well, I need to start now if this is to be done on time," and began, and only then realized that there were 10 minutes left in the session, and Tazzzo would have all week to prepare for a British attack. [In retrospect, this may have been good after all; at the beginning of the most recent session, he reorganized his troops, presumably because of that attack, which made him open to Tyrannian forces in the south.]

At the beginning of this session, the decision was made to go ahead with the plan with some minor modifications which did not preserve its essential strengths; Tyrannia would join the League of Desperate Minors, which would allow calling them in on Tyrannia's national-focus accelerated timetable to war.

Nevertheless, the tale of this session is of clear British victory, with all stated war goals achieved: the state of Western Australia once held by distant Thuringian overlords is now ruled by Australia, Britain's colony. [That Britain's press is tasked with raising wartime morale is perhaps relevant to this assessment of events.]

Things have not gone as well for the League of Desperate Minors; Georgia and Ar Adunaim, seeing their chance, declared on Noobgorod once his front in the Baltics had stalled, without any allies coming to his aid, Noobgorod was partitioned. Egypt mostly sat out the war, while Tyrannia's early successes turned to dust; now the eastern half is Thuringian-controlled, with only Italy remaining under Tyrannian rule. With significant defensive territory, Tyrannia has the ability to stall for some time, tho to what end remains unclear.

What will the future hold? 1942 is coming to a close, and the leaderboard has shifted. The Alliance of Georgia is now the industrial powerhouse, with 773 IC held by humans; the Federation is second with 565 (tho it also has a comparable amount of AI IC, currently tied up in the aforementioned Canadian war), Flanders (as yet unbloodied) in third with 527, Thuringia in fourth with 497, the League of Desperate Minors 329, and Grand Sicily, so far neutral besides South American adventurism at 225. [Brittany at 122 would be in the Flemish faction, one assumes, except that it was dissolved some time ago for increased diplomatic flexibility.]

 

[Tazzzo]

Some points of order Vaniver.
1st. I didn't re-organise my troops in response to you and japan but because of Tyrannia. It is just that the Tyrannia's NF dow caught me off guard
2nd. I had just killed 10-20 divs of Noobgorod's that attacked into me, then were pocketed (i.e The battle of the bulge) as such I could just battleplan Noobgorod and annex/puppet all of him. Georgia and Ar Adunaim wanted parts of Noobgorod so dowed on him.

 

[King of Men]

10-20 divs of Noobgorod's that attacked into me, then were pocketed

Noobgorod says, "two out of three ain't bad!" There was nothing wrong with my strategic choice of attacking the major threat on my border in an attempt to gain the most densely-industrialised areas in Europe. Failures of mere tactics are to be blamed on the officers from colonel and downwards, and not on the national-level direction of the war!

 

[vaniver]

This session in brief, with events a bit out of order: Brittany and Grand Sicily joined the League of Desperate Minors, the Alliance of Georgia declared on Egypt, Thuringia declared war on Flanders and joined the Alliance of Georgia; Flanders refused the automatic offer to join the Federation, and was conquered in Europe and India, while maintaining the southern half of Africa; British planes lost air superiority over London, tho that has now been restored. It's 1943, and while the Federation and Flemish Africa still stand against Thuringia, it holds all of Europe and has two powerful allies; enough to call the game.

Britain's proposed peace--trading Portugal for Western Australia--falls on deaf ears, as the Germans think they have the potential to invade Britain. While Britain does have two nukes, they don't seem sufficient deterrent, and there's not much hope in winning the air battle against an industrial power three times its size (and that's before allies are called in!). So, congrats to Tazzzo and Mark (Georgia) and Sauron (Ar-Adunaim).


In retrospect, what went wrong? I think I actually did 'above median', in that my ally and I are the sole non-victors in possession of their homelands and almost all of their overseas possessions (I've lost Gibraltar). But most of that was defensive geography and turtling, rather than skillful play. The Federation was pretty unbalanced--I was a strong air power, and Japan a strong naval power, but we didn't have any meaningful land power on our side, and we were middle-of-the-pack when it came to industrial power. The strategy to grab a bunch of victory points, be inoffensive, and eventually win 'by default' wasn't very robust to the density of victory points in Europe. We had all 2 of the North American VPs, all 2 of the Asian VPs, and 2 of the European VPs--but there were about 12 VPs in Europe, and once Thuringia started running wild it had six of its own, and then when it teamed up with the Alliance of Georgia, we were sunk. [Perhaps if the end year for score had been 1945 instead of 1950.]

I think this was probably worse than the timeline where I teamed up with Tyrannia instead. I think it would probably have been a coinflip whether or not we would have succeeded in taking Germany (tho Georgia and Scandinavia declaring on Thuringia's enemies make me suspect that might have gone poorly for us), and then I think we wouldn't have been in a great position to take on Flanders, the remaining titan.

[Another 'could-have-been' was owning North America directly; I think the time to do that would have been in EU4, maybe, when I could have moved my capital to Greenland and then owned the north Atlantic myself. But more recently I could have conquered AI nations instead of bringing them into the Federation; that probably would have led to much more useful IC than I had this game, where the AI mostly parked their troops in Canada and ate up supply, preventing any movement on that front.]