| A Long (Parenthetical) Remark |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|08:58 am]
_Quinn
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Got my hands on a copy of the Hearts of Iron II anthology. Good game, but it would be much better with only a fair amount of UI work. And enemies that were more willing to give up. Grr. (So I played a few years of two games as the French to get a feel for the game, and then conquered Germany in the third. Managed to smite them before the Russians stuck their nose in, which was rewarding. Then switched to playing the Germans and am trying to take over the world. Conquered the Netherlands without anybody seeming to even notice (...), then decided to try and see if anyone would care too much about Belgium. That didn't go over so well. I took two weeks longer than Germany had historically to smash Poland, but two weeks after that, finished off all of continental France. (Which may have been a mistake. Apparently, they get all snooty if you refuse the Vichy settlement and refuse to surrender later. So the larger part of the army, by manpower, is squatting around in France, keeping the marquis under control. *sigh*) Italy, bizarrely, joined the Allies after I bypassed the Maginot Line, and was promptly beaten soundly for its troubles, also losing all its continental territory (and also, bizarrely, refusing to surrender). The plan, I'd guess, had been that Italy would attack into Austria, well behind the front in France, and force the German armies to turn around and go home to chase them back out again. Seems they'd forgotten about the rest of the Axis, somehow... which held them off in the mountains until the armies in France finished up and turned east. (IIRC, the Axis at that point included Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Yugoslavia joined up shortly after Italy joined the allies, and Greece after they declared war on Russia after it declared war on Germany. (Huh?) More on that later. There's also no Slovakia, primarily because the country was totally useless to the Axis, if not an actual detriment, when I was playing as France.) Then I waited around for my paratrooper divisions to recover from their drops in France and the Luftwaffe to win the Battle of Britain. (The key is to hit each of the airfields in southern England as hard as possible in turn, leaving one bomber group behind each time to prevent repairs. Then your interceptors win the war of attrition, since England's can't get repaired.) I paradropped six divisions into Plymouth and Dover, and tried sneaking six divisions across the Channel by sea. The Home Fleet sank two (both panzer divisions!), but the U-boats distracted them for long enough for the others to make it ashore. After that, it was just a matter of time. The English, of course, are still harassing me from their bases in India and Egypt, but unlike the French and the Italians, retain enough of an industrial base to be problematic. Specifically, enough of a base to keep the Royal Navy in supply, which means I couldn't go chase them. So the spring of 1940 was very quiet, with Germany trying to build a fleet and an air force to get its army to Africa (and a bunch of annoying little islands in the Med). Then Russia decided it actually had really wanted half of Poland after all, and attacked.)
As you can tell, I'm having a ball with this game. :)
(The Russians were mostly held at the border by Axis infantry, probably saved by the otherwise-idle bombers of the Luftwaffe. The German army was stooging around in southwest France, getting ready to smash Republican Spain (yeah. The Nationalist Chinese beat the communists, too, before getting smashed by Japan.) so as to take Gibraltar and gain a bridge to Africa. Within hours of the declaration of war, the French rail system was in chaos, as tanks and men were loaded to be shuttled east, to retake Memel and Konigsberg and counterattack in the broad Kazakh plains. (Actually, I had to back and redo that -- the first time the tanks went to Konigsberg, but northwest Russia, southwest of Leningrad, Moscow, and Smolensk, is a maze of swamp and forest; the tanks, they did nothing.) Before the first snows fell, the Axis had trapped and obliterated fifty Soviet divisions, and captured Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev and Kharkhov. With the Soviet army in disarray, a slow drive through the snow to the east captured Stalingrad with minimal fighting. There the war froze for a few months, as I tried to redress my lines, which were stretched thin over to Stalingrad, mostly held by tank divisions I would need for the assault in spring. But the Russians rebuilt their shattered army while I waited, not wanting to attack into the snow across the rivers I'd established as my primary defensive lines in the north and center. They attack in Januarary, and a very slow-motion war developed, in which I lost a great deal of territory I'd speculatively taken in the direction of Baku (a major oil center), but took Moscow in two weeks of heavy slogging and captured Leningrad with another combined air- and sea- borne assault. As the situation stands when the spring muds of 1941 arrive, the German army holds all of Russia's major cities, although Leningrad can still only be supplied by sea. However, much of Russia's industry had been relocated east of the Caucus Mountains before the war began, and much of her legendary reserves of manpower remain. It's going to be a long slog to victory.)
(Bizarrely enough, sometime during this, Portugal joined the Axis. I'm still not quite sure why, but that got me close enough to Gibraltar for my paratroopers to take it. In response, England invaded and almost conquered Portugal; I had to rush the invasion reserves in England down to save them. Luckily, closing the Straights of Heracles made life hard enough on the Royal Navy that I didn't lose anyone doing so. Unfortunately, since then, the French fleet has sailed from Casablanca and begun intercepting any vessel venturing in or out of Gibraltar; the Baltic Fleet was obliterated discovering this. Because of this, my plan at the moment is to drive on Baku; the Soviet Union has a border with Iraq near there, which is a British puppet ... and connects through some French colonies to, you guessed it, Egypt.) |
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