Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000
From: Vermont, USA
Status: offline
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Hi AdmiralHalsey,
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ORIGINAL: AdmiralHalsey
So my first game ends notionally on 4 October 1942.
Moscow is surrounded and undersiege. Leningrad is a smoldering ruin. Sevastapol is still undersiege, and Axis forces hold a strong unbroken line from Leningrad to Rostov. Alas, Hitler is unhappy with my progress and fires me.
I haven't found avoiding the sudden defeat conditions on Normal to be particularly difficult. I'm curious in this respect what you think lead to the sudden defeat? Did you realize this was coming and what was your plan to try to avoid it? I'm assuming you were trying to take Moscow as your way out? Any reason you didn't also take Sevastopol?
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I've destroyed no fewer than 45 Airborn brigades, many of them the same one over and over again. The AI never thought to drop them on me, they just seem to like remaking them and throwing them into the front lines. By contrast I only destroyed 48 ordinary rifle brigades. Wasn't one _significantly_ more common than the other?
The Airborne troops were used as normal infantry historically in this part of the war. I don't think the AI's choices here really tell us much, other than that it used what it had.
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The AI persistantly liked to commit seriously understrength units to the front line. Ultimately it worked, as it slowed me down, but 6,000 men divisional strength or 2,000 man brigades really don't feel like the AI should be putting those in the front line.
When you play as the Soviets, you may find yourself doing the same. At 110 or Challenging, you'll see the AI with just a bit of help scraping the bottom of the barrel less often.
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City Forts are -really- -really- hard to dislodge without an AIrforce. Full AI Air control, given it wipes your directives means you can't interdict Sevastapol or Odessa from the Ocean. In general the AI Air seemed reluctant to do much other than die in droves.
That's not correct, but may explain why you didn't take Sevastopol. I've played with Full AI Air Assist and all you need to do is assign the Flieger Fuehrer Ostsee to Luftflotte 4 in the south, then on the next turn once it has rebased shift it from following a HQ to Naval Ops on Odessa or Sevastopol. If you want to really make sure, assign a Fliegerkorps to Naval Ops on the same port as well. With fully AI Air assist and doing these few steps, I've been able to interdict Odessa and Sevastopol, thus allowing them to fall. For large ports with City Forts, it's really the best way to take them and the only way to guarantee a good result.
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I had some weird issues with routes. For example, I'd cut Leningrad off from all the ports on Lake Lagoda [They all had an Axis division in them] but not secured the port outside Leningrad itself [Osinovets], but I still had some Soviet divisions on subsequent turns rout - Onto - the mainland. I'm not sure how.
If they were not Isolated because of existing supply in the depots (perhaps flown in by air) then this is possible. Would be worth posting a save in the support sub-forum to make sure though.
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I'm not sure how to break Moscow either. Surrounding it for a month and laying siege one hex at a time with as many divisions and fit and reducing the fort level to 1 seemed unproductive.
There's a lot of supply in Moscow. If you had it fully surrounded and had pioneers and siege artillery to help with fort reduction, you will eventually get it, but you have to also be patient in this. Assaulting Urban forts before the supplies run low is a good way to take a lot of casualties without much result.
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I don't like the sudden death victory conditions. I was wholeheartedly looking forward to my retreat back to Berlin and seeing how the war would be different without the Axis advance into the Cacuses, but with a potientially destroyed Moscow and Leningrad - Alas, I'll never know. I get it for multiplayer games, but vs the AI it seems like a completely uneeded feature.
Understood - I doubt this will happen to you again as you become more familiar with the game, but I agree we should add an option to play without for those who prefer the sandbox feel.
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The assigning of support units seems counter intuative when handled by the AI. A newly raised army requesting three of each unit will recieve zero for many turns in a row. While other armies will remain stacked full. You can't reassign any to OKH because it claims none are available, and as a result you can't assign any to the army. Instead you have to manually go to each support unit and order it to relocate to the army you want it to go to.
Are you sure you had the priorities setup correctly? A save posted in the support sub-forum would help us check to see if all is working as intended.
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- My persistant over garrisioning of Africa lead to us being outside Cairo for six months. Sadly our -Excellent- performance lead to a gain of zero VPs. Given I've lost from sudden death for having insufficent VP, it seems harsh repeated Axis ground successes are ultimately worthless. I may have delayed the allied landings, but these don't mesh with the VP system, by the time they happen the last sudden death marker will have passed.
Overall my overcommitment to every single Theaterbox resulted in 6 VP. That's... Underwealming over overgarrisoning every single Theater from turn 2 to the sudden death mark.
It's by design harder to get positive bonuses vs avoiding the negatives. So if you under-garrison, the historical timeline can advance much faster than over-garrisoning will slow it down. As we see more games and get more feedback we may tweak this but that sounds correct to me based on the design and perhaps a few bad "rolls".
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Overall, it was enjoyable. The AI puts up a slightly better fight than WITE1, but not hugely so. The sudden death mechanics are a step backwards from a game that used to let you fight 'The war' and get a score.
I have to respectfully disagree in the AI being only a little better, but YMMV. My experience has been that the "Normal" AI in WITE2 feels about like the "Challenging" AI on WITE1, which is a major upgrade. The Sudden Death victory conditions are a key part of the game design though and influence play in very positive ways, in my opinion. I don't think you will have trouble avoiding sudden defeat in the future as you learn more of the ins and outs of the system.
Regards,
- Erik
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