henri51
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Joined: 1/16/2009
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If you are like me, you haven't played AT for a while. So I dug up AT to refresh my mind about how to play the game while I wait breathlessly for AT Gold. A nice scenario to refresh AT knowledge is The Second Civil War. I had forgotten how complex this game is - easy to learn and hard to master.
This scenario has six factions fighting over the US, each starting with a single city: New York, Chicago, Miami, Texas,Seattle and Los Angeles. I have only tried NY, but so far it is a fairly challenging game where at one point I found myself fighting four enemies!
This is the usual type of scenario where the initial phase is grabbing as many of the free cities as possible. I grabbed a few of the Eastern cities without meeting any resistance, but when I arrived at Florida, I collided with the Miami faction who grabbed Atlanta from right under my nose. At the same time, I collided with the Chicago faction around Pittsburg. At that point everybody had 4 or 5 cities, and the real struggle began.
Being really rusty, I struggled a bit with organizing my forces and my production, first producing too many supplies, then running out, a victim to the infamous oscillation that happens when you run low on supplies and thus on readiness, thus requiring many more supplies to regain equilibrium, then finding out again that you are producing too much.When they add oil and steel to this mix, it will be bigtime fun...
Finally I reorganized my HQs under a main HQ in NY, with two armies called appropriately 1st Army and Second Army. First Army has one sub-HQ AG1, and 2nd Army has two, AG2 and AG3. Second Army is handling the East Coast area, and 1st Army the area to the West. Unsurprisingly 2nd Army was fighting mostly against the Miami thugs, whereas 1st Army was fighting the Chicago gang.
To my surprise it didn't take long for the Texas cowpokes to show up between Miami and Chicago, which forced me to fight a 3-pronged war.I couldn't see what was going on further inland due to fog of war, but from the strategy map I could see that like me the Chicago gang and the Texas unshaved were probably fighting a 2-front or a 3-front war.
Fighting a 3-front war didn't give me much leeway to advance my research, but I eventually managed to research level II Rifle infantry, which constituted most of my forces. I tried to commit a bit of artillery, armor and air support to all three fronts, but I hardly could muster enough resources to produce armored cars, machine guns, mortars, SMG, and so on. Due to lack or resources I decided to forego trucks in favor of horses; although trucks go considerably faster, horses are a lot cheaper, and this game gives little leeway for wide encirclements anyway, the fronts tending to be stable and slow-moving.
Although Miami are in a bottleneck, they are unlikely to get in a 3-front war early on, and indeed they seemed to be concentrating on me while the Texans grawed at their left flank and rear. The Texans and Chicago gang, fighting each other in addition to me, were also getting their rears bitten by the Texans, and considering the number of units they were throwing my way, they may have been neglecting their backs.
I managed to hold on to my gains and just when it seemed that all 3 of my opponents were on the verge of cracking and that I was winning, the Los Angeles street gangs showed up in force through the Texans! Checking the strategic map, I saw that my 3 original opponents were indeed cracking with their number of cities decreasing sharply to my advantage, but that Los Angeles held 11 cities, equal to my number!
This probably means that Seattle is out of the game and that soon it will be a fight between me and the LA unwashed horde. As the game stands now, I hold 12 cities to LA's 11, but a couple of mine are hanging by a thread, and I have no idea about the state of LA's cities. I have desperately started to produce armored cars, so that I can scout out exactly where the LA strength is concentrated, and then beat the stuffings out of them before they do it to me. But first I must deal with the remnants of the 3 early opponents, therefore fighting four opponents at once. Whoever gets 25 cities first wins the game. I will probably start producing trucks in order to eventually replace the horses in my best units, since the US is a big territory.
Henri
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