nachtmusick

I honestly and truly like Fortress Italy best, so you can all go and...uh...prefer other versions.

Minor Defeat, even though the rattled and broken Italian infantry overran the lemon grove in the last minutes. On the defense every last Yank died where he stood. If even a few of them had any sense of self-preservation, I would have gotten at least a minor victory. What I have learned from this debacle is that no matter how many 6.5mm rounds one concentrates upon paratroopers in foxholes, they will shrug them off as rainfall.

Ah - reinforcements. That's all the encouragement I need to finish up. I hadn't thought of just sitting tight and letting time run out. That may be the way to go. I've got three of five objectives already and another one is just smoking craters that I can occupy at will. I've still got some artillery left, so I'll amuse myself with that while the time passes. If I can't run them off the last objective with that, I'm not going to get in a big firefight over it. My guys are too traumatized to shoot straight anyway.

I am close to winning the second scenario, having taken the hilltop. I just need to clean up the units I managed to bypass and take the last objective. I am not sure I've accomplished anything though, as I don't know if I have enough troops to move on. I've still got two of three M3's and my CO's and FO survived (so far), but the grunts have already taken 40-50% casualties with more misery to come. The story was the same for Troina 1 - I eventually won, but with over 60 killed and wounded and some dead vehicles. Both of these companies return for later scenarios that sound just as hard as the first two; is there any hope of continuing with these depleted units? Alternately I can re-fight these battles and get better results via knowledge of enemy positions (and outright cheating), but that would still take a lot of time. I have already spent as much time as I care to dodging artillery strikes. If that's what I have to do, though, I'm not going to bother finishing my current attempt at Troina 2.

Playing as the Italians has taught me the value of direct fire mortars. Those brixias are indispensable.

I just finished this fight without too much trouble. I found the "thin trees" on the east ridge to be pretty good cover, actually. If you advance through the center of the tree line, though, your troops will be under the canopy and will be visible to all. If you advance to the east of the tree line, halfway up the slope, the canopy will block LOS from the rest of the map. Mostly. You can walk at least two-thirds of the way to the town this way and receive only spotty fire. More importantly, you can find numerous positions on the hillside where you can fire through the canopy down onto the church and to the line of foxholes that lies between the town and church. The return fire was not at all lethal. The key for me, though, was planting a Stuart in the sweet spot mentioned above at the northern end of the tree line. From there the tank was able to drive all opposition from the church and foxholes. That then allowed me to mount an advance from the walled grove through a dead zone on the "cross valley road" and then straight up the slope to Building 14. You may also be able to get an AFV around the back side of the NW stand of trees and then pummel the town from a position north of the walled grove without getting hit by an ATG.