How to reduce cities?

[Greyshaft]

I'm playing on default difficulty settings and I can't figure out how to reduce Foochow. I send in multiple BB and CV (set to Naval/Tactical) to soften it up then follow up with 3 Armies (all with +2 Inf weapons) but it sits there grinning at me still on a strength of 10. The only result I get is a message telling me that China has lost MPP. I've seen this in multiple games. Then I had a similar problem against the corp sitting in London. Three +2 Panzer armies and two +1 Infantry Armies couldn't make a dent in it. I tried for three turns and the only point I took off that corp came from a bomber striking from across the Channel. Then Russia invaded so I figured that game was kaputski.

What am I doing wrong?

[Bill101]

Hi

If you encircle the defender then the maximum strength they can reinforce to is 5, and this will leave them far more vulnerable to destruction in a subsequent turn.

Another requirement for any successful offensive is to have HQ support in close proximity to the attacking units, as this will provide both supply and combat bonuses to the units under its command.

Bill

[Argothair]

Definitely having an HQ nearby is essential, both for the supply and the morale bonus. When I first started playing Strategic Command I underestimated the need for HQs; I thought of them as a cool bonus, but really an HQ is a more essential piece of equipment for each army group than an armor division or an air wing. An HQ should be, at the very least, the third piece that you send to a theater -- don't bother having more than 2 pieces in an area unless one of them is an HQ.

That said, I don't always find that encircling cities reduces their reinforcement level to 5 -- sometimes the city itself seems to serve as its own source of supply:5, even when I bomb the city and any associated ports down to 0 mpp value. That allows the unit to pop up from 1 strength to 8 strength every single turn, which can be frustrating. I like the Morale penalty that seems to apply to armies that take a repeated beating over several weeks, but I would prefer for the penalty to be even stronger, especially in situations where the fort or whatever has been apparently abandoned.

Like, Malta is a tough nut to crack, and it should be, but part of the assumption behind the historical defense of Malta was that the British would at least occasionally send resupply, send a destroyer squadron or fighter wing or something nearby to at least spook any attackers, and so on. In my current game of SC Global Conflict Gold, the British literally don't have a ship or a plane anywhere in the Med, and I"ve been hitting Malta for three turns in a row with 3 BBs, 2 CAs, a fighter, a tac bomber, and a strat bomber, and all of that knocks the corps there down to maybe 7 out of 8 points. I don't think there's anywhere to even land an invading force unless you can totally eliminate the defending corps; if you put a paratrooper down on a one-tile island, the paratrooper just dies, right? Ditto amphibious assaults; you can pepper the defenders with the guns on the landing craft, but you can't actually land if there's no second tile, right?

Another example is that in Ethiopia, I leave the Italian Special Forces unit at 8 strength sitting in Addis Ababa with no HQ, no air support, no naval support, no reinforcements, and low supply after the British close the Suez Canal to Italian traffic. Britain comes after Ethiopia with five or six infantry units, plus naval support and multiple HQs, and the special forces just sits there and takes it, racking up experience, for at least six months. Even then, the special forces just retreat safely into the jungle, and can't quite be killed, forcing the British to leave a garrison behind.

It just seems like the difficulty of reducing totally isolated and under-supplied cities is a little too severe. Advantage to the defender is one thing, but this goes beyond even the traditional idea from WW1 that you needed a 3:1 infantry advantage. It seems to me that even with tanks, planes, etc. and other tools that were specifically designed for quickly conquering cities, you need about a 5:1 advantage to take an enemy city in this game in less than three months, which seems too harsh. I'm buying tech for ground attack aircraft, armored warfare, etc., and it's just not helping very much.

Is there an easy way to adjust this in the editor? It's a great game and I'm really enjoying it so far, but I would like to tweak the difficulty of taking cities if there's a way to do that without wrecking the rest of the game.