Panzerkeil

I don't think that was his implication. He's making the point that it took time to marshall the men and supplies necessary to launc a serious landing. In addition to the logistics is the necessity for training and the right support equipment. The Allied landings in Norway, for example, were a farce, with plenty of logistical cockups. They sent mountain troops with skis, but no bindings for them; insufficient supplies and equipment. I've read nothing historically to indicate that a German landing in England would have been any less mismanaged.

I think the CoS rules for amphibious assaults would also bring the game back to reality.

I'm glad I'm not the only one here making references to Clash of Steel. There are more than a few parallels between these two games. That was one thing that CoS got right. It helped, but it was not a complete solution, of course. There wasn't a unit for every city, so you still needed to keep some corps sized units to secure your lines. I usually used minors for that.

Rambo, I must ask from ignorance: What is/are Buntas?

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, Rambo. Sure there was a lot of nasty living in New Orleans, but a lot of innocent people got caught in that and whatever we may personally think of the things that occurred there, not everybody who lived there was like that. In that sense I was wrong to say what I did and for that I apologize.

Know what? You're right. It was stupid of me to say that. I'll delete that right now.

[ May 04, 2006, 08:28 AM: Message edited by: Panzerkiel ]

The fact that there are so many strongly held opinions in this area shows there is something wrong with this aspect of the game. You cannot simply overlook the realities of war: to approach an enemy shore you had better be able to protect your landing force from air and naval attack. No defender is going to simply sit in port while the enemy lands, unimpeded, as it is forced upon him by this game's mechanics. Stop trying to defend the indefensible. It takes shipping, and lots of it to move an army from one shore to another. And, it takes a long time to build and amass that shipping. Hitler and his generals thought it would be something on the order of a large river crossing. They envisioned landing along 200 miles of England's shores! Raeder did his best to rein in their ambitions and tried to get them to accept a less ambitious landing along about 25 miles of shoreline. The Royal Navy would have torn such an adhoc landing party to shreds. This was why the stipulation was put in place that there must first be absolute air superiority before such an attempt. The Germans were proposing to land an army using canal barges pulled by tugs, river boats and assorted craft. In short, they were going to try a Dunkirk in reverse! Sadly, this game gives us the impression that amphibious landings could have been pulled off almost anywhere and at any time with almost no preparation, other than spending a few MPP's and the requisite transport magically appears. It just wasn't so. Ironically, it was Goering who had the most realistic plan for taking England: airdrop airborne onto a port and landing strips and quickly fly in reinforcements and fast surface transport under cover of darkness. This too would have required control of the skies. It was to this type of invasion that Britain was more seriously vulnerable. We should just admit that this game cannot in its current form do justice to the amphibious assault concept. I hate to say it but Clash of Steel handled this aspect better: you had to buy naval transports like any other unit, wait for them to be produced and then you loaded your land units aboard and sailed. Along the way you were subject to naval and air interception. You made certain to control the air and sea in that game before you risked sending a landing force. It also had Mulberry units for the Allies and one for the Axis, I think it was called a Freiheit, which was able to provide supply for your invasion force for two turns, by which time you had better have captured a port. You could also put escorting naval units in with them and the game handled the interception routine. This could be possible, similar to the way air fleets do an automatic interception. [ May 03, 2006, 05:57 PM: Message edited by: Panzerkiel ]

Maybe if HC put this on a PS2 platform and set it to a hip-hop soundtrack it would be more up his alley?

Question to those who play human-to-human games. Playing the 1939 campaign and without the historical US entry variant, what is your typical experience with regards to US entry to the war? When do they decide to join? How does your aggression or lack thereof as the Axis advance or delay their entry? I would find it interesting to hear the varied experiences of the players here. While on the subject, what about Russia? If you do not attack them in 1941, when do they typically enter?

That country is Algeria. By default it becomes Vichy territory after the fall of France. As the Allies in a game against the computer, I put a British corps in Syria, in an effort to keep the city after the fall of France. I was surprised to find that my unit "surrendered" and the territory still went Vichy. I guess that is there to prevent the gamey player from "knowing" that Syria et al will go Vichy.

Did the reviewer actually play the game? I wondered that after reading this line: "The computer easily provides you a challenging adversary."

Agreed. Content before graphics is preferred. Now, if we can only get the MTV generation to agree.

Don't worry, I got that point. Much of this game is an abstraction, out of necessity. Otherwise we'd be pushing around a whole lot more of little counters.

As it should be!

Yugoslavia has the distinction, I believe, of being the only self-liberated country in WW2. Good information, Retributar, and relevant.

Here is a quotation from "Russia at War 1941-45" by Vladimir Karpov, 1987, The Vendome Press, ISBN 0-85656-077-2, page 139: "That year, 1942, the Wehrmacht was forced to divert up to 24 divisions of its regular army to fight the partisans. But it was in the summer of 1943 that the movement had the greatest success. As the Soviet Army launched its counter-offensive with the Battle of Kursk, resistance groups mounted a concerted effort to destroy Wehrmacht communications and supply lines." "There were more than 250,000 fighters in the Partisan units by 1944. The biggest group in Belorussia, consisting of over 150,000 men, worked closely with the Red Army throughout the year. When the drive to liberate Belorussia began, they blew up more than 60,000 railway trucks, paralysing all German attempts to bring up reserves. They entered the capital of Belorussia - Minsk - together with the regular army. Minsk had been one of the first big cities to be occupied. From the outset, the Germans were given no peace. Oberst E. Westphal wrote to his brother at the front on 5th august, 1943: "Here in Minsk we hear booming every day and at night there's firing just like in the trenches. Sometimes guns fire, or perhaps it's the damned mines. There are plenty of them here. The power station was blown up and we had no electricity for a week. On Sunday a car blew up by the officers' club and a locomotive by the water-tower. Many Germans have been shot in the streets from behind corners. I'm cracking up." "In his semi-official history of the partisan movement B.S. Telpukhovsky claims that in three years [1941-4] the partisans of Belorussia accounted for 500,000 enemy soldiers, including 47 generals and Hitler's Reichkommissar Wilhelm Kube, who was killed by a time-bomb placed in his bed by his Belorussian mistress. In the Ukraine, according to Telpukhovsky, the partisans killed 460,000 Germans, wrecked or seriously damaged 5,000 railway engines, 50,000 railway trucks and 15,000 motor vehicles." Now, even if we take into account the known penchant for Soviet writers to exaggerate, the partisans exacted a terrible toll of the German occupiers. Aside from the material losses was the hard-to-calculate but not insignificant erosion of morale of the men at the front, many of whom may not have had leave since entering Russia. The partisans attacked any target and showed little mercy. They even derailed hospital trains behind the lines and poured kerosene on the wounded and set them alight, such was their hatred for the German invader. Russia was a graveyard for the Wehrmacht and the partisans haunted the soldiers day and night. They never felt safe when behind the lines; often they felt safer at the front than in the rear. They could never be fully exterminated and seemed to always pop up again when the units that hunted them moved on. Their operations were more significant than their numbers may have indicated, one million or so according to Karpov. Having to keep a number of corps sized units in cities to combat them is not unrealistic at all. [Of course, in my opinion.] P.S. I really recommend this book to those interested in the Russian war. It has about 300 black and white photos, well taken and including some of partisan operations. It tells the story from the personal perspective; a worthy addition to anybody's library of WW2 books. [ May 03, 2006, 02:55 PM: Message edited by: Panzerkiel ]

That's what I was suspecting to be true. Thanks, Lars.

Good point, Lars. The Germans had to siphon off a lot of front line personnel to keep their lines of communication open. It's hard to translate that to the abstract way in which this game represents such things.

And there aren't enough German units either. That's why they Romanians, Hungarians, et al guarding their flanks at Stalingrad. Noob question: Is the garrisoning of cities in Russia necessary to prevent partisans? I am presuming it is, but I'd like a definitive answer. I haven't played as Axis yet.

The reason I said not to take Churchill literally about everything is that he used a lot of rhetorical language, for added effect. It is all too easy to pull out a quotation to prove a point. There's an obscure reference to him thanking Canada for our troops' presence in Britain after the Dunkirk disaster. I don't think he intended that Canada saved Britain. I could have quoted him on that and then bragged that we saved England, but I would have sounded stupid for doing so. Likewise he said that the only thing that ever really scared him was the U-boat peril. Really? I bet there were more than U-boats that gave him the willies as he tried to sleep each night through that long summer of 1940. Churchill is at the top of my list of personal heroes, but I don't take everything he says as the gospel.

Lars, I haven't played yet as the Axis so I don't know for certain what happens to U-boats in rough weather in the game. Do they lose strength points like surface units?

I guess fighting U-boats would qualify under "really needing to be there." This leads to my next question: Are U-boats hindered by stormy weather in the game? If not, they should be. Although sailors hate being in stormy seas, it was a blessing in disguise, as it hindered the ability of the U-boats to hunt and operate against convoys. I said hindered, not made it impossible.

Exactly! Hitler intervened on numerous occasions, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He stopped Guderian at the canals when he was closer to Dunkirk than the British. He forbade von Paulus from retreating or attempting a breakout; earlier in Barbarossa he shuttled 2nd Panzer Armee south to encircle Kiev when the road to Moscow was open. With his "intuition" he pulled U-boats from the Atlantic because he "knew" the Allies were going to invade Norway. He was certain that the landings would be at Calais, not Normandy. He denied Rommel a few extra tanks when he had a chance to take Egypt, then, when defeat was near in Africa he sent division after division to Africa, only to have them captured in Tunisia, with a captured personnel equivalency to Stalingrad. On and on and on we can go down the list. Ironically, in terms of this discussion, if he had listened to his generals, there probably would not have been an attack on Poland. It was the military who were conservative in the beginning and Hitler daring. When prudence dictated that he should be conservative, Hitler could not pull back. He had that fever that he could not shake, the desire to meddle and the unswerving conviction that he knew more than the professional soldiers. Stalin was the same, although probably to a lesser extent.

Rob Ross, if you carefully read my posts, you'd not be asking such an ignorant question. Let me make it easy for you: I am Canadian. For whatever they were worth, the Brits were glad to have them. I think taking Churchill quotes literally leads to some confusion. I was asking for input, not insults. You didn't have to be such an asshole with your post.