Glabro

Nevermind. Problem solved.

But the first requirement was the elimination of Hitler.

Wait wait, you mean three corps and three detachments per field army or a TOTAL armed forces of three corps and three detachments? That's pretty...bad for 20 mil people and a big country. But would they really have entered the war with that little if mustered through diplomacy or invaded? Surely conscripting would have begun and at least their force pool would be bigger, with 2 HQs and such. Needs must, and so on.

Why not just make a Fall Gelb DE with Manstein's (initially Guderian's) plan presented to the Axis player, then he can decide whether to take the chance or not. Success in the DE would guarantee a fall of France like in history, but failure could lead to a harder road, while opting not to take a risk would be in between these extremes.

Well I think it's appropriate that the French have a) lower quality units (check) lower leadership (check) c) lower infantry warfare tech (check)....these represent the issues stated before rather well in my mind. As I said, the only real problem is that the type of outflanking executed in Fall Gelb does not work in game. Maybe that can be abstracted with the kind of morale scripts that are already in place, but I wouldn't make France surrender so easily based on those, but rather just from Paris barring a long war. Instead, the morale loss would affect the readiness of French units... Anyway, what point is there to try to enforce historical results in a wargame at the cost of historicity? That sounds like totally opposite the point of playing wargames. And I believe yes, the Axis should be allowed the chance to fail at France already, and how well they do in Poland as well as how much the Brits are willing to assist the French should play heavily into that. I'd even give a huge morale hit for the French if the BEF is not deployed in a new DE, or if the Brits evacuate, another (but a bit smaller) hit. To counterbalance this, yes, Soviet mobilization should be slowed down for 1942. Makes the early war much more interesting both ways. And yes, if this doesn't happen officially, it will probaly happen in my mod.

Actually France is missing a huge number of units or at least they've all been "abstracted" into half-strength "armies" and a pittance for income. If you read about Fall Gelb, you'd find it interesting that German High Command despaired over the military situation in spring 1940 and Guderian's armoured attack through the Ardennes was a big time gambit against a strong enemy army, but unprepared unconventional tactics and poor leadership. But the attack through Belgium was no surprise, of course, it was the grand scale breakthrough of the armour that cut the defenders near the Belgian border off from Paris and sealed the deal. In a slugging match, the French Army was a mixed bag (one could say that what the French lost strategically in not concentrating their armour, it made their line units that much better) but so was the Wehrmacht, and could have tied them up for a long time, and time was one thing the Axis could not afford to lose. The difference in doctrine, however (effectively infatry warfare tech) could have seen the Axis through, though.

Back to the main topic, I should point out again that the French (and the Poles in a small way, but mitigated by there being no Soviet invasion) campaign are far too weak, and seem to be "designed to fall" with no chance of resisting, and thus there is zero motivation to even bring British troops to the continent. Since there's no way to "cut the defenders near Belgium off from Paris" due to the Supply model and because the Entente player has foreknowledge of this, I understand it's a challenge, but still...as it stands the early part of the war feels like a bit of a waste of time as usually nothing that exciting happens until Barbarossa starts, barring any North African action. And that too has a big problem if the Axis plays right, as we've been shown.

Yes, press P to see which towns or cities can "spawn" a partisan unit, and which ones are liable for partisan attacks but can't spawn a unit. Putting a garrison on a spawn location prevents partisans from taking that location, but I believe they can still affect its supply from a distance.

I should point out, since there seems to be little interest towards this, that irrespective of Diplomacy the Entente can easily conquer Spain if the CP doesn't pressure them, this is something that not many realize. Spain has a pretty high income for the minimal effort required.

By "Early Surrenders" do you mean like Armistices, them becoming neutral, not handing over their territory to the Russians, right?

I have to whine a bit about Spanish military capability: I enlisted Spain to my (Central Powers) cause, hoping to put some pressure on the French industry near the Pyrennees. Little did I know that Spain with its 20 million people (the equal of Turkey) can only muster 3 corps and 8 detachments to the war and NO hqs at all! This is essentially much weaker than even Bulgaria with 4 corps, 5 detachments, 1 cavalry and 2 HQs, and that country only had 5.5 million people, almost four times as little. I'm afraid the Entente will simply walk over the weakling Spain while I concentrate on Russia and capture a huge amount of MPPs for my folly of daring to think that Spain would prove a good ally, I saved up a lot of MPPs for them. Even though they have unrest going on, one would think those take only a small minority of the potential recruitable armies and at least some sort of leadership would be possible. So maybe Spain should be a more expensive but militarily stronger minor nation.

Rambo, don't tell anyone, but having played with Sharkey, I think he's your fellow countryman on a top secret diplomatic mission in Germany. Drats! Now I gave it away. You be sure to notify his next of kin as you live Stateside yourself, eh?

Well that's good. On the other hand, it means we wait with our mod until the patch comes with the much needed updates to the WW2 campaign (not to mention WW1, but to a much lesser extent). Well, hopefully we can somehow import our changes in without manually doing it all again. Somehow I feel that's exactly what we're going to have to do, so I guess I'll just wait and see.

I think the manual was wrong, you needed more troops than that. I used just those and I got the message that Soviet War Readiness was going up because of too few troops. I don't remember the point in 41 this happened, but I had units in Warsaw, Königsberg, Tilsit and Siedlice as instructed.

Well, we've been doing something similar. Very interesting to see if this obsoletes our work (that might be a good thing, no worries, as it's still unfinished). However, we probably have a bit different approach when it comes to the units - we'll have elite corps (in the special forces slot, representing mixed infantry and armour formations), corps, reserve corps, garrisons, tank groups and cavalry (replacing anti-tank). Did you change all the unit scripts as well?

Well then, I owe it to you to test out the single player of BF1939 too since you're so dedicated to it. I didn't really play more than a few test games for WW1 that I quit when I'd learned enough. Don't be too modest on the "little" more maneuvering room for Europe!

It's quite fine, I agree with the decision as the distances covered are longer. Does this also mean that the Atlantic Ocean and US are in 80km scale to facilitate Ocean travel (including tactical ocean travel, not just using loops).

Actually I think I was logged as Scorpion back then. I've added a signature to signify me as such. You know, the Finnish git who kept arguing against overpowering air power in SC1 (well it was, wasn't it, with dual role air fleets and gaining XP for both purposes equally).

Oh indeed, I'm eyeballing TROM3: The Road to Kyoto and others on TWC. I found a pretty cheap Shogun 2, 12£ or something as a download, but I'll wait and see, as $15 was a lot cheaper. I've pretty disappointed with Steam now that everything there is more expensive to us Euros, so we'll see if they can actually offer deals to us anymore. Hola Rambo, you're quite the magnanimous one, I remember your antics from SC1 times. Did we ever play? I don't remember.

Yeah, sounds great for us who love a more detailed Global game. Maybe that needs to be emphasized more in marketing!

Thank you for the quick support. These are critical times in the game...It's been 2 turns now and at least I'm back to 70%ish readiness and can carry out some kind of operations, but nothing like if I was back at 90%. Well, if I can win despite it (and the unintended naval battle around the UNW symbols) I guess I can be proud.

The problem isn't just Karaman, it's the supply model.

The problem is that the convoy routes on both turns were gray ans shut down but still I got the same US increase as when I did a full scale sub attack. Effectively this means I can no longer carry out unrestricted warfare, but oh well. I don't understand why surface ships should be forced into raiding because surface ships raided historically.

I'd like to report that I'm getting US mobilization increases by only having surface vessels that are not raiding near the UNW icons. This is annoying and harmful. The Lusitania was sunk by not being near the UNW icons either - is this too intentional?

The Entente just conquered Belgium, and immediately the morale of the entire German army is in tatters along with my plans. What's going on? The only other thing is that I launched a major unrestricted naval war campaign and sank enemy ships.