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Troina! Fantastico!


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After spending a fair amount of time beta testing and then having exams and assignments plus my 2 year old son to look after I haven't been able to spare a lot of time for actually playing and enjoying the game! Have I been missing out or what!!

What a campaign! Immersive, challenging, pretty, and thoroughly rewarding. Kudos to the designers. It feels so totally different to anything in Normandy, which is what you would expect obviously, but to produce something that portrays the epic struggle that was the Italian campaign in 1943 so well is remarkable in my honest opinion. I'm part way through the campaign, or rather I was until I foolishly deleted my two save games ;) Now I have to start again.. But I'm not complaining.

Time for a brew and then another onslaught no doubt!

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great maps and lots of fun - these mountains really impressed me -wow- and the Troina-town fight at the end was a change of pace and a kicker.

I kind of felt that I was in for the long haul on this one but I could kind of keep track of the strategy of it all (thanks to the maps, briefings and possibly because it was kind of straightforward)- that was a great part of this for me

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Yeah. I wrapped up that campaign about a week ago. I have to admit it really kept me on my toes! Very well thought-out and very challenging.

****Mini-Spoiler******

The last map was kind of fun carpet-bombing the German positions ahead of my advancing troops. By that time, I was tired of taking casualties ... and really didn't have a problem with literally flattening the town to reduce US casualties. ..... I imagine this was probably the case in Real Life as well. I bet the town of Troina took A LOT of damage in that battle.

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  • 4 months later...
After spending a fair amount of time beta testing and then having exams and assignments plus my 2 year old son to look after I haven't been able to spare a lot of time for actually playing and enjoying the game! Have I been missing out or what!!

What a campaign! Immersive, challenging, pretty, and thoroughly rewarding. Kudos to the designers. It feels so totally different to anything in Normandy, which is what you would expect obviously, but to produce something that portrays the epic struggle that was the Italian campaign in 1943 so well is remarkable in my honest opinion. I'm part way through the campaign, or rather I was until I foolishly deleted my two save games ;) Now I have to start again.. But I'm not complaining.

Time for a brew and then another onslaught no doubt!

Damned Straight! Literally JUST finished it after months of inertia on the second mission. Fantastic maps - very visually appealing and tactically interesting.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Holy . . . is the second mission indicative of the rest of the campaign? I lost 3/4 of my infantry to artillery very early on in the battle. Just about the same time that my artillery was falling, so was theirs. My guys weren't all bunched up . . . but there wasn't a lot of room to spread out either. I quit before getting past that first line of defenses. Just after the HT's arrived. At that point I didn't have the infantry (or the morale) to go any further.

After seeing what I was up against, well, not sure I see much point in giving it a second shot.

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TBH

There is at least one covered approach to get you halfway up the hill. From that point you can gather your forces and grind down the isolated enemy units piecemeal through use of the terrain. I was beating my head against the wall going up the middle.

My experience was that the remaining missions did not involve the head bludgeoning I received on the second mission.

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Trying to replay it again tonight. Still not faring so well. The Germans have a ridiculous amount of artillery and I seem to have very few troops to move up that hill. Especially when wherever they go, the Kraut arty is sure to follow.

I've now lost one entire platoon to artillery and I haven't even moved a couple hundred yards up the hill. I thought I might move this platoon over to the little gully on the far left side. They made it OK, but I couldn't move them too far up the gully and I couldn't move them out of the gully until the supporting HT's arrive. Well, the HT's don't arrive in time, giving the Germans plenty of time to annihilate this platoon with arty. My remaining two platoons are both at about 75%. Now the HT's have arrived . . . but jeez, I don't know . . .

This is certainly no beginners battle.

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hey phil , im on mission 5 i think , the one where you have to cut the road into troina? bout an hour into it and have almost cleared the the first ridge . got engineers moving along the rd around the ridge, shermans ready to roll. long way to go . great scenario . constant artie fire covering my very slowly moving infantry in a horseshoe up the ridge.

for what its worth . effective use of your artie assets is the absolute key to all these scenarios.

by the way , hi everyone.

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TBH

[MAJOR SPOILER]

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From the set up zone, move everything along the road to the RIGHT, then send everything along that right side of the map up the hill. Avoid the center rock wall, avoid that little gully to the left of the rock wall. You can make it to that road halfway up the hill. There are enemy troops on the right side of that hill. A combination of shoot-n-scoot from the HT and artillery will take care of the entrenched ones impeding your fruther advance. You'll have opposition on the side of the hill higher up overlooking your troops once you get to the road, but you can keep them suppressed and get your force within the shadow of that hill. Once there, you can work your way up the hill and isolate units by using the terrain for cover.

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Well, thanks for that tip. I almost didn't read it but I figured I've already cheated enough by playing this battle twice, so what the heck.

It won't help me in this battle. I'll have to do my best to slog it hey diddle diddle (again). I thought about climbing that hill on the right but it looked like I couldn't get over it at the top. I probably should've sent my FO up there . . . but he's actually doing fine from where he's at. It's my infantry that is suffering.

Just going to assume that I'll either lose or break even on this one. Oh, and the briefing tells me I'm supposed to exit this battle with enough troops to fight the next one.

HAH! As if.

O'well. Can't win 'em all.

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Three hours later . . . I made it another hundred yards or so before seeing my guys chopped in half. Halfway up the map. No strength to go any further. I give up. Is this one of those keyhole battles where there's only one way to win it and all other approaches are built to fail?

Seems like an impossible task. Not enough infantry. No armor. Three flimsy HT's. How in the heck does anybody save any infantry for the next battle? Sitting around waiting for artillery to drop (and be dropped on myself) isn't much fun.

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The second mission is the hardest, i have ever played. (I play combat mission since the very beginnings)

1. In the first try i lost a lot of infantry to the german artillery, because i left my troops for too long at one place. I had not expected such a amount of ammunition on the german side. So i tried again.

2. In the second try, i manouvered my troops (one unit after another to give no great target to the enemy-artillery) to the right and at this edge of the map up the hill. Every unit stayed only short at a firing positions an then moved on to escape the artillery-fire.

I was even able to fight across the street and up to the main hill. Problem was, the introduction tells you, that your attacking company is also used in a second mission of the campaign and i had not enough troops left for such a task. New try!

3. Now i knew the main positions and also, where the mortars of the enemy were on the map. So i destroyed them with the first artillery-strike, set my pre-arrangend artillery firing points at the right spots and fought up the hill with 22 dead and 2 halftracks lost. 2 platoons are in good shape, so i will go on to mission 3 now.

What i really did not like:

Normally you need a 3:1 advantage as an attacker, especially in such a uphill fight, but there is nothing like that. It´s o.k so far, makes it more challenging.

But... if you get not enough troops by the designer, he has to give the player troops with much more experience, not mostly green or regular with bad leadership marks. I often had the chance to attack a single enemy positions with a superiority number of troops, attacked tactically correct, but failed, because my soldiers did a crap-shooting, were easily supressed and retrieted after a minute. The biggest problem were the canon-halftracks, which were of no use, when they got some enemy traces (from the front!) on there armoured-plates.

The only vehicle, that was kind of senseful, was the halftrack with the 50 cal. MG.

To summon it:

Very interesting and challenging scenario, but not senseful with the wrong kind of toops on the US side. I dare say, that no one of the players, who normally play a campaign without savegames, ends this scenario succesfully in the first try.

Successfully means, at the end, he has enough troops left to fight another scenario of the campaign. No chance in my opinion, even if we have tactic-gods around here.

Greets, MARS42

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Yes, I also was surprised to see that there was no numerical advantage for the attacker in this scenario. I would be surprised if even the best CM players were able to achieve a victory in this battle on the first try . . . and save enough infantry for the next.

I tried my replay from a previous save. I didn't start over from scratch. I'm not too interested in replaying a battle three or four times because by that time I do know where all of the opposition is coming from and it just feels like too much of a cheat.

I'm giving up on this campaign and just moving on to the next.

One thing about this one though, I don't ever recall having so much artillery to work with or such a long time to use it. I think this had a lot to do with why I've failed so miserably. I'm used to having to be very stingy and precise with where I use my limited arty assets as well as having to push an attack forward at a pretty fast clip.

If I were to do this battle all over again I would let that artillery fall broad and fast. Problem is, there's really nowhere to hide your (too few) troops during this exchange of artillery since they seem to have nearly as much as you do.

I don't hug map edges in PBEM battles and I don't like to do that in AI battles either because it is gamey. Seems the only way to win this one is to do exactly that.

Not my cup of tea.

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As the campaign designer, please accept my apologies for your difficulties in the second mission. The testers that got through it reported it as difficult, but nowhere near as hard as you are reporting.

I will try to include an updated campaign file in the next Fortress Italy patch that has a slightly easier second mission.

Regarding the plentiful artillery: this campaign requires liberal use of artillery. You're expected to use all of it in your missions. Also, a possibly helpful tip: there is no campaign penalty for losing mission 2, if you want to just cease fire and go to the next mission.

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I can see now that artillery, early and often, as well as putting a spotter on that hill to the right is essential. My guess is that the people who have made it through this battle on the first try have utilized that approach. My mistake was not seeing the hill as a great perch for an FO. In hindsight, it seems like a really poor choice on my part.

The brief does mention that arty is necessary. I don't remember it saying anything about the hill, but that's something that a good player should be able to find on their own. Failure to recognize the utility of that hill seems to spell certain failure for the whole scenario.

I think I'll give it one more try, from scratch.

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Just so there's no confusion; I didn't get through the second mission on the first try. On the first page of this thread I stated that I had been stuck on it for months. Not playing it every day, of course, but making an attempt, getting wiped out, getting disgusted, then putting it away for a few weeks until I'd forgotten how hopeless it seemed. I tried up the center several times, around the left ... when all else fails ...

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  • 1 month later...
For some reason,this new version doesn't show up in the campaign menu.Even trying to replace the original by renaming the file makes no difference.Looking forward to using it,if and when it's sorted :)

Interesting. Do you have Gustav Line installed? If not, it might be that the new version I produced will have to wait for the base game patch.

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