France delaying action

[Kuniworth]

Battle for France is surely one of the greatest and most important sequence of the war. A succesful allied campaign here can delay Barbarossa by valuable months.

I would like you to post your suggestions on how to create best possible defence.

What I do is the following;

PREPARATION for the invasion

Time is running very fast for the french. Poland stay alive barely 3 turns if you are lucky, so you must start building defence-line at once. The reason for this is that you must make your units entrench.

1. The first thing I do is to disband the fleet and the airforce. The airforce is useless anyway and will just drag you into an airwar forcing you to spend the british airunits in a futile attempt to gain air-supremacy. Save your british airfleets for the battle of Britain and use english ships instead of the french to pound Germans at the Belgium coast.

2. Build 2 corps in the first turn and place it outside Paris, ready to be rushed to form the 2nd layer in the defence-line in the next turn. Move your units to entrench along the belgian border. Let armies take position in and left of the ardennes. Let the british send the London corps to take your extrem left in the next turn.

3. The corps in algeria should be sent to the french southcoas by transport at once. Move your syrian troops to Alexandria for further transport or disband it and gain 30 MMP. If Italy joins early disband immediately. Let your canadian corps be part of the second layer. Ship themover at once embarking at Brest.

4. When the germans start pounding your troops to keep you occupied try not to reinforce your units to full strength in order to let them gain experience. Keep them alive but no luxuary!!!

5. Italy front can´t be afforded to be ignored. A breakthrough here and you are toast at least 3-4 turns earlier. Build a defenceline consisting of 3 french corps in a straight south running line in the mountains.

WEHRMACHT ATTACKS

Now you will have a very nasty time. Can you survive until the end of 1940 the chances are good that you will gain the initiative in 1943.

The whole idea is to slowly withdraw your front line and finally mass it around Paris. Avoid giving them 3-shot possibilty except on the army in the northen maginot line. This should be your anchor unit. This means you have to very carefully look at which units to reinforce. You just get at max 115 MMP every turn and that must be spent carefully. But if you can calculate what units you can keep exposed and sacrifice you will find that you even can buy some units now and then. Never buy armies, buy corps. Never buy anything else. HQ-units are useless because of the low leaderratings.

What you should do is just keep withdrawing to Paris. When the front eventually collapses at the ardennes rush your Maginot-armies to plug the gap. And there after move your mobile corps on the italian front up to fill their gap. Form a Paris hedgehog.

So how do you do it?

[Niklas.Andersson]

I have a rater diffrent tactic

Dispand all but the troops guarding the magiot line. Get 3-4 fighters before paris falls to England and dispand them afterwards to get 600-800 MPP for UK.

[Doomsday1]

French Navy: Poised to blow the Italians out of the water once they finally decide to partake in the festivities.

French Air: operate with R.A.F from the British Isles.

Algerian Force: To Malta after the Huricanes & Spits are transported home for defense.

B.E.F: If In a 1940 campaign- march to Brest and then Dunkirk them.

Canadians: Send to the desert for future ops.

Beruit Force: Egypt

Extra corps in S. france...then let the Italians come to you, stay on their flanks.

Then fight the good fight by abandoning the Forts when the time comes...as mentioned, don't re-enfore greater than '8', take out the armor and pray.

Good against the AI, but the carbon based life forms are a bit smarter and craftier, so modify as needed. Just an alternative.