France holds out till Aug 1, 1941

[mavraam]

Using normal difficulty settings with the invasion of France campaign (which starts in June of 40 I think) I managed to hold France untill August 1, 1941.

I think that works out to over 30 turns. The key was not giving up the low countries for as long as possible. I did this without buying an HQ for France, just kept building corps, rotating out the injured and hammering armor everytime I got the chance.

I also transported all Brittish troops to France including HQ and retreated the corp out of the Low Countries capital so I could move in an army. I spent absolutely no Brittish money on research, saving every penny for reinforcements and new corps.

I also used the French Navy to hammer coastal units which distracted German planes. And I used about half of the Brittish navy to take out the North Sea German Navy which also distracted the German Air Force.

Because of all this, Germany didn't attack Russia till Spring of '42 which means if I'd been using the historical model, the US would have entered the war 3 months before Russia! That would have been interesting. As it was, they came in about 2 turns after.

The down side was that it took quite a while for the Brittish to develop the Air Force needed to support Overlord. Once the Americans landed with Brittish arial support, the German position crumbled in a matter of 2 or 3 moves as they scurried to defend France and it wasn't fun to play any more.

Looks like its time to move to a higher difficulty level!

[Krikke]

Been playing the demo here, hold france on normal the whole game. Brussels fell after a couple of turns, but i could establish a line of defence just behind it, the Canadian army could still attack Brussels from where it was. I brought in all British troops, and used them to defend against Italia, which they had no problem with. Allmost all point were spend on reinforcing the troops, but I could buy 2 British tank units after a while. My fleet got almost completely whiped out, as I couldn't spare the points to repair them, but they were a huge distraction for the german planes. I had a couple of lucky strikes, destroying a german tank, a corps and an army early, and my fleet got the Bock hq.

At the end, my lines were being driven back, as their airforce didn't had my fleet to shoot at, and my airforce was completely down. I retreated to a shorter line, just before paris, then the demo ended. I had just gotten the second tank unit, so I think I could have hold the Germans till late summer '41.