Hi Curt,
Here is my final update. I’ve reached the beginning of January 1948 and still firmly hold on to a Decisive victory.
As I indicated previously, my strategy to whittle down the British in Sicily was successful and I was able to regain Messina and push them out of the island altogether by December 1945.
After the situation had stabilized in the Mediterranean, I was able to transfer more troops to England and finalize my conquest of the British home islands, including Northern Ireland by April 1946.
That left the English with only Reykjavik, Gibraltar, Malta and Nicosia in their possession on the European front.
Simultaneously, in the Far East, I was able to finally capture Vladivostok by June 1946, leaving just the Pacific coastal cities of Magadan and Petropavlovsk under Soviet control in this part of the world.
The final conquest of the Russian Central Asian cities took longer to undertake, as the resistance in this area was fairly heavy, but was finally completed when I captured their last stronghold of Urumchi in October of 1947, leaving the Soviets with just the two aforementioned cities.
Of note, in the conquest of the final 10 or so Soviet cities I was receiving between 2000 to 3000 gold pieces for the conquest of each of these cities, with a final payoff of 8300 gold for Urumchi itself. In essence, all the gold that was being granted to Russia through the event file was basically being used to fund my own treasury.
I’m not sure how the AI typically handles gold during the game, i.e. does it actually use it to buy improvements or units or does it only use it to bribe units and cities. If the latter, in this scenario, at least, it isn’t useful. As such, you may want to revise your event driven gold donations.
After capturing the southern most Soviet city of Mashad in central Asia, I redirected my ground forces located in that area and combined with the reinforcements I’d been accumulating in Iraq finally began my drive to push the British out of Iran. By the beginning of January 1948, I was at the gates Gombroon on the coast of the Persian Gulf.
In June 1947, the Neutral power launched a sneak attack on Germany but it isn’t in any manner a threat to me and I am easily able to brush off it’s attack and proceed to launch my own punishing counter-offensives to any region that might prove too much of a hindrance.
Finally, on August 1947 the great Allied invasion of France, Operation Overlord, took place. The invasion force was indeed formidable, with a wide variety of naval, air and ground forces at its disposal. Unfortunately for it, I’d been expecting and preparing for it for the past 3 to 4 years.
Though it was able to inflict many casualties, the assault force was unable to capture any French coastal cities though it came close to liberating Brest, it also sustained many losses in its efforts as well. So much so, that by the next turn, my reserve forces situated around Paris and England were able to completely wipeout the survivors, save a few Allied planes which had escaped to the airbase in Spain.
With the two great Allied invasions defeated, the Soviets down to 2 cities, the British basically pushed out of Europe and my scientific discovery of the Atom bomb (I’ve already accumulated a stockpile of 4 bombs with more on the way, compared to England’s 1), I believe my position is fully secure and unassailable.
Final observations:
As I mentioned, I prepared an excel file that tallies not only the casualties list but the scientific research progress and state of the treasury by power.
Of note is the Science tab. After 85 turns, Germany developed an extra 20 advances but 9 of these were acquired through the 'Foreign Affairs Ministry' wonder, which it captured from Russia, and a further 2 free advances when it built the 'Secret Weapons Program' wonder for a total of 11 free advances.
This means in 85 turns it only actually researched 9 advances for a rate of 1 advance every 9 turns (and of course this is only possible because the game is set to last up until February 1950). Even by January 1948, Germany still had at least 10 other advances to research.
America, as expected, fared relatively well, at a rate of 1 advance per 4 turns but Japan did horribly at only 1 advance per 17 turns.
Given the overall number of technologies to research, I believe the research rate is clearly insufficient, and would at least recommend reducing the Tech Paradigm level by half from it’s current 200/10 level.
As a consequence of this reduction, I would try to make it harder to be able to go down the whole Atomic Research path because under the current circumstances you can begin researching it relatively early on and it only requires 3 technologies to get Atom Bombs.
Of particular interest for you will be the production/casualties list for each power. As I expected America, Britain or Russia failed to produce not only air but tank units as well.
Britain and Japan in particular were champions in building freighter units, with each producing
209 and
323 respectively.
Finally, as far as I can tell, Japan never went to war with either the British or Americans, which I guess for them is a good thing as they seemed to already have their hands full with the Chinese (no wonder since they were too busy building transports
). As I was playing as the Germans this didn’t appear to overtly affect me but I thought it was worth noting in case that wasn’t your intention.
Oddly enough, despite these imbalances, playing the scenario as the Germans still ended up being challenging. If the Russians had been able to put up greater resistance, the ending would have been quite different (the problem being of course, that even though it was being overrun, the majority of its cities were building improvements rather than units)!
In case you are interested, I also attached the last game turn save file.
As usual, I hope my feedback proves useful to you and feel free to use as little or much of it as you deem appropriate.
Overall another very fun scenario to play!
