ORIGINAL: hjaco
There you see Ulver?
Resistance is NOT futile [;)]
This is probably the most entertaining GOA game I’ve played with the advantage swinging wildly back and forth. Both sides have experienced the trauma of defeat followed by the euphoria of victory.
Best of all: Whatever happens we look certain to be heading for a photo finish. The best games are always those decided in the very last impulse by a single point and here we may actually be looking at a draw
One lessen that has genuinely surprised me is that the Central Powers must knock out France or lose the war. There may well be other strategies available for winning the
game but those all relay on running out the clock and merely postpone the inevitable defeat of Germany outside the timeframe of the game.
My opponent played an absolutely brilliant game knocking out both Russia and Italy while keeping the Ottomans in the war. He achieve more by the end of 1917 then I would ever dare dream of - isolating huge Russian armies and starving them to death without ever having to expend lives and treasure eliminating them. He did all this without any particular luck even having to contend with functional constitutional government in Russia making the cost of forcing an armistice with the Russians that much greater.
By any reasonable measure he outplayed me and was on top of the world. A desponded Entente faced 1918 with the Central Powers in uncontested control of the European continent east of the French border except for a small pocket in the Ukraine and a real fear that a massed German attack might overrun France. I estimated my chances somewhere between zip and zero and only ordered the general offensive in the West out of desperation with very little hope it would achieve anything.
I always knew that Entente was the stronger side but even I had massively underestimated the way technology shifts the advantage to the attacker in the endgame. Even with 1-1 odds, tanks and elite assault troops will easily push the defender aside and I’ve routinely prevailed even against numerically superior forces. This equally applies to his counterattack obviously but with entry of the Unites States I can afford a lot more offensives and expensive tanks. With the ability to entirely ignore trenches and a sizable firepower bonus to attacking assault troops the stalemate is comprehensively broken and a fluid war of movement is back. Given enough time the Entente is certain to win this new mobile war.
The sheer speed of the advance shocked me. Slightly less then a year after starting the offensive in the spring of 1918 British forces would smash into Prague and American forces would be on the outskirts of Vienna. Any static defence is useless. The only thing that works is counterattacks and those increases the speed the meet grinder works at – in a situation where I have a lot more meat to grind.
Late August 1919: An illustration that advanced tank technology pretty much guarantee a successful advance even when you lose the battle by any reasonable standards. There is simply no way to hold anything even with maximum strength garrison dug in to level 4 trenches.
