Tips for breaking the Gustov line?

[Arkham]

FYI, May 26th was the historical breakout date. I had just hit end turn over and over again from (then) early april wtihout doing anything, so it appeared to me that the line broke on the day it should have. I have since reverted to my real game where its back to mid april. I'm attacking the line every day with medium bombers because why not, but I am not putting much effort into rail yards on Italy. I have not been bombing it with heavies at all, they are all going north bombing engine factories.

I have never seen any allied attacks on any units unless disruption is above 50 percent. If i just let the line sit for three or four weeks I would never get notification of attacks. So either I'm bugged or something else screwy is going on.

[TaggedYa]

Sometime "Soon" I will have to completely dissect the ground war stuff but it is extremely complicated and it is confused by them using locations (the same data structure as factories, road junctions, airfields, and such) for troops. The combat routines parse through the whole Location structure and things like factories have a combat value equal to their capacity (the same variable is used for both) which is probably a bug but I don't know.

[Lars Wistedt]

Being a while since I played this game actively, I recognize your frustration!
After having read many forum posts, I changed my strategy according to this:

- Check historical break through dates and start ground support a week or two before that date.
- Once break through is achieved, continue to disrupt enemy tank and mech formations (prio 1) so
as to keep up AI attacks.

- Bombing POWER close to industrial centras does seem to affect production negatively
- Bombing railways stops produced elements like aircraft engines to be transported to assembly factories etc.
it doesn't seem to affect the folw of replacements bu can hamper the transportation of units reinforcing a break through area.

- Combine bombing high capacity targets and close by rail yards to maximize disruption effect on Axis production

- Bombing population areas where rail yards and high capacity factories are, gives a synchronization effect as
you get points for terror bombing as well as hits on rail yards.

[TaggedYa]

In a classic example of why much is unknown about the game:

In response to this and other recent discussion about the ground war I undertook an experiment to compare what seems to be the case in the code with actual experience.

I ran a 43 campaign hot-seat making no attacks that were not necessary to keep away instant death. I never made a ground attack and the Ger. never flew an intercept (I did do some mass patrols to fiddle with availability). No Avalanche target was ever hit.

Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica were all invaded on schedule.

No ground attack messages were seen until after the Gustav line broke. It broke on May 26th, the historical date just as Arkham reported. This implies that ground attacks are meaningless just as Arkham surmised.

In an additional bit of weirdness, DDay came on June 3. I would have bet a great deal that DDay was hard coded. There is a check for the specific date, June 6, then a "set status" for the Normandy front to active. The only thing that I had done that might have caused an early DDay was bombing transport. To keep ind. damage up I was using 2 tac air to hit all the OverLord transport targets and they were all red. I can not however find any check of transport status in the code for the ground war.

So what does it all mean? Beats the hell out of me.

[warshipbuilder]

What it all means is that the game is seriously flawed. Unfortunately there is nothing else out there now or probably any time in the foreseeable future to replace it. Therefore we have to live with it, warts and all.

Thanks for the great support devs![:@]