Uxbridge
Posts: 835
Joined: 2/8/2004
From: Uppsala, Sweden
Status: offline
|
The sea lane from Italy to NA should be relocated to include the central Med. Even if this means an unatural long voyage in pure time, it would allow the Brits the possibility to attack with air from Malta or the Royal Navy to intervene from the sea. I think it is a must! 
The high density of troops in NA is much more difficult to do something about, the game system and scale being what they are. The main problem facing Rommel was not Malta, because enough supplies to feed and drive his troops were landed at Tripoli almost for the duration of the campaign. It was the long distances that the supply had to travel up to the front that was the rub. As an example, from Tripoli to the el Alamien front it is roughly 1000 miles if you travel via the coast road. For a comparison, this is just as far as from Warsaw to Stalingrad, or from Berlin to the tip of Italy. Some supplies were landed at Benghazi and Tobruk, but these ports were far to small to recieve more than a token of what was needed.
Therefore, Rommel had to takes his supplies all the way from Tripoli to the front carried by lorries, and the longer from Tripoli he came, the more was the shortages felt. In the carried mix of food, ammo, spare parts, weapon, water (depending of where he was) and fuel, the last cargo type normally took up about a third of the space in the lorries. Since the lorries needed fuel themselves, they steadily consumed parts of their cargo as they went. Needless to say, the further Rommel got from Tripoli, the longer he had to delay his operations before he had enough supplies to fight and maneouvre. Increasing the amount of fuel in the lorries got him a little further, but then something else had to go, and the soldiers got hungrier, thirstier or had to shoot less. And the less they used their weapons, the more they had to manouvre, which consumed even more fuel. It was an impossible dilemma.
To a certain degree, this could be reflected in the game by lowering the Supply figures of the cities between Tripoli and Alexandria, so that the units could only move a number of hexes before they felt the strain on supplies. But since the supplies never would catch up, its only a compromise.
Limiting the number of troops in NA to its more historical level, could be accomplished by replacing a number of the desert hexes along the coast with plain hexes, and at the same time making desert hexes much more expensive to move in. We tried this and it worked fairly well, the only problem being the long stretch between Sirt and Benghazi, since we had no means to alter the terrain, only change the cost to move there. As supplies is measured at motorized speed, it was almost impossible to pass this stretch. If some of the coast hexes were converted into plain hexes, this problem would be lessened.
Anyway, if the above were true, it would be a bit pointless to move any but your best units to NA, since most of the fighting would be over a few coastal hexes, the desert hexes being very slow to move in. This might change the NA theatre from being a second Eastern front, to a place where most of the fighting is determined by technical advances, air forces and control of the central Med, not the number of troops involved.
Just a thought! 
|
Printable Version
Italians in North Africa - 
RE: Italians in North Africa - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread