So the game ended after 71 turns and almost 4 months of play realtime.
Imgur is not great at displaying the animated gifs inline so here is A dropbox folder with them all and the full war.
Turns 1-51 - Expansion and AI stomps.
Everyone expanded as much as they could with special notes that DTurtle managed to breat down a Major AI and take their capital (Detmold) intact giving himself a hefty industrial advantage. The various capitals are underlined in light blue (except DTurtles Chelonodis which I seem to have missed in my highlighting pass). The other players had much less in the way of minor cities to pick up.
Unfortunately despite this significant lead DTurtle was faced with three potential fronts of conflict. Unbeknownst to him the other players - alarmed by his technological and industrial lead had formed a secret mutual defense pact declaring that if any of them came under attack by him the others would assist.
Saros
A small stretch of rocky plains and sand separate the two capitals of the major powers. In the south near the equator there is a second smaller front. Half of the cities are colonies so low population and output compared to DTurtles concentrated populations.
ForeverBWFC
A massive mountain range separates the main cities of DTurtle and ForeverBWFC but the cities of Politoyes and Toulose are exposed while ForeverBWFC's heartland lies open with minimal defensible natural features apart from the great lava lake.
Banditu
Two sandy passes emerge from Dturtles core into a plateau housing Banditu's capital and most of his industry. Frontage for any conflict will be limited but not too badly.
Turns 51-59 - The Banditu Blitzkreig
Armored brigades equipped with Polymer armored light tanks backed up by Laser armed infantry swept directly for the Banditu capital. There was little the technologically inferiour defenders could do except fight a delaying action as projectile weapons and RPG's were not enough to defeat the high-tech Dturtle tanks. The capital was subdued then nearly all troops were forced to depart as they were needed on other fronts.
Turns 56-60 - Saros & ForeverBWFC join the war
Having just finished the mechanisation of our infantry and a recent tank update (still conventional armed at this point) I scrambled to recall troops and prepare to respond to Dturtles earlier than expected attack on Banditu. His army was about 3x the size of mine but I was hoping that I could push through to his capital while I poured every bit of research into producing nuclear weapons to get aound his tactical combat focused tech lead. In turn 56 both me and ForeverBWFC declared war. I especially took a massive morale hit to our troops due to high relations with Dturtle so our troops were very fragile for the first half of the war.
Look at that morale hit!
Start positions
Western Front 55-60 - A new hope
The war started with a bang, literally. We had found a Galactic Republic 1-shot nuke launcher some time ago and had hoarded it for this moment. Our very first act was to deploy it against DTurtle's capital to try disrupt his industry but it was only somewhat effective.
After fighting our way to the gates of his capital we were stymied by DTurtles latest toy, the "Killer" Tank destroyer and a huge number of massive AT guns deployed alongside his infantry. More troops were also being buillt and railing in from the east as Banditu was defeated. The south was going better with two of Dturtle's smaller cities falling to me and ForeverBWFC across these turns, there was no significant industry in these cities however so they were a largely meaningless prize.
Given that we were mostly trying to fight these with polymer/40mm cannon light tanks and machinegun armed light APC's it wasnt going well.
Turns 60-64 - The Turtle Snaps Back
Turtle's entire army poured onto the western front facing my greatly outnumbered troops. He also updated his infantry and started handing out humongous numbers of insanely armored laser-APC's.
A singularly bad turn.
- DTurtles units
- My unitsI started to issue my own laser-tanks (above) and finished walker research but they weren't enough to stem the tide and he threw my formations back towards my capital with immense losses on my side. One memorable turn I lost over 800 APC's and tanks. My tanks I was producing were better than his high-velocity gunned light tanks but the only thing that could hurt his APC's were my walkers and I had far too few of them. He also had fat stacks of AT guns in every crucial hex so counter-attacking was nigh impossible.
We weren't going to win against superior numbers and units so I had to get... creative.
Strategic war - Return of the Warcrimes
Meet the unit that won the war almost single-handedly,
If you watch the turns 60-64 gif above you see my units falling back in shattered bits everywhere except the southern end of the main front. Dturtle was striking directly for my capital with everything he had and I was diverting troops to hold the south and industry to build launchers instead of more tanks. The reason for this is that missile launchers like the one above have a seven hex range and can do significant damage to the industrial assets of a hex. One unit of 50 launchers can do about 200pts damage to every asset in a hex which is roughly one level of building disabled. I quickly had three (very expensive) units like these built and began to missile his capital every turn.
Very shortly the industry, power generation and most importantly logistics of his capital were in total ruins and he was unable to provide his troops with fuel or energy for their guns. He just about managed to feed them using logistics from his second city on this side of the mountains.
Turns 65-71 - The endgame
The next few turns were a sudden reversal as Dturtle both couldn't supply his troops and also ran short of power for industry. You can observe fifteen or so hexes suddenly sprouting solar farms and truck stations between his two cities so he managed to return to a semblance of normality after a few turns but by then the war had decisively shifted.
- Dturtle designs
- Saros DesignsDturtle updated his tank designs with laser guns and to be more cost-efficient but I was also making incremental updates - especially to my armor thicknesses.
By the mid-late 60's my research program into nukes had bourne fruit and as DTurtle managed to reform his line short of his capital I brought out updated Walkers and 1MT Nukes. The Nukes and Walkers would blow a hole in his lines and mechanized troops would exploit the gap to create small scale encirclements.
Gif is not embedding - it might be too big - link
After we forced him back enough for the missiles to trash his second city's industry and logistics it was apparent he didnt have an answer to the atomics/walkers linebreaker combo and Dturtle surrendered.
You can see all the spots where I used nukes from the radiation spikes shown on the map. I had 12 launchers by the time the game ended and enough radioactives mining to run them for a good while.
Summary
DTurtle surrendered and Habituallyred (subbing for ForeverBWFC) acknowledged that they had no chance against the warmachine I had built.
Gif of the whole war.
Overall it was an excellent game and it was down to the wire for several turns. For the summary apparently me and ForeverBWFC chose very similar reds for our empire colors so generally the higher one is my line.
Total troops
- Dturtle had very good infantry designs, copnsistently better than mine the whole war.
- He also had a lot of AT guns, most of my gun total was obsolete artillery that acheived very little.
- Tanks count includes both APC's and tanks.
- Nobody else fielded walkers.Casualties
- Turtles larger and more infantry focused army suffered on the open plains.
- You can see where I started dealing with AT gun concentrations by nuking them (turn 67).
- I lost more AFV's in the cruical fighting turns but the surrounding and eliminating formations in the later turns caught DTurtle up.
- Walkers are good but not cheap.
