Overlord 44 me against the AI

[larryfulkerson]

I finished my moves for Ken yesterday and I haven't received any moves from Walter yet so I'm between games. So I thought I'd start a game of Overlord '44 because this is the first game I played when I bought TOAW III may years ago. I'm not sure this scenario has been updated for TOAW IV so this is more of a test than a game against the AI. I'm going to give the AI all the bells and whistles I can to make it the best opponent of it that I can. I'm also going to use the red-green-yellow rules for this game. I'm going to rest the planes when they get to below 50% on supply and I'm going to make this as realistic as I can, meaning I'm going to drop the paratroops where they actually dropped IRL. I'm going to post things as I find them so you'll see what I do almost as soon as I do. This is the opening game map.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's a list of all the aircraft I get. They are all green and they were all set to Interdiction when the game starts. I notice that there are a lot more fighters than bombers. That means I'm going to have to use a lot of the fighters as CS on occasion and fortunately I have a lot of fighter-bomber types that excell in ground support like the Typhoon, P-47, etc. The Spitfire's don't have a grandeous range so I'm going to have to move them to the continent when that becomes possible. The Naval fleet starts the game in range of the CD guns so I won't have to do much moving of ships, which might cause losses from CD guns. The German planes are offmap in the righthand corner of the map. All of my aircraft are based in England right now ( T1 ). This game is supposed to last 200 turns.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's all the units that are arriving in T2, which is a LOT. Most of them are arriving in England so they will have to be shipped across the channel which means I'll have to see if I can't offload all the first wave to give shipping to the second wave. Some of the arriving units are paratroops that can be dropped on the continent. All this stuff is more than welcome.

[larryfulkerson]

This is the area on the continent where I'm going to drop most of the American paratroops. As you can see there's some storm clouds in various areas but there's plenty of clear weather to drop the troops in. I'll need to refer to the weather when I drop them because I want to avoid the thunderstorms and rain etc. so the troops will not be hindered by bad weather. Avoids needless losses that way.

[larryfulkerson]

I had a CTD so I need to redo about an hour's worth of work. Gimme a minute.

[cathar1244]

I had a CTD so I need to redo about an hour's worth of work. Gimme a minute.

What were you doing in the game when the CTD took place?

Cheers

[larryfulkerson]

I had just selected another unit to move, was moving the mouse to the destination, the movement shadow followed the mousemovement like it always does, and when I got to the edge of the screen the map started scrolling and all of a sudden I was looking at my desktop.

[larryfulkerson]

I've noticed that the ranges of the aircraft that I'm using are way bigger than the edges of the map. So since the shortest range is that of the Spitfire I've set it at 90 so that it will just cover the entire map. I'm going to give all the Spitfires a range of 90 so that I can find the Spitfire's from a list of my aircraft judging by the range of the unit. It occured to me that the rest of the aircraft don't need the range they were capable of either so I'm using the following ranges for the different aircraft so I can identify what aircraft they are by their range.

Code: Select all

 Spitfire 	90
 P-47		91
 P-51		92
 P-38		93
 A-20		94
 B-26		95
 Typhoon		96
 Mosquito	97
 B-25		98
 

[/b]
I've just discovered to my horror that the British AVRE are mainly engineering units and not tanks. The label says Churchill and I thought that was a British tank but NOOOOO it's not a tank at all. D'oh. I'll have to keep that in mind during the game so I don't try to get into a knife fight with an Axis AFV.

[larryfulkerson]

Here we are just before the first combat round. I want to give the Naval Fleet a chance to whittle down the CD guns before my amphibious forces approach
the beaches. All the aircraft are given a CS mission to execute except for the Spitfires....I've set those on AS just in case the Germans
want to come out and play.

[larryfulkerson]

I've just watched at least two dozen attacks by aircraft and ships and nobody has caused any Axis losses until this BB got a hit on a CD gun that has destroyed
all the AAA that was at that location. That makes it safer for aircraft to pound it from the air.

[larryfulkerson]

I'm really disappointed in the results of the attacks. This is the best of them all
and I'm so used to the bloody results that happen in other scenarios that I'm not all
that impressed with the sparse losses that seems to happen in this scenario. No wonder
this scenario takes 200 turns.

[cathar1244]

ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson

I had just selected another unit to move, was moving the mouse to the destination, the movement shadow followed the mousemovement like it always does, and when I got to the edge of the screen the map started scrolling and all of a sudden I was looking at my desktop.

Thanks Larry. Was the unit you were attempting to move a naval unit?

Cheers

[larryfulkerson]

No, it wasn't a naval unit. IIRC it was an AT unit.

[larryfulkerson]

Okie dokie....I think I'm ready to pull the trigger.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's the equipment and troops that I lost moving my floaters into position to attack. There were about two dozen
attacks by CD guns and the losses mounted up pretty fast. Now that they are in position I'm going to assault the
beach using ignore losses.

[larryfulkerson]

This is an image of the main beaches just after the first combat phase and you can see who got ashore and who didn't. It's round two now and I need another combat phase to get everybody else ashore.

[larryfulkerson]

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the development team has produced a new version and it needs to be tested before being released into the wild. I'm the one to test that bad boy so this AAR will come to an abrupt end. I'm posting about my test on the development board with the hope that they will eventually move it to the public board.