I finally finished my UK game that I started back when MtG had just come out. This is the one where America had done nothing at all despite historical focus, and Japan had done very little bar helping Germany against Russia.
The war continued, the axis grinding away vast numbers against my careful defence on one narrow front. Naval superiority ensured they had no chance of opening new fronts; their massive armies meant I had no hope of pushing further.
Around late 1948, Turkey suddenly went fascist and joined the axis. This left me scrambling to defend Egypt as axis forces now had access to lightly-garrisoned Syria. I held at the canal, but having only one bank cut my supply route to Italy entirely and I was forced to fall back all the way to Sicily before a naval landing cut off the troops in Sinai and restored the Suez canal to my control, and with it my supply lines.
I used the tactic of cutting off enemy forces on peninsulas using naval landings quite a few times during the game from that point, both in the middle east and in Italy. A bit cheesy as the AI doesn’t learn, but I didn’t really have any other way to deal with such huge numbers of divisions.
Anyway, by late 1950 Germany, Italy and Nationalist Spain had all run completely out of spare manpower. They still had loads of troops in hundreds of divisions each though, against my rather small but well supported army, now holding most of the Italian peninsula.
And then the Americans (on historical focus remember) finally did something: they became communist! The first I knew about this was a request to send 20 divisions of volunteers, which turned out to be powerful medium armoured divisions. That was their sole contribution to the war, but it did help me a fair bit as they came and sat in Italy, allowing me to withdraw one of my armies there from the front.
Those nukes I’d been working towards had been utterly useless as I wasn’t able to gain air superiority anywhere for long enough to use them. This changed finally when I threw every avaialable plane over the Alpine region to help with a big invasion of the Venice area. That invasion was successful, and I used a nuke on Genoa (the new Italian capital) to break the level 10 naval and land forts there and allow a second invasion. Between them, this was enough to push Italy to capitulation, and I was able to surround a large chunk of other axis forces there.
With that, the tide turned. My armoured divisions thrust through the defences at Nice and helped surround more axis forces in the French alps. Another couple of armies pushed north from Italy and took Munich while my allies fought at a stalemate in the Balkans. The AI should have been able to hold easily enough I think, but kept moving its forces around between the French and German fronts, providing me with opportunities to advance, then defend when they returned.
After much more fighting, I broke through into Spain (which turned out to be utterly undefended) and forced a quick surrender, removing lots more divisions from the fight. Vichy France remained well defended, but Germany did not. My armies there took Berlin and shortly afterwards the Reich surrendered. After that it was all mop-up, ending in late 1952 with an invasion of (democratic but still axis) Japan.
On the way, one more great silliness: Germany had a civil war after surrendering, with one of the provinces in central asia (liberated back to Germany by retreating Japanese troops) revolting and joining the Allies. But not joining the main war, only an extra civil war. The Germans were able to invite only the capitulated axis countries to join that war. That meant that as I captured provinces in Russia that were nominally part of Germany from the Axis-Russia peace treaty, they were assigned to the new allied Germany… and because it wasn’t in the main war I couldn’t attack into Japanese territory from these. *sigh*
And as one final absurdity, in the peace treaty at the end the new German state was automatically assigned all of Germany and German-conquered Russia, thus pushing my UK to second in total score despite winning WWII almost single-handed. :)
