The earliest scenario date and there’s two way to look at it. If you want to be in the drivers seat be the Axis. But if you want to sit back and relax a bit and have more options down the road be the Allies. However… you have to be OK with the fact you will watch lots and lots and lots of units get annihilated in your first game. But the AI will show you lots of excellent attacking techniques to maximize your turns.
Don’t do just Italy. It will be insanely boring after a while. They are just like their historical versions - terrible plus weak.
In case you’re playing as the allies and you note that the Soviets have a distinct lack of units as Barbarossa approaches, you do get a bunch of units when Germany declares war. Unfortunately you are never going to be able to use some of them as the Germans will destroy them before you even get a chance.
It’s still nice though to know that you will get your forces supplemented. Otherwise your forces will probably look distressingly sparse as May or June of 1941 approaches. I’m only on turn two of defending against Barbarossa and I am hoping that the 175 MPP’s that I spent early on to buy an additional engineer unit will come in handy with the fortifications around Leningrad. The unit that is automatically given to you in your purchase queue is being used to build around Moscow and now that I have completed my Leningrad defenses, I am hoping to be able to get at least two sets of fortifications built in front of Stalingrad.
I recommend UK and USA for your first time around. Though you may have to step in and assist the USSR occasionally due to a bug in the USSR resources that the USSR may experience, which they are addressing in the patch once it releases.
My allied game was interrupted due to RL events, but I am back on now. In early 1943 the Axis were still pretty scary (especially with the extra experience bar) but now it’s March 1944 and they are pretty wrecked. Soviet units already completed a giant encirclement around Kharkov and are trying to trap an even larger number of German units on the wrong side of the Dnieper. UK units are slowly pushing from northern Italy into Austria and the US Army has landed in force around Brest. The biggest opposition there is lack of supplies.
Really the wind has gone out of the Axis sails. I made a big investment in strategic bombers and I think it is working out OK. It’s painful at the start, but once you get higher tech bombers and enough bombers and escorts to grind down their interceptors, it starts to be extremely painful for the other guys.
Did you play with the soft build limits on or off @MikeJ? I’ve played with them on for my two allied games (one where I was Britain and the US and one where I was the Soviets). I’m trying to figure out if removing the limits would favor the Axis as it might allow them to be able to better defend against the allied sea landings while still maintaining a large number of units in Russia.
I played with soft limits, where building beyond the historical involves rapidly scaling costs. As I understand it, hard limits are also an option but I don’t know if there is an option for no limits.
I don’t think the limits played a big role for the Axis. It looked to me like they were just running out of MPPs. Between the bombing campaign and the giant reinforcement costs in Russia, they just couldn’t keep up (even with Spain and the 10% bonus). If anything, being able to build extra heavy tanks might have hurt them a bit as the extra units are extra expensive to reinforce.
Honestly, I can’t see how a one-unit-per-hex mechanic could ever reflect the Napoleonic Wars (or any European War prior to WWI). Entire armies essentially were concentrated in one hex and didn’t form nationwide “lines”. How would a siege be declared? It should occur with the besieger and the besieged in the same hex, but the engine won’t allow that. This appears to me to be a clumsy conversion as Napoleonic warfare requires more than a change in art.
Allies can feel a bit demoralizing in the early going, so I’d agree with orald and say go for Axis. I also think Axis is a bit harder overall at the default settings.
Just got this as a gift, the nice hardbound manual edition! Booted it up long enough to see how it looks (very nice, the interface seems much better than most wargames; I wish the zooming were smoother though). Looking forward to diving into the manual and pushing some Panzers around.
Looks like multiplayer isn’t in yet; hope they get that sorted soon. Hopefully we can get some games going when they do!
For those interested the developers released a beta version of multiplayer last week. Looks like reloading turns (cheating) will not be allowed.
This PBEM beta includes the v1.01 update
To download the PBEM v1.01.01 beta go the Strategic Command Public Beta forum.
The Devs warned that save games from the release version will not work with this update.
I’ve still only clicked around a little bit in this game. I think I need a human opponent to really get engaged. So yeah, I’m interested, but on the other hand maybe it makes sense to wait until it is released for real.
