Panzer Corps Afrika: Lost in Iran!

[Longasc]

Or rather out of fuel/prestige... a serious problem!

Take a look at my savegame if you want, I am afraid I will have to replay this!

I would appreciate some feedback what to do in this situation with my units and resources; not feedback how a completely different core with 30K Prestige would have no problem with that, okay?

http://www.filedropper.com/scenario

^ Contains scenario.pzsav.

[ThvN]

Well, that is some situation you got into! I cannot tell what and/or how you moved the previous turns, or what your starting positions were, but I'll just rattle of my uninformed opinion anyway . You might try to go for an MV, because I don't think you can intercept enough trucks anymore. So you can abandon your Northern push and have them help out in the middle. This way you can keep moving east towards the VH's.

In the south, you will need to push through the southern VH, but lacking long-range artillery and infantery there (to attack the city hexes) means you will have to compensate with a lot of bombing, or else you risk damaging your tanks too much. Ideally, you will try to move some heavy armor north as early as possible, because you have too much of your best Panzers in one place, and they don't have proper backup there so it is a bit of a waste. You still got some Allied reinforcements coming in later and most of your heavy armour is in the south, the wrong place to counter them. And your artillery units ended up a bit unevenly distributed I think, but that will probably even out later.

Should you start over:

Your core looks fairly good, although I don't see any HW infantry, and you have a lot of StuH's, which are very good in preventing attackers from damaging you but the lack of range can stall your own attacks sometimes, since the lack of range means they can't suppress the AI's artillery. But, you have Hummels to help out, so if you make mixed groups it will work fine i think.

I usually try to get rid of the minefield at (11,24) with my engineer. This opens up the road to the south, and can help in capturing the southern VH quicker.

[Longasc]

Yeah you are quite right, I don't have artillery and infantry in the south. Funnily I was lacking StuGs and Tigers in the north, several Churchill tanks made things awful up there.

But as you can see in the savegame below, I almost made it. Unless another surprise takes me by... well, surprise. The "Assault Group" coming over the Caspian Sea fortunately ran into my medium tank column. While they couldn't stop the group, they could body block their landing zones till the Ju188A nuked them all. There was a KV-5 monster tank among the landing crafts, brr!

I noticed again that the best the Americans can field are their excellent infantry units. Fortunately the AI still has the habit to move out fully entrenched Infantry now and then, especially when "baited".

What saved me was not so much what I did; It was rather that the enemy ran out of Prestige and troops, too. Unless there is a nasty surprise at the last VH.

Savegame: http://www.filedropper.com/persia

[ThvN]

Well, looks like you did a good job... And yes, if you can block the landing ships, stopping the amphibious attack is easy. Especially with your Ju 188's. If the devs ever want to expand the Panzer Corps concept into the pacific (ala Pacific General) they really need to alter the way amphibious actions work... Or do some pretty sophisticated scenario tweaking.

Those Churchill tanks are tough, reminds me of the GC West campaigns, where those things are like mobile anvils... Sometimes they seem almost impossible to get rid of. BTW, may I ask what happened to all those lovely bonus Italian units you must have gained during your AK campaign? You didn't leave them out in the sun for too long, I hope? I still remember upgrading that one Italian tactical bomber (with the huge attack bonus) into a Hs 129, now that was a tank killer. And the Semoventes would have come in handy during this scenario. With your core you don't really need them, but I like them for the flavour they bring.

[Longasc]

The losses among my Infantry, Recon and Tac bombers are usually extreme. Especially among Infantry the more the war progresses. I usually substitute Infantry with strategic bombers and artillery till max suppression is reached and then attack with a StuH or Tiger. I had to replay Arabia, there I did worse than in Persia. I split my forces into two groups and didn't have enough high quality armor to fight off the enemy attacks without expensive repairs. Disbanding some Panzer III and my useless paratroopers helped me gain Prestige for some Panthers and a Tiger. I continued upgrading my best units and now I am in East Africa with 7 units less than the core maximum but I am doing extremely fine atm. I fear the upcoming India scenario as my core is specialized towards open terrain combat atm.

P.S. I starved the Churchills or blocked them till Tigers came along. Strategic bombers are very good at depriving units off all their ammo, a pair of them is ideal for that. So I encircled the Churchill so that it couldn't reinforce or resupply and slowly killed it or suppressed it and attacked, sometimes the tanks surrender then when they are fully encircled.

P.S. the Henschel has an odd icon, just like the Me410. It also has some very minor issues, I started a thread about that.

[Rudankort]

P.S. the Henschel has an odd icon, just like the Me410. It also has some very minor issues, I started a thread about that.

So what's the problem with those icons, exactly? In that thread the problem, as I understood it, was that two Henshels appeared in the new unit popup. But, as you found yourself, one was german and the other italian - that was the reason why you got two. What other issues are there with these icons?

[Longasc]

I just checked again. I am sorry, this was my mistake.

By now I realized that all Afrika Korps units are sand color but their icons on the unit screen are nevertheless grey.
The Italian Hs129 has both a sand colored icon and a sand colored icon on the unit screen. This confused me and I thought the German should be sand colored, too.
You could add a B to the German Henschel Hs 129 in the unit screen, Henschel Hs 129 B. Besides that, everything is fine.

Regarding the looks,
the Me410 and Hs129 icons always look strange to me as they have their engines before their nose, which makes the Me410 look like it has a boxing glove and the Hs 129 has a peg leg. Which is actually a centered machine cannone between the two black tips of the engines.