Cliffs of Dover Strategy

[aleader]

Played it through 6 times now and I'm getting frustrated with this one. I'm losing too many units to the wildly inaccurate dice rolls and the Brit super-soldiers. Is this by design? Grateful for any ideas.

[peterw]

Two ideas:
1. Use a lower difficult setting.
2. Use "chess" mode disabling the dice; I play always this way.

[robman]

1. Bring along a couple of strategic bombers to sink the British fleet. Along with the auxiliary minelayer, this will buy you more time to disembark, which you will need for suggestion #2.

2. The deployment hexes imply division of your forces into roughly equal landing groups, aimed at Dover and Folkestone. In practice, this does not work very well, as you have discovered: Dover offers two few landing hexes, so units landing there are lucky even to survive. Folkestone is an easier target, as is the beach to the southwest. My ultimately successful strategy was to land at Folkestone and the beach, with paras dropped inland of the beach to cover the landing, and then to sweep northward from the beach and northeastward from Folkestone, taking Dover along the way.

[aleader]

Yep, that worked. Got a DV this time. Can't believe I didn't see that beach to the SW. Pretty much landed the whole force there. The paras are all but useless in this one, unless you bunch them up right away and protect them. I thought paras were strong, revered units? The brit infantry slice through them like butter. It seems the brits have been given a modifier to make them much stronger than usual...maybe because they're defending their homeland? I always lose at least one tank to any brit unit, no matter how weak it is or what the terrain is. I lost 9 strength on a 12 strength PzIIIG to a reg brit infantry in clear ground, and 8 strength to a vickers MG carrier!? this seems to happen rather frequently. I don't recall reading about a lot of Panzers being decimated by Vickers MG's in open ground... I'll have to try changing to chess roll and see if that changes things.

[captainjack]

Dice Chess gives +/-2 from the prediction (well, as far as I can tell), so you can't be certain what will happen but you don't get the really extreme cases. I started using it a year or two back because of results similar to the Vickers machine gunning my Panzer IVs to bits and my stress levels have gone down a lot!

[nikivdd]

It seems the brits have been given a modifier to make them much stronger than usual...maybe because they're defending their homeland?

Not at all. They are not weaker nor stronger than the British infantry from the vanilla campaign and DLC '40. Also the unit parameters in the equipment table have not been altered. They do have a basic experience of 1 star in this scenario.

[aleader]

Dice Chess gives +/-2 from the prediction (well, as far as I can tell), so you can't be certain what will happen but you don't get the really extreme cases. I started using it a year or two back because of results similar to the Vickers machine gunning my Panzer IVs to bits and my stress levels have gone down a lot!

I'm going to try that. I suppose I have to restart the entire campaign though to do it?

[aleader]

It seems the brits have been given a modifier to make them much stronger than usual...maybe because they're defending their homeland?

Not at all. They are not weaker nor stronger than the British infantry from the vanilla campaign and DLC '40. Also the unit parameters in the equipment table have not been altered. They do have a basic experience of 1 star in this scenario.

I'm not sure what it is then but I played both of those and didn't have this much trouble against the brits. After playing it through several times now it seems that it's a dice roll thing as I don't recall every having this much variability in the outcomes: i.e. it shows say 1-4 and ends up 4-0 instead. After playing through the grand DLC campaign 5 times, Afika Corps and Allied Corps, I don't think I'm imagining it.