The Mod that Happycat and I are playing has added the cities (with a port) of Ajaccio in Corsica, Cagliari in Sardinia and Messina in Sicily. We felt it was too cheesy to just fly air units to Corsica and Sardinia and then get easy excellent airbases to support an invasion into Italy or southern France. With the ports you have to invade the islands and you need to capture hex by hex to get new airbases. Italy can now send more land units to these islands to delay the invader a bit.rkr1958 wrote:Couldn't you just take/use Corisa and / or Sardinia for your airbase(s) and "invade" next/near to Rome (e.g., Anizo)? From a gaming point-of-view this seems a faster way to take Italy out than an Operation Husky type approach that goes through Sicily.Ryben wrote:Well, it´s a bitt hard attacking Rome if you had to cross France, the Alps and half Italy to get there (at least its very time consumming) so yes, they have a strategical value. At least Husky.
I won´t bother too much with North Africa (Torch) as their PP value is laughable and the Axis troops placed there are not really a great menace to yours. Just wipe out the garrison in Sicily to establish a base for your bombers and start pounding Rome from there.
The addition of a port in Messina means that the strait of Messina is closed for the Allies before Messina falls. The port will also provide supply for the Allies if they invade the tip of Italy.
If the Axis send some fighters and tac bombers to southern Italy then it's not so much fun for the Allies to just send transports to the coast. You need to survive bombardments and then get ashore depleted. The Axis can then repulse the invaders if some Germans are stationed in Italy.
I stage operation Torch because I need to get air range to Tunisia, Sardinia and Corsica. In our mod we've added some land units in Africa, e. g. the DAK armor. It won't activate until Italy joins the Axis so this means the Allies must reinforce Egypt prior to Italian DoW upon France. So it's not a cakewalk to kick the Axis out of Libya. That gives a reason to invade Algeria. This way it's possible to move eastwards towards Tunisia and Tripoli. So if the Axis is very strong in eastern Libya then you can force them into a two-front war. So they invasion of Algeria has 2 main objectives. The most important is to relieve Britain in Egypt so it's possible to get the upper hand and defeat Panzer Arme Afrika. The second is to get air range to Sardinia, Sicily and Corsica.
You need to invade these islands to get airbases for invasion into southern Italy.
All I write is based upon playing a human opponent. Against the AI it's very easy to win in the Med and then you can bypass certain targets.
In our current game (I'm the Allies and Happycat the Axis) I have to inch my troops towards Rome. The Italian mountains between Naples and Rome are so hard to fight in. Happycat defended well with 3-4 fighters and 1-2 tac bombers so I had to progress quite slowly. I invaded Sardinia and then Corsica before I got enough airbases to capture Sicily and then invade through the tip of Italy and move towards Taranto and then Naples. This turn (january 1943) I just captured the central mountain hex just south of Rome (Monte Cassino?) and will hopefully capture Rome in 3-4 turns. Happycat invaded Greece and sent a land unit to Heraklion on Crete (new city with port) and also a few air units. The airbases on Crete made it quite hard for me to take Tobruk and Benghazi. My
land, naval and air units were harassed for several turns and I had to reinforce this area with fighters to repulse him here for good.
The last game we play now with our current modifications is much more interesting to play because the Med is quite active now. The Axis can do a lot down here to make life difficult for the Allies and delay the eventual invasion of Italy.
We even placed a port in Rome (Civitavecchia) to reduce the number of sea hexes that's adjacent to Rome. Before I always followed the cheesy strategy of building lots of tac bombers and fighters as the Allies. These air units bombarded Rome every turn and when I believed Rome could fall I sent 3 transports adjacent to Rome so they could invade an empty hex. Before the invasions I sent naval units along the coast to check for subs. With 3 transports adjacent to Rome it was impossible for the Axis to eliminate all these 3 transports with air units. So if the Allies got lucky and destroyed the Rome defender then the Allies could invade the empty Rome hex and force an Italian surrender. With Civitavecchia you can only place 2 transports adjacent to Rome and Italy can place a sub in Civitavecchia to have a chance to shoot and one of the transports. So with 3 tac bombers or so it's possible for Germany to destroy all transports trying to get Rome the cheesy way. This chance meant it was safer for the Allies to invade along the southern coast and move northwards until a land unit gets adjacent to Rome. Then it's possible to bombard Rome and finish it off with the land unit.
I want to CeaW to have a chance to simulate the real strategic choices the Axis and Allies had to make in the real war. Happycat and I have refined our mod a lot of times now and we think we're getting closer and closer to the version we're 100% happy with. When we feel we've done all we want then we will post the mod for all the rest of you to download.
