Slitherine

Novogorod
DV turn 15/19
Ending prestige 4900

This was a tough slog! The amount of armor in the middle of the map near Novogorod was pretty crazy! I really wish I had a bridging Engineer for my northern-most team, i split my forces into three groups and the northern group had to cross a river without a bridge or bridging engineer. This was a rough one but yet another enjoyable battle. Novogorod itself was especially tough due to the rivers and the anti-aircraft and artillery. On to Leningrad!

I played Crete Naval Invasion on my imported core campaign and I did find it to be quite a bit tougher than the airborne invasion but ultimately differently tough, I honestly feel that the Royal Navy can kill your lnog-established core units too easily. I ultimately had to do something similar to what I do in Sealion and that was hold my troops back for the first, oh nine or so turns. It really takes a long time to bring the Royal Navy to heel, possibly too long, even with a 13 strength Junkers strategic bomber. I managed to still get a decisive victory, but only on the very last turn and it took a supreme effort and all of the aux units in the center were lost since I wasn't able to back them up in time. My Aux units to the west survived though. I do like a lot of aspects of the naval invasion, like the race to try to save those paratroopers especially but I think it could use some work to be somewhat balanced with the airborne scenario.

Wasn't there talk of having an "easy mode" and a "hard mode" for a scenario? This sounds like a good example. It seems Crete Naval is hard, and Crete Airborne relatively easier. Although you should probably change the briefing to emphasize that a naval invasion is more difficult.

To reward a player for going for the hard branching path, maybe put more captured units in that path, or at least increase the prestige to balance out the higher probability of losing units. Could be an interesting design for future DLCs.

That is a good point Deduct, you are right. But as is, the mission briefing actually makes the naval invasion sound like the easier choice.

Leningrad
DV on turn 19/21
Ending prestige 5500

This was a bit of an odd scenario in several ways. It was a bit disappointing that we don't get to capture Leningrad itself. I actually tried to, orders be damned, on my first playthrough this mission but lost a couple core units and lost a great deal of prestige. I did control all of the city below the Neva river though. On my second try, which is what I am describing here, I split my forces into three groups and captured the objectives in the west and center fairly quickly, in fact I was done by turn 7. All that remained were the three or four objectives in the east. Those took considerably longer to capture. So I found this mission odd in that we don't get to capture Leningrad itself, though I do understand that you want to reflect historical realities, and it is odd that the eastern objectives take so much longer than the others to get, and one other point of oddity is that the "siege artillery" was just regular artillery. It would have been nice if some of the big Karl Gustav type guns were brought in for this battle, at least one or two. No serious issues with this one though.