Slitherine

Greetings all,

I wondered about an existance of a printer friendly manual on the regular forum. Alec kindly contacted me that he had been working on a draft for one. One thing lead to another and playing a game with him(getting my arse kicked I'm sure:).

Anyways I see version 2 of the GS introduced many new features. One of them is the local railnetworks including railing in Finland. This makes me want to repropose something that has been brought up previously as the stategy would be much more viable now. Hindering lend lease getting through by capturing ports of Murmansk and Archangel. These were the ports in USSR for the northern LL route. Murmansk is not on the GS map so capturing the Archangel would be the determing factor. Makes sense because if Axis had gotten to Archangel they would most likely gotten to Murmansk too.

I'm not even proposing anything overly too complicated. Just a condition that if Archangel is in Axis hands the northern convoy to USSR is spawned smaller in size.

Eliminating the convoy alltogether and allocating a fixed ammount(smaller than normal convoys would be) on LL getting through via Vladivostok and Persian in case of the city's capture would probably be too big of a change for the game? Or too cumbersome to test balancewise.

But I would like to see this as a potential strategy for the Axis. Combine capturing Archangel and taking Persia and thus eliminating the Persian LL route I see some previously unseen historical gaming fun in the horizon.

Cheers,

_augustus_

Sounds like a fun historical what-if that could be introduced into the game without turning things inside out. But I've never played a game -- win or lose, either side -- where the Axis captured Archangel.

Neither have I. There hasn't been any reason try to take the city and it's so isolated that you won't end up taking it along the way to some other operational goal.

The city is still isolated and behind an extended treck through some very unpleasant terrain in v2.0. But it's very slightly less isolated. The airborne troops might help and most importantly the local railing allows troops in Finland to be rail to Petrozavodsk once that city is taken as a launching area and the added eastern Finnish citys allow troops to be railed to help conquer Petrozavodsk faster. Previously you needed to wait for Leningrad to fall before you could feed more troops to the Artic effort in any practical manner. I reckon to get into Archangel would require Archangel and Leningrad to be very high on your target list of the Russian campaign even in v2.0.

And I can't see this becoming the optimum or the most popular strategy for Axis in the east even if LL convoys are reduced by taking the city . But I'd like to see the possiblity of it implemented. It's historically grounded, it adds on another what-if for an Axis player to try out and therefore adds the potential fun gained from the game.

Just my 2 cents,

_augustus_