MarsRobert wrote:I feel your pain man. Similar topics have come up frequently here. You know the drill: Maybe you're not wining a decisive victory in every battle (at normal difficulty), but you've been plugging away and steadily building and buffing up your forces as you go. Alas, you reach 1944 and the rather rude awakening of the Overlord/Bagration battles. You witness your magnificent army badly bloodied, if not totally annihilated. In fact it was especially unnerving for me as I came off a decisive win in Italy only to have my head handed to me on silver platter in Overlord. It's a bummer.
In all fairness though, when I played Overlord my buffed up tanks and planes were inflicting some losses on the Allies, and for a time it looked like I was going to survive. The trouble was that I didn't have enough tanks and (especially) planes. To counter the enormous Allied air power in Overlord, my gut feeling is that you need a minimum of four (and preferably five) veteran fighters to have any chance.
BTW, come to think of it, I was a bit disappointed that there was no Third Battle of Kharkov (Mainstein's fabled 'Backhand Blow') scenario. IMHO it was one of the most interesting battles of WW2. Paul Carel's narrative of the battle in his book 'Scorched Earth' was fantastic.
Anyway, I've been sort of taking a break from the game while I await the arrival of my new Falcon rig; arguably the best gaming PC in the world.
I'm definitely not going to let myself get frustrated and give up on the game though. It is way too cool and too much fun.
Hmm, this sounds realistic, though maybe not so much fun? LOL!
Arguably, the Allies won the war, or at least ended it when they did, because, by the end of the war, the Luftwaffe was all but destroyed. The Allies had total control of the skies.
Can I tell you an incredible story about my uncle, who died recently? During WW2, he was a Canadian pilot in the Royal Air Force, and mostly flew Spitfires and Typhoons. He got shot down twice: once in Cairo, and then again near the end of the war, in France, during The Battle of Falaise, which most people have never even heard about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falaise_pocket
When he bailed out of his Typhoon in France his parachute swung twice before he hit the ground with a thud. Unfortunately, he landed behind enemy lines (just like in the movies), and to add insult to injury he landed in an area through which an entire company of Germans was retreating. There were few places to hide so he jumped into a muddy ditch and tried to remain still, while also trying to determine if the retreating unit was an SS unit - he knew that if it was an SS unit, which at the time would have been made up of seasoned veterans, and fanatical members of The Hitler Youth, and if they captured him, then he would have been shot immediately.
Luckily, it wasn't an SS unit, because five minutes later, one of the panicked retreating infantrymen actually stepped on my uncle.
He was taken prisoner, along with another pilot, who was from Algiers. Immediately, a German officer, who was furious, stormed up to my uncle and the guy from Algiers, and shouted at them in a thick German accent: "My God, do you see that! Your fucking wingmen are shooting at our ambulances!" This, of course, would have been in violation of The Geneva code. "Explain yourselves, immediately!"
My uncle was lucky again, because he was an officer, and the German officers actually had a lot of respect for their Allied counterparts. My uncle explained that he had been ordered to shoot at ambulances approaching the front because apparently the ambulances were bringing ammunition to the front, then taking wounded soldiers away.
"I'm going to stop the next ambulance that comes down the road," said the officer. "If it's not transporting ammunition then I'm going to shoot you both."
My uncle, who had been following orders, had no way of knowing for certain if the ambulances coming forward really were transporting ammunition... and even if they were, perhaps, by chance, the next one wouldn't? He began to work at making peace with his Maker. His brother (the uncle I never knew) was shot down and killed just months earlier, and he assumed that in mere minutes he would be joining him in The Better Place.
Five minutes later an ambulance came towards them, and the German officer stepped forward with authority and stopped it. They all went around back and peered inside as the back doors were opened. My uncle said it was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen: ammunition, stacked from floor to ceiling. At this point, the guy from Algiers started to jeer at The Germans. My uncle claimed that if he'd had a pistol on him he would have shot the guy himself!
He was then taken POW and put on a train for a POW camp in Poland. The camp was liberated ten months later by the Russians. My uncle said that one morning the German guards were just gone. The prisoners were told to stay in the camp though, because The Russian soldiers were barbaric and would have shot them on sight. My uncle said it was fascinating seeing the army coming through because they saw only a smattering of soldiers, but that it went on for days. Apparently, from the air, you would have seen the entire Russian army stretched out for dozens and dozens of miles, but from the ground it wouldn't have been so obvious.
My uncle, because he was an officer, was one of the first to be taken from the camp. He said that in the first German town they arrived at he saw a German woman being raped by Russian soldiers. Basically, the Russian soldiers were conscripted, uneducated peasants, who were unfed by their own army, and were basically 'on the loose', though being guided.
Anyhow, you have to respect those guys who fought during that war. I tip my hat to them.
I don´t think i´ll survive this scenario.
