Slitherine

I am doing base grand campaign on the Col. difficulty level. So far I have been doing pretty good and arrived here with ~5000k in prestige. However, I just get chewed up on this scenario. My bombers and fighters just get crushed by the allied air units. Even adding in AA doesn't seem to help as the AI just bombs the crap out of them. I have about 5 Tiger 1 tanks and 8-9 top of the line Panzer A/G or IV's. The rest of my corps is 3x artillery (4 stars each) and infantry. Any advice on this scenario or is it supposed to be almost impossible? I did DV the previous defensive scenario in Italy.

If you defend the landing sites, you will get blasted by the navy and the airforce, and then overrun by ground forces.

Personally I deploy well back, and advance cautiously to good defensive terrain. Fighters only protect ground forces with support from AA (as AA can defend against multiple attacks it can be more effective in some circumstances). There's mixed views - covered in some depth elsewhere in the forum - on whether it's best to finish off individual planes to wear down the numbers or to damage as many as possible so they head off for repair and give you some peace. Whichever tactic you use, ensure that AA fires first to weaken your preferred targets, then use mass attacks on the fighters to get the initiative in your favour as much as possible. Personally I try to destroy fighters and damage any unprotected bombers.

Also, be careful of terrain effects - bocage is very bad for tanks against 43 infantry. There's some good advice on this elsewhere - even using only parts of it improved my success a lot, so it's worth having a look.

When you decide it's time to advance, start methodically but at some point you should gain enough numerical advantage to focus on clearing out the remaining allied troops.

No guarantees, but it's worked for me two or three times.

Also, if you deploy far from the coast, you can depend on the AI rushing into your traps (AT guns) multiple times. Wait for the avandgarde, destroy them and retreat.

As far as fighters are concerned, either take no planes yourself and more Grenadiers or attack only small enemy formations and make sure to destroy these all at once. If you take into consideration that the AI nevers remembers anything it cannot actually see, it will never know what hit them.

Snowball you have reminded me of Kerensky's tactic - buy cheap units as speed bumps.
88 or 75 AT are cheap as chips with no transport and will cause a lot of damage in an ambush. You won't shed any tears when they get destroyed and can either buy more or deploy your experienced reserve core units. If they get experience that's good too.

I found that deploying far to the rear and waiting to the Allied advance worked great. The first 3-4 turns were spent only fighting air battles and eliminating as many Allied planes as possible. By the time the allied ground units got near me their air was pretty much done. Then you can fight the Allies piecemeal and eventually just walk in and take every flag. It helps if you can deploy 1 or 2 strats to deal with the fleet as you advance towards the coast.

Unless you're there intentionally (deliberate losses) or started in '43, I would just start again, as you have lost all chance for victory in the USA by then

- BNC

Is this Vanilla Overlord or GC overlord (I hate both with a passion)

LandMarine47 wrote:Is this Vanilla Overlord or GC overlord (I hate both with a passion)

happyloaf wrote:...I did DV the previous defensive scenario in Italy.

Indicates that it is vanilla (I assume here that he emans the "Italy" scenario speciffically, rather than "Monte Cassino")

- BNC