Slitherine

To those of you who are following my posts (my last one was over here) http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... 21&t=75602 I've finally started playing Panzer Corps again after a long break after being frightened away by a handful of really crash and burn attempts at playing Berlin 45.

This time however after promising myself that I would finish my always reloading missions from the very start if I wanted to reload them play through of the Grand Campaign (which has been progressing at a rate of about one mission a year as I get down to the last few nail biters) I promised to steel my heart against the repeated deaths of some of units I have really come to know and love and to promise myself that I was not failing, I was learning whenever I needed to restart.

Since Berlin lacks the impassable rivers of many other recent maps, I found setting up pockets of resistance was difficult/impossible since certain areas had too many options to attack.

So, recalling the famous saying about he who defends everywhere defends nowhere, and knowing that I'd have a 32 turn marathon to work with, I decided to set up my entire army in the southern section of the map. This allowed me to use the two airfields there to refuel my planes, and serve as safe places to park my tanks. My huge collection of Self Propelled artillery could zip around the battlefield/fall back with ease and safety and I just had to wear the soviets down.

Also my positioning meant that for the first half or at least two fifths of the mission when additional soviet aircraft arrived, they'd fly onto the map, not be able to reach any of my ground forces, and then get blown out of the sky by one of my three jets.

On my most recent (about sixth strategy using this approach though all of the others except the very first time I used it crashed and burned early on due to more or less unforced errors) everything went more or less exactly like I planned. My core is from what I can tell hilariously over stocked with air units, but that was all too the good for the most part since the soviets have roughly all of five anti-air units on this map and none of the highly mobile ones which are such a pain to deal with before they're able to make their presence felt. I took out the first thrust around turn 14, dealt with the second wave by around turn 25 and then it was off to the races with the map more or less empty of soviet units, and my guys racing around the map to grab everything.

I ended up loosing one airplane due to missing a mission objective space that caused the mission to drag on longer than it should have, and one infantry unit due to using them a sacrificial lamb to draw fire rather away from a king tiger I put in the wrong place, but I did achieve a decisive victory.

I'm going to reload and redo the mission and aim to clear it without loosing any units, but now I know that I can get a DV on this map, and a lot more of what to do and what not to do.

So yeah, in a week or so I should have a play through of this mission that I'm satisfied with, my current go into is starting with 6.5K prestige and that you get about 4K (even at max soft cap) I should be able to repair damages fairly easily and do the thing I haven't done since back in '42 and fully over strength my thanks, those strength 15 King Tigers should be able to hopefully help me blast a path to victory!

Way to stick it out and get the job done, I am not sure I will be able to garner the Decisive on Manstein, if I make it this far, but I plan on giving it all I got thanks for giving me a possible strategy to implement.

goose_2 wrote:Way to stick it out and get the job done, I am not sure I will be able to garner the Decisive on Manstein, if I make it this far, but I plan on giving it all I got thanks for giving me a possible strategy to implement.

I'm only playing on Colonel, but under 1.20 rules, and the the soft cap makes it plenty hard enough, since there's no way you can convince me it was designed to work work the way it currently does, though that's a particular horse that isn't so much dead as has been reduced to a skeleton, then had the skeleton ground into dust.

Thanks for your feedback and I hope you find my post useful.

If I ever try to play through GC West I'm going to set the rules back to 1.14, soft cap is hard enough to deal with when you can have a 20K or more saved up from the early years to coast on, trying to go do it from scratch would give me nightmares upon nightmares upon nightmares!

1.2 brought in a whole load of other changes along with soft cap, although most of them made it harder rather than easier. You might be better off disabling soft cap (use Nico's mod through GME if you'd rather not edit games files) rather than changing a load of other features.

captainjack wrote:1.2 brought in a whole load of other changes along with soft cap, although most of them made it harder rather than easier. You might be better off disabling soft cap (use Nico's mod through GME if you'd rather not edit games files) rather than changing a load of other features.

The problem/issue with that approach is I own the game for iPad but and not on my computer, so I am not sure how easily I could download mods for it it let alone alter the game files.

Great post on your tactics, thanks for sharing - I'll keep it in mind when (if) I get there.

But... you played the entire GC on an iPad? Blimey, you must have some patience

Iwfan53 wrote: The problem/issue with that approach is I own the game for iPad but and not on my computer, so I am not sure how easily I could download mods for it it let alone alter the game files.

Mods require accesses to the file system, If your IOS version is earlier than 8.3 then you can get some access without jail breaking, and may be able to mod.

Iwfan53 wrote: I ended up loosing one airplane due to missing a mission objective space that caused the mission to drag on longer than it should have, and one infantry unit due to using them a sacrificial lamb to draw fire rather away from a king tiger I put in the wrong place, but I did achieve a decisive victory.

As long as the units lost does not include Rudel, one does not need to replay the scenario.
Berlin Redux is the only big battle left, and it is a puzzle scenario more than a major battle scenario.
The soviet army is larger than the one in Berlin, so slugging it out is fatal.

For hints/spoilers look at:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... ux#p645753

rubyjuno wrote:Great post on your tactics, thanks for sharing - I'll keep it in mind when (if) I get there.

But... you played the entire GC on an iPad? Blimey, you must have some patience

I have a really bad really long commute, but its easier to take it through public transportation than through driving, so I wind up with a lot of free time with no internet access and my ipad to keep me company. Not that this is the only time I play it, just one of the main times.

dalfrede wrote: Mods require accesses to the file system, If your IOS version is earlier than 8.3 then you can get some access without jail breaking, and may be able to mod.

I'm pretty sure I'm using a much more up to date version of IOS than that so I probably can't do it. If all else fails I'll use the sliders to set the player prestige to 200%, while I know soft cap means that at max soft cap I'll only be getting 40% of what I would normally get, that is still better than the 20% I've had to limp along with through the later years in the east. Is my math right on this one by the way?

dalfrede wrote:
As long as the units lost does not include Rudel, one does not need to replay the scenario.
Berlin Redux is the only big battle left, and it is a puzzle scenario more than a major battle scenario.
The soviet army is larger than the one in Berlin, so slugging it out is fatal.

For hints/spoilers look at:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... ux#p645753

Nah it was one of my fighters that got shot down by a bunch of enemy fighters flying in from not quite sure where late in the mission.

Either way its a moot point since sure enough I just managed to redo the mission (winning on turn 26 after doing a lot of careful unit shuffling) and not loose any units from my core. Sadly this seems to have lead to me having on 9.5K or so prestiege instead of the 10.5K I had the first time around either because of soft cap or because I did more repairs in the field this time around, doesn't really matter. It was more of a personal honor thing since I've been able to pull through a lot of missions (all the way back to like 43 or so maybe 42) without using any non recon units (in the sense of reloading the missions whenever I lost a unit, there have been a lot of reloads)... and I stopped using recon units once my guys have gotten enough heroes that I typically could have a three spot range tank with every one of my attack groups.

That said, I'll be perfectly fine if I end up loosing some units in Berlin Redux, because you know sometimes the secondary lead has to serve as ablative armor, I mean die heroically so that the hero can save the day, or at least make the day marginally less ruined.

Also what you said (though I'm not looking at the link and have no intention to until I DV it on my own) more or less confirms what I figured from the mission briefing. One group holds the command bunker, one groups holds the south eastern airfields so my planes don't run out of fuel and crash, everyone else charge Wusterhausen like Aragorn taking on the Black Gate, then swing round and hit Erkner and Rudersdorf, with possible deviations on other later attempts involving a group trying to force the Landwehrkanal in the south east before passing across the spree river in order to hit the latter two targets earlier on.

Don't give me too much or too direct feedack on the above since I want to discover the joy of the mission for myself.

Anyway, come this weekend I'll be putting "Hearts of Iron" by Sabaton on endless replay and having a go of it.

rubyjuno wrote:Great post on your tactics, thanks for sharing - I'll keep it in mind when (if) I get there.

But... you played the entire GC on an iPad? Blimey, you must have some patience

I am also playing the GC on iPad. Why should that require patience? PC is perhaps the best game ever on iPad in my humble opinion. It competes with FIFA 14 (15 and onward became ‘free’, as in you have to either slug it out or pay-to-win), the Baldur’s Gate series and the XCOM games.

The turn-based gameplay, the sheer size of the content, the attention to detail - PC is a juggernaut! The biggest drawback for most people is probably its complexity. I have shown it to my stepson and he played it twice before shelving it.

One thing that could make the game more convenient would be a less time consuming deployment phase. I don’t know how that should be built, but it would be nice to deploy faster.

I agree that Panzer Corps is the best game ever released on iPad - I bought an iPad 2 (used from eBay) just to play it and use the iPad for nothing else. I found the iPad too unwieldy to hold so got rid of it and bought an iPad mini which was much easier to hold but of course has a smaller screen. I have a Sony tablet that is vastly superior to the iPad which makes it frustrating (but understandable because of piracy) that Panzer Corps is not available on Android. Using the touch screen for everything on the iPad isn't as intuitive as using a mouse/touch-pad on a PC/laptop as it's not always obvious what you need to do to achieve something. Another problem is that the store section is useless. DLCs that have been bought don't show up, DLCs that HAVEN't been bought show up as bought but can't be played (because I haven't bought them), meaning that I can't play them but I can't buy them to play either. Yes. I've sought answers on the assistance forums and by emailing support but after suggesting a couple of things that don't work they give up.

Finally, like all the best games, Panzer Corps is designed and meant to be played on a PC (or laptop). Does my rant explain why you must have a lot of patience

My iPad languishes in a drawer, unused for as long as I can remember