good game, very fun and fast pace indeed!
yah that first round was massive for germany, and desperately needed. pretty sure without such a result i would’ve been toast. in fact, to be honest, i’m quite surprised you threw in the towel on this one, but i do understand your rationale for sure, and of course such a massive loss in egypt is very demoralizing.
at this point in the game, japan was really hurting after that naval disaster…i was worried you’d swing that retreating navy over to the pac and just absolutely overwhelm japan…meanwhile holding tight with russia while the allies rebuilt on the other side. however, you are absolutely right about africa, but even the med would reopen for the axis…now that i own egypt, i could do some pretty nasty things like drop a sub in 81 to eliminate a UK pac NO, drop a dd there as well to scatter your subs and eliminate the med convoy, rush and grab s.africa and pretty much all of africa as you said, and maybe even retake some of the med islands. all the while pushing back the russians with the massive air and still powerful armies in the north and south of moscow.
thank you for the compliments on my early japanese play, but from my perspective, i was kicking myself the whole game after i allowed china to come back alive! the game got unnecessarily difficult for me over there with a combined powerhouse of china and UK stacks. nonetheless, i do agree that my early bullying and fist-shaking at anzac did force it to turtle up and did force america to focus almost exclusively in the pac, helping the euro axis out quite substantially. so it was in my opinion a mixed result.
very interesting game, especially the ending with those two massive battles on both sides of the board.
let me know whenever you’re down for a rematch.
@nerquen:
@axis-dominion:
Thought just had occurred to me, I eliminated 40 allied air units in that one battle. Wow that’s quite impressive.
O yes, 41 actually,
I believe this is the game deciding battle. Maybe if the battle went about average we could still have a game on. As you said, if you lost that battle, Germany would have very hard times, US/UK would start pushing them out off MED area and Ruskies would be free to go to full offensive. But now it looks really hopeless for Allies. 13 armor and 23 planes surviving is crazy. Russia could go on a very short offensive but with your 23 planes you can easily force them back home, I thought of a Russian suicide, to try to liberate MED & Egypt with Ruskies and give up Moscow but looks like it won’t work, Axis already have 70 units south of Volgograd and 2 factories there… by the time my slow units that don’t have much offensive power got there you would be pushing me back and Moscow burned down. Also I don’t have any match to your 13 armor in Egypt in whole Africa region… if you wanted you could turn whole Africa gray very fast.
Very well played from your side I must say, you have shown me that Germany can be a real monster in BM game as well. Allies had quite some extra cash compared to vanilla game but failed to utilize it into any real offensive in either theater. And being just on defense everywhere does not work long term. Once Germany is able to start building bombers it is a downhill spiral for Allies. At the game start, I thought I have to open west front with Germany soon, but your Japan opening forced me to put almost full US attention to Pacific just to prevent Sydney falling early. Sure, China got a ride as a result… but you managed to keep them relatively under control without causing much problems. But importantly all the US investments into Pacific were badly missing in Europe and Germany got going pretty hard. I also liked your Italian dedication to can opening mechs/armor. I was surprised how much time it actually took me to get control of MED sea given Italian 0 investments into the waters.
In retrospect, maybe I should have let you have Sydney early, I would have to give it a second thought. The thing I was worried about though is that once Sydney is fallen Pacific victory is a big threat especially if EuroAxis send air/mechanized units towards India…
Still the game seems to be very well balanced, the Egypt battle was not that far from a coin flip. I just could not believe you got 53 hits in the 1st round in Egypt. The chance to get 53 or more hits there was only ~ 0.2% (20 in 10 000 runs). Anyway, thanks for a fun fast game!