(https://i.imgur.com/CgGzt6F.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/vp7Qks5.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/Q6LTNnG.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/4dbBswC.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/XMxU4wh.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/yKxCr9L.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/rZmODcb.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/sDTfSwT.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/ibi97lX.png)
The displayed part of the last report doesn't particularly suggest it, so it might just be that we both got really !LUCKY!, but there's a lot of radiation around both of us.
For my part, I've made this wonderful map of Hoboken as it looked at the beginning of its titanic struggle against the evil Galactic Empire Republic:
(https://i.imgur.com/fJUhb5g.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/A7k0WJL.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/tI0AMn9.png)
His lower capability has meant he's a lot slower to reach his potential, but 41 Charisma is respectable enough that I was willing to stick with the primadonna from turn 1 onwards. He's been slow to develop, but he's gotten to a pretty imposing level of swag.
For the record, Air Units do appear to have an HQ Power stat that decreases if you move the Air HQ far away from them- which affects how strongly commander bonuses apply. This is how regular OHQs work too- I don't remember them having an effect on logistics.
Yeah, makes sense. That question was again me not doing my due diligence in checking the basics. See, I thought Air OHQs were actually Air SHQs.
I suppose there's no harm in linking this utter tool's social media profile:
That's pretty much identical to my guy:
(https://i.imgur.com/5omWcyb.png)
Cap II, not III.
(https://i.imgur.com/3Of28nr.png)
Seriously, though. Talk about underwhelming. I saw your GR nuke and was picturing a nuclear holocaust of my precious armies. But it really is a one off attack with just the stats it has listed. 900 hard and 700 soft attack is not much, really. Killed nothing, and added a measly 200 rads to the hex. On our world that's considered a healthy minimum.
Welp. Soon there won't be much left worth defending in Gapwhite - bunker or no bunker.
Also:
(https://i.imgur.com/dadz3rg.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/VWd1Z44.png)
I also got the tech that I was whining that I shouldn't have studied Missiles to get sooner, but that still needs prototyped before I can deploy it.
For perspective, and mostly for the benefit of any peanut gallery that might exist, these are the prior models. It kinda underscores how badly we've been neglecting a number of our units WRT modernization.
(https://i.imgur.com/iHMBYWF.png)
(and OF COURSE my screenshot includes a tooltip. Well, at least it's not covering anything...)
I actually have my initial economic director still refusing to die on the frontlines. His happiness constantly hovers around mid-40s, but doesn't ever quite reach the rebellion levels. Over the years of fighting he's become half-decent for a Cap I dude.
The game might be wrapping up. Or maybe just slowing down considerably. We'll see.
In the meantime, considering how I'm sure by now we both have pretty much perfect enough recon on all crucial areas, I see no reason not to share the state of the map on turn 82 as seen by the League of Hoboken:
(https://i.imgur.com/gUwZrwo.jpg)
The whole expansion can be seen in the screenshots here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZSfiMiyRDLIZU9Dfhpt0oQBxzWGwEZn-/view?usp=sharing
The front line seems to have collapsed and Gapwhite has fallen. I don't think there's much of a point in continuing, unless you have a couple fresh corps lying in wait somewhere:
(https://i.imgur.com/VtutWgV.png)
Even if you do manage to break through with some of these forces, I don't see a whole lot of new units appearing on the front, while I can at this stage replenish all losses and raise a new brigade with independent attachments each turn. It's just a matter of time before you get swamped.
I agree there's little point in continuing, though I'd point out at this point I was raising a Corps a turn. It wasn't sustainable, certainly, and I didn't have the machinery to put them all in heavy battledress, but about 10 turns too late I put my recruitment on a proper wartime footing and finally fixed my earlier problems where I was running out of recruits every turn. I also should have set up a seperate SHQ in Gapwhite 2 turns earlier than I did - if I'd've even done it the turn before my final one, it would have made capturing the city a bloody affair instead of an easy mop-up operation overrunning exhausted and depleted units.
I also do wonder how quad-laser tanks would have fared on offense against your big infantry formations, but it was too little, too late at this point. Probably my best bet would have been making low-armor nuke RPG units that I could crank out en mass, but even then I'd sold off too much of my rad reserves for that to be sustainable either. The credit disparity from water sales hurt me more than I appreciated in the end.
There's a lot of things I could say, but for now I'll post my AAR and map gif. The AAR started out as a narrative and quickly degenerated into notes that could be turned into a narrative but never were. Even so, it's 8.3k words so I'll post a pastebin link for it.
(https://i.imgur.com/bxT8GxX.gif)
The history of the rise and fall of the Republic of Ferrohead:
https://pastebin.com/rYhaVFNC
Good old IrfanView. Each time I get a new system I neglect to install it, but it inevitably proves invaluable.
I did not keep notes as I played, mostly because I had no good idea on how to organise it sensibly. But here's at least my progress with some annotations:
(https://imgur.com/IYhcGau.gif)
Here's some random observations from looking at both our save files:
It looks like I had a good couple thousand+ headway in industrial capacity, even accounting for the two cities you've lost. It meant I >could< sacrifice some thousands to build the road through the mostly low, but extensive mountains. The late city gains must have hurt you here.
The infantry designs on my side, apart from being somewhat better structurally (much better in case of machineguns - I rolled 123 right off the bat), must have enjoyed the linear techs since much earlier. I went for applied science earlier, and with better budget than I normally would, because the rng gave me the sensei card from the fate pack, and the guy was too good to leave idling. Hence the high unit stats all around.
You seem to have sunk quite a bit of BPs into staff council tasks that I completely ignored. I only founded that council sometime during the final dozen turns or so, and was using them almost purely for stratagems - since I had enough to go around, each turn I'd start by giving my troops attack stratagems, and end it by switching them all to defence.
I don't know, it's possible customising formations and operationalising new ones could have paid off in the long run, but - as with everything else - time proved not to be on your side.
My cabinet was super happy all the time, yours less so. It's the first game I saw them this elated, too. This must have relatively drained some BPs from your council tasks.
I found artillery to be mostly useless unless massed - individual battalions or even a couple did not seem to do much of any damage. This seems to apply to your rockets/missiles too.
But a couple divisions of 300mm howitzers targetting a single hex were enough to punch through even your high-tech, entrenched defences. They were doing the main job in making my breakthroughs. I wonder how it would look like had you invested in numerous counter batteries rather than the battledress infantry.
The planes you've built were effective, but IMO easily countered. Sure, good flak guns are expensive as hell (1000 industry and metal per battalion here), but I only ever needed a few to cover all crucial points. And the shit fighters I built seem to have started to make short work of your better planes. Again, it looks like numbers matter a lot here - 30 planes = meh, 90 = death.
It also looks like I was churning out new SHQs much, much more rapidly. If I'm seeing this right, your final save has 4 brigades (maybe another 4 were lost in the sieges?). I had 20-ish. Around 15 when the fighting started, I think. This focus on manpower would explain the headstart with conquests. Certainly with land area.
What was your bottleneck here? Food, maybe? (I wonder how much the food bonus from meritocracy bootstrapped my army - I never once >had< to build a farm to feed the troops during the game).
The constant offensives were draining my fuel reserves something fierce. This final-turn assault alone resulted in -6k after production. At this rate I'd be looking at the bottom of the barrel in maybe three-four turns. Maybe a bit longer with extra oil drills. You holding the line for that much longer could have resulted in me losing the initiative for the foreseeable future.
And of course the water bonanza did not hurt me (but I don't think it mattered that much in the end).
All in all, it does look like you were caught fighting maybe a dozen turns before you were ready. That such a small delay in catching up can have such large consequences raises questions on how to best balance these matches. I'm thinking, more than two players might be necessary for a balanced game so that diplomacy acts as an equaliser (but then again, that'd be a slooow PBEM).
- Overall, your pre-game concern that one of us would lose from uneven minor regime distribution was valid. You just plain had more and easier access to expansion than I did. I'm not sure there's really any good way to fix this short of having an extremely flat planet that's totally covered with minors or any other sort of planet that basically has no minors.
I don't know, maybe keeping majors around would have worked better? In that they are a bit harder to take in stride.
- IDK how you managed to do as well as you did with that terrible Supreme Command Council director you had. Yours looked at least as bad as the one I started with, and I spent the first 2-3 turns getting rid of mine... and I was still starved for PP the whole game despite a high Democracy profile. Not getting rid of my Econ director was also a big mistake; had I gotten Heavy Industry sooner, the additional Heavy Battledress units that would have translated to would have made a very large impact. Having said that, the RNG would have likely been different and I'd probably not have gotten HBd...
I... have completely forgotten how terribad he is. And I was struggling with low PP until the late game. Not least because of me wasting those on unification attempts. Had I realised he's to blame I'd fire him on the spot. I even had a CapV administrator from some scrap card idling as an advisor. And there I was praying for the democracy bonuses to finally trigger for half of the game. Doh.
And I think I didn't want to play propose client because of what I saw as a high chance of critical failure lowering relations and making the whole thing even harder to achieve. And as you may be able to see in the gif, the previous two joined me so quickly that my expectations of success were high. Alas.
(https://i.imgur.com/SOQctEL.png)
My assault guns were monsters. They were also the only significantly above-average armored vehicle I designed all game (next best two were 105 Heavy Tanks and my second take on APCs), and they were one of the few who didn't start out in the low 90s or below and require multiple redesigns to be even close to average. They also suffered from the same lack of refinement as the rest of my armies - RNG did not like my Applied Science director.
I really did want to bomb out your supply lines, and given what hell I played on my own logistics immediately before your line hit mine, I should have had it fresh in my mind. Your truck stations were just outside the range of my bombers, though, and my thinking was too rigid to build a forward airbase or redesign the bombers to eek out a few more hexes range. The other problem my air forces suffered was very thematic - our love affair with technology meant that as soon as we could build rockets, we basically forgot low-tech soft attack options even existed, and built almost nothing but hard attack options that fared poorly against your massed infantry in rough terrain. But if I had tweaked my designs, built a forward airbase, and waited until I had massed bomber wings to launch an attack, I probably could have done heavy logistic damage. Instead, I waffled and tried to do everything at once w/o going all-in on anything except technologically-derived hubris.