Well as promised, I have had a look at "A World Divided", Thygo's choice for a PBEM. I think it would be a go-er.
Above you can see my second attempt at playing as Nazi Germany. (My second after reading the production rules, cos I totally stuffed those the first time around.) I have just formed Vichy France and have just found an unescorted convoy to attack. There has been a pro-Allied coup in Yugoslavia which troubles me greatly, but as it was announced with a cool video off the happy general who has deposed Prince Paul, I forgave it completely.
Combat is relatively straightforward - you move lots of your boys into their boys club house and roll a die. Well, although there actually are dice thrown in the game, you do not get to throw them, but you get told the bad news afterwards. (Note below that commander Brendan Mahoney was in charge of the air defence of the German infantry and could not do better than a two!)
The rules are complex on how combat is calculated, but it is inspired by scissor-paper-stone. Infantry is good against artillery which is good against armour which is good against infantry, and ditto for ships and planes. Getting certain combinations gives your bonuses, and I can see that this is where we will do a lot of learning as we play.
Your spies do help by giving your an overall view of what is happening to your entire armed services and your opponents:
You can see that with the Fall of France, although I took more losses in the battle above, I managed to destroy (second column) 25 infantry, 13 milita, 4 artillery, 3 flak, a fighter and two tactical bombers, although some of those were from Poland. The first column is interesting - these are damaged units. Effectively they lose a step, and then they run home and get repaired in the next production turn. So I can now see that for the first time in the game, the Wehrmacht is bigger than the allied forces:
(Well, except for the navy of course - the last row of air units represent carrier based aircraft.)
The second column in this display shows production, which is done as the standard spiral. Annoyingly, you do not just pay once to put a unit on the spiral and then happily wait for Christmas morning. You have to pay for it every turn it is on the spiral. This means that this turn, I will have to pause one of the goodies to pay for my various repairs.
You can see in window 1941 there is a paused armour and a heavy bomber. I think I have to pause the Bismark too, to get rid of the minus 1 next to the factory. The negative number next to the people symbol is not a problem (I think) as I have a big pool of young men willing to serve the fatherland. The little military icons at the bottom of each square shows when I would get something if I started building it now.
I can look at the value of each of my provinces from the province screen. Note that I have a bit of a partisan problem (right column) in Poland and the Low Countries, but as their race is inferior, it is not surprising that they do not know what is good for them.
The big trouble with this game is the huge number of options you have. If Paul were playing, it would be easier, I would just keep attacking him. As he is not, I am wonder what I need to do now to be able to deal with USSR and USA when they come knocking. So I am investing in my armed forces and in my airforce, so that I will at least be able to deal with the USSR.
As you can see, there are a lot more areas that I can research that I have the resources in research. The benefit of research is that it does not use manpower (in game terms) so once you have built your lot for the current recruiting pool, you put the rest into supplies and research. (Yes Paul, in this game you should buy supplies for your troops to fight with. However the game has a "ignore supplies" option just for you!)
Once interesting place you can spend your supplies on is intelligence and espionage.
The top row is your anti-espionage service, that keeps other spies at bay. Stalin's purge gives him a clear lead here. Next is the "SIGINT" rating, showing how much effort is going into knowing what the enemy will do, before they do it, giving you combat shifts. The remaining columns are just for espionage. Note Stalin's focus on what the Nazis are up to. These spies can steal research and can tell you what the other side is researching:
So what will I do next. Well, the great thing about the game rules (182 pages in PDF) is that 20 pages at the end is dedicated to what strategy each power might try. They suggest Germany can take Alexandria, if it really wants to, and if it does super research on torpedoes and subs, it can destroy the Western Alliance's shipping. Interesting.
This time, I am going to try my favourite WW2 Nazi strategy and take out Spain and then Gibraltar, to give me a Fascist Sea to play in. I look forward to Thygs coming on board so we can try different scenarios ourselves.
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