Well, I was very fortunate. I had a very good Pearl Harbor attack, and I had invaded Midway with 6 infantry with the idea that if I did well enough that I would follow up with an invasion of Hawaii. Next turn, I did just that, as my opponent didn’t have anything to fly to Hawaii, and didn’t have a transport to ferry anything there. After I took Hawaii, it was sort of a case of “Now what?” I took the West Coast of the USA for a turn, but of course didn’t hold it. But I was strategically redeploying a lot of stuff to Hawaii to keep pressure on him, hoping to distract him from Germany. He was doing pretty well against Germany and wanted to keep the pressure on them, and so he tried to cut things close with Japan as to keep pounding Germany. At the cost of a CV and some fighters I sunk 2 carriers, a BB, 2 CA’s, and a DD (that’s in addition to Pearl Harbor – I don’t remember what I sank there) and shot down a lot of planes in the vicinity of the west coast. I took Dutch Harbor, and then the turn after that I got Western Canada. At that point I had to pull back; he had built a lot of planes and had two CV’s on the West Coast with 2 more coming off the ways, so things were about to get very unhealthy for me. I was able to strat 10 infantry to Dutch Harbor, and had a good stack of infantry with fighters at Hawaii, plus a large fleet there as well. I also took all of the other island victory points and the Philippines, and also Australia, so I was in very good shape in the Pacific.
In Europe I ran wild with Italy again and took the Suez and Iraq, as well as Gibraltar. He took Gibraltar back, but then I took it back the next turn. This kept Italy safe, but all of the amphibious invasions I was making meant that I wasn’t building very much.
Where I almost blew it was with Germany. My opponent likes to build a lot of aircraft as Britain at the expense of ground troops. This has happened the last three games, and the lack of ground troops always tempts me into invading England. I took London and Wales again this game, but couldn’t push him the rest of the way out of England, and he wound up taking it back. This hurt him and caused him to neglect Africa since he had bigger problems (which allowed Italy to go crazy), but in the end all of the resources I used in the England campaign really hurt me when he finally pushed me out. I wasn’t strong enough on the Russian front and the attrition there slowly wore me down. What really hurt was Russia having air superiority (I lost a lot of aircraft in the England adventure).
I wound up winning on points in Winter 1943-44. I was going to be able to take Burma and India fairly easily with Japan and he wasn’t going to be able to come up with 2 points to take back from me to save the game, so we called it there. It was a very close game though – another turn or two would have just about done it for Germany. I might have been able to hang on as Japan to the end given how much ground he would have had to make up, but it wouldn’t have been fun.
Lest anyone think poorly of my opponent, let me say that overall he played well. He does very well playing Russia. He didn’t do anything spectacular with Russia – he just kept applying constant and steady pressure, knowing that he was going to be able to wear me down – and he did. In this game he just fell into a sort of “tunnel vision” with the Western Allies concerning Germany, and tried to cut things close in trying to keep the pressure on them. He lost the West Coast when my last infantry hit and his missed. He of course pushed me out pretty quickly. While all of this was going on he was able to land in France in Spring 1943 and I never did get him back out. I think I’m going to have to adjust my strategy and stop letting myself be tempted by the cliffs of Dover – the last two games I’ve lost too many units I can’t afford to lose and it’s cost me later on. It’s just when you see London with a bunch of aircraft but only two infantry it’s hard to resist…
I don’t know if I’ll ever get to play any of you guys, but if you do you will probably want to have some sort of intervention group to keep me from going after England…
I’m going to try to convince him to use the optional aircraft rules so that aircraft block supply through a sea zone – that would make London a much tougher invasion to pull off. I also want to try the airbases out to see how they work – in our recent games we’ve both had circumstances where we’ve had ridiculous stacks of aircraft where in reality they never would have fit.
I still think that something isn’t quite right with fleets concerning supply. He had a fleet out in the Central Pacific while I was at Hawaii, and it just doesn’t seem right that a US fleet can move around and fight so freely when their supply line is cut off.
Oh well – time to tear it all down and set it up again for next game.
Getting back to my original question – I’m fine if Western Canada only connects to the Western US. Does that mean that Eastern Canada connects to both the Eastern US and Central US? The rules say that eastern and western Canada are connected, which means that you have a country with 2 territories connected to one with 3 territories. I’m sure that it will very rarely be an issue, but I do think this is one you should get locked down.
