Another round of Second Front

[Xin Yu]

Last month started playing SF again but stopped at turn 8 (captured all targets of part I). Since it's been a long time, yesterday I started all over again and played till turn 3 (occupied 7 targets and rush-built the Mulberry wonder which should take effect on turn 4). Seems that by turn 5 all targets can be reached.

Some tactics:

Some cities have no anti-air units. Use bombers to clear the cities then land rangers/commandos to occupy them.

For other cities, use Combat engineers to kill the blockhaus/15cm navy battery, then use 15cm shells to get rid of the other defending units, then use rangers/commandos to occupy the cities (all must be finished in the same turn). This is extremely effective against Point du Hoc (use the rangers' 2/3 attack to kill the shells).

Cruisers can bombard the two 210mm battery cities and some anti-air units on the shore. However you need to protect the cruisers by forming a circle of LCVPs around them. Send the LCVPS there first to check for drift mines. Drift mines needs to be cleared (sacrefice LCVPS) before the attack.

US infantry and British infantry units are useless . Rather than send them to France, head back to England and disband them there for building new armors. Do it immediately on turn 2 so your armor units in England can reach France faster.

Only use bombers, crocodiles (part I only), combat engineers, heavy artilleries, and 105mms to attack cities (Other units are close to useless). It is very important to keep those units alive or you'll lose momentum in attack.

Churchill and firefly are very good in defense. Sherman and M3 are second to them. Put those units in front cities as soon as you occupy them. Churchill is a bit slow though .

Pay attention to the timeline for occupying the cities. If you get the cities too early or too late you don't get the helping technology. However I only follow the timeline up to part IV since I expect to get the job done by part V.

Divide your troops into three groups.
Army group A should land on La Madeleine (after you occupy the city a barbware will disappear so you can land easily) and push to north then to west. Occupy Cherburg as early as you can. You get the lighthouse wonder, which will be very useful in part IV. This landing point is close to England so put less troops here (reinforcements will arrive soon).

Army groupB should land on Arromanches and push to southwest. You can go all the way to the other shore if you avoid to attack certain bunker cities.

Army group C should land on Langrune/Ouistreham and push eastward. Bypass Caen and get to the rear of the enemy. Each turn, send a fighter to this direction in front of your troops so that your land units will not be picked up by enemy planes.

The enemy cities facing Vierville s/Mer, St. Laurem, and Colleville are heavily defended. Just send a few troops to occupy the beach cities and defend them well. Do not try to attack from there.

There is no immediate need for fuel caravans. Build caravans with other commodities and get a lot of money by trading with Cherburg/Le Havre. You need to build expensive barracks, and city walls are not cheap after part I. Besides, you need a lot of money to bribe Wittman .

[Bullwinkle]

It looks like this was the last post on Second Front strategy.

I love this scenario. I'm pretty new to these user-created scenarios--I've only played a very few of them--but this one is sensational.

On my third full try, I've finally been able to take all of the objectives well before the Mortain Offensive takes place (on turn 65, and I think I could easily cut that by ten moves, knowing what I now know). Having eliminated all three Axis civs, I expected the game to end, but it doesn't. Is this normal? Are we expected to deal with the Mortain Offensive anyway--that is, do I have to keep playing to the bitter end, to evaluate my score? Or, once you've taken all axis cities, can the Mortain Offensive still take place (that is, does the enemy require a city for the offensive to begin?)

Anyway, I just want to affirm certain thoughts people have had about strategy in this scenario, as well as offer some of my own.

1. In my own opinion, there's only two phase-based bonuses worth worrying about. One is capturing the Carpiquet airfield on time (phase 4), and the other is taking out the beach fortification in phase 1 (that guarantees a mess of engineers a little later). Other than this, I disagree with sticking to the historical timetable. Indeed, I have noticed that places like Caen, Cherbourg and (especially) St. Lo and Coutances are invariably much more difficult to take if you are not about two phases ahead of the historical schedule when you take them.

2. I agree with Xin Wu that attacking the "Le Havre-Calais" part of the map very early is excellent strategy, though I do it completely without gliders. Until the last axis move of phase 6, v1s are not so aggressive that they attack destroyers. Thus, your destroyers can form Xin's doughnuts around troop ships for chaining units into the region. Etretat is lightly defended, and artillery can unload directly next to it, hit it and take it immediately. I start with an expeditionary force of 24 units at once. It can take care of itself for many turns because the area is so lightly defended. This force can easily take Le Havre and most of the cities near it. Later (and you must get this done before the end of phase 6), you'll need more artillery to take out the two command posts that are inside the two northernmost coastal cities in the area--the most eastern of the two being where the v1s pile up during phases 1 to 6 (when they are not so aggressive). If you do get to that city in time you'll need a pretty large number of high movement armoured units to kill the ridiculous number of v1s in that city.

3. But once this is done, your entire "army group northeast" can descend on the easternmost edge of the map. By that time, you should have taken cities to the east and south of Caen and after that there's not much terrain to prevent a pretty savage coordinated attack by the army group northeast and your troops coming out of the Caen region on the entire eastern third of the map. It is my experience that this part of the map folds up like a house of cards under such an assault.

4. One more note about this particular part of the strategy. By that time, you should be in the position of earning about 1000 or so gold per turn AND you should also be in a position to sell USMVs in the cities left behind at 500 gold a pop. As Xin eluded to in his comment about bribing Whittman, this is the phase of the battle where you want to only bomb those Tigers and Jagdpanthers which your recon units cannot easily get to (to bribe them). They aren't really that expensive to bribe (about 500 gold or less per pop for me at that point). The Jagdpanthers are awesome city busters...after I'd bribed about six of them my Caen sector armies simply went east like a hot knife through butter.

5. On the cheapness of bribing units, this of course seems to depend how far units are from the headquarters city. Headquarters starts in Le Havre. Once it falls, the AI moved it to the center of the board--cities around Villers-Bocage. One of the things I believe in is driving fast and hard through the center of the board, because once I had taken out the headquarters city in this central area about three times, it got moved to the extreme west (Coutances). What this means, of course, is that from that time onward the units in the eastern region are very cheap to bribe (think of all those Tigers and Jagdpanthers). In general, I don't know whether this is what always happens, but dividing the German forces into an eastern and western region simply forces the German to put headquarters in one region or the other, meaning that the units in the remaining region will be very easy to bribe.

6. I think Caen can be taken early, and at relatively low cost, very early. The secrets are surveillance, patience, aircover and zoc-pin-downs. You simply watch Caen with recon units, waiting for the turn when all of the armour (except motorized infantry) has left the city on some silly errand. Then put a veteran infantry on every urban square around Caen, using your recon units to inflitrate through zoc, and fortify them. On the same turn, use commandos and rangers and terrain to do zoc-pin-downs of all the German armor that might come back. On the following turn, use fighters and terrain to pin down the German armor for another turn, and move a bunch of mostly veteran artillery into the urban squares where your infantry is fortifying--say six or eight of them. On the following turn, Caen is yours. It's obviously much easier to pull this off before Panthers have arrived on the scene, and that's when I want to get it done. This large-city-killing technique works like a charm until Panthers show up.

7. This is one reason why taking St. Lo well before its historical death time is so much easier than doing it later. After (I think) the end of phase 6, St. Lo starts getting a pair of Panthers practically every turn, plus a veritable herd of 7th army regulars. I think this occurs right after the "Germans develop 2nd SS panzer" event. Forget about any cheap or quick conquest of St. Lo after that. Footnote: If you take St. Lo, the same troop buildup seems to switch over to Coutances. It took me a highly concentrated couple of turns of massive air raids to get into Coutances after that. Therefore, if I play again, I will try to coordinate a simultaneous attack on Coutances and St. Lo before the 2nd SS Panzer event.

8. I'm not as hot on disbanding infanty as Xin is. I like my veteran infantry for various purposes--especially providing cover and zoc-pin-downs for the advance of artillery. On the other hand, I believe in disbanding almost all green infantry units in Brighton and then buying artillery every damn turn. Until I can bribe the Jagdpanthers and Tigers easily, heavy artillery is, quite simply, the only way to proceed. I want to make sure that I have more of it than I need almost everywhere.

9. I think there is a part of the German defenses that should simply be ignored until the bitter end. This is the western half of the middle American beach. You know, that mess of marshes, cities on rivers with command posts (!) (god only knows why Formigny is important), blockhausen and so forth. I simply go around this stuff, striking south from Carentan and Southwest from Bayeaux (spelling?), encircling St. Lo. Later you can worry about taking out those last few cities, after the "general panic" event has been achieved. Hell I was in St. Malo before I took Formigny. The only important thing here is to take out that 210 mm battery sitting on the cliffs at the western end of the beach, which (I believe) gives you a pile of new engineers a little down the road.

Footnote to 9: There is actually a silver lining to leaving this German area alone: It is a great place to turn your arriving green infantry into veterns because the AI continually sends infantry out of this area into the grass and marsh squares to the north and northeast of St. Lo. These are great sitting ducks for your green infantry to get some experience before heading south.

10. Speaking of St. Malo. I try to take Cherbourg before the ridiculous pile-up of infantry begins there, and as soon as I do, I rush build a liberty ship in one of the ports on the western side of the peninsula. A single liberty ship is a devastating weapon here, allowing you to do a series of largely unopposed conquests all the way down to Brittany while the AI is (ridiculously) piling everything it has into Coutances or other points north.

Anyway. An incredible scenario that kept me thinking almost all the time. Lots of interesting tactical problems to solve. I'll bet it's sharpened my tactical Civ skills 100%. My hat is off to Captain Nemo.

[Bullwinkle]

Ooops, I said "Xin Wu" up there. My apologies to Xin Yu.

[Case]

I'm not all that convinced of the fun in beating the scenario's game engine.
Still, I was rather pleased with myself when I was way ahead of the historical schedule in SF version 1.0 (then Nemo had to go and make a harder version )

BTW, how did you find this old thread? I thought that the seach search function had been disabled...

edit: Hooray, I'm 9/10th of the way to being a king