Heil, glorious Codex! Today we shall be beginning one of the TBS classics: Panzer General. In the name of the Reich we will (hopefully) conquer Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France, England, the USSR, and finally invade America itself. If we fail to achieve a major victory in France, we may also have to take either the Balkans or go into North Africa and the Middle East.
For my first LP, I had wanted to do a solo wild mage BG2 runthrough, but then we had two excellent BG LPs so now I give you games of strategy instead of roleplaying.
Also if this LP is a success I may make one of some Allied General campaigns, too. At least the Russian one (as it is ridiculously difficult).
Anyways, let's fire this bro up:
Playing on hard cuz we ain't no bitch
Doing the 39 campaign, gotta forge our own destiny
Sounds easy, just need to run and gun some silly Polacks.
And here we are, the game screen. For some reason I decided to move a guy before taking the first screenshot (our infantry guy in the north). Anyways, the basics of this game are pretty simple, move along hexes, each unit has a set movement and spotting. Running into an enemy that you havent spotted yet while moving will give them a big bonus to fighting you, so moving ahead carefully (but not slowly!) is important. So yeah with that first move I was just talking about we uncovered this cavalry guy to the north that you can barely see.
We move our other infantry guy up there and attack the sunvabitch.
Here I guess is a good place to explain the combat. Combat is based on a number of things, especially unit type. Attack scores are broken up into 4 different scores: soft attack, hard attack, air attack, and naval attack. Soft and hard attack are what concerns land battles. Every unit is either a “soft” target (e.g. infantry, most artillery, etc) or a “hard” target (tanks, recon, etc). Thus, when fighting a battle, your troops only use the attack they have for the enemy's unit type. Since this first attack is infantry against cavalry (which count as infantry in this game), both will be using their soft attack.
Hard and soft types are also important for city-based combat, where infantry get nice bonuses against hard units, meaning infantry are pretty necessary. Also, infantry are better in forests and rough terrain. The game really forces you into a combined arms strategy of infantry, tanks, planes, and artillery.
Units also have defense scores, ground defense and air defense are split up. This also goes into combat considerations.
Initiative is an incredibly important score, because it determines who will fire first in combat. Tanks especially have very high initiative scores.
Now about entrenchment. A unit gets entrenched for not moving, and his entrenchment will increase for every turn he stays in the same hex. Certain hexes, like fortifications, increase entrenchment. Getting attacked (by any source, land, sea, air, artillery) will lower entrenchment. The main advantage to entrenchment is that your unit fights better (especially important is increased initiative) and has a higher chance of getting “rugged defense”...which basically means the unit takes little damage and deals out a ton during the attack.
Finally to actual combat. In combat the first thing that will be decided is initiative (there are 3 possible outcomes: one of the two goes first, or they both go at the same time). When this happens, 2 things can happen: part of the unit can be killed, and the unit can be suppressed (or of course, nothing at all could happen). Suppression basically means no casualties are taken (the unit's strength doesn't decrease), but those guys are done for the current fight. If a unit's strength goes to 0, he dies, if his strength minus his suppression is 0 (or less...i don't think it can be less but I'll just cover my ass in case) he will retreat in the opposite direction he was attacked from. If there is nowhere to retreat, he will surrender (die).
Notice that on the bottom of the screen it tells us the expected outcome of the upcoming fight. Supposedly we should lose 3 and the enemy should lose 6. These predicted outcomes are not something you should have a lot of faith in. They do help you to notice if you will overpower or get overpowered by someone, but most of the time they are just general ideas of how the fight is going to go, and we will see me rage many a time throughout the course of this LP when the outcome is nowhere near what was expected. Anyhow let us press the attack!
So basically, we went first, killed 6 of his guys and suppressed 4, so the cavalry retreated. The natural reaction to seeing this is “fuck year, we wrecked them!” but this actually wasn't the most desirable outcome. Because the cavalry retreated, they will be able to take replacements on their turn, and be back to 10 combat strength for just a bit of prestige (basically money). Had he not retreated, he would not have been able to take full replacements, and would likely have spent his turn retreating or taking just a couple replacements.
Anyways, it was a good enough outcome that I'm certainly not complaining.
Now we shall take on the other cavalry, this time using our glorious panzers. We start with a IID
The expected outcome occurred! Now let's get'em with some infantry.
Beat the shit out of them!
Moving some guys up. Note we put the artillery in a truck, because otherwise it can only move 1 hex per turn, which is fucking balls. Because we moved in the truck, he ends the turn in the truck, which can be dangerous. If I hadn't played this map about 5 million times I probably wouldn't have put him up there, undefended, in the forest. But I have, so I know he'll be fine.
Moving our guys to the south.
OK, we can't move anyone else. Time to buy some shit.
Note, along the right side, you can see all the stats I was talking about earlier. Note I forgot to talk about close defense, which is basically just how well a tank can defend in the forest and places like that. Also here you can see ammo and fuel, but we won't have to deal with that until the next scenario, because this one is fucking small.
Anyways we buy this delicious Panzer IIIE. He immediately becomes our best tank.
We also buy another artillery for our southern attack group, and are now broke. Time to end that turn.
OK, well we didn't get attacked at all so our turn begins again with all our troops just like they were at the end of last turn.
NOTE: for a little while I forgot to take start of turn screenshots cuz I'm a dumbass. Anyways, here you can see his cavalry replaced to a 10.
Here we move our tank next to the one hex around the city we couldn't see, and lo we find an artillery! Note that if we attack his infantry in the city while the artillery is behind him, the artillery will get a free attack on our unit before we get to attack. Time to fuck him up.
Here's our first in a long line of rugged defenses.
Wasn't too bad, 1-1, but it sure would have been nice to actually fucking hurt that arty. Anyways let's see how this infantry does.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
OK, well again that wasn't so terrible in actuality. We killed 3, he killed 4. But we're still kinda fucked if we want to attack that city this turn. Note that by expected outcomes that artillery should be a 2 =(
Anyways, since we aren't going to be attacking the city with infantry this turn, let's F this cavalry up for lolz.
Pretty good outcome.
Time to do some arty
Got what was expected. Moving infantry up in front of our arty because there's a chance he kicks our infantry next to the city away from it, which would mean he could buy some new units there (no unit buying at cities that have enemy units next to them).
Move all our guys down at the bottom up some. We actually did encounter an enemy. There's a cavalry to the south of that city that you can't really see at the northeast. Not a big deal though.
We end our turn.
Cowardly Poles don't attack yet again.
Again forgetting to take an intro screenie, but you can basically see how it went. He moved his cavalry away to that city in the northwest, and his artillery back. Let's see if his artillery can get any more rugged defenses.
No, but we still did really shitty.
Attack with our arty, moving him north in a truck.
Kalisz is ours!
Scouting ahead with our tanks we see the first of the 2 objective cities. Once we capture both of these cities we win the scenario. If we capture them super fast (by turn 8 I think), we get a major victory, which sometimes unlocks different next maps, and always earns you more prestige.
Here's my first “as it looks at the start of the turn” for the southern part.
We use our shitty Panzer IA on the cavalry
Going kinda reckless for no good reasong against this cavalry.
Probably not a great idea. We keep moving our other guys up.
I forgot to take the screenshot of AXIS TURN WHATEVER. Anyways this is the start of the new turn.
Fucked his shitty little tankette up with our IIIE
So I made a huge fucking mistake here. For some reason I moved my artillery up there, thinking that my tank's zone of control would stop his cavalry from doing anything to the artillery, forgetting that their movement isn't really fucked up too much by swamp.
The south.
Trololo
Actually not that bad.
Godfuckingdamnit
Not being able to kill that guy with our infantry means we have to divert our tank to finishing him off, leaving the cavalry up there to get replacements.
So here I decide to give this unit replacements. It might have been a better idea to just move him next to those faggy cavalry, but hey.
Note you can give a unit replacements or “E(lite) replacements”. Basically, E-replacements cost more, but you don't lose experience for them. Since they cost so little for infantry anyways, even though this guy only has a little bit of XP, we're still giving him the E's.
Allied turn. He is merciless on me for my mistake.
Ouch. That's all he does though on the attacking front. Time to beat their kielbasas.
Yes, we did attack his artillery with our tank. Did nothing.
Move our tank and infantry up to protect our arty
Jesus Christ
Yep, we pushed him back with the rugged defense, then moved into the city with our 7 strength infantry, attacked, and did....0 damage?
ASLKDJFHSAFDEWQYRIUASDCASDC
At least we didn't do any suppression either, but still. Anyways, that's the end of our turn
He attacked our infantry next to his city and kinda shit on him.
OH HOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED FUCKER
Lol killed 7 of his guys.
WHAT THE FUCK HE KILLED 4 IIIE'S WITH HIS 75MM ARTILLERY
Anyways, this is how the maps looks on the next turn.
Remember when I said our IIIE would be our best tank? Apparently I fucking lied, can't kill a single part of a fucking artillery.
Also where I retreated with the IIIE was a retarded place. We shall see why that bites us in the ass later.
God...are you...fucking...bullshit
In retrospect it was dumb to take the chance that that could happen. But we still should have killed that fucking invincible artillery.
I probably should have just said fuck him, since he's on a river let him take replacements. But I was pretty angry at this point and wanted to let him know who the fucking boss was.
Note, had we moved our IIIE to a better place, we could have put our arty there, putting him in striking distance of the city.
The southern front. Looks pretty silly.
I forgot where his cavalry went, so I'll just kill his infantry.
You've got to be fucking shitting me
Nope
This is our position at the end of the turn
His cavalry attacked us, did shitty, and then ran away like a bitch
His tankette burns in the hellfire of the IIIE
Really, we didn't kill him? Ah whatever we've knocked him out of the city, now we can win whenever we want.
At this point I quite simply had a complete brainfart, and just moved my guy into the city, instantly winning the campaign for us, when we actually had a whole turn left to go before I had to take it for a major victory. This means our troops don't get to spend that time killing Poles and gaining XP, and we don't get as much prestige as we would have had we taken more minor cities.
Oh boy!
So overall, our first scenario could have gone better. I made a few mistakes that I probably won't make as I play more, especially taking the last target city so soon. Still, we got a major victory and didn't lose any units, so this certainly wasn't a total failure. We should still have enough prestige to buy 3 fighters and 2 stukas in Warsaw, so all is good.
Next time, we go deeper into Polish territory, showing them that interesting and well-done combat mechanics beat retarded QTE combat.
For my first LP, I had wanted to do a solo wild mage BG2 runthrough, but then we had two excellent BG LPs so now I give you games of strategy instead of roleplaying.
Also if this LP is a success I may make one of some Allied General campaigns, too. At least the Russian one (as it is ridiculously difficult).
Anyways, let's fire this bro up:
Playing on hard cuz we ain't no bitch
Doing the 39 campaign, gotta forge our own destiny
Sounds easy, just need to run and gun some silly Polacks.
And here we are, the game screen. For some reason I decided to move a guy before taking the first screenshot (our infantry guy in the north). Anyways, the basics of this game are pretty simple, move along hexes, each unit has a set movement and spotting. Running into an enemy that you havent spotted yet while moving will give them a big bonus to fighting you, so moving ahead carefully (but not slowly!) is important. So yeah with that first move I was just talking about we uncovered this cavalry guy to the north that you can barely see.
We move our other infantry guy up there and attack the sunvabitch.
Here I guess is a good place to explain the combat. Combat is based on a number of things, especially unit type. Attack scores are broken up into 4 different scores: soft attack, hard attack, air attack, and naval attack. Soft and hard attack are what concerns land battles. Every unit is either a “soft” target (e.g. infantry, most artillery, etc) or a “hard” target (tanks, recon, etc). Thus, when fighting a battle, your troops only use the attack they have for the enemy's unit type. Since this first attack is infantry against cavalry (which count as infantry in this game), both will be using their soft attack.
Hard and soft types are also important for city-based combat, where infantry get nice bonuses against hard units, meaning infantry are pretty necessary. Also, infantry are better in forests and rough terrain. The game really forces you into a combined arms strategy of infantry, tanks, planes, and artillery.
Units also have defense scores, ground defense and air defense are split up. This also goes into combat considerations.
Initiative is an incredibly important score, because it determines who will fire first in combat. Tanks especially have very high initiative scores.
Now about entrenchment. A unit gets entrenched for not moving, and his entrenchment will increase for every turn he stays in the same hex. Certain hexes, like fortifications, increase entrenchment. Getting attacked (by any source, land, sea, air, artillery) will lower entrenchment. The main advantage to entrenchment is that your unit fights better (especially important is increased initiative) and has a higher chance of getting “rugged defense”...which basically means the unit takes little damage and deals out a ton during the attack.
Finally to actual combat. In combat the first thing that will be decided is initiative (there are 3 possible outcomes: one of the two goes first, or they both go at the same time). When this happens, 2 things can happen: part of the unit can be killed, and the unit can be suppressed (or of course, nothing at all could happen). Suppression basically means no casualties are taken (the unit's strength doesn't decrease), but those guys are done for the current fight. If a unit's strength goes to 0, he dies, if his strength minus his suppression is 0 (or less...i don't think it can be less but I'll just cover my ass in case) he will retreat in the opposite direction he was attacked from. If there is nowhere to retreat, he will surrender (die).
Notice that on the bottom of the screen it tells us the expected outcome of the upcoming fight. Supposedly we should lose 3 and the enemy should lose 6. These predicted outcomes are not something you should have a lot of faith in. They do help you to notice if you will overpower or get overpowered by someone, but most of the time they are just general ideas of how the fight is going to go, and we will see me rage many a time throughout the course of this LP when the outcome is nowhere near what was expected. Anyhow let us press the attack!
So basically, we went first, killed 6 of his guys and suppressed 4, so the cavalry retreated. The natural reaction to seeing this is “fuck year, we wrecked them!” but this actually wasn't the most desirable outcome. Because the cavalry retreated, they will be able to take replacements on their turn, and be back to 10 combat strength for just a bit of prestige (basically money). Had he not retreated, he would not have been able to take full replacements, and would likely have spent his turn retreating or taking just a couple replacements.
Anyways, it was a good enough outcome that I'm certainly not complaining.
Now we shall take on the other cavalry, this time using our glorious panzers. We start with a IID
The expected outcome occurred! Now let's get'em with some infantry.
Beat the shit out of them!
Moving some guys up. Note we put the artillery in a truck, because otherwise it can only move 1 hex per turn, which is fucking balls. Because we moved in the truck, he ends the turn in the truck, which can be dangerous. If I hadn't played this map about 5 million times I probably wouldn't have put him up there, undefended, in the forest. But I have, so I know he'll be fine.
Moving our guys to the south.
OK, we can't move anyone else. Time to buy some shit.
Note, along the right side, you can see all the stats I was talking about earlier. Note I forgot to talk about close defense, which is basically just how well a tank can defend in the forest and places like that. Also here you can see ammo and fuel, but we won't have to deal with that until the next scenario, because this one is fucking small.
Anyways we buy this delicious Panzer IIIE. He immediately becomes our best tank.
We also buy another artillery for our southern attack group, and are now broke. Time to end that turn.
OK, well we didn't get attacked at all so our turn begins again with all our troops just like they were at the end of last turn.
NOTE: for a little while I forgot to take start of turn screenshots cuz I'm a dumbass. Anyways, here you can see his cavalry replaced to a 10.
Here we move our tank next to the one hex around the city we couldn't see, and lo we find an artillery! Note that if we attack his infantry in the city while the artillery is behind him, the artillery will get a free attack on our unit before we get to attack. Time to fuck him up.
Here's our first in a long line of rugged defenses.
Wasn't too bad, 1-1, but it sure would have been nice to actually fucking hurt that arty. Anyways let's see how this infantry does.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
OK, well again that wasn't so terrible in actuality. We killed 3, he killed 4. But we're still kinda fucked if we want to attack that city this turn. Note that by expected outcomes that artillery should be a 2 =(
Anyways, since we aren't going to be attacking the city with infantry this turn, let's F this cavalry up for lolz.
Pretty good outcome.
Time to do some arty
Got what was expected. Moving infantry up in front of our arty because there's a chance he kicks our infantry next to the city away from it, which would mean he could buy some new units there (no unit buying at cities that have enemy units next to them).
Move all our guys down at the bottom up some. We actually did encounter an enemy. There's a cavalry to the south of that city that you can't really see at the northeast. Not a big deal though.
We end our turn.
Cowardly Poles don't attack yet again.
Again forgetting to take an intro screenie, but you can basically see how it went. He moved his cavalry away to that city in the northwest, and his artillery back. Let's see if his artillery can get any more rugged defenses.
No, but we still did really shitty.
Attack with our arty, moving him north in a truck.
Kalisz is ours!
Scouting ahead with our tanks we see the first of the 2 objective cities. Once we capture both of these cities we win the scenario. If we capture them super fast (by turn 8 I think), we get a major victory, which sometimes unlocks different next maps, and always earns you more prestige.
Here's my first “as it looks at the start of the turn” for the southern part.
We use our shitty Panzer IA on the cavalry
Going kinda reckless for no good reasong against this cavalry.
Probably not a great idea. We keep moving our other guys up.
I forgot to take the screenshot of AXIS TURN WHATEVER. Anyways this is the start of the new turn.
Fucked his shitty little tankette up with our IIIE
So I made a huge fucking mistake here. For some reason I moved my artillery up there, thinking that my tank's zone of control would stop his cavalry from doing anything to the artillery, forgetting that their movement isn't really fucked up too much by swamp.
The south.
Trololo
Actually not that bad.
Godfuckingdamnit
Not being able to kill that guy with our infantry means we have to divert our tank to finishing him off, leaving the cavalry up there to get replacements.
So here I decide to give this unit replacements. It might have been a better idea to just move him next to those faggy cavalry, but hey.
Note you can give a unit replacements or “E(lite) replacements”. Basically, E-replacements cost more, but you don't lose experience for them. Since they cost so little for infantry anyways, even though this guy only has a little bit of XP, we're still giving him the E's.
Allied turn. He is merciless on me for my mistake.
Ouch. That's all he does though on the attacking front. Time to beat their kielbasas.
Yes, we did attack his artillery with our tank. Did nothing.
Move our tank and infantry up to protect our arty
Jesus Christ
Yep, we pushed him back with the rugged defense, then moved into the city with our 7 strength infantry, attacked, and did....0 damage?
ASLKDJFHSAFDEWQYRIUASDCASDC
At least we didn't do any suppression either, but still. Anyways, that's the end of our turn
He attacked our infantry next to his city and kinda shit on him.
OH HOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED FUCKER
Lol killed 7 of his guys.
WHAT THE FUCK HE KILLED 4 IIIE'S WITH HIS 75MM ARTILLERY
Anyways, this is how the maps looks on the next turn.
Remember when I said our IIIE would be our best tank? Apparently I fucking lied, can't kill a single part of a fucking artillery.
Also where I retreated with the IIIE was a retarded place. We shall see why that bites us in the ass later.
God...are you...fucking...bullshit
In retrospect it was dumb to take the chance that that could happen. But we still should have killed that fucking invincible artillery.
I probably should have just said fuck him, since he's on a river let him take replacements. But I was pretty angry at this point and wanted to let him know who the fucking boss was.
Note, had we moved our IIIE to a better place, we could have put our arty there, putting him in striking distance of the city.
The southern front. Looks pretty silly.
I forgot where his cavalry went, so I'll just kill his infantry.
You've got to be fucking shitting me
Nope
This is our position at the end of the turn
His cavalry attacked us, did shitty, and then ran away like a bitch
His tankette burns in the hellfire of the IIIE
Really, we didn't kill him? Ah whatever we've knocked him out of the city, now we can win whenever we want.
At this point I quite simply had a complete brainfart, and just moved my guy into the city, instantly winning the campaign for us, when we actually had a whole turn left to go before I had to take it for a major victory. This means our troops don't get to spend that time killing Poles and gaining XP, and we don't get as much prestige as we would have had we taken more minor cities.
Oh boy!
So overall, our first scenario could have gone better. I made a few mistakes that I probably won't make as I play more, especially taking the last target city so soon. Still, we got a major victory and didn't lose any units, so this certainly wasn't a total failure. We should still have enough prestige to buy 3 fighters and 2 stukas in Warsaw, so all is good.
Next time, we go deeper into Polish territory, showing them that interesting and well-done combat mechanics beat retarded QTE combat.
