Any good leads on a custom Red Baron fighter?

@King_Of_Tanks

Great, sounds good to me.

@Krieghund

👍

France:
The powerful French Navy MUST help clear the Atlantic for safe shipping to the continent.
Then, a French reinforcement of Albania and/or Egypt is a good tactic.
France needs Infantry buys for several rounds before advancing on the Germans, in my opinion.

@oztea:

At this point in history fighters weren’t really ready to do any real damage to boats yet. Their speeds were very low and cross winds were very hazardous. Also planes of the time couldn’t carry very much in the way of firepower, so hurting a ship was outside their scope.

Yes, all good points.

You can totally reach paris with only starting units and the planes coming in. You do need an AH stack to join you but this is not a problem.

@Auztria:

I think that for a more fluid game we need cavalry units as well as adjusting the price of tanks. Tanks are devastating in large groups, but it’s hard for most nations to produce large groups of tanks at 6 ipc’s. Plus the early game is pretty monotonous with only masses of infantry and artillery attacking and counter-attacking. Cavalry could help spice it up a bit, maybe with 1/3 atk/def and a movement of 2 with blitz. If they cost 4 but could be boosted by artillery, they’d be a fairly viable unit but would probably fade a lot when tanks arrive.

To say that cavalry played a major role in the war or even that it had an equal level of survivability as infantry is a misstep at best, and revisionist at worst. Cavalry units were consistently BUTCHERED against machine gun-defended infantry lines, and quickly became obsolete. I actually think that the omission of cavalry from this game is one of the better choices of the designer. The early game is “monotonous” (as you’ve put it) with infantry and artillery, because the early WAR was “monotonous”; 1914-1916 was a period hallmarked by mass artillery-supported infantry attacks.

Now, I will grant that on the Eastern Front (as well as in other parts of the world, Mid-East, etc.) cavalry played a slightly greater part than on the Western Front, but I still don’t think it is worth adding an entire other unit to the game to represent this limited role.

If you ARE going to represent cavalry in the game (which I don’t recommend), you must then differentiate between entrenched infantry and mobile infantry, and make the cavalry 0 attack against entrenched. This is the only way it would make sense.

@protevangelium:

How did things in Africa go for the CPs, and how do you feel the naval balance affected this, Chacmool?

Well like everytime in my games the northern African Units of the Allies were early shipped to the European theatre (to reinforce and/or activate Minors like Albania or Portugal) and the British Egypt Army invaded Trans Jordan.

South of the Sahara the Germans took some british colonies until the Allied armys catched them. There were some battles without hits/results in this contested areas until the Germans as defenders could decimate the attacking Aliies in South/East Africa. The naval forces of Britain were too busy bringing more troops into Arabia to push the turks back but after the colossal german/austrian naval investements they had to reduce their Mobilizatian in India to a minimum to enlarge their own Fleet in the North Sea… In the med Italy wasnt capable to answer this naval race and France had to buy Infantry…

At the End of the game strong turkish forces captured the last African tts that werent already in german control while Austrian units landed in Northern Africa.

I much prefer to make Switzerland worth 4 IPCs. The non-aligned tts in the game are, essentially, those countries who never became involved in the war as an active power (the one problematical exception is Greece), hence they cannot be assigned an alignment.

I don’t like anticipating history by making them into some fictional alliance of neutrals. Would Switzerland or Sweden really even think about mobilizing because the Russians crossed the Afghan border?

Bulgaria, for example, listened to offers from both sides before joining the Central Powers; largely because they promised it a large slice of its enemy Serbia.