In 1939, the Wehrmacht attacked France with a 1:1 ratio in manpower. It took 3 weeks to overrun it.

In 1944, the US and the UK landed with combined force in Normandy and advanced with a 3:1 manpower superiority, with a 5:1 superiority whenever they attacked. They had near complete air superiority. It took them 7 months to conquer France.

That’s Prussian military tradition in action.

I’m confident Germany could have won if Hitler just hadn’t messed up the battle plans so many times.

The Dunkerque evacuation was only possible since Hitler panicked and ordered the panzer divisions to halt. A proper surrounding with the following tank shock would have destroyed whatever the British could have used to defend against an invasion.

In the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe had almost destroyed the RAF and Britain was ripe for bombing or conquest, but suddenly a lone bomb raid over Berlin was regarded as a personal insult by Hitler, and he ordered the bombing of civilian London, giving the RAF time to recover.

During fall 1941, Hitler ordered his troops to, instead of conquering Moscow, go towards Ukraine and its abundant food stores. Hitler moaned about how his generals don’t understand war economics, while the effects of conquering Moscow would have outweighed Ukraine heavily. The entire railroad network of USSR would have been messed up with the fall of Moscow. The army would have got proper winter shelter. The soldiers’ spirits would certainly have risen, and the Russians would most certainly have felt a huge blow to their morale.

Hitler replaced several generals simply because they disagreed with him, which was very fatak for the armies’ front performance.

And, most peculiar of all must be the failure to deal with Operation Overlord. Only a few hours’ drive from the beaches, there was a Panzer army which probably could have thrown back at least a few beachheads into the sea. It was though under Hitler’s personal command. At the time of the landing, Hitler was sleeping, and nobody was allowed to wake him up regardless of anything. Consequence? When Hitler finally woke up, several hours had passed and the beachheads were too well fortified to be assaulted.

What’s the correct first-turn of the German Mediterranean Fleet in your opinion?

Definitely Axis victory would have been far closer. After all, lack of natural resources was what hindered the German war effort the most.

Lack of oil and aluminium was what made the Luftwaffe unable to afford enough losses to defend against strategic bombing. Heck, the Germans made synthetic oil out of coal, and the Japanese extracted fuel out of pine cones :D

Of course, lack of manpower would have remained a problem, but if USSR had fallen Germany would have had one front less to worry about. Also, with sufficient industrial capacity I suppose you can make up for the lack of manpower by building troops with a high combatpower/personnel ratio. A tank with 6 crew would be far more powerful than 6 infantrymen with rifles. But of course, you’d have to find some way to prevent the enemy from countering with panzerfausts :-?

Sorry. My thoughts went ahead of my writing, so it became a bit garbled.

What I was going to say was, that for me the game is almost always decided at the time when the US gets seriously into the action.

I suppose partisans could work something like this:

Cost: 4 IPCs

A max. of 1 can be recruited each turn. When recruited, can be placed on any enemy-conquered non-homeland territory (in AAE, this would be the grey areas belonging to germany but being conquered rather than mainland, with Italy being an exception). However, they can be moved to enemy homelands once recruited from conquered lands.

They work like ordinary infantry, with a few special rules:

They have two modes: Surfaced and hidden (symbolise by tipping over like battleships and subs). They can switch mode either during the combat or non-combat movement (depending on whether they come into combat or not). They can both surface, hide and move in the same turn.

When surfaced, they work like infantry in all respects, with the exception that when they defend they have the “disappear” ability, which works like subs submerging, with the exception that they can’t re-surface during the same battle. Each attacking infantry gets a sniffing out attempt (see later), and any surviving partisans become hidden in the region.

When hidden, partisans don’t interact in any way with the enemy: They can’t conquer territories, they can’t attack or be attacked, they move freely, and they can be in the same area as enemies without anything happening. They’re effectively ghosts, with two exceptions:

SNIFFING OUT: Enemy infantry units in the same region as a hidden partisan can attempt to sniff 'em out. This is done during the combat movement, and no other action can be taken by the sniffing infantry. The sniffing unit rolls one dice for each hidden partisan in the region. For each 1 scored, a partisan has been found, put against the wall and got his brains shot out while chanting his anthem.

SABOTAGING: A hidden partisan can attempt a sabotage in the region. All enemy infantry units get a sniff-out attempt against all saboteurs (e.g. if there are two enemy infantry in a region and three partisans attempt a sabotage, a total of 6 dice will be rolled). Any surviving partisans immediately destroy 1 IPC from the enemy. Unless there is a homeland industrial complex in the region, the maximun IPCs destroyed is the IPC value of the region.

Btw, just noticed, a poll option (Allies, absolutely) somehow was removed. Sorry!

No debates please, this issue has been debated enough. Just a poll to get the overall view. Any debate articles, rants or whatever will be shredded for untermensch bedding.

After the initial sea cleaning, what do you think is the correct approach for the US to take? Whenever I play A&AE, the game is almost always decided in one way or the other at the time when the outcome has been decided.