AGEOD's WW1

[Tamas]

Lets see the situation at the start of October:

This is Galicia, as you can see the A-H victory at Lemberg did not exactly reach RL Gorlice proportions, mostly due to the slaughtering house Trieste had become:



Here is the Polish sector, advance is better here, and could actually end up decisive, if you take a look you see the entire Russian salient is protected (or rather, unprotected) by the Russian 4th Army. Unless Russia manages some reinforcements, I can have Christmas in Warsaw.



East Prussia is less interesting altough the Russians keep harassing me there:



Here is the Western Front overview, I guess you are more familiar with geography here so it needs no explanation:



The following image shows the important part of West, where actual fighting is taking place. West of Ypres is where the French almost broke through last month. Maubeuge was the original target of my Great Offensive, which I captured. The rightmost province on this pic is where the French GO target is supposed to be.



Here is the Italian Front. That minefield next to Fiume, I forgot to report: I bought it in August.
You can see the German 16th on its way, but I think I will bump into stacking problems.



Serbia is basically gone, only Montenegro remains (not for long) so rather than that, here is Romania, you can see the combined Bulgarian-Austro-Hungarian offensive rather nicely. Note the "()" mark on two Romanian stacks (one of them is the army hq) showing they are isolated from supply, and should get eliminated pretty soon unless they can brake out.
The big Romanian flag is Bucharest, just so you can orientate yourself. Also do note that Russian stack on the right edge: its some cavalry force the Russians sent down, and now the 2nd Turkish army I moved to the theatre, is busy chasing it down.




And this is the Caucasus Front. As you can see, at this moment it seems to be a complete overrun:



Mesopotamia, not exactly thrilling:



And the Sinai. The god damn Arabs in Hejaz just revolted at the start of this turn.

[Tamas]

OCTOBER 1915

It seems the Russian AI realized the position it was in. One of the two corps keeping the Azerbaijan revolt in check was sent to block the Turkis advance on Tbilisi, and in general my all-along-the-front-except-east-prussia eastern offensive encountered stiffer resistance than expected, altough it did achieve some minor gains.

The isolated Romanians did try to brake out and got eliminated. Half-assed Entente efforts at the West.
Again, barely holding Gorizia. Some reorganization would be needed as the troops there apparently belonged to no HQ.
Seeing the AI's taste for naval landings, I railroaded a couple of Greek corps back to Salonika, since their job was done anyway.

And the French 7th Army did not land in Venice, they landed in Trieste This can be a problem. The German 16th would be probably sent there instead of the high Alps, because those two Allied armies had to be eliminated before they could brake out to clear terrain.

At the end of the turn, A-H stood with a total of two points of manpower in reserve. Winter was coming however, with the chance to call in conscripts as a political action. But it seemed, a big chance to finish Russia off was lost due to Italy's determined effort at getting and keeping Trieste.

[Norgy]

Sometimes, the EUIII map looks great. You just need to compare it to something like AEGOD's map in this game.

[The Brain]

Sometimes, the EUIII map looks great. You just need to compare it to something like AEGOD's map in this game.

This one makes my eyes hurt.

[Cecil]

Thats better. But whats with the maps tendency to avoid the North = up and South = down. Confuses the hell out of me.

[Alcibiades]

Casualty counts dammit!

[Norgy]

Well, we all know the first casualty of war is innocence, so you can cross that one off. 

[Berkut]

Man, this game looks like a case study in a developer/designer shooting themselves in the foot by making a great game with an impenetrable interface.

I just read the Matrix Forums on this - not good. I think the guy who wrote the game wrote all the interface code himself - I mean at the base levels. So you ahve stuff like you ahve to click and drag a unit to place it at some points in the game, while in others you can click to select, then drag. What a nightmare.

And the real problem is that things like that tend to be incredibly hard to fix properly.

Great AAR though Tamas. Keep it coming, please.

[Tamas]

Ran into a crash the developer could not reproduce (he could continue the savegame which was crashing for me), but me reinstalling the latest beta patch worked, got through in the save game. Meh. Well, its been on my computer since early alpha so maybe a complete reinstall is in order.

Anyways, back to business:

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1915

First of all, it was the French 8TH, not 7th Army, which landed in Trieste. So yes, the Army of Orient was there. And they were busy. The combined forces of the Orient Army and the Italian 3rd struck out from Trieste in two directions: a combined, bigger force attacked Pola which was heavily defended by Austria, at least by their standards of the time: 3 corps were defending, with artillery being sent from reserves, and it proved to be enough.
The second attack was done by Italian second line units against Fiume, which was defended by a lone active-duty corps of Slavs and a Hungarian artillery unit. In a heroic struggle this lonely unit managed to hold the lines against repeated assaults of the numerically superior enemy.

By the end of the year, the supposedly major portion of the Russian 4th Army were encircled, isolated, and eliminated in Russian Poland. The door seemed to be open for Warsaw, with assumed numerical superiority against the Russians. Yet a Russian force recognized a gap in my line in Galicia and made a desperate bid to reach Lemberg and thus cut supply for basically 2/3rd of the Austro-Hungarian forces on that front, but could not reach it. It still needed to be mopped up and destroyed though.

Armenia was entirely Turkish by the end of 1915, the remnants of the Russian 10th Army were concentrating west of Tbilisi to defend that crucial city of the region. Two corps of Turkish reserves were still crawling northward, wondering if the Russian would care to garrison Sochi up on the Black Sea coast.

In other news, god damn Bosnians rebelled, so 3 corps of the 5th Army, marching like crazy toward Trieste, had to be left behind to keep up order.

Speaking of Trieste, it was clear by the end of the year that the next couple of months would be a race against time. The French and Italians looked determined to finish conquering the ports of that coast, and on the long run only the arrival of the Austro-Hungarian 5th Army could stop them. The German 16th Army took over the frontline east of Trento from the A-H 8th Army, which thus got concentrated around Trento itself. The Germans had good reserves of ammo and manpower, but there seemed little point of a grand offensive if the Austrian could not assist, and they were in no shape to do that until the spring the earliest.

So the obvious question at that time was: where should Germany strike? Unfortunately, the French National Will recovered to 32, so forcing their surrender with a single offensive seemed next to impossible. But Russia was already crumbling, so hastily plans were made to launch a Grand Offensive with the general direction of Warsaw during the first two months of 1916. The plan was that the Austro-Hungarians could still act as the securers of the German right flank while saving strength for the Big Push against Italy which was to come during the Spring.

On a sidenote, with the fighting in Serbia basically finished, I checked and it turned out that during the fighting Greece got Makedonia up until Skopje, with Bulgarian getting almost everything else up until Belgrade which became Austrian.

[Tamas]

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1916

Severe mutinies shocked the Russian army during the holidays. This could be the beginning of the end.

Unfortunately, Turkey on the CP side was a bit shaky as well. Last year the Armenian genocide pulled down Turkish NW, and lack of major battles triggered the Enver's obstinancy event despite the big advances. And since most of that advance through barren territories, conquest of cities could not really offset negative trends either.
Also, looks like the AI does not need to ask the neighbors for some game system abuse, as it appeared, the British Grand Offensive for 1915 was Basra which they conquered sometimes early that year with no resistance. In the boardgame of course, launch of a Grand Offensive makes its target public, here you sort of need to have a battle to realize its part of a grand offensive. So in short, loss of Basra delivered an additional NW hit for Turkey during the end of the year Interphase.

As a result, Turkish NW slided into the instability zone for a while, but strike and mutiny attempts were mercilessly crushed and so the situation stabilized.

For economical news, this was the first Interphase when some of the CP countries received negative blockade effects (basically the blockade system works as such that in first half of the war Germany and A-H actually gains some economic points from the blockade check, simulating some oversea trade still ongoing. It gets nastier in later years). Due to the depleted stockpiles of Austria, no new units were ordered for them, but Germany started the creation of several units including a Polish corps.

Military-wise, the new year started off really quiet, apart from the Bulgarian conquest of Bucharest. The 11th Germany Army was scheduled to start a Grand Offensive in March with the objective of Warsaw.

[Tamas]

Finally Calvinus, the developer managed to find what was causing me crashes, this has resulted in a new beta patch.

So back to business once again:

MARCH-APRIL 1916

These were busy months, as spring slowly returned to Europe. The Germand Grand Offensive for Warsaw had started, with all armies except the 8th and 12th (both guarding East Prussia) on the East moving to the offensive, and with the leading army (11th) trying to experiment with stosstruppen tactics.
Austro-Hungarian armies also sprung into action all along the Russian front. Advance had been slow but steady, with Lublin being the only noteworthy conquest.

The Turks achieved much better with the conquest of Tbilisi, altough instead of decreasing Russian fighting spirit, the loss of this regional capital triggered a minor national resurgence, so Russia actually gained 2 NW from it.

The earlier Battle of Bucharest was a major battle, but the Romanian army did not care much to resist, with their manpower reserves depleted. This month they again easily gave up a major battle against Bulgaria. [I like the AI logic here for example it never bothered to deploy for the second sub-battle since it retreated as soon as it was allowed to. I like that even if:] Bulgaria itself was also completely out of reserves, so this had been the struggle of two exhausted enemies, altough the end result was in no doubt with the Austrian eastern right flank reaching into northern Romania, and the Turkish 2nd Army, by this month having two units of heavy artillery, pushing northward on the Black Sea coast, driving the understrenght Russian forces in front of it toward Russia.

The Western allies were quite active. The French launched their own Grand Offensive in the Ardennes with a successfully applied heavy bombardment tactics, but they had been repulsed so far by the German defenders applying constant counter-attacks to disrupt the flow of the (non-existant) advance of the Allieds. Also some minor attacks by Brits and French happened along the frontline.

The Italian elite mountain troop corps tried to take Gorizia, but the defenders once again held out.

MAY 1916

Romania surrendered! With free access through the country, the Bulgarian army were ordered to march and take up defensive positions along the western bank of the Prut river, the Romanian-Russian border, linking the Austro-Hungarian flank, and the 2nd Turkish Army on the sea coast.

The Italians launched their own Grand Offensive against Villach, led by Cadorna, but they retreated fast this month.

The German offensive had been a total success. Warsaw and two forts to the Norht-East of it were captured, while Austro-Hungarians took the fort of Ivangorod in assault. Already plans were made for reaching the next target: Brest-Litovsk.

Sporadic fighting on the Western Front continued, and a couple of secondary Italian attacks were quickly repulsed in the Alps.

[grumbler]

Very interesting turns.  Keep it up, please.

[Alcibiades]

Indeed, very nice.

[Cecil]

So what happens in gamey terms if you knock Russia out of the war? Does your supply situation get any better with the blockade and does the borders change around a bit?

[HisMajestyBOB]

Keep up the AAR, it's very interesting!

I tried downloading the demo from AGEOD's website, but apparently the zip file is corrupted. Bleh.