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GET THE CAMPAIGN! (LOOK IN GERMANY)

First of all my compliments to Ernst Wiltmann for the impressive work he did.

Not only did he make a campaign with 45 interesting scenarios so far, he tried his utmost to make your life as a Commanding Officer of DAK as realistic -read: unpleasant- as possible.

The concept seems easy: hardly any supply, limited choice of armor and troops and scarce prestige resources.

Combine this with an enemy force often vastly outnumbering your own forces, more and better supply, well dug in enemy positions and terrain favoring the defender (at least in the later scenarios) you’ll roughly have an idea what to expect.

Since this isn’t the first campaign with pre-defined rules by the campaign maker I started playing according to the rules (guidelines may be a better word) and at 100% prestige.

After a few scenarios a dilemma is opening up: you need to maintain roughly all your prestige at the start of a new scenario to re-strengthen your weakened units during the scenario.

This prestige is actually needed to overstrength your elite Tank, infantry and AA units which have to advance against some dug in and overstrengthened enemy (elite) units. Furthermore it’s recommendable to buy some more infantry units to safeguard your conquered victory hexes where always rearguard battles have to be fought with insurgents who want to re-take your hexes.

Those infantry units have one major disadvantage: they engage in battles and gain experience only while being attacked. Often they do not survive this since your prestige is dried up and you can’t reinforce them anymore while they need it most.

If you stay in the Historical Path -and almost certainly you will, if you follow the rules strictly- you can manage to get along with some BVs, Vs and TVs and play the campaign as designed if you are an experienced PG II player.

The inexperienced player inherits a lot of days without sunshine and learning the hard way.

Anyway, the longer the campaign takes you into the African continent and with some highly specialised tasks coming up I think one shall be allowed to change a few things in your core force without going over board.

Ernst himself recommends in one of the later African scenarios to sell 75% of your mechanized forces and buy infantry units.

Apart from feeling that it’s a pretty bad deal to sell some 1000+ experience tanks/AT/ATY and buy O experience Wehrmacht troops, I didn’t feel like abandoning my core mechanized force without knowing if I needed them in later scenarios to come.

Around the Suez scenario (no. 21, the fictional path) I decided to break a few of the guidelines for obvious reasons:

Not only just one kind of AA - without motorized AA plus only 2 fighters you get bombed to stone age (to stick with a popular U.S. general) and lose some of your best units which is a thing I personally HATE especially after 20+ scenarios played with.

More than one prototype. It’s anyway a matter of blood, sweat and tears in some scenarios to gain a BV - I just got reluctant to dismantle the hard fought for prototypes just by order.

There are a few scenarios in the very later campaign phase namely Tenerife, Niger and Cameroon where more than one unit of paras or mountain troops are helpful to seal the fate of your enemy forces.

Last but not least, I like Ernst’s approach of letting the campaign grow slowly and maintain the general direction throughout the scenarios.

Fortunately there’s a bunch of excellent new maps out there which supports that it’s not getting too easy by the time.

I’m looking forward to see what’s up after Cameroon - if things continue like this we’ll end up in Cape Town ! Great job Ernst !

A general remark concerning almost all campaigns independent of the canpaign maker :

One point I’d like to see being changed is that one has the option to play the linear campaign function as well regardless if it’s historically correct or not.

In lots of campaigns are scenarios hidden that you do not touch because of the series of results you achieve.

Whether you have to replay some scenarios or check out the detailed campaign flow beforehand if available (if not you have to dive into the .cam file), you have to maintain a lot of save games to cope with it.

Of course you can always edit the campaign with Lasse’s campaign maker tool but those folks who create the campaign shall better do that than the player himself and leave the option to the player.

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