WW1 mod multiplayer game (France)

[Rastrigin]

Hi all!

I recorded my game as France in the WW1 mod group to add some nice addition to DarthShizNit's next chapter (as Italy) of his great AAR series. Sadly this chapter will never see the light, but I'll still post my videos here in case anybody finds them interesting.

I had to speed up the video for two reasons: watching WW1 at speed one is incredibly boring and I had to somehow compress to video size. The downside is the lack of any sound (which probably my teammates as grateful for, but it would have been interesting) and probably the movements on the map are too harsh.

For obvious reasons I also didn't record the build-up, so here is a little background for this video series:

This is the first game of the series with a 1910 start instead of 1914, so we didn't expect everything to work all right, but here we are.
This new start date is very good for France, even if I lacked the IC (and leadership) for any massive unit production, I could use the time I had to strengthen my existing, already quite large, forces. Infantry and artillery were researched ahead of time, land doctrines were researched up-to-date, the militia divisions were upgraded to infantry, artillery brigades were added all over the place (around 80% of the divisions had artillery before the start of the were), some elite division was created and, most importantly, all the army was 100% upgraded (it took more than 1 year) and the officer ratio was brought up to almost 140%. I let UK take care of the naval and air war stuff (which they did happily because they lacked manpower for anything else).

I forgot to record the very first days of the war, what happened was that the CPs had focused most of their forces against Russia and the first probing atacks I made on the Western front revealed interesting possibilities...

[video=youtube_share;kwFdndUsd0A]http://youtu.be/kwFdndUsd0A[/video]

PS If you have anything to say about my gameplay, ie I do something inefficiently, I could use some shortcuts, my tactics are bad etc. You are welcome to do so and I'll be very grateful to anybody that will post any suggestion (just keep it constructive)

More to come soon

 

[Rastrigin]

Here is the second war session. Basicaly in the first session of war the Russians were getting smashed, especially in the South, so the French attack had to go on, despite being very costly in terms of manpower, in order to force germany to send forces to the West. The goal of France in this session was to reach the Rhine and establish a bridgehead East of it... If this could be accomplished we would get within striking distance from some major German vp province, with German surreder progress being already pretty high. Notice that in this mod the surrender progress is accellerated by a loss a NU that comes right after the loss of every VP, and most of Germany's VPs are in the West...

[video=youtube_share;GkCAGVVZtjk]http://youtu.be/GkCAGVVZtjk[/video]

 

[feye1]

Cool, good stuff

 

[Rastrigin]

Cool, good stuff

Thanks, I'll admit it is difficult to watch with all the harsh movement on the maps and no audio... If do this again I'll try to keep it slower, put some audio in the background and make smaller chapters.

 

[Rastrigin]

As you have seen in chapter 2 France have succeded taking the West side of the Rhine, I also nearly succeded in crossing it (If the Rhine was crossed the war would have probably been won), but I was repelled by heavy German reinforcements brought from the East. The good thing is that the German pressure on the Russians in the North dropped significantly and the Russians were able to reinforce the Southern front were the Austrians had conquered the whole of Ukrain and behond. Thanks to this, a British elite expeditionary corps of 3 divisions and newly deployed militia units the Russians were able to stop the Austrian invasion in the South and pushed back a bit. The Southern Russian front has been the most mobile and interesting front so far, with both sides suffering some minor losses.

Other interesting things of the 2nd session: the Ottoman joined the war and attacked Suez, the battle was close but they were repulsed, they also attacked Greece and some good fighting is going on on the Greek border. The British landed on the North Sea coast of Germany, the german fleet came out of the Blatics to engage. The operation ended with Germany losing their whole fleet, except for some smaller ship, and UK losing 2 marine divisions. The Ottoman navy also got engaged in the Black Sea by the Russians and lost badly. The only relevant CP naval force remaining in Europe is the Austrian navy bottled up in the Adriatic by the French fleet. So Japan is the only remaining naval threat for the Entente, but right now they are still waiting to join...

Although the Rhineland campaign was overall a success for France, it was very consuming in terms of manpower, which was already low from the start. At the end of the operation it was decided that the French army would not be involved in any major offensive operation for the rest of the war, unless exceptional events arose. A defensive line was established on the Rhine and half of the army was pulled back in France where it wouldn't suffer from attrition. At first the plan was to send a full army to Marseille from where they would have been assigned to operations in the Med and in Japan. But as the Germans made clear their intentions of counterattacking across the Rhine it was decided to keep most of this force as reserve and send only one corps to the Med theatre.
Also, the Greek army was exped to France beause the Greek player was busy cooping Russia. The Greek army was on the back foot, but fresh English quality reinforcements were close to reaching the frontline, and new opportunities were arising in the Eastern Med...

Here is the third session, so far the most exciting one.

[video=youtube_share;cNG4VdublxQ]http://youtu.be/cNG4VdublxQ[/video]

 

[Rastrigin]

The game has officially ended with an entente victory, due to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Southern and Eastern fronts, where there is nearly nothing opposing the Entente armies, and the failure of the German push in France (which ended with more than 100000 German casualities).
The manpower situation also reversed during the last session. The CPs lost their main manpower pool, the Ottoman Empire, while the Entente gained Italy which has a very big pool and is currently getting all the allowed lend-lease from the UK. Germany and AH saw big drops in their pools while the 3 suffering Entente powers, France, Russia and UK, were able to limit losses, thanks to the French defensive stance behind the river, UK getting troops from the dominions and the CPs taking lots of divisions away from the Russian front.

And this is the reason why (sadly) there won't be any AAR about this game.

 

[DarthShizNit]

I was going to write such a glorious AAR about my endless offensives into the mountains...it would have been glorious

 

[msaaim89]

Thanks, I'll admit it is difficult to watch with all the harsh movement on the maps and no audio... If do this again I'll try to keep it slower, put some audio in the background and make smaller chapters.

Yes, you definitely need audio. It just seems dull watching a video without sound. In game sounds with you narrating it would be really good.

 

[Rastrigin]

Yes, you definitely need audio. It just seems dull watching a video without sound. In game sounds with you narrating it would be really good.

Thank you for the feedback. Actually it was impossible to use the original audio as it would have meant to record our teamspeak channel, my teammates and I were a bit unconfortable with that. Also using the original audio would have meant to have the video at the same speed of the game, which is veeeery boring to watch. Not to mention that the speed-up allowed me to reduce the video size by 3 times an it still took 12+ hours to upload every single video...

 

[msaaim89]

Thank you for the feedback. Actually it was impossible to use the original audio as it would have meant to record our teamspeak channel, my teammates and I were a bit unconfortable with that. Also using the original audio would have meant to have the video at the same speed of the game, which is veeeery boring to watch. Not to mention that the speed-up allowed me to reduce the video size by 3 times an it still took 12+ hours to upload every single video...

In that case you could possibly do after game commentary when you are editing the video. Not sure how difficult that would be.