hmm, how much does bad weather affect ground attack missions?
Lots, especially if you have unreliable radar and your missiles are usually only allegedly guided. I don't think the Viks will be doing
much with their air force until the weather clears, if only because even most of the planes they already threw at us probably need a maintenance cycle. And because the Leamington landing force will need considerable time to dig out, sort themselves out, and figure out what to do with the limited resources they have left.
So I think we can expect an operational pause before anything really substantial happens. We don't have the assets to counterattack, but they don't have the assets to
press that attack. The next move will either be a desperate balls-to-the-wall offensive by the Leamington forces, an attack from the south by the other (bigger) part of the Victorian army, or both.
Horrible as it is, we're more capable of rebuilding the army elements under threat here. We'll just have to hope that being out of supply actually matters in the combat engine for this quest, instead of the penalties from it being totally offset by various fanaticism-related bonuses. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what the hell we do, because reality would still be stacked in the Vics' favor.
Looking at the modifiers we've already seen in play,
I'm expectingthat next time they attack up around the Leamington landings, the Viks will be fighting at anywhere from +2 relative advantage to -2 relative disadvantage. I think the less Vik-friendly interpretations of that are a bit more probable, but the more Vik-friendly ones aren't
im-possible, unless we can find more sources of bonuses.
It is my hope that the oncoming inclement weather also neutralizes their airforce next turn as well.
Heck, bad weather favours us a great deal as the defenders.
Yeah. Attacking through mud isn't fun.
Bad weather can also be ruled to be a penalty to falling back, thus making it possibly a penalty to us as well.
Only if we
don't hold them, which I would like to hope we can do this time...
Still no sign of the southern force? At this rate, we'll be able to just wipe out the entire eastern push and move our forces into better positions.
This has all taken place in only a day or two worth of combat. It's not unsurprising that the southern force hasn't gotten moving,
ESPECIALLY if the true purpose of that attack was (
as I speculated some time ago) to draw out our reserves and pin them in place on the wrong side of the Detroit River while the "real" offensive grinds us up from the South.
There will come a time, in the distant future, if we win this eventual fight against the Vics and establish a Prison Camp to house the assorted Vick prisoners, when we will have to have a War Crimes Tribunal as prescribed by International and Pre-Collapse American Rules of War. When that time comes, I imagine that many Vicks will be tried and found guilty of various minor infractions, but ultimately many will just be regular soldiers with some god-awful opinions.
Those guilty of acts like this will be tried, and if reasonable evidence is found, they will be hanged. It won't be public, it won't be a celebratory event or something like revenge, but they will be punished. In a yard in the Prison Camp, they will be hung by the neck till dead, then buried in a standard grave with all the rights and accompanying material that any person is entitled to. But they will hang.
You'll have my vote, but then I'm less anti-death-penalty than most people in the thread...
Hmm. About how many planes do the Vicks have left? We traded one for one, ish, and they started with about fifty, but how many did we lose?
We stated with about fifty.
They started with at least a hundred and very possibly more in reserve.
The bad weather is interesting.
Given the Vick's ASMs are borked, their Air Force will be useless, like the USAAF during the opening stages of the Battle of the Bulge. All told, no reason to contest the air and lose our aces.
Naval-wise, fighting them in rough weather would give our trained sailors the advantage over their army grunts, but their "sailors" are probably so incompetent, and their salvaged ships so bad, that they'll sink themselves. Either that, or they will do that smart thing for once, and not go swimming.
The problem is, their ships are
gone. The Victorian Navy isn't the trouble for us operating in bad weather. The problem is that our gunboats aren't seaworthy, and aren't numerous enough to put a curtain of AA fire up that can ward off massed air attack by what planes the Victorians still have ready to fly. We'll be operating at significant penalties during bad weather, which will reduce the effect of any shore bombardment. The bad weather may hurt the VAF as much as us, but again, that doesn't matter if our ships sink in a storm.
Really, the big worry is what the Negaverse questers are up to. Prompt: they are saying "yes, everything according to plan". Why? What is the plan that they are so convinced that we are following the script for? Remember, the enemy is allowed to be smart. Even the Vicks. Especially the Vicks: you don't make such a Khemer-Rouge type philosophy work for long, even with outside support, by being doctrinaire idiots.
Well, my theory is still that this attack is
not meant to be decisive, but is meant to maneuver us into committing our reserves and being badly out of position to stop the second, harder attack from the south. If so, then to some extent they've succeeded (our air force was part of our reserves, in effect), and to a large extent they can still pull it off.
This is what the point of the plan was. We can trade space for time and now we're in a position where their amphibious landing is now running on fumes, something that wasn't in the plan but is a highly advantageous development. We also know they're going to try to come at us since we've been retreating in the face of their advance (something that, to them, proves they're winning on the moral front) and because they need Detroit at this point to properly resupply. Even before going into munitions there's simply no way there's enough food in the area to sustain five divisions for any appreciable length of time.
Hm yeah, even if they forage
hard, the pre-Collapse population of Leamington was about 27000 (ironically, it was once voted the #1 place to live in Canada- trivia Wikipedia power!). Food shortages will be an issue for them soon, you're right about that.
On which note, they just captured (SOB) a pre-Collapse tomato cannery! (SOB) The Pizza Party will wear black armbands...
They either need to spread out to forage, which dilutes the threat they pose and opens them up to defeat in detail, or come at us to take our ration tins and cartridge boxes with no heavy equipment and charging into the teeth of real artillery.
Yeah pretty much, except...
@PoptartProdigy can we get a write-in for the Navy of:
"Keep the ships close under Detroit's AAA envelope and in a good position to provide fire support for troops east of Detroit"?
That strikes me as the best use of the fleet's big guns and may just bait the Victorian Air Force into charging our much denser anti-air defenses around the city.
I'm pretty sure, looking at maps, that the Victorian forces can threaten our second defense line without being in artillery range of positions on the Detroit River. I'll have to doublecheck in a bit, no time now.
