Sure they were! But given the sizes of those armies, the bottlenecks on them were much bigger than a single city.
Your breezy overconfidence does not reassure me.
Biodiesel has to be made from things that grow, because of the bio part of the name not the diesel part of the name. You can run a diesel engine on just about anything that will combust with oxygen.
Okay. So which fuel, specifically, can you run the locomotives on consistently, while making sure said locomotives are easily maintained and work all the time and that the fuel is available even when food isn't?
Remember, again, that you are smacking head-on into the cold, hard fact that the post-Collapse economy of Chicago and its surroundings has been relying heavily on coal fuel, including for mobile applications like ship engines. They are not using diesel engines for the same purpose. It seems logical to suppose that this happened for a reason.
Also, do you know how much labour it would take to gather, process and transport coal after all the supporting infrastructure had collapsed in the Illinois basin?
It doesn't matter; the Victorians would
allow that labor to be undertaken, because they need coal mines running too. They don't need oil from that region; they're clearly getting that from elsewhere.
You're missing one of the critical features of colonialism. The economy is shaped not only by what is optimally efficient and profitable, but by what the colonial overlords will
allow. And colonial overlords often tolerate a lot of economic inefficiency, in the name of extracting a few key commodities from their victims while preventing any future uprisings.
Not in the middle of the Congo they don't. There are still diesel generators in the middle of the Congo though, because it is still cheaper and more convenient to import the stuff across relatively poor supply lines than it is to build up a whole new infrastructure to utilize more local resources.
There is no force equivalent to the Victorians in the middle of the Congo that actively prevents diesel fuel from being imported- and if there is,
Sure, but that's not my point. My point is that attacking and taking the initiative is an advantage and adopting a plan that suits your strategic aims even more of an advantage.
My point is that we should not forget our aims at the first IED and cede the initiative because (shocker) the Victorian militia system - which has been designed to fight like Kraft and his minions thought the Viet Cong fought - actually makes a credible attempt at re-creating an Iraq-style urban battle.
If we spread our forces too thin, adopt impossible goals and hang around making easy targets of ourselves, sure, that's a bad thing. But we in this quest are under no obligation to repeat the litany of mistakes that allowed US intervention in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to be so thoroughly humiliated.
Keeping our forces concentrated is going to present challenges if we are launching offensives. I, for one, am very glad our forces were concentrated when
this little surprise blew up in our faces. Since other Victorian cities will probably have just as many militia lying around as Buffalo did, we need to prepare for exactly this kind of resistance- not exceptionally well organized or trained, but enough to make it very difficult for us to advance at will across a hundred miles (or more) of hostile countryside overland. Air strikes are probably within our capacity, but we have limitations on how much of that we can accomplish with the aircraft available (a few dozen turboprop and prop planes, and 21 jets that can average one eight-plane sortie per day)
fasquardon
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I still maintain we should just smash and grab the region as much as we can.
Take anything that is't nailed down, stockpile it in Buffalo start it back to the commonwealth and anything we can't take with us gets dumped in the lake or set on fire in an empty lot.
There is virtually nothing of value left for us to loot, in the process of doing this looting and pillaging we will hand the Victorians a lot of propaganda material, and the next time we come back to fight in this area (
we will), the populace will remember what we did to them and fight us tooth and nail.
If all we're hoping to accomplish is trashing Buffalo further, we shouldn't have taken Buffalo in the first place; it's pretty heavily trashed.
And if all we
can hope to accomplish is trashing Buffalo, then we might as well not bother and go home; any added benefit we gain from trashing Buffalo isn't worth the effort of doing so.
I pointed out that Rochester, the main Victorian port on Lake Ontario, is roughly 100km away, which is a daytrip. That Syracuse is 200km away. And Victoria has been maintaining it's internal roads.
The problem is that you're going to have to drive past a LOT of hills and small towns and forests and ambush sites on the road from "here" to "there" in any of those cases. 100 kilometers across enemy terrain that we now know the enemy WILL fight for? That's actually a big struggle to deal with. Remember how hard it was for the Victorians to travel an even shorter distance from Detroit to the Raisin River.
Unless we start committing Lind-level "lol we can just go where we want and attack as we please" foolishness, we can't count on hitting Rochester overland without a very substantial, expansive commitment.
If we commit to holding Buffalo, that's a LOT of AP we going to spend to hold it. AP we can't use to solve our domestic and foreign issues and get stronger for when Russia looks at us in a rocks fall scenario.
Our initial strategy was to use peace talks to GAIN APs. Not spend it.
Occupying Buffalo for longer than our initial plan just because we can means we changing the strategy. So... What would that be then ? Destroying Blackwell hold on Victoria?
The hope is that we can increase the amount of pain Blackwell feels because of our continued activity, to a level that causes him to agree to a better peace treaty.
In hindsight we should not have accepted the coin flip. But I wouldn't assume we're doomed here. Mobilizing our military costs 1 AP/turn; the
entire Detroit campaign effectively cost us the 2 AP we spent on "Mobilize the troops"
and that was it. We spent more AP in the runup to the campaign securing basing rights and so on, but that wasn't directly related and won't be as big of an issue here.
Hopefully, holding Buffalo and inflicting more-than-pinprick damage on Loyalist positions via air and gunboat raids will convince Blackwell to go back to the peace table. If it doesn't, maybe we'd just better withdraw and give up the benefits of having that peace treaty, or accept a much less beneficial one. But fighting a military campaign doesn't stop us from doing other useful things in the same turn, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
They did just get done stripping themselves of military supplies for the Leamington force.
So doubtful.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying "the detonators were already in Buffalo several months ago, when the Leamington force resupply effort rolled out." Or even "the detonators were left in the city weeks ago, when the Crusaders rolled out."
I'm saying, it's been
weeks since the peace negotiations broke down, and the Crusaders had already left Buffalo before that, permitting Blackwell's men to re-enter the city. Blackwell knew we'd be fairly likely to launch an attack in this general area. It would have been logical to take some of his
existing stockpile of bomb detonating equipment, load it on a truck, and send it to Buffalo in the anticipation of our arrival.
