Where are Soviets getting all these PPs in Fortress Oslo?!

[cdjohnson]

I'm finding FO to be an extremely frustrating experience, and wondering what I'm doing wrong, or how I can better anticipate the Soviet/WP capabilities.

My frustration is not at the tactical level, but the strategic/operational layer.

After several failed attempts at FO, I'm finally rolling in my current campaign. It's Day 6, I've taken Copenhagen, Oslo, and most of Sweden up near Stockholm. I've destroyed 3-4 SU/WP battlegroups, and kept my five BGs in very good shape (1st Infantry Brigade, 3rd Commando, 4th MAB, 82nd Airborne and 18.Panzerbrigade).

I've won major or total victories in almost every battle, some of them desperate fights against long odds (4th MAB fighting off three heavy BGs in a row when they unexpectedly all converged on the same territory).

Yet despite holding most of the Scandinavian territory (which should give me an advantage in Political Points, yes?), destroying multiple BGs without losing any of my own, AND winning nearly all of the battles, I now find myself facing 7 BGs with another appearing on the west coast for an amphibious landing in my rear. That's 8 BGs against my 5.

Worse, the Soviets are sliming me with repeated Chem Weapons attacks, hitting 18.Panzerbrigade two days in a row and rendering it totally ineffective.

My frustration is that I'm now outnumbered 7-8 to 5, with the Soviets having heavy groups like 510th Independent Tank and 131st Guards, while I'm struggling to advance using largely infantry-based brigades.

I can't understand why the Soviets have so many Political Points to spend on new BGs AND special attacks (bombings, Chem Weapons), when I own most of the territory and can't scrape together enough PPs for anything heavy like 194th Armored to counter the Soviet heavies.

It's just frustrating to feel like I'm both outnumbered and outgunned, yet I'm supposed to be attacking. That I'm winning my fights and yet falling further behind

Where are the Soviets getting all their PPs from? How many Chem Weapon strikes do they get before they run out?! I'm nearly out of Air Cover, and I'm worried about concentrating my forces because another Chem strike (they've already used two) would put my BGs in big trouble.

Argh. Will the Soviets ever run out of PPs or special attacks here? I think I can fight the 7-8 on the ground now, but if they get even more reinforcements or special attacks, I'm sunk.

Chris

[Mandellorian]

This game was never designed for solo play its concentrated on multiplayer and they really really didn`t bother with the AI or balance

[mike_hanna211]

Funny, in the trailer for the game, they touted "dynamic campaign" as one if its points. I didn't get this game for the multiplayer experience. But for the "dynamic campaign" that they claimed was in the game. While there is one, it's poor at best. I was expecting Red Storm Rising, entire European theater in a conventional WWIII-type game. Instead, the fights are all in Scandinavia with token units from the UK and US. Seriously, every person that studied war tactics during the Cold War knew that if the Soviet Union attacked, it would be through the Fulda Gap in Germany.

Great concept for a game, but I feel I kind of wasted my money on this one. I keep coming back to give it a try, but I just can't get into it.

[cdjohnson]

Mike,

I'm somewhat frustrated with WALB, but I also want to be fair to the game.

You're right that the centerpiece of any Soviet invasion would have been through Central Europe, ala Red Storm Rising. However, if you're looking for that Central Europe scenario through Fulda Gap, then you want to pick up the original game, Wargame European Escalation. That game had a number of campaigns all set in Germany. While I thought some of the campaigns that came with the original release suffered from the "puzzle mission" problem (where you have to fight multiple times to figure out the "right solution"), the Able Archer DLC campaign was very good.

I think the designers felt they had addressed Central Europe in their first game, and wanted to add some new armies (Scandinavian) and new formations in a novel setting. Thus the Scandinavian theater for WALB.

Chris

[Cougarific]

Hey somebody tried to play a Eugen game as a single-player game! Welcome to Eugen's world, where the only thing that matters is multiplayer play. Single-players need not apply.

[mike_hanna211]

Cougarific původně napsal:

Hey somebody tried to play a Eugen game as a single-player game! Welcome to Eugen's world, where the only thing that matters is multiplayer play. Single-players need not apply.

Kind of a silly statement, again when they claimed a dynamic single player campaign. Never hearing of the software company Eugen before, how would anyone know that their games were ONLY multi-player?

[Cougarific]

That's the point. They're not supposed to be multi-player only, but Eugen apparently devotes a tiny fraction of their resources to the SP stuff, and simple requests from the SP community aimed at making it worth purchasing for the SP stuff are ignored.

I play SP only, don't enjoy multi-player, and like you I got suckered into buying this by their promises of a better SP experience (than W:EE). Nope, it was worse.

That's what I mean by "Welcome to Eugen's World". You can join our "Painfully Dissatisfied Single Players" club - in fact we're looking for a new Treasurer, interested?

[mike_hanna211]

Cougarific původně napsal:

That's the point. They're not supposed to be multi-player only, but Eugen apparently devotes a tiny fraction of their resources to the SP stuff, and simple requests from the SP community aimed at making it worth purchasing for the SP stuff are ignored.

I play SP only, don't enjoy multi-player, and like you I got suckered into buying this by their promises of a better SP experience (than W:EE). Nope, it was worse.

That's what I mean by "Welcome to Eugen's World". You can join our "Painfully Dissatisfied Single Players" club - in fact we're looking for a new Treasurer, interested?

Haha, ok! I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic originally. I guess I could do multi-player co-op. But, there's people here that play this game non-stop; I would most likely get my arse handed to me in PvP.

[Cougarific]

You can set up single-player matches against the AI if you want something outside the campaign but not MP.

[James Blonde]

I have to admit I've been getting a lot more enjoyment out of playing solo skirmish 3v3 with 2 AI on my team, vs 3 AI on theirs - it provides the balance (and bigger maps) I wasn't getting from 1v1 skirmish

[petri.piira]

I just won the Fortress Oslo campaign - it was the last one I completed. I'd say it is the hardest of the four campaigns.

I did it with the following units: the British infantry brigade, the commando brigade, the US marine brigade, the US armored brigade and the West German armored brigade.

It required shameless exploitation of the AIs weaknessess. It would have been impossible if I had not learned how it thinks by first winning the other campaigns against it. I managed to destroy 5 AI battlegroups, liberated Oslo and Copenhagen, that was enough. It still had more troops than me at the end.

Ambush the AI startup forces if possible: deploy an ATGM/Infantry trap in the firing range of where the AI will purchase its initial units. (The locations will become obvious to you after you have played a bit - almost always at the position where it has the least distance to your nearest zone).

Rush infantry to the towns. If you need only a small amount of points to win and you have tanks, attack immediately, otherwise defend. Try to deplete the AIs AA units over several battles. Rout them in defensive battles and attack to destroy them on the next day.

[cdjohnson]

Argh!! Just wrote a very long post covering observations on the AI, and then lost it.

Don't have the time to rewrite it, so let me just say that I finally beat Fortress Oslo. Really tough campaign. I then went onto Zhukov-2 and beat it with a Major Victory first time through. I haven't yet tackled the final campaign, but so far I agree with other posters who suggest that FO is actually the toughest. I don't know why Eugen setup FO as the 2nd campaign, it's a quantum leap in difficulty.

But as you learn the AI's patterns (like petri.piira is describing above), you can eventually start to achieve repeated tactical victories that counterbalance the strategic challenge of having inadequate PPs.