this is a sequel to the Gizmotron user-mod for Axis and Allies. featuring new types of weather & terrain. new, larger territory maps in skirmish mode. new experience ranks and bonuses (regiments improve up to 2000 exp points). 100+ special ops, new water-based units like cruisers and submarines (with torpedo attacks). nations included are Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Communist China, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, India (Allied), Indian National Army (Axis), Iran, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Mongolia, Nationalist China, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic (Axis), South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, Yugsolavia, and the Yugoslav Partisans more nations and territories available for WW2 mode, see images for details.
I've relocated all of Italy's artillery units into a single division HQ. none of the units described here use new models. some units (like the 210 mm howitzer) are extremely powerful but have a very low rate of fire (3.5 minutes!) others have very light attack values but can fire very quickly.
they still won't be able to win a direct tank-vs-tank match with most of the major nations. but if players use them as long-range bombardment weapons they can still inflict a lot of damage.
with the very heavy artillery it's probably best to have them grouped together for a single burst to crush enemy buildings and regiments, and then have them retreat behind friendly tanks and entrenched infantry. Italian arty tanks tend to get annihilated by enemy medium tanks in direct combat.
yeah, I know that some of these units were primarily used in dedicated anti-tank roles. with the Semovente 47/32 it was considered useless against tanks by the middle of the war-- and so ended up getting used to support infantry.
the 149/53 has a very powerful attack but a VERY slow rate of fire. even with Italian Heavy Tanks to support it during combat, it's probably better to avoid direct combat with enemy tanks until AFTER you've scored your first big barrage.
probably best to spam three divisions of light and medium artillery first to keep the pressure on and make the tougher enemy tanks rout themselves into paralysis. once you've done that then you can attack with the heavier artillery for the finishing blow against weakened enemy armor.
once that big volley goes down on enemy heavy tanks, if they're still not dead, THEN you can rush in with the front-line heavies to engage enemy tanks.
Italian tanks have some of the lowest health and defense values of the game. so don't expect to win a close-range slug-fest with enemy heavies very often.
Not to be nit picky, but was the Italian green-white-red tricolor ever used without the shield emblem by the Italian Kingdom or the fascist puppet state Mussolini made after he was kicked out?
well, we used the unembelished tri-color because original Italy was donated to us by Capt. Kramer. it's been practically remodeled from the ground up since then.
adding the shield emblem in there shouldn't be too difficult.
So the basic tactic of the Italian is rally on their artillery barrages?
Italian infantry is actually very competitive once upgraded: you've got Bersaglieri, Chemical Weapons troops, the Lagunari (marines). and the Alpini divisions are quite good.
you can muddle through the mech stage with lots of chemical weapons and AT infantry... but once those heavy tanks show up you need something better.
once the game moves into the mech and armor stages Italy can't win against America, England, Germany, or Russia without some serious artillery support.
This isn't specifically related to Italy, but do you know if there is a ways to change the Rate of Fire scaling that's displayed in-game?
In the base game we have Very Fast | Fast | Medium | Slow | Very Slow which is fine since even the Very Slow is still like once every 10 seconds. But with the new scaling of artillery to be more historically accurate, would it be possible to change these to seconds per attack ranges/add more categories to more accurately represent their Rate of Fire in-game? I know you have spreadsheets with the statistics of all the units but it's kind of a hassle to pause, minimize, look up the unit, then go back to the game with the knowledge of how often you can fight/if the unit can take normal skirmishes.
Obviously this would just be a quality of life change and is by no means necessary, but I was just curious if it was possible. Great work on the mod so far, a lot of the stuff looks really cool.
we've changed so many things with the "Uncommon Valor" mod that I've wanted to do this for a long time. thus far I have only been partly successful. you can see the recharge time in seconds for upgraded units. I haven't found a way to get that for non-upgraded units yet.
in the original game every unit for every faction had a generic attack (the attack values, rate of fire, and range were all basically the same). so this meant that every nation could adopt the same basic tactics and timing for attacks.
now that nearly every artillery unit has a unique attack value, maximum range, and rate of fire-- knowing these details for friendly and enemy units could form the basis of unique successful tactics for each nation and regiment. a case in point: rocket tanks now require nearly three whole minutes to reload between volleys. you don't want to keep them exposed to enemy light and medium tank regiments while they're utterly helpless.
I also wanted to display unit speed as well. but the problem there is that infantry are made unnaturally fast in the original game to keep them from taking forever! and I don't really want to make them slower. I plan on adding unit speed in as a pure number, though.