Bismarck Campaign Questions

[Wayfare]

Hi all,

Having picked up this game recently, I decided to play the Bismarck campaign. This has led to a few questions:

1. I initially elected to pass through the Denmark Straits. The dialog then said that the first scenario would begin as I passed south of Iceland

2. I fought through the first scenario just fine, suffering no damage while sinking a British CA and then clearing the red line. For my second choice I opted to go hunt west. I got a dialog saying that there was smoke on the horizon and a battle was imminent. I then got a dialog saying the battle was a draw. Was there not supposed to be an actual battle here

3. After that the game decided I should head back to France and threw me into the Bay of Biscay. Bismarck is now put-putting her way to the red line in a scenario that will last for THIRTY HOURS. Even at max time compression, this will take me three hours to complete? Worse yet, I am now over two (game-time) hours in and not a single Brit in sight

Maybe something(s) got bugged? Any insight would be appreciated

[GMcClellan]

On #1: I'll check the dialog text. If you were in the DS, you'd obviously be N of Iceland, but one choice lets you go south.

#2: Did you get this dialog immediately, or a few (game) hours later? Depending on what the AI chose, it's possible you were facing a single British BB, and so if you did play the scenario, you likely missed them. I'll have to review the scenario to see if the ships are too far apart.

#3: This is a tricky scenario from a design perspective. It's essentially a version of the historical situation, with the British coming from a number of diferent directions, including Force H with the Swordfish to aid in scouting. That said, it does seem to happen too often that the German player gets no contact, and the length becomes frustrating then.

[Wayfare]

Thanks for the response

#1 felt like a text error, I can try to reproduce it and take some screenshots if you need me to.

#2 went straight from dialog to dialog. The game never went to the battle map as far as I could tell.

#3 I understand the difficulty you describe. Maybe that whole phase of the operation is just too big for a single scenario?

[Wayfare]

Here's a screenshot of the #1 situation, I just restarted the campaign to reproduce this:

[Wayfare]

This time through the second battle did take place. I sank an old British battleship and one CL and then got away with hardly a scratch on the Bismarck. So far so goood.

And now I'm in the 30-hour scenario again with nothing happening :/ I'm sorry Gary, this last scenario is just not much fun I think. 30 hours game time = 3 hours real time at 10x acceleration and that's a long time to be staring at a screen waiting for something to happen. Even if something did happen it would be too long. Maybe you could divide it into smaller pieces to cut out the downtime?

[GMcClellan]

I'm thinking of what changes, but it's much more complex than just "break it up"... so I don't know what it will be.

[Wayfare]

I'm thinking of what changes, but it's much more complex than just "break it up"... so I don't know what it will be.

I didn't mean to imply it would be easy, sorry if it came across that way. I'll be looking forward to what you come up with. In the meantime there are plenty of other cool scenarios to keep me occupied!