Off-site Screenshot test poster

Siegfried Sassoon posted:
“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”

Welcome to a Let's Play for John Tiller Software's First World War Campaigns series: France '14 and East Prussia '14.

In August of 1914, the German empire, along with its Austro-Hungarian allies, went to war with Serbia, France, and Russia after a nutball six weeks or so of diplomatic maneuvering. There's a YouTube channel, The Great War, which covered the entire war from 1914 through 1918 week by week (in real time!), and they did a fantastic job of bringing all of this stuff to life. Check out their series on the prelude to war, which explains all of the major players, the dumbassery they got up to, and all of the diplomatic shenanigains that ended up with World War I:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMMg8xHeY2K-0ap9srI_zx7

Here's the playlist for the episodes dealing with 1914, which covers everything we'll see in these games.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxO1lsrC98VOyOzfW0Gn8Tga

The Games
France '14 and East Prussia '14 are enormous wargames. The scale is generally 1 km to the hex, 2 hour turns, and battalion- and company-sized units. France '14 models all of the western front from Switzerland to the Channel at this scale. East Prussia '14 does the same for the eastern front, though the area covered is a bit smaller. Here are the planning maps for both campaigns for reference (linkified because huuge):

We'll be playing the "Grand Campaign," which is a series of scenarios covering the majority of the war in 1914 on both fronts. Normally you'd be playing against an opponent, but we'll just be playing the AI. As a result, we'll probably do better than the historical results or if I was playing a human opponent, but it should still be challenging because I'm just not that good at wargames. We'll play the Central Powers first, and if I manage to get through it, we'll see about flipping it and playing the Allies.

There will be some audience participation after the short prelude scenarios; we'll vote on the plan of attack and handling of reinforcements for the eastern front for the Central Powers. The plan of deployment for the BEF and the Allied Powers defense plan will be decided randomly after the voting.

Before the major campaign, we'll play out some prelude scenarios, to get an introduction to the game and its play, and see what happens before the situation in larger fight. These scenarios cover the early fighting in Belgium, at Liège, Haelan, and Dinant.

Scenario Starts
Liège