What news from the Home Front? Has the occasional Luftwaffe raids over Southern England developed into the Battle of Britain? I read only one report of attacks and that was over Plymouth.

Never done it myself, but an invasion of Sicily should avoid any issues with getting overrun by the Germans and might give you an opportunity to damage the Italian navy some more. The only negative would be a need to station ships between the boot and the bucket.

They were striking Portsmouth too. Still getting hit once or twice a week, but no appreciable damage to any ports, industry, or anything else in southern England. My Hurricanes on intercept duty have been doing a fantastic job of chewing up German bombers.

The Germans have been fairly smart, though - they're moving away from striking targets on land and have begun hitting my patrol task groups at sea, where my air cover can't yet reach. A light cruiser force patrolling the Bay of Biscay for subs had to retreat due to air attacks, and is now laid up for repairs. I really have to give the AI credit where it's due - they couldn't make any headway bombing England, while my navy was ripping their surface combatants to pieces at sea. So they did probably the best thing they could: built up naval bombers in significant quantities to go after my ships.

I've also observed a German marine division or two prowling around on the Channel coast. I don't expect Sea Lion to happen anytime soon (if at all), but I don't think the Germans have given up hope yet.

Hmm.... Yes, this could work. I don't recall if the Strait of Messina is passable for land units, but if so, they'd still face big penalties in combat for river crossing. Taking Sicily and perhaps Sardinia would deny the Italian Navy quite a few ports, and also put my strategic bombers in comfortable range of Rome. I'm almost guaranteed to see a lot of enemy divisions move down to the 'toe' of the 'boot' to either defend against any encroachment onto the main peninsula or try to oust me from Sicily, but they'd be banging their heads against a wall trying to get across the Strait.

Okay. Right now it's late November and I've swept the Italians out of North Africa. I've redeployed 6th Corps to Abyssinia to clean up things in East Africa. By the new year, we should be in a good position to hit Sicily and Sardinia.

They do a very good job. I like letting the AI take over at the corps level, as it still lets me handle a lot of the operational campaign planning as I did here, but saves me the work of micromanaging my divisions into tactical engagements. I find the AI still needs a bit of baby-sitting. It seems particularly reluctant to carry out amphibious invasions in both this game and my last game as Japan. And in this game, 7th Corps kept sending divisions to attack westward all the way to Tobruk despite its objective of Alexandria and being set to defensive stance. But it's so easy to switch the AI off and override with my own commands that I don't really mind the occasional odd behaviour at all.

Neither do I. As I've said, I was pleasantly surprised that the AI managed to divide and conquer.

I haven't tried low-level AI control yet Do the attached corps follow suit automatically if you e.g. redeploy an army or do you have to issue movement orders for every unit yourself?

Great reporting fatty. Thanks for referring me to your thread here, I'll check on your progress regularly.

The enemy attacker would face an amphibious assault penalty because it is a straight. Also if you have ships positioned in the ocean between the land masses the enemy will not be able to cross anyway. So as long as your navy is there Sicily is safe from a counter attack.

Great read fatty keep it up

Not entirely sure what you mean by redeploying the army. If you mean by assigning new orders to the army HQ, any orders at army HQ level cascade down to the corps level, cancelling and overriding any orders you gave to the corps HQ. You cannot have one set of orders assigned to the army HQ and a different set of orders assigned to the subordinate corps. As far as redeployments, as you probably know, you can tell an army HQ to capture Paris, and the attached corps will follow suit. Then you could reassign the army HQ to capture Bruxelles, and the attached corps will be automagically redeployed.

If, like me, you are assigning orders at the corps level, the army HQ doesn't do anything - the army HQ brigade itself remains under fully manual control while the AI moves the corps around. I usually just move the army HQ along manually to keep it within range of my corps HQ so they get the trickle-down bonuses.