Tunisia - dreadful Tunisia if you’re playing as the Italians. I dunno if this is a luck thing like when playing as the Italians, we might stand a chance if the opposing side doesn’t have a large tank…
If they do, which they always do, there’s almost zero chance of holding them back. It’s almost comical if it weren’t so futile and frustrating.
When I switched to the British to see if it’s just my inability and maybe just the weaponry or something , I spent the first game played sparsely moving and just sitting by the objective in the starter tank , expending thousands of bullets from the machine gun wiping out literally hundreds of enemy soldiers without even trying.
They couldn’t do anything about my tank. The game ended with me resting neatly at top a small mound of over 280 dead Italian troops.
They had no anti tank capabilities to speak of. Grenades? What will those do but make a dull thump! on the ground outside my vehicle.
Ah, wait! Th-they have th-that armoured car right? The main gun can surely do something right? No. If one has the luck to score a penetrating hit and it actually DO something, I would recommend they stop playing, and purchase lottery tickets as soon as possible as theyre likely to win many jackpots at once.
Yeah main gun is a joke. It overheats very easily, has a very very limited magazine and no ability to be useful against soft targets. It’s great for making noise, ringing in the new year, or drawing fire from the enemy side of every corner of the tsunami-like line of contact. The tiny magazine for the main gun that doesn’t mag dump likes to be reloaded twice or so it feels. I spend more time waiting for reloads and overheats than actually shooting at anything moving. The machine gun has a laughably small magazine as well and the rounds lack any semblance of stopping power. Its ability to even behave like a rapid firing , stabilized automatic firearm is pathetic. It’s reload is kinda funny cos the sound is the typical changing of a mag, but then it continues clinking clicking chh-chh’ing , and the frustrated loader shouting in Italian.
But then it pauses briefly and suddenly continues again with the hurried, frustrated, frantic clicking clanking and slapping and sliding and clacking of stamped/machined metal parts as I imagine the poor under fed, dehydrated, terrified, exhausted, hysterical loader fighting with the slowly but surely loading “machine gun”.
The reload goes through a second series of this after the first and THEN the gun is loaded and charged, ready to fire another magazine of 8 or 9 rounds at below 20rpm with a rather pedestrian muzzle velocity of I’m guessing below 50 meters /s.
The armament in the Italian armored car would do more damage if I slowly fed it to the enemy or just unbolted it from the frame of the vehicle and THREW it at them along with handfuls of its underpowered , low velocity otherwise useless ammunition.
Honestly if I just played the tank crew instead, and ditched the vehicle someplace far away, I think that would do more harm to the enemy.
The rest of the combat teams of the Italians in the Tunisia campaign are woefully inadequate and not suited to fight at all under any conditions.
The rifles are awful, the submachineguns are even worse and the DIY smoke grenades make it quite clear the italians should be REMOVED from the game entirely.
The best rifle in their inventory is a slightly cut down version of a German rifle (that irl I find is a joy to shoot btw) of WW1 vintage. And you have to buy/equip everyone with it as it’s a rifle the Germans start with but not the Italians heh. That don’t sit right with me for some reason. Anyway, why not just remove them and maybe add partisan campaign in eastern Europe or maybe another eastern front hotspot like Rzhev (I know i butchered it) or Market garden or something else where it’s a little more balanced as far as each side has the ability to return fire and kill one another instead of it just being an absolute one sided slaughter.
I love the challenge don’t gemme wrong, I like the difficulty being impossible but this is just dysmal and depressing. It would be nice to see the Italian armored car weaponry have at least a slim chance to strike fear into the enemy…
