THERE WERE DALEKS AFTER ALL!!!
At least at the start.
Okay, one thing Cyrano forgot to explain, was the Austrian corps offboard (no doubt he'll get to this later tomorrow). That was Barthheart's corps, the 3rd Corps, commanded by Hohenzollen, who's the second best commander on our side for the game -- meaning he grants the next most bonuses to combat after Charles himself (whom I'm playing).
The reason he's offboard, is that this campaign has an option for the Austrians where we can send at least one corps (I don't recall if it was possible to send more, but anyway we didn't) on a safe off-map loop to arrive north of Regensburg (also known as Rattisbonne) after several game days.
Now, as Cyrano may mention in the full set of videos coming tomorrow (but in case he doesn't), since this was a game and I was interested in every player being able to operate as independently with as much responsibility as possible, I synthesized together an operational plan from player suggestions pre-game, which is why you see us spread out across the Isar, and Barth over there offmap. This definitely got almost everyone into the game throughout the game -- except unfortunately poor Barth! I figured the first few days would go by pretty quickly as we got our initial manuevers out of the way (like last time), and so after only a month or two in real time Barth would be warping back onto the map on that hill north of Rattis, where hopefully our main thrust would soon be meeting up with him, advancing along those roads parallel north and south of the Danube. In reality, I'm not sure he got into the game at all until around TWO REAL YEARS LATER!
Incidentally, I named the operation after that factor Cyrano/Jim mentions, where the French move twice as fast as us: Mighty Sheet, as a metaphor for a sheet of glacier ice grinding down upon our foes, thus Maechtiger Panzer. (As I quipped, if we can't win with a name as awesome as that, we deserve to get beaten!) The force groups were named after the pun in German between "mighty" and "tiger", so down by Munich was the Hindclaw Force; at the central Isar crossing was the Lowerjaw (sometimes called the southern jaw) Force; at the confluence of the Isar and Danube were the corps of the Upperjaw Force; and Vance/Barthheart commanded the Frontclaw Force.
Now, the rules for this campaign allowed us the strategic initiative, meaning that we were allowed to assume that we timed things to arrive at simultaneous points on the Isar for starting our crossover. Charles historically was known for preferring to turtle up and let invaders bounce off his indestructable well-supplied fortifications before counterattacking, but we aren't doing that, nor exactly what he did historically although his unexpected offensive did take the French by surprise, reflected in the French setup here which I gather was more restricted in options. (Cyrano may go through the differences in our plan and the historical Austrian plan eventually.)
This is also important because the campaign rules allowed us to shuffle divisions among our corps before we set out for our game-start positions. That's why Cyrano is talking about the elite cream of the Austrian forces down near Munich: those are the two Guard Corps, and we arranged to juice them up a little more by shuffling weaker divisions out and stronger ones in. The same is true about the other corps. Where did we put the weakest infantry divisions? -- over in Barth's 3rd Corps! Our idea was that this way they weren't dragging down our combat capability on the map, BUT they could be relied upon this way to SAFELY arrive in a dangerous position against the French, where they would benefit from Hohenzollen's combat bonus, AND where they would maximize their striking potential for such weak troops: in a supporting flank role spoiling the enemy! How that worked out, I'll leave for future videos.
Bohemia is nice this time of year...
That explanation explains Barth's comment (in retrospect) -- he was off in Bohemia for most of the game, a LOT longer in real time than we were expecting him to be.
Also incidentally, since this might come up later/soon and be a little confusing: while each corps had named infantry divisions for their (non-player character) commanders, NONE of our Austria corps had named cav divisions. It's always 6th Corp Cavalry or something like that, not Vincent's Cav Division or whatever.