Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: AresMars

In your example;

MACK 134A would retain command of the force at all times as he is a NAMED LEADER with the highest Seniority, then Charles 446B (and 2 Corps), then Wellington 553B (with 1 Corps) and then a Purssian Corps Commander (111D)

At least based on my previous experience; In EIANW, it would depend how the Allied force was created but MACK would be in charge if this was EIA or EIH.

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There's still possible weirdnesses if not everybody is at war with the same nations, which is why the original EiA rules forced neutral nations to either declare war on the aggressor, or to move to an adjacent area (and that has a known loophole tactic involving allies with enforced peace).

quote:

ORIGINAL: KenClark

Hello all. I have been playing EiA for at least 15 years, with at least three significantly different gaming groups who all had slightly different rules interpretations. I understand that lots of people have different opinions and I respect them.

In this case, however, there is a critical game balance problem as the computer game is now played. The game balance problem is caused the lack of combined movement and shared political point gains/losses. The 'loan corps' feature is an attempt to correct what appears to be a problem with the difficulty in programming combined movement.

In every EiA game I have ever played, the goal as the 'at-start' alliance against France (Au/Pr always, usually with Russia, sometimes with Turkey) is to defeat France before it becomes an unstoppable monster. The reason this coalition always occurs is because France's counter density and leadership is much higher than the Allies'. An ideal full six-stack French army under Napoleon would be the Guard, the Artillery and Corps I-IV. This stack has a numerical strength of 20 Guard, 12 Artillery, 13 Cav or so and 90 Inf (there may be some error here), totall strength 135 or so. Morale is about 4.2

The Allies' best combined six-stack under Charles would be 2 Prussian, 2 Austrian and 2 Russian corps, containing the I-II corps of each nation. This has a strength of about 81 Infantry, 10 Guard and 10 Cavalry, totalling 101 factors. Nappy gets a +1 Charles gets a 0. Morale about 3.3

The Austrian best six-stack would have about 75I 5 Guard and 7 Cav, total 87 Factors) under Charles. Nappy gets a +1 Charles gets a 0. Morale about 3.2

The Prussian best six-stack has about 7 Guard, 75 I and 18 Cav (?) total 100 factors under Blucher. Nappy gets a +1 Blucher gets a 0. Morale about 3.4

Given the corps density, leadership and morale advantage, you would say that a 6-corps stack gives the French a 0.9 to 1.0 morale advantage, a 35% numbers advantage and a +1 die roll advantage. In fact, the French can pretty much get numerical parity and a 1.0 morale advantage using only 4 corps.

The French advantage of the +2 Guard, 1.0 morale and +1 die roll means that the French will win about 30% more battles on average than the Allies, and means that they will lose about half as many battles (with a much higher number of ties).

What does this mean politically?

On average, France will win 4 points for Nappy battles, whereas an allied stack will win 3. Given the 30% morale/leadership advantage this really turns out to be about 4.3 verus 2.7 for victories when normalized. Losing, France would lose 5 points 20% of the time whereas the Allies will lose 3 points 50% of the time. Again normalized this works out to be -1 to -1.5. So given equal stack corp numbers France on averave will gain 3.3 PP versus the Allies 1.2 when average losses are subtracted from average gains. Clearly this works out to France's advantage.

In the board game, on average, the Allies tactic for getting over this aparant advantage was twofold: Corps numbers and Splitting Forces. If a 3-country team attacks france they have about twice to 2.5 times the actual numbers of corps, which means that defending minor countries is difficult for France. This is a bit outside the scope of this thread. The Splitting Forces method takes advantage of the fact that under the EiA rules a defender only lost political points based on the number of its corps in the battle, instead of the total number of corps in the battle. As per the ideal stack above, if the Allies were to win the battle they would each get 3pp wheras if they lost they would only lose 1 pp each. Given the normalized math above, this brings down the differential by a factor of about 2.0 as the losses now cost 1/3 and the victories stay the same. You will see that the math then works out to a net difference of 3.3 to 3.2 France to Allies (roughly).

Now of course it's somewhat difficult to get the ideal 6-stack with 2 corps each. You would want to optimize your superstack by stacking 12 corps with Charles and 10 corps with Blucher/Kutuzov. This would still give France a +1 and the other countries a +0 for tactical rating but then gives the Allies a chance to get cav superiority which could bring the odds of getting a +1/+1 situation much higher. This also allows the corps number superiority to become more important as the French have to superstack themselves to avoid getting killed off by numbers alone. (this also makes the 4-corps per depot rule MUCH more important and which is why my groups ALWAYS played with the 4-corps-per-depot rule).

So the rough math in this post is meant to show that if you want combat to be balanced for the "allies", against the numerical and morale advantage that France has, you should employ some form of victory-point splitting mechanism. Otherwise France will always win barring extremely bad luck. This is especially the case as France can split its movement between the Allies (due to the no-combined movement issues) and thus catch them before they can combine. The loaning corps solution is a pretty good one, but it has to be combined with the splitting-VP option or else it's meaningless.

Don't get me started on the lack of 1-factor Militia screening corps and 5:1 trivial battles not being implemented, which is also needed to avoid France smashing everyone one at a time.

Ken

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First, I agree that Au/Pr with GB bankrolling them, should try to get/hold off France. If they get Russia, all the better. But he usually is ALSO going for Sweden, and so when I play they get one stack and a good leader.

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Secondly, I've NEVER seen Turkey go to war with France off the bat. This is the best time to:
--get the Ottoman Empire AND/OR
--wait a few months and then schwack AU when he's busy AND/OR
--hit Russia (least choice)

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Third, you added Blucher too early. I believe that he comes in in 1807 not 1805.
As the allies, we also usually had two "monster stacks" adjacent to each other

quote:

ORIGINAL: iamspamus

Secondly, I've NEVER seen Turkey go to war with France off the bat. This is the best time to:
--get the Ottoman Empire AND/OR
--wait a few months and then schwack AU when he's busy AND/OR
--hit Russia (least choice)

quote:

ORIGINAL:  Ralegh
P4. Why lend a unit to an ally? So the unit can move in their turn: this is the only way to achieve that in EIANW. Note also that such a unit could be used against an enemy you are not at war with (example: while remaining neutral, Spain lends all her fleets to France, who uses them against the British)

quote:

ORIGINAL: AresMars

In the orginal EiA Blucher joins the Prussian OOB in Feb 1806

In EiH v5.1 (I think), Blucher joins the OOB in 1807, and there seems to be some special rules around his appearance, but I cannot rememeber the details. Also, I could not find them on a quick search.

So, KenClark is right from his prespective, as EiA was the primary game version he played I bet.

iamspamus is referring to EiH (v.??) rules, and in that version, he would be correct.

Please be careful when correcting others that you identify the versions of rules you are referring to.

There is quite a lot of differences between EiA, EiA with optional rules, EiA with additional rules, EiH v.3, 4, 5, 5.1 and 5.2 and EIANW v1.0.0

quote:

ORIGINAL: AresMars

iasmspamus, your specification "at the beginning of the game Blucher was not available" was not clear to me when I read your first post.

I re-read KenClark's post and he did mention the _at-start_ war so........MY BAD!

Are we still friends?  Or will it be pistols at 10 paces?

quote:

ORIGINAL: zaquex

Vaguely related to this topic

We often used a house rule regarding access to neutral major powers, we thought it was unrealistic to disallow an army to enter a neutral major power, its not like its a massive wall around the border and its not like a local official even if he dared to stand in the armys way would be able to force an army to turn around.

To deal with this we used two different house rules.

1. Nothing stops you from entering a neutral major powers territory but each turn you do, or keep a corp inside such territory it costs you one political point for each major powers border you intrude.

2. At any time when a corp controlled by a major power enter your controlled territory its concidered casus belli and you can declare war at the controlling major power at no cost, this even if there is an enforced peace.

As you see, the penalty for violating someones border can be substantial, it was at least enough of a deterant to make it extremly unusual for someone to actually activate these rules. I think that concidering the current repatriation rules and some other silly scenarios, it might be worth to concider something similar in EiANW.