Jimmer
Posts: 1968
Joined: 12/5/2007 Status: offline
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Yes, several, in fact. The first thing to know about is "auto-forage". It's the button in the lower-left corner of the screen during the land phase. Don't use it right away, though: You need to FULLY know about it, first. What it does is finds all corps which, using their remaining land movement points, would automatically succeed at foraging, with no losses. Bring up a test game, and you can see this in action. The other thing it does is put an entry in the message box (above the log, left side) that says how much your current supply costs will be, after it finishes foraging everything it can. However, it's important to read those words carefully, because there are some "gotchas" lurking. The biggest one is that it ALWAYS forages any corps that can do so automatically, and is not currently besieging a city. So, if you move a pile to a city and set them on besiege, they won't forage. BUT, if you move that same stack into an area that has both enemy corps and a city garrison, then, because you are not THEN besieging, your corps "count". This is most important for France, but it can affect anybody. I'll use France as an example, though: Let's say Nappy is sitting one space from Vienna (a 5 forage value area), and Charles is sitting on Vienna with his army. In addition, Vienna has 20 factors in the city as garrison. Both parties have 6 corps. Nappy moves to Vienna and attacks. If at this point Nappy's controller clicks the "auto-forage" button, every French corps will auto-forage, because they all have three movement left, and it's a 5 zone. 5+3-2 (for extra corps) is 6, so none of the French corps will lose any boys. However, because they foraged, they can't besiege the city, assuming they win the field combat. Now, change the example, and have all but one French corps come from distance 4, and the last corps come from distance 1. All of the corps coming from 4 away will not forage, and so could besiege. However, the last corps, if auto-forage is used, will forage itself. Thus, the whole army is prevented from besieging the city, because one corps can't. How do you get around this? Well, you have to manually forage the corps, BEFORE you hit the auto-forage button. When you manually forage, you want to tell the dialog box that, no, you do NOT want to use remaining movement. Then, when you get around to auto-foraging, those corps will already have foraged. So, the moral is: Don't auto-forage until you would otherwise be ready to hit the "end phase" button. Once you auto-forage, go back to your corps that will utilize "normal supply", and make sure that's what you want. How do you find them? Click the button sixth from the left at the top-left bar of buttons. It shows you all your corps counters, and (among other things) their current supply status. The ones that say "Normal Supply" will have to be paid for, so you should go through each one mentally and make sure that is correct. If not, click the zoom button and go do something else with the corps.
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At LAST! The greatest campaign board game of all time is finally available for the PC. Can my old heart stand the strain?
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