marcpennington
Posts: 335
Joined: 1/31/2011 Status: offline
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Thanks for the reply Sabre, and I understand why loosening up OOB issues might cause balance issues. Still, I do think the slider might be moved a little bit further towards Axis flexibility, and agree with Tarhunnas it just doesn't feel right. To use a specific in-game example from the period of Glantz's Barbarossa Derailed, it just doesn't feel right in the Road to Smolensk scenario that one really needs to think ahead if one is going to switch that infantry corps out of Guderian's over-burdened Panzer Corps to, for example, von Weich's Second Army. Here, in my last game I needed to not allocate as many SUs as I would have liked in the previous turn to save up enough points to switch the corps in the following turn. To give a historical counter-example, per Glantz, the Germans "spur of the moment" during the Minsk encirclement divided up Army Group Center into two groups, Fourth "Panzer" Army with some infantry to keep going east and another group around Minsk to envelop the pocket. The OOB change would seem to be largely based on where units happened to be at the moment of the decision, and encompassed virtually all of AGC. But again, I agree that changing the system too drastically probably would unbalance the game. Again, from my original post, maybe for the next game, dividing up admin points into "OOB points" and "supply points" for things like HQ build up might work to resolve the issue. For example, the Germans could have virtually unlimited OOB points but low supply points, while in the late war the Soviets might have a huge number of "supply points" to simulate build up for offensives but a relatively more restrictive OOB. I imagine this might also be a useful mechanism on the Western Front, given the even more decisive supply advantage of the Western Allies opposed by flexible ad-hoc German Kampfgruppes. An alternative solution, that might be just possible to easily implement within the WITE engine without too much work (or not... :) ), would be to add in a "strategic reallocation" option. So, for a cost of say, 50 admin points, a player could cause all of Army Group Center's units to be assigned to OKH, allowing him then to regroup all his underlying armies/corps/divisions (kinda like what happens when Army Group A and B are formed). This might do a good job of simulating the German's ability to quickly modify their force structure for a change of strategic plan, while not making more admin points available for use of an ahistorical amount of HQ buildup and such.
< Message edited by map66 -- 5/15/2011 5:24:59 PM >
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