BletchleyGeek
Posts: 4713
Joined: 11/26/2009 From: Living in the fair city of Melbourne, Australia Status: offline
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I'd like to bring this to your attention Joel, quote:
ORIGINAL: Joel Billings I don't understand. The rules are clear that the first week new territory is taken there are extra movement costs involved. These include but are not limited to: 1) Lack of understanding of the terrain. 2) Unknown of when enemy will be encountered. 3) Road congestion as units are moving in ways that were not predicted in advance. 4) Small scale delaying actions by enemy units that are abstracted. One real problem with hex ownership conversion is that it can generate situations were: 1) The main line of defense is breached, motorized divisions break through. 2) Rather than looking for an encirclement or whatever, MP's are spent just for the sake of converting as many hexes as possible, "raiding" cities and blocking enemy paths of retreat. 3) Motorized units go back to their start line, laughing at the rather immobile non-phasing player forces. Flavio has pointed out that air interdiction is a possible counter, but I don't think that aerial interdiction was so effective in the Eastern Front as to really hinder operational movement in a significant way, much less in 1941-1943. Positioning during your phase (the much hated hedgehogs) and reserve mode aren't flexible enough, and the former are too predictable to be really useful. More so with the increased mobility of German motorized units due to the morale increase which came with 1.05. I think that some sort of limited reaction rules are needed, to generate "meeting engagements", as janh and myself have been arguing during past week. Which such rules in place, there's no need for "cheesing out" anything: one could put units in the operational depths in "reaction" mode, which would move to intercept enemy units entering a certain radius. That these interceptions occur or not, should necessarily be mediated by suitable morale, experience, leader rating checks and possibly unit type (motorized, cavalry, etc.) Not sure if that's feasible or fits your vision of WitE, but I sincerely think that would be a very nice refinement for an already very elegant ruleset.
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