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ColinWright -> RE: Comprehensive Wishlist (8/10/2013 12:32:35 AM)
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quote:
On review, I might say that the Allied movement allowances are too high. I know the Americans could always find enough trucks to motorize an infantry division, but the thought of battalions loading into trucks and driving thru the bocage and marshes doesn't seem right. Similarly, the British never did anything bold. Even during Goodwood the 51st Div sat at the start line for 'protection' while the tanks struggled without infantry support.
There's a big difference between troops that actually kept their vehicles in combat (panzergrenadiers, 'motor infantry' battalions, etc) and those that merely used trucks to get to the battlefield.
The latter would advance, fight, etc on foot, as a rule.
One thing you can do that I make use of in various scenarios is to regard truck movement of this kind as rail movement. I've actually edited the sound tile and altered the 'rail' tile to make it tidier in some scenarios -- but you wouldn't really need to do that.
Make Allied infantry units truckless. Then give them a hell of a rail movement allowance and a very quick rate of rail repair. Obviously, that would create some other problems -- but it might turn out to be a net plus.
For one, looking beyond just this scenario, one can limit just how many Allied divisions can go charging off across France. Historically, some were in fact stripped of their trucks in order to make a rapid advance possible.
More generally, though, we need dedicated truck units. Some way has to be found to simulate the real situation that existed outside the American Army. Almost all forces could move part of their infantry by truck -- and they could vary which part. However, they couldn't move all of it at once. The British army, for example, in at least the earlier part of the war, provided enough trucks to lift any one of the three brigades in a division at a time -- when Slim was advancing through Iraq, some of his troops rode, and the rest just stayed behind. German infantry units advancing through Russia in 1941-42 habitually formed a 'schnell abteilung' that would fully motorize an advance detachment whilst the rest of the division trailed along as best it could.
...I suppose that the most practical way of simulating both the value and the limitations of this would be to allow infantry to entruck or detruck -- so long as they weren't adjacent to an enemy unit.
...or some such programmable expedient. The point would be to confer (a) flexibility as to which units get a ride, whilst (b) preventing them from being panzergrenadiers. Perhaps 'entrucked' units would automatically detruck when they moved adjacent to an enemy unit -- and could only entruck at the start of their move. That should prove fairly easy to introduce -- and of course players can always stick with the current arrangement if it doesn't work for their purposes.
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