Jabod
Posts: 26
Joined: 6/23/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
When speaking of forts and fortifications, perhaps it is best to think of them as series of such. Thanks for your reply. The point is I want to use the engine to model historical campaigns, not imaginery ones. The campaigns I'm interested in had significant fortresses and fortified towns, but typically you couldn't fit tens of thousands of men in them and this did not happen. This is a glaring problem with the "Age of Napoleon" scenario, for example (one scenario I have been studying to see how the engine could be used for non-WW2 campaigns). You have fortresses - Glogau, Ulm, Metz, Smolensk etc - but as the engine stands you can sit the entire Grand Armee, 200,000 men, in them. This is nothing like what actually happened! In the game there will seldom be battles like Waterloo, Leipzig, Borodino etc, because the common sense thing to do is just sit your army on a fortress! Indeed, the stacking limit is a factor to bear in mind. But the point about modelling pre-20th Century warfare is that in general you want to encourage big stacks (concentrated armies), not long front-lines with units spread all along them. This is done in the Punic War scenario, for example, by setting a high stacking limit (500 stacking points). But then this stacking limit will also apply to every town and fortress, though you couldn't fit a big army inside any of them. In both the Napoleonic and ancient eras - and in most eras in fact - you had a few large field armies that fought battles, and lots of much smaller garrisons that defended towns and fortresses. You didn't defend a fortress with an army, because the army would quickly starve (even if it could fit in there in the first place). I think this engine has great potential for modelling warfare in different ages, not just the modern era, by tweaking variables such as stacking limits etc. But this issue of fortress capacity is the biggest problem I have come across. Like you say, it seems a simple thing to change. It also seems logical within the current game system. The fact that "structural damage" to a fortress does not diminish its capacity to act as a fortress is extremely... odd. Here's what the manual says about structural points: Structural Points These can be damaged in combat and dictate the efficiency of production. Also they give penalties to aircraft in airfield or ships in port if not at full level. So you damage a port and it penalizes naval units there. You damage an airfield and it penalizes air units on the field. So why doesn't damaging a fortress penalize the defensive benefits to land units in the fortress? Very odd.
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