neuromancer
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
On a second thought, removing the rule from the early stages of the campaign would be harmful. It's an incentive for the Soviet player to attack and take risks. So we perhaps should look at it as a way to "herd" players into the historical, very offensive mindset of Soviet High Command.
That is a very poor way of encouraging attacks. And having it persist past November '41 is even worse. The Soviets made many ill advised attacks that resulted in high Soviet casualties, and typically an outright defeat or (at best) a stalemate that delayed the Germans (still desirable, but rather expensive). This method instead gives the Soviets low cost victories that they simply didn't get. The result is simply what you see, lower Soviet losses, and higher German losses, and the Soviet player still not actually attacking that much!
A game I was recently readig the rules for called "Proud Monster" (I have no idea how proud it is, but its certainly a monster) is at the same unit scale and a similar time scale as WitE (they have 2 week turns, but with some mechanics to simulate 2 individual weeks), and with 30 km hexes instead of 10 km. They dealt with two problems in the game in an interesting way.
First every turn (2 week turns) the Germans have an automatic Victory level, that level increases from turn to turn. On the first turn it is a lowly 4, the Russians cannot lose 4 VP locations on the first turn without automatically losing the game! And yes, the designers acknowledge that they have seen games end on turn 1 because of poor Soviet setup.
The intent here is for the Soviets to do a phased withdrawal, instead of a mad surrender of territory that the player 'knows' will fall anyway. Because the number increases every turn, it means that an objective that absolutely HAD to hold last week, is expendable this week. Which makes sense, the situation has changed, priorities shift. Perhaps the key (whatevers were removed in the past couple weeks and so it isn't important. Or maybe there were a bunch of civilians trying to evacuate so the army had to hold the line and give the civilians time to get away (very appropriate, and suitably heroic).
It also means the Germans want to try for those auto victories "if I can grab those three locations next turn, I win!" Again representing some of the variability of the objectives when on the offense, how an objective that was crucial last week is now very 'meh'.
Secondly, and relevant here, the game allows up to five combat units to stack in a non-city, non-fort hex. The Soviets however only get to stack three. This represents the bloated nature and poor inter-unit organization of the early Red Army. The Soviets want to attack and earn 'close combat markers' in order to get enough to increase their stacking potential to 4 units, and then 5. Getting those poitns are mandatory to improving first the Soviet defensive ability, and then their offensive ability, so the Soviet player has to look for those opportunities.
Something similar could be done in WitE, that the Soviet evolution towards a more competant and better organizaed army means that they have to have fought a number of offensives. Once they get X points, they can get a morale/ formation upgrade Y weeks later (allowing for the lessons of those battles to be contemplated, and changes to be deployed). Now the Soviet player has to look for the chance to go on the offensive - a crushing defeat gets him no points, a defeat maybe a half point, and a victory 1 point, so he will want to pick his battles too, not just sacrifice some random unit at a German stack.
Note on Winter - the Soviet Army being in vastly better shape than they should be could certainly explain part of the problem with the Winter Offensive being vastly too effective. Of course there are three things to remember.
1. Historically the Germans pushed right up until December 5, they had no idea the weather was going to get that cold all of a sudden. No one knew. The players should be encouraged to NOT dig in early in order to represent Typhoon, it should not be necessary to do so lest the army disintegrate. Making it necessary is yet another fantasy element that has no place in the game.
2. Hitler order the army to stand fast. And in fact it has been argued that they would have done worse if they hadn't.
3. The Soviets ran out of supplies and had to stop their offensive. They didn't have this massive never ending supply that both sides have in the game.
The game should have the exact same results if the players do the same thing as history. If we say the players will suffer worse than was historical if you follow history, then there is something deeply wrong in the game.
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RE: Toss us a bone - 
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