Redmarkus5
Posts: 4456
Joined: 12/1/2007 From: 0.00 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Flaviusx quote:
ORIGINAL: Jakerson quote:
ORIGINAL: redmarkus4 3. WiTP AE has two start options, IIRC, one of which allows you to start on December 08, after Pearl Harbor. Maybe WITE needs an option to start the Grand Campaign in week 2, with the historical successes of the first week of operations already played out and the surprise factor removed? This is kind of good idea but it wont stop German players making new type of totally optimized opening move for week 2 and forming new pockets from week 2 setup. This optimized start up moves is bit of problem for every turn based game. It's a question of leverage. Surprise turn effects can be leveraged in a way that ordinary turns cannot. You can optimize future turns, sure, but the pay off won't be anywhere near as big or have as huge strategic consequences. I'm pretty well convinced at this point that the Lvov opening is greatly accelerating the pace of operations in AGS, by a good month or so. It's having a non trivial impact on the game. SW front is just getting wrecked way too easily. Wonder why Soviets are running away so much? Well...because after turn 1 they haven't got a whole lot left to defend with. In real life 2 of the 3 front were demolished from the getgo. The Lvov gambit turns it into 3. Exactly. I wasn't really thinking of this as 'fix' by Trey - more as an alternative scenario with a different start point, exactly like the '42 or '43 start options. For those who are saying 'I am tired of this issue' there are an equal number who are clearly not tired of it. Now, I have along history of complaining that the Soviets are way overpowered and the Axis need better chances to create pockets vs. human players, but the Lvov pocket and the early Romanian release should not be part of the solution, IMHO. My ideas: 1. Improve the Soviet position in the south so that they at least have a chance to put up the tough historical defense they did, but also prevent them from vacating the field (AI player included). Remember, the critical operational choice that the Axis faced in late summer '41, to go for Moscow or create the Kiev pocket, was a result of the strength of Soviet resistance in the south. Without this resistance no iteration of the game will ever force the Axis player to make that choice, and that can't be right. See points 3 and 4 below for ideas about how to make the soviet player hold rather than flee. 2. Fix/freeze or constrain early Soviet movements in the center and north so that they absolutely do not have the run for the hills option there, but similarly reduce Axis armoured MP so that driving to Leningrad by Turn 6 (as I saw in one AAR) becomes logistically impossible. I hear the Axis screams already, but once expert players start doing significantly better than expert German generals did at the height of the blitzkrieg, something is wrong with the settings :) 3. Make the prolonged defense of cities and key regions more essential by altering the factory evacuation mechanism. For example, evacuations cannot commence (for 'political' reasons) until an Axis division is within N hexes of the city in question. So, if you want to evac your cities, you need to hold the enemy off for a certain number of turns - the more resources the city has the more focus you need to put on defending it. On the other hand, if you race a single Axis division on its own too close to a city, the evac will start. You need a proper plan for capturing or cutting off the city in question if you want to prevent that. 4. Remove the single unit ZOC rule for terminating factory evacs and base this on the relative ZOC strength, such that the Axis must have a higher ratio of CV points with ZOC in the city hex against the value of Soviet CV with ZOC into the city hex. So, if I decide to hold a city and it's adjacent hexes with a few weak brigades and you push an Axis Army Corps into one or more adjacent hexes, evacuations halt. A Pz Regt, however, may not achieve the same thing. This might take some of the silliness out of the game. 5. Enforce a rail line rule such that cutting the rail lines into a city (even with a weak unit) prevents evacuation - this will encourage more imaginative flanking and operations in depth rather than a headlong race to sit next to each city hex. (Is this rail rule already the case? I never found out as most of my stuff has generally been evacuated long before the rail is cut!) As a self confessed Soviet fan boy, I do want a tougher fight against the Axis, but I don't want to play space invaders. On the occasions when I have played as the Axis I can't even get beyond Smolensk because I am not a very good player, but I have never yet lost Moscow as the Soviets. Something clearly needs to be adjusted in the Axis favour, but whatever that is, the game needs to retain a quasi-historical aspect; it might not play out historically, but it needs to play out plausibly. Chaos theory dictates that deviations from a quasi-historical result in the first few terms mean that the whole course of the game will be radically affected. Therefore, the potential for deviation should be constrained and should only increase incrementally over many turns.
< Message edited by redmarkus4 -- 9/24/2011 10:17:41 AM >
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WitE2 tester, WitW, WitP, CMMO, CM2, GTOS, GTMF, WP & WPP, TOAW4, BA2
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