[Consim-l] Re: [boardwargaming] Another Bone-Basic Question

[Mike NotSpecified]

Avalon Hill had an interesting twist on this in "Across 5 Aprils", a fairly 
simple game of several American Civil War battles.

In that game combat between adjacent units was also mandatory, but combat came 
before movement.  So if you are playing the Confederates and the Union troops 
are solidly entrenched in good defensive terrain, say a woods, the tactic was 
to move your units across the open field and stop just outside the woods, 
adjacent to the Union line.  Then, on his turn, the Union player would have to 
attack you, with no terrain modifer since the combat is presumed to be 
occuring in your open field hex.

And this could lead to an even wierder situation.  Say the Union gets a forced 
retreat result in the above.  Since they started in the woods hex, they would 
have to retreat one hex deeper into the woods and you would have the option of 
advancing after combat and occupying the first woods hex.  But if you do, then 
on your turn, you are forced to attack the adjacent Union troops who will now 
get a defensive bonus because they are in that second woods hex.

It creates real seesaw situations and I actually enjoyed the couple of games I 
played, but the mechanics seemed really strange.  I try to picture those brave 
Confederates in the above example, movng across the open field, then standing 
around just outside the woods waiting to be attacked.  Or those rather foolish 
Union troops abandoning their carefully prepared defensive postions to run out 
into the field and mix it up with Confederates.

In the early days we were pretty much thrilled to be playing a wargame at all. 
 I think it took a while for people to start comparing the game tactics with 
historical tactics, and questioning if the game mechanics weren't leading 
players to do things their real life commanders would never consider.  I think 
it is still a challange to create game mechanics that sufficently reflect 
reality that good historical tactics are rewarded and bad ideas are punished, 
but permitted.


On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:43:02 -0600
  Gary Krockover <gary at garykrockover.com> wrote:
> Ah yes, the old "basic rules" of the early AH games.  I guess this "1st 
>Alamein" has gone retro as I would venture to say that attacking has been 
>mandatory from D-Day '77 onward....
> 
> GJK
> 
> At 05:24 PM 1/25/2007, you wrote:
>>It's actually a very common mechanic in the "classic" games.  Typically you 
>>move, then you have to attack every enemy within any of your ZOCs.  Which is 
>>accomplished just as Allen said, if your poor little all by it's lonesome 
>>unit 
>>is adjacent to three enemy hexes, you treat all the enemies as one combined 
>>defensive value and execute your attack at very low odds.
>>
>>Which leads to an ancient tactic called the "soak off".  You move your line 
>>up 
>>into contact with his line.  Instead of having each of your units attack 
>>their 
>>immediately opposite number however (at roughly 1:1), you have one of your 
>>units engage as many of his as it can reach (at maybe 1:3), which frees up 
>>some of your other units to double up on others of his at hopefully 2:1 or 
>>better.
>>
>>Since a lot of those games have attack strength ranging from say 1 to 7, and 
>>defense values with a similiar range you can get even better odds.  Send in 
>>your poor AS 1 unit to tie up (soak off) three of DS 7 and you will surely 
>>kill your sacraficial unit at 1:21 odds, but it if frees up your AS 7s to 
>>gang 
>>up and punch a hole right where you want it, well thats a good trade-off 
>>right?
>>
>>There is a long and boring argument right now on consimworld (WWII folder) on 
>>the validity of this approach.  I won't get into it, just know that this was 
>>a 
>>basic skill with the classic games....
>