ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
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Granted it's a gamey reasoning, though based on the historical fact that the Soviet high command suffered from severe lethargy in the first few months of the war. But the utter gaminess of simply running away and counting on your replacement system to build an army anyway is even worse in my opinion. That said the gaminess of the Germans leaving Soviet territory to avoid winter is even worse in my opinion and likewise needs to be addressed.
The Soviets should be required to fight (and have the ability to fight as well), running away should be a last resort forced on a player after severe losses...
The more I think about these issues, the more I remember why I stepped away from the game in the first place. The game doesn't focus on strategic or regional goals, other than evacuating factories there is no reason for a player to want to hold any given location. The game needs a way to make players want to risk it all to defend a given location.
Cities in general need to be more of a focal point of the game. Perhaps if the supply system were more reliant on cities close to the action to act as distribution centers or something.
Indeed, reducing the MPs would just misuse the system. It would make no sense to make the soldiers slower than ants to mimic lethargy of command. And beyond that, not every step East for SHC or West for Axis is such a retreat. You kind of would have to bind groups of units to cities or other strategic targets and check whether this target is abandoned, because some rearward moves may just be necessary to get into flanking positions, counterattack or whatever.
Besides, would one want to disallow any retreats, or would it be ok if players could chose the terrain to fight at least occasionally? One means bowling/steamrolling if one side can't retreat and is basically static, while militarily would be wisest to do so, say in very poor open terrain like the south. How much freedom should every side have to correct its lines, chose the terrain to fight? Could retreats, say of 3-4 hexes per unit move spent rearwards while the enemy is within 5 hexes plus a city is adjacent, be linked to paying some AP?
Since WitW is said to have major changes to logistics including depots, this could already affect the role cities have to players. Otherwise, oftentimes battles over locations that were not of major logistic importance were fought just because Stalin needed the morale show, or Hitler got one of his "Feste Plätze" flashes, which both in some way are rather arbitrary reasons. Such would be best modeled by something that can be tuned in arbitrary fashion as well, like victory points.
I think the others here are right that a victory point system on per turn basis like in the smaller scenarios would also be best for the GC. Right now, the symmetry is the sudden death (alt) or the final victory points, which means people will play only towards these goals and optimize their play in the interim without needless battling and such. Now there ought to be the question whether those per turn VPs ought to be static for each city for the entire GC, or change every year, or maybe have even a random factor in them that surprisingly make a random city a major target for just a couple of turns. But definitely I can see that this would mean a very different dynamics, and a balancing act in not loosing cities too early, getting them back early and also with choosing destruction or manpower or Red Army over VPs or so.
ORIGINAL: turtlefang
As a long time student of the Eastern Front - as in 30 years - I'm having a hard time with the whole random reduce movement point roll argument. As it is, Soviet infantry can barely move next to advanced German units with full movement points - which average in the first couple of months 12 to 14 pts - and can't generate enough points for more than one attack...
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And on top of that, if the German's decent, the Soviet's don't have the ability to fight in a pocket the way they did historically or hold out in selected cities like Odessa. So reducing the Soviet mvt pts just don't doesn't make any sense to me - either from a game balance POV or a historical POV.
Agreed, I also am oftentimes quite annoyed by the lack of Soviet MPs. The mobile units are penalized badly already, but with the poor SHC leadership and resultant rolls, my infantry has a hard time approaching the enemy to counterattack. Part of that is because I find the MP cost for flipping enemy hexes changes to drastically with morale. If you only have some 8-15 MPs, the difference is enormous whether you need 1, 2 or 3 MP to make a step. Holds true for the Axis minor ants as well, but maybe there should be one fixed value, and not such a large variation.
Now: lacking MPs for deliberate attacks, doing hasty attacks with this combat engine, which often for forces very disparate in strengths, formation types (armor, no armor, air support etc), or morale/experience generate results they read like several k casualties to none, makes no sense with the Soviet ants. Given that, you cannot replicate the historical attrition and counterattack strategy the Soviets used, in which case it becomes logical to refrain from that, chose a purely passive defensive stance, and chose the terrain to do so as well -- which includes the need for Soviet retreats, or call it a tactical withdrawal away from the open front areas to wooded or hilly areas found beyond Pskov, the Valdai, Rhev, etc. But that kind of use of military doctrine is exactly what people don't like here.