@cystic:
i’m agreeing w/ Baghdaddy, and i’ve said this before.
That lone guy at Midway or the Soloman’s and etc. is not a unit of x,000 troops, but rather a given unit of combat capability. You might send in 2 inf and a ftr squad to take that unit, and this may represent 3-4 times the number of attacking troops you have otherwise as the defending unit is dug-in, knows the terrain, has wired the area, is hiding in caves etc.
You might only have a couple dozen ftrs guarding an AC (as opposed to the hundreds comprising what is thought of as a ftr unit), but one might consider that there are several carriers in the flot, anti-aircraft guns, and supporting vessels - corvettes etc.Â
The dice come in to demonstrate variables that lowluck will not account for - commanders, morale, terrain, espionage, weather etc.
I think back to an old game my brother and I played called USN, Pacific Campaign. It had week based turns and aircraft points where one point represented 10 aircraft. It also had regiment and battalion size USMC units that were of similiar combat strenghts as army size Chinese units.
That 1 US Inf sitting on Wake island is not the same number of men as the 1 US Inf hitting the beach at Normandy nor the same as the 1 Russian Inf sitting in Moscow.
This is a strategic level game and it is focused more on playability than any solid connection to the historical events. For as simple as the game system is, it is astounding that it plays as much as the historical war did. That is a tribute to the skill of the game designer and the patience of the play testers.
If we get bogged down pinning a number of men to each Infantry point, we are truly missing the point of how this game system works.
As a prime example, nowhere in this game system can you simulate the British evacuation of Dunkirk yet every historian points to the rescue of the men of the BEF as being crucial to the ability of the Brits to re-arm and field an army as quickly as they did. Instead this game states that ground forces committed to an amphibious assault can not retreat. This, at first glance, is ridiculous. Getting men back of the beach would not be risk free but surely not every man would die. On closer examination, it becomes clear that what is really being tracked is not the number of dead bodies in the surf zone but the loss of combat capability due to lost equipment, scrambled command structures, missing supplies and demoralized men.
To take this one step further, combat losses on a front do not mean entire armies of men are destroyed. Instead it means they are no longer combat capable. Equivalently, the infantry, artillery and armor units built represent equipment and supply replacements for those combat losses as much as they represent newly trained recruits.
These same concepts carry over to fleets and air units. Consider the fighters that are lost in a offensive combat operation. Their bases and ground crews are still intact. If those same fighters were lost in a defensive combat operation, those bases and ground crews are presumed lost. Obviously the game system does not model this as well as more complicated systems that track airbase construction and maintenance seperately.
I’m just happy that the game plays as easily as it does yet provides this level of realism. To be honest, anything much beyond this level of play, and I will be looking for a computer based game to assist in tracking all the game mechanics so as not to overwhelm and bog down the players.
