Another dimension - Defender Retreats

@Imperious-Leader Not as ridiculous as the OOB rule for Only the Attacker given the option of retreat but the defender gets to be Wiped out with no recourse- at least with my proposal the Defender can get away with maybe a few units, a number small enough not to wreck the game!

@zombiemaster22 If you just Google advanced axis and allies rules. You can find a million sets of house rules that allow retreating. And from personal experience it doesn’t change strategy all that much, it just means that you get to call your friends horrible monsters for allowing their units to die when they easily could have lived.

I totally agree with you on terrain. Played a huge role obviously, and just can’t be shown on this map. Weather as well at times, but again, only so much you can do.

You make a fair point on limiting rounds of combat because of how far and fast some fronts moved compared to others. Again, not 100% how to quantify that in a game though. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you’re talking about a similar idea without limiting the number of rounds of combat to three. But what’s stopping the defender from retreating after one round of battle each time then? I guess I feel it still doesn’t fix the problem of fast moving fronts, but I don’t know.

You’re right, naval combat is another thing all together as well. I’ve thought on that one too, and my initial thought process is that combat shouldn’t necessarily happen every turn. If we assume ships can share a territory in the same manner that land units can finish a turn contesting a territory, we could role a die before each naval combat, a role of 1-4 battle commences, but at a 5-6 nothing happens during combat, as the two navies couldn’t locate each other. Having planes out scouting could add one to your dice role though, to better help search for the enemy fleet.

I haven’t come up with any decent idea about air combat either, but again, I agree, it would be nice to have some sort of aerial combat that would dictate local air superiority in each battle.

@Pelanderfunk:

This may have been addressed before, but my opponent and I are thinking about adding defensive retreats as an option.

Basically as a defender, you would have the option to retreat your army to an adjacent controlled territory at the beginning of each combat roll. If you choose to retreat, the attacker would still get an extra roll to inflict some damage on the routing forces.

Obviously this means some heavy adjustments to strategy. You don’t need to be as careful with your advancing armies as long as there’s enough  cannon fodder to cover the attacker’s first roll. It becomes a lot harder to destroy large stacks, unless you have them surrounded.

My question to you guys: do you think this rule adjustment favors one side more than the other?

In our house rules games we allow the defenders to retreat if they have a commander unit only after one full round of combat. FMG will have commander units with their new sculpts. I do not think they will favor one side over the other. Of course that depends a lot on what powers the commander has. Without commander units I would say no it will make the game longer.

Yoink

@Boyardee:

I dont like house rules, I like to play by the Book,
But it is true that retreat could be implemented with such rules, would be nice.

By the book… so you don’t use fighter interceptors or the (now) lesser heavy bombers?

@WILD:

So as the defender you bring in 2 reinf 2nd wave. The attacker doesn’t like the odds and has no eligible units to reinf so he retreats. The defender would then have to pull his 2 reinf units back and they would be idle for 1 complete round? Sounds like a good bluff and you might hold on to the country. Keeping track of idle units might be hard, because you could end up with several nations with idle units causing some confusion. Don’t get me wrong I like the idea of the defender having options for reinforcements or retreat. I think its silly to think the defender would just sit there and let the enemy dictate the battle with out using all his resources. Maybe someone else will chime in with an idea or two.

yeah hopefuly

yep