in my table top test of Anniversary edition, which I just got, i have only needed the battleboard a few times, when units greater than 10 on attack and defense.
It’s interesting how bad dice rolls can doom a larger attack force and reshape the game drastically. In this game the dominant countries have each had a really bad turn of dice rolls change their fate. Another thing for dice is the technology rolls, so far, only 1 country has one and many many IPUs were spent trying to get them, which also affected the games early stages for Germany.