THE FALL GELB PROBLEM

[captain10]

A good World War II strategy game must try to simulate the Blitzkrieg, that is, the bold and quick advances of armour spearheads.

I have had a lot of fun playing this game for years, and one of the reasons is that the game let the player to use this Blitzkrieg tactics as German in Poland and Russia and as Allied later in the war. But I have always thought that the way the game face the France 1940 campaign is not correct. As a German player, if you choose to attack in Spring 1940 (as the Germans did), you'll find that the Allied player use a lot of garrison units to slow down your advance, so the campaign last for four/five months and waste a lot of German resources.

This topic is to share ideas about this problem, the Fall Gelb problem, and to try to give some solutions.

Maybe a house rule could be used, so the German won't attack in the West till Spring 1940 and the Allied player will only use garrison units in cities or resources hexes.

But it would be fine to solve this problem without any house rule. Any ideas?

[Peter Stauffenberg]

The problem with simulating Case Yellow properly is an issue most WW2 wargames struggle with. One reason Case Yellow was such a success was because the Allies moved into a trap by moving their best forces into Belgium while the Germans attacked via the Ardennes. A player will not repeat such a mistake. In strategic WW2 games you need to give players freedom to deployment etc. So you can't tell a player to not reinforce the front in the Ardennes.

In GS Case Yellow often starts in March and ends in June. It's virtually impossible for a player to force a French surrender in just 3 game turns (6 weeks) to simulate the real war. However, since you can start earlier than May (real war start) you end up with a pretty historical surrender date.

The real Germans actually had quite a bit of losses in Case Yellow despite the rapid success of the offensive. Axis GS players can take Paris with quite low losses if they aren't too aggressive. So it's not like you are in for a slugfest in Case Yellow where the Allied strategy is to bleed Germany to death. Because of the Allied morale loss etc the Germans can easily crush the French garrison units without much losses. E. g. German armor units get odds like 10:1 against a garrison unit before having softened up the garrison with an airstrike.

I don't think we really need to alter Case Yellow. What is important is that decent player by the Axis should be able to beat France in a few months. If GS had simulated WW1 with a stale mate in Belgium then I would have agreed a chance was warranted.

There are quite a few conflicts that are hard to simulate properly in games. E. g. the German invasion of Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece. The blitzkrieg effect the Germans attacked with meant the defenders crumbled faster than one would imagine. If you remove all the defending units in GS except in the capital you will notice that it's still not enough to do a fast enough conquest due to the number of hexes you need to move from the border to the capital. We can't have special rules where Axis units get a higher movement allowance in Yugoslavia and Greece than elsewhere on the map. We can't alter the terrain to clear hexes just to make the conquest happen as fast as in the real war.

So wargames will often have to compromise a bit. The main thing is that the game flows well and players have fun playing.