impar wrote:It does reward the player who places a stronger southern group. Progression is made so much easier.
How do you mean?
Supply isn't modeled, and you get little in return from committing a large force in the south. The resistance is rather light, and using more units than roughly what the stand-alone scenario gives you mostly means units sit idle.
They are much more useful, IMHO, in the north, since having a strong north means you don't have to play a defensive game - by assaulting the allies, they're crushed that much more quickly, which in turn means it's a breeze to cruise to the coast afterwards.
If the scenario designer is trying to give the message that Halders original plan would have worked out just fine (seeing in retrospect that the axis artillery and luftwaffe, and generally stronger army, would have carried the day) and that the Manstein/Guderian drive through the Ardennes could be reduced to a light secondary force (since no reinforcements from France to the south were forthcoming anyway) that I could respect. But I don't believe it to be the case.
I just played the Low Countries stand-alone scenario on General difficulty, winning at Turn 15 by simultaneously wiping the map clean of allied units and at the same taking the last allied flags.
To take Luxembourg and Sedan, I only used 22nd Panzer IIIF, 21st and 23rd Inf, and the StuG. To take Dinant and join up at Charleroi I only used 18th Panzer, 19th Pioniere and the Sturmpanzer. (Obviously with some Luftwaffe support)
The Panzerjäger and FlaK deployed in the south I drove up north, through Aachen. Also, all reinforcement units I bought, I deployed at Aachen (One more sFH 18 artillery piece, two Stukas, and a fighter)
Then you assault the Allied positions on the plains of Belgium head-on; and using the full might of your artillery combined with a focused effort by the Luftwaffe they die as quickly as they manage to drive up (or fly to) to the front lines.
When you can do it without taking too many losses, as you can do here, this is faster and better than making encirclement maneouvers: when I first started playing the scenario, I tried for a historic approach. Sure enough, you take Sedan and reach the coast perhaps a turn earlier, but you suffer real losses up in the north. I had considerable difficulties maintaining my northern front, since taking out the two forts was slow-going when there weren't strong reserves. And hiding behind the Meuse isn't an option, since this frees too many Allied units to slow you down in the south.
To do well in this game, you need to concentrate your forces, and deal maximum damage. In order to do both, you do need a sufficiently committed opponent, and in this scenario the place where this happens is in the north. Creating a bloodbath there is way more efficient than following in Guderian's footsteps, I'm afraid.
If the scenario would feature a more rugged and more static Allied defense in the north, then that could encourage the Axis player to deploy a stronger south, since there would be no golden opportunity to simply wipe out his main force. These static units would then be of little use when and if the Germans complete their encirclement strategy and attack from the rear, so they wouldn't add too much overall combat power to the Allies.
Another idea is if the patch allows designers to add in specific reinforcements (units rather than prestige), you could also design the scenario so that additional (emboldened?) French units enter the map from the south, if the Germans haven't cut off the supply routes by then. If you place fairly strict requirements in timing on these triggers you encourage the German player to commit to the south (in order to avoid a single unlucky combat to delay the advance). This in itself would mean a weaker Army Group B (the force around Aachen), which in itself would mean a un-historical head-on assault is less palatable.
PS. Historically, 70% of available armor and roughly half the infantry divisions was deployed in the south*. Think about it...
*) source: Wikipedia