Slitherine

By analyzing the strategy made by e. g. Morris it's obvious that he's playing in a way that would be not possible at all in the real war. E. g. he's sacrificing units from all the major powers he control in order to wear down his opponent. That's maybe an effective strategy, but it would not have been possible in the real war.

Particularly Britain was very weary about not getting high casualties because they lost so many soldiers in WW1. So Churchill and even more Montgomery were against military offensives that would mean very high casualties, like a 1942 invasion of France.

I think we could have a very simply rule preventhing this. We setup a matrix of max number of destroyed units allowed per country in a particular game year. If you're above the limit you lose something like 5 max morale per destroyed unit above the limit. Each year' limit will be a bit higher so you're allowed to have some losses per year.

The limits for Russia and Germany should be very high, but UK, USA and Italy should have lower limits.

I think we should only count destroyed units and not step losses. This allows for heavy battles, but you would do what you can to save your units. This change will also be very good against a British garrison blob in France. It means Britain can end up with a morale loss situation in 1940 due to high losses and will be easy to recover from. So if you send units to France you better make sure you can evacuate them before the fall of France.

I'm just giving you the idea first so we can discuss if we want it or not. If we think the idea is promising then we can look into the limits per year for each country.

As a general rule I would think the following is a good idea:
Italy, UK: Low
France, USA: Medium
Germany: High
USSR: Very high

Then we can setup limits for each group.

Maybe we should even discuss if the limit should only be used for land units because it was the land units that had the most manpower that would be lost. Air unit are so valuable so the countries will make sure these are not destroyed. The same about naval units with some exceptions like sacrificing the RN that Morris likes to do. Losing many naval units will affect the convoy size etc. I leave this open to discussion.

A game called Master Front by Columbia games has a special rule regarding naval movement. They use a system with control ports for sea areas and you determine the owner for sea areas like Axis Naval superiority, Parity, Allied Naval superiority. The amph and transport rules are affected by the status. if you have naval superiority then invasions would be easier (range longer etc.).

I'm not saying we can use such a system for GS, but having some kind of system with control ports within a certain number of hexes to enable amph invasions could be worth looking into. Typical control ports could be ports with production > 1. We could then alter the production of e. g. Tunis from 1 to 2 to make it a control port. In Britain London, Liverpool and Glasgow would be the control ports.

If you're not within range of a control port then you can only invade into empty hexes with amphs and not land at all of you're not an amph.

Both are interesting ideas.

I'm not sure if its true that high losses would affect the morale in a significant way during WW2. It is true the UK and US did not had high losses compared to the Soviets or Germans. I would also agree that the political system (democracy vs. dictatorship) does matter concerning the acceptance of losses in the population.

Nevertheless, I think that both countries would have been able to accept high losses. Neither the US nor the UK actually faced an invasion of the homeland. For example, I'm quite sure that the British people would have accepted high losses if the Germans actually did Sealion and invaded Britain. In fact high losses can even result in a morale boost (thirst for revenge, a "now more then ever" attitude etc.).

I think this can been seen in the German population during the war. At the start of the war the Nazi regime feared high losses and a similar battle for attrition as in World War 1 at least as much as the British and French. Nobody wanted a second Verdun or Somme. However, the early German victories as well as the propaganda machine allowed to accept high losses later in the war.

So I'm not quite sure if "high losses" equates to lower morale. In fact the Italians had bad morale from the start (because of mostly outdated equiment, poor leadership, early defeats etc.).

The idea with the ports also seems interesting, but I don't know if it would not complicate the game to much.

Something definetly has to be done to curb this US/UK focus to landing stuff in wave after wave. I like reducing WAllied capacity for permanent losses. However, it will be tough to come up with actual numbers. Btw, would tweaking the manpower pools for US/UK achieve similar results or are the quality and survivability malus too small to have a reasonable effect?


Following somewhat related to the issue:

A 'Normal' (France, gobbling up minors, '41 Barbarossa) Axis game is easily derailed by US/UK landings to France. I just checked how many units I could assemble for Barbarossa in my most recent Axis game and it really doesn't have much leeway should my opponent decide to toss units into France on 'Morris scale'. This is with minimal commitment in Libya and pretty small losses so far.

In '41 a foothold isn't really achievable in most cases but the damage will be out of proportion due to reduced Barbarossa. US can join the landing efforts in '42 (with land units same tech as Germans) if they put their early labs to INF and/or ARM since they begin with some levels on both. The lacking organisation is compensated with leaders and sheer mass of units. For comparison: I usually put early labs on GEN and NAV so my land units achieve parity much later while performing reasonably in Africa/Italy.

Maybe some of the US land unit tech levels should be moved to navy instead? Everyone would have to change lab strategies comparably but achieving parity with Germans wouldn't be possible in '42.

The thing about landing in wave after wave is the only sometimes I can get ashore as the allies.

Besides by 1944 in my games I have an invasion capability of 6 for the US and 4 to 5 for the UK.

Depending on the results of the landing. If the US uses up all of its capacity on the first turn, It will only have one free the next anymore

and the costs go up. The UK has to wait 2 turns before having a free one without costs accrued. This is the system we have had in place for over a year ( v1.10beta which is about 60 or more updates since then and there has been no problems with the method we came up with back then) I think this is a non -issue.

AFAMIC I don't believe it can be fixed. The game will become something we don't want and was not the intention when we started this in the first place.

If I had the losses or tried what happened in the MAX - Morris game, my MP would be in the crapper so something is not right.

I barely can play the Axis let alone sometimes successfully as the Allies. The Allies are very constrained in the game.

The UK does not get an average of 50 PP's every four turns it is lower than that.

As for the US and the force that Morris invaded with By that time in game he would have only about 400 to 500 PP's and could not have built what he invaded with and the levels that he had. It is not legally possible.

pk867 wrote:The thing about landing in wave after wave is the only sometimes I can get ashore as the allies.

Besides by 1944 in my games I have an invasion capability of 6 for the US and 4 to 5 for the UK.

Depending on the results of the landing. If the US uses up all of its capacity on the first turn, It will only have one free the next anymore

and the costs go up. The UK has to wait 2 turns before having a free one without costs accrued. This is the system we have had in place for over a year ( v1.10beta which is about 60 or more updates since then and there has been no problems with the method we came up with back then) I think this is a non -issue.

AFAMIC I don't believe it can be fixed. The game will become something we don't want and was not the intention when we started this in the first place.

If I had the losses or tried what happened in the MAX - Morris game, my MP would be in the crapper so something is not right.

I barely can play the Axis let alone sometimes successfully as the Allies. The Allies are very constrained in the game.

The UK does not get an average of 50 PP's every four turns it is lower than that.

As for the US and the force that Morris invaded with By that time in game he would have only about 400 to 500 PP's and could not have built what he invaded with and the levels that he had. It is not legally possible.

I agree that sometimes landing like that is the only way but in '42? Morris has essentially sat on the French coast from March to June and just kept landing stuff in. What I would really like though, is him telling us HOW it is done. Secondhand info and eyeing various opponent AARs only goes so far...

Maybe instead of adding some artifical restrictions for casualties game setup should be changed so allies will have less room for error (and suicide attacks). For example reducing western manpower pools, so they will really react to casualties. It will provide same morale loss without any additional rules.

Hi,

In 1942 the US has about 2 or 3 invasion points and the British has 1 or 2 so the US would have been going into negative PP's

without being able to rebuild losses. I did not hear what the tech levels were for Surface ships.

Without lab building things will not advance.

Naval techs were same as in 1939.

I like the idea of control ports in amphibious rules. It would be a good way to make amphibious landings more realistic. We must make a successful german Sealion have more consequences than it has now. So if the british lose two control ports as London and Glasgow can be, then no amphibious landings could be done in occupied Europe since it would have been impossible from a logistical point of view. As many guys have reported in the forum, the fall of Britain should mean high chances for the axis to win the game and this will enforce this idea. Exploits like Morris does with the Brits sacrificing them many times would have no effect with this new rule. This way, if the axis takes control over UK we won´t see more allied invasions of occupied Europe launched directly from USA. Or also, we won´t see more allied naval landings in Italy without previously control Tunis (no Torch). So the fall of Britain would be a severe blow to the allies (as in the real would have been).

Anyway, if we do this finally we could make Western allies campaign in France in 1944 less hard than now is. This way, I think we should look into make less strong the Sigfried Line removing some fortresses. Many players just try to invade directly into Holland/Northern Germany because this way they bypass Sigfried Line which is excessively strong. It seems that in the real war this defensive line was partially dismantled after the Fall of France and transportable weapons in the line were moved to other Fronts. This way some of the Atlantic wall fortresses were built from dismantling both Maginot and Sigfried lines. So at the same time that Atlantic wall hexes are created we could remove some Sigfried line hexes as it is showed in the image below.

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Let´s think that the area is full of forest hexes and rivers so, if we finally decide to change this, the germans would still be able to properly defend this sector.