Slitherine

I'm sure the designers have their own plans on where to take this great system next. But just in case...

Some people have suggested Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, but it occurs to me that Russia 1917-1922 is another setting that would provide a new and exciting atmosphere but without requiring many changes at all to the core system: ensuring route security with an exotic mixture of units with very different capabilities.

In regions like Siberia or Ukraine, pretty much every side needed to control spread out villages on either side of a railroad line against partisan opposition. The counterinsurgent faction could be Red, tsarist White, SR/Komuch White, German, or the mad Baron Ungern's khanate, the rebels could be Red, White, Makhno's anarchists, Cossacks, Muslim, Green, and probably a half dozen other factions that I forget. Pretty much anyone could fight anyone.

Partisan bands, operating from camps in the woods or marshes, could be both horse-mounted or foot. Maybe they don't use as many mines, but they certainly will place dynamite on the rail lines if you aren't careful.

The counterinsurgent forces could use infantry, garrison troops, cavalry, Cheka, heavy artillery, light artillery, tachankas, armored trains, and biplanes. Logistics units would include trains, horse carts, riverboats, and, in certain theaters, columns of Bactrian camels.

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there, on the off-chance there's a chance...

Very excellent idea! for being so paradoxal in old common west politics
I very like, and bolsheviks seen as counter-insurrection shows that west powers, their philosophy, prefer a bolsheviks power (or muslim, etc) than a people power (an actual democracy).

Actually, Bolsheviks as counterinsurgents would not even have been that contrarian a narrative in the old USSR, The second half of Tikhii Don, probably the most celebrated novel of the Stalin era, is mostly from the perspective of a White Cossack partisan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_F ... to_the_Sea

Obviously it would be a lot of fun to play *as* Nestor Makhno or the Greens, but that would involve making insurgents playable. But if that were possible, then you could have a real tragic cycle of a campaign: Part One as either Red or SR-White partisans fighting for land and freedom, but when you win the national command needs your "liberated zone" to supply bread to feed Moscow and conscripts to feed the front, and the peasants resist and join the Greens, and now you need to play Part Two and crush your former comrades-in-arms.

Nijis wrote: ↑Thu Aug 22, 2019 4:46 amPart One as either Red or SR-White partisans fighting for land and freedom, but when you win the national command needs your "liberated zone" to supply bread to feed Moscow and conscripts to feed the front, and the peasants resist and join the Greens, and now you need to play Part Two and crush your former comrades-in-arms.

Bolsheviks, with their treaty of Brest-Litovsk, had given lands to germans, so people could not be confident with these traitors. There could be instead a whole red partisants war against germans, what only anarchists did (as even SR launched their attacks against german representatives, their left still stayed with bolsheviks who were protecting germans until bolsheviks fired SR, while right-SR went fleeing to Samara). Lenin was the russian Pétain (or rather Philippe Pétain was the french Lenin).