From: Charles Ryder Subject: The Gamers OCS "Tunisia" Okay, here's the post I've been trying to send all day to rgb. If you would, I'd appreciate it if you'd forward it to the newsgroup? ************************************************************************* Great timing with your question. I, too, have always heard great things about OCS but never had the chance to play until last Saturday, when an experienced player walked three of us newbies through the first Tunisia scenario. Interesting game system, wild and wooley. The lack, or minimal presence, of ZOC's takes some getting used to. I know that one well-known designer/reviewer in our hobby has basically blown off OCS for this reason. He can't accept enemy units marching along (or worse, walking through a small gap in) his front lines unscathed. Supporters of the system say that, once you're familiar with its style of play, this is something experienced players know how to compensate for or take advantage of. Its part Part of the learning curve. This isn't such a problem in Tunisia because the terrain is so mountainous that many avenues of approach are channeled, but even so, one must pay attention to the potential moves of the enemy at all times. The combat system is interesting. Our one experienced gamer says its "attacker friendly". I gather he meant that the attacker has better chances here than in other systems, but some more experienced player will have to editorialize on that. The biggest impression made on us was the "surprise" rule. For any attack, the attacker rolls two dice. Taking various DR modifiers into account which I shall not detail here, rolling high (9 or 10 + on two dice) gives the attacker surprise over the defender. This would give him one roll on a six-sided die. That roll indicates the number of column shifts to the right on the CRT he gets for said "surprise"! But if the surprise roll is low ( 5 or 4 - on two dice) it's the defender who gets the surprise, with one die roll's number of shifts to the left on the CRT. This means anything can happen, and it certainly did in our game. On the very last turn of the game we were able to play (had to quit due to time constraints), the British player attacked my part of the German line in two places. On the first attack I got defender surprise, with a 3 column shift in my favor. The result was the loss of three British units (Actually, 3 steps, but in Tunisia, all units are single step counters.) My fellow German player and I were feeling just great about how things were going, but our experienced friend, manhandling the American units toward the south, said to the disheartened Brit, "You can't let it get to you. The best OCS players keep going, waiting for things to swing their way. This game is as much about player morale as it is about anything else." Boy, he wasn't kidding. In the best example of a demo game, the British launched his second attack. This time he got attacker surprise: 5 column shifts to the right! I won't bother with the grisly details. Suffice to say that after completing his exploitation move, 4 British units stood out of supply behind the German line, after overrunning all but one of the northern German airbases, and 3/4 of the on-board German aircraft joined the four one-time defending land units in the dead pile. All of this happened on a turn when there was better than a 50% weather chance of getting mud, meaning no movement could have taken place at all. But NO...we had to have clear weather. It was a heck of a time to stop. Would have loved to see what we Germans might have been able to do in response. Still thinking of the possibilities... Anyway, some other quick thoughts.... OCS is two games in one. You have a combat game and a supply game. Supply is the end-all and be-all of OCS. If you can't manage supply, you will not do well in this game. You pay supply to move, you pay supply to fight, and you need to have that supply where you can get to it. Very neat system design. I have only one really negative thing to say about OCS. Units are rated as armor, mech, motorized or other. Regardless of a unit's id functionality, for movement purposes, there are only 3 distinctions: track, truck, leg. Any unit can be in one of two voluntary modes: combat or movement. A unit in combat mode is deployed for combat and will have a high(er) combat factor and small(er) movement points. Turn the counter over and it's all "packed up" and ready to travel. Hence it will have a correspondingly lower combat factor but a larger number of movement points. For some units, the unit will retain the same movement category regardless of mode. An armor unit, for example, will be "track" in either mode. But other units can change categories. Some infantry and artillery, for example, will be motorized in movement mode, meaning they use truck points, but in combat mode are considered leg units. This makes sense in that infantry aren't loaded on trucks or artillery isn't being towed when deployed for battle. But this can lead to a strange "gamey" situation. At one point some British artillery approached a line of mountain hexes on the map. Now only leg units can move into mountains. Trucks and tracks can't pass through mountain hexes without the presence of roads. So the British player flipped the arty over into combat mode and used their leg movement to "slowly" move them over the mountains. Once on the other side, they flipped back into movement mode (reattached to their transports that must have crossed over through some magical means) and continued on their way. I was about to complain about this when our experienced player said that he himself had had many arguments with Dean Issig over this very issue. Trying to keep track of the motorized transport of each unit (e.g. supplying transport markers for eligible leg units) unnecessarily complicates an already involved system. Simplification requires this "unrealistic" aspect of the game. In spite of this (and I'd appreciate reading comments from you experienced OCS players out there about your take on this), I had a great time playing OCS and would love to try it again soon. But not this weekend, I'm busy reading the CWB system rules for the game our friend has promised to run tomorrow. Bill Tricomi Center for Dairy Research Babcock Hall - Rm A205A 1605 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 1-(608)-262-1534 btricomi@cdr.wisc.edu