Markus Stumptner - Nov 14, 2004 10:43 am (#154 Total: 158) You may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection. Question: Do the mandatory attacks also apply to units in entrenchments? I.e., do units in entrenchments have to attack out of the entrenchments when other units move adjacent? Joseph Miranda - Nov 16, 2004 6:38 pm (#155 Total: 158) I.e., do units in entrenchments have to attack out of the entrenchments when other units move adjacent Yes. Markus Stumptner - Nov 18, 2004 7:02 am (#156 Total: 158) You may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection. I was afraid that was the case... major step backwards in my opinion in terms of game feel compared to the boxed game. Also means that the scenario has a very hard time capturing the historical battle. (I'm quite willing to hear that we played a specific rule wrong; it would be better than the alternative, that the game was intended to play this way.) First, the Turks have a hard time even guarding all the entrenchment hexes; the Russians definitely will get some foothold. Second, the moment that happens, the attrition rate will drop to be almost equal for Turks and Russians in that area of the battle. I found it interesting that a number of people commented on the Plevna scenario in terms of how hard it was for the Russians. "By turn 3 they are broken" etc. I agree that this is likely, which is quite strange; the historical accounts that John McGuffog posted indicate that the Russians typically bombarded half the day, then launched assaults only to be forced back. The battle will never play out this way in the game. Instead the Russians, in particular those propelled by their D leader, will race towards the entrenchments and try to bash their way in, only to read a disorganisation level of 20 or 25 by 10-11am. Not very convincing. However, the battle is by no means over after they have broken. Instead what happens is that the command radius of the leaders drops to 0, so virtually all units have to roll command control on their own. But that means the feared Fall Back result is very rare, since Skobeleff now cannot force any unit to run back except those he's stacked with! And he won't be stacked with any after the first Fall Back. So the Russians will actually go at things in a more controlled manner than before even though the occasional unit will lurch back to the map edge. But it gets worse. Because they will be partway into the entrenchments, they will have a much more favorable attrition ratio. The Turks are forced to either fall back and concede more and more of their position (especially since their retreats are more and more constrained by Russian ZOCs) or accept that they will now die as quickly as the Russians or more so since now there are no more advantageous modifiers for them, but there are likely to be still more Russians. In our game, by turn 5, it was clear that the Russians would actually meet all their victory conditions. The Turks would not meet their weakest condition, but would meet the middle one (breaking the Russians), and because the Russians are weakened as well and have a lot of Lethargic units, there was still a chance some Turks might be able to break out and take the road hexes on the map edge before the Russians could react and eject them. Thus the outcome would have either been a Russian decisive (because the Turks threw themselves out of the trenches onto the Russian bayonets) or a decisive victory for both sides (because the Turks managed to grab the exit hexes even though they lost Plevna). In other words, it seems the game is almost but not completely unlike the historical battle. Dave Boe - Nov 18, 2004 1:43 pm (#157 Total: 158) I suppose it depends how many times units will leave their trenches to attack? I remember this happening a few times and I think I simply ignored attack results on the command table for commands in trenches, or at least have the option to ignore. Seems logical from a tactical viewpoint, but perhaps there's a valid design reason? I've only played Plevna once, but played C-Ville several times and enjoyed it. However that game suffered from some gamey misuse of the command rules. Markus Stumptner - Nov 18, 2004 10:35 pm (#158 Total: 158) You may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection. I suppose it depends how many times units will leave their trenches to attack? I remember this happening a few times and I think I simply ignored attack results on the command table for commands in trenches, or at least have the option to ignore. I agree that would make sense but we have just been told that that's not how it's supposed to be played. Also, we didn't see that the command table had anything to do with whether units have to attack. It just determines movement. Units that are adjacent have to attack; period. Did we read that wrong? Seems logical from a tactical viewpoint, but perhaps there's a valid design reason? May be but it's not evident in the play outcomes; and if it doesn't produce historically sensible behavior, player decisions, or battle outcomes, then it can't really be a valid design reason.