Thanks for your great reply @oriskany.

Glad you took time out for for the 4th.

We are getting ready ourselves, just 14 days to WinterCon. So FoW is on hold until after it. There its going to be quite a few games of U-Boot however.

Thanks for reminding me of probability and statists that we had to wade through plus logic engines of building corporate wargames. Sadly my copy of SPI’s own bible of game design went missing during the move to my current address.

It is just the nature of the beast. As you move from lesser tactics through to strategy more and more must be abstracted, otherwise you will never get off the ground. It is paramount not to allow the details to distract you from the task at hand. One hex is one FoW game, well you have a lot of dice to roll for all those infantry teams to shoot as all those target teams. Would you even remember that it was supposed to be about Omaha beach. As I always saying it is about questioning. Is it about if the village was taken out is it about how it was taken. It the story about the village or its the village just part of the story. Like yourself I like exploring both possibilities but I will use two different tools to do the exploring with.

However I believe it is more than equating hexes to battles. Inside that hex I can have up to about 6 platoons of tanks. Here I am interested about doctrine and tactics of the tank company. Yet if I wanted to look at tanks shooting at each other and how to force my opponent to my will then I would use BG. Yet I can’t yet dismiss BG as you can field half a company using it. So there is a fair bit of dynamics happening here that is more than dropping tables in hexes. I find it comforting that the dynamics of command and doctrine overall deliver similar results. Yet on a BG table there will appear to be a lot of chaos swirling around the edges and so there should be being at the lowest level. FoW should be far less ordered than the PL map. In turn PL is more disordered then when I have my divisional level The Russian Campaign dusted off. This is the joy of the wargaming hobby. I am happiest when it’s about teams working towards a result rather than individual results.

It is great that we can explore a battle from all these different perspectives to get a holistic and balanced view.

This was perhaps the failing of SPI’s Mega game of D-Day. Doing all the beaches at one time down to platoon level was perhaps done at the cost the perspective of D-Day. What should have been abstracted was not. I think a far better game to explore and take in the unique issues would have been done at battalion or perhaps regimental level. To experience the difficulties of landing on and taking a beach would be done by looking at a sector of one of the beaches. Chosen for how it highlights these difficulties and dropping to platoon level to investigate. If FoW was to be used here I would be insisting for linked battles or mini campaigns along lines of advance. This is something too few FoW players try and by doing this miss out on a lot of depth of the battle rather than the game.

So off to Caen and surrounds. This will please @timp764 to no end. He will have the opportunity to see his Desert Rats fight as a division rather than the usual reinforced companies of armour and infantry with support of higher level assets.

While I find it very rewarding to research and look at battles that historians forgot. It is often refreshing coming back to these major battles to deepen our experience in the history behind them.

Not very historical battles, Tigers at El Alamein and the like. I think I understand the temptation of doing this by younger players. They have models of these eye candy breasts but not the history studied yet to use them. They know the big battles, so let’s do a “ish” battle and use this or that. What I would be more concerned with it a player using for their advantage vehicles from late 43 to play a game set in early 42. There is an evolution and generation apart that would give an absolute advantage.

Yet I love doing the reverse for the challenge of using 41 models and variants against the early to mid 42 models. Ok there is something wrong with me.