Duane Romfoe's article on march rates (Forward...March in issue #10) is the best work I've seen on this area for Europa, ever - and I've been seeing comments on this area ever since I got involved in Europa design in 1978. However, don't go out and buy heavy duty boots for your infantry counters - they're not going to do extra marching!

Duane concludes that movement rates are understated in Europa, based on historical examples and on various armies' doctrines for sustainable rates of march. He's right as far as he goes, but he doesn't go far enough. One problem is that actual conditions deviate from the theoretical ones. Sure, the Soviets expect to sustain a rate of 7.4 to 14.8 miles per day in snow and cold. However, as one example, this rate doesn't take blizzards into account. When a blizzard comes in - and they do fairly frequently in the Russian winter - movement is reduced to nothing, for several days on end. This sort of thing isn't confined to the winter either.

For example, German Panzer forces spearheading the drive into the USSR in July 1941 were slowed down by thunderstorms, which temporarily turned the dirt roads being used to mud. Non- physical factors also intrude here. Armies march to campaign plans and battle plans, which rarely survive contact with the enemy. As plan meets reality, the plan must change, not reality. Adapting a plan of campaign to the actual conditions encountered can't always be done on the run; it often takes time and causes delays - in effect slowing the actual rate of movement. (And, I argue, a well-conceived plan has the best chance of success if the attacker has fresh, trained troops and achieves surprise over the enemy at the start of a campaign.

This case is taken into account in the games through the surprise attack rules, which add an extra turn of movement and combat.)

Another problem involves the slipperiness of some historical examples. Duane mentions that leading elements of the German 121st Infantry Division were east of Daugavpils on 28 June 1941. "Leading elements" doesn't mean the full division, and what are these leading elements? In the case of the 121st, I don't know, but I have my suspicions. Let's swing south a bit and look at Guderian's drive. By mid-July, elements of Guderian's infantry divisions had reached the Dnepr River around Mogilev, as Guderian states in his book, Panzer Leader. Guderian then reveals that these elements are just the recon units and the few motorized units of these divisions. The bulk of the infantry was far to the west, marching hard to catch up. A division in Europa is represented by a tidy, single counter, but reality at times is much messier, which causes difficulties when you try to compare the game and any specific historical fact.

One last example concerns Soviet units marching like hell to escape encirclement. Yes, there are exciting cases of this, but in many instances these are the remnants of smashed units oozing back to the Soviets. In Europa terms, these more often are special replacements flowing into the replacement system rather than intact, hero units rejoining the front line.

The core problem here revolves around what is meant by sustainable rates of march - a sustainable rate is not an indefinitely sustainable rate. Europa is a long game, with very many 15-day turns in it. Duane's longest examples of marches are 26 and 27 days long, not even two full Europa turns. If you look at the larger picture, these rates of march are not sustainable indefinitely, turn after turn. Instead, armies tend to move at sustainable rates, or faster, for short periods, followed by periods where the armies recover from their exertions. In other words, "sustainable" really isn't sustainable.

Yes, the German II Corps marched at 15 miles per day for 27 days, with 11 battle days and no rest days, at the start of World War 1. They, and the rest of the German outer wing, were required to march without rest days - called for by German doctrine - in order to maintain the rate of advance the Schlieffen Plan required for success. They paid the price of this advance when they reached the Marne. Their exhaustion was a big part of why they lost the Battle of the Marne and the chance to knock out France.

For a World War II example, let's look at Barbarossa. The Germans marched themselves silly in June and July and had to rest up to recover. In fact, they marched too hard at first and killed off large numbers of their horses through overexertion. This caused all sorts of problems, such the lagging or outright abandonment of many horse-drawn artillery pieces.

So, armies march and then rest. Europa averages this out. A unit in Europa is rated on its long-term average combat and movement abilities, not its short-term maximum or even "sustainable" abilities. This is a convenient and, for our purposes, excellent way to handle things. Instead of averaging things out, we could have had a system where units have "maximum" abilities, but they quickly rack up attrition and fatigue penalties as they operate. The big drawback here is that this approach requires either a ridiculous number of counters to keep track of things, or a mind-numbing amount of bookkeeping and paperwork. Either way, it wouldn't be very practical or fun to play - and, if it worked right, it would average out over the long run to the way things work now.

Duane's comments about mobile defenses and envelopments being made "impossible, or ... far less common than they should be" by the movement system is off-base. Both are possible and present in the game. Massive, deep envelopments are possible, with the classic problem of trying to close off the pocket with motorized forces while the infantry takes a turn to come up.

Mobile defense is present, exactly in the form that Duane claims is missing: trading space for time and launching counterattacks against targets of opportunity. Indeed, I more often get the complaint that mobile defense is too powerful in the game! Pulling back in the face of the enemy and launching hit and run armored attacks against a haphazard advance can be very effective. Perhaps things don't work exactly the way they would if Duane had designed the game, but that's a different subject than movement rates.

Duane and I come close to agreement concerning what he calls unopposed movement (I call it follow-up movement), although we go about it differently. When I originally designed the admin. movement rules, I was conservative, as I mention above. I'm relaxing the admin. movement rules in the Second Front playtest to test my current thinking on the subject. In essence, I'm removing the restriction that a unit may admin. move only in territory owned by its side at start of its turn.

Instead, a unit may admin. move in territory that is friendly owned at the time it moves, including territory that other units have gained ownership of during that turn. This requires only one more rule to make it work: a unit doesn't exert a ZOC in the movement phase in which it uses admin. movement. This prevents an admin. moving unit from gaining ownership and thus an admin. route of advance for itself as it moves.

More Inside Europa

Evolution, Revolution, or Stasis
Marching Rates Rebuttal
Europa Q&A