Rules Court The Case of the Rostov Attack: Part 1
An experienced Axis Scorched Earth player is pitted against a Soviet opponent who is playing FitE/SE for the first time. The novice has committed several blunders and the Axis player has taken full advantage of them. Furthermore, the weather throughout 1941 totally favored the Axis. For his part, the Axis player has admittedly been playing "fast and loose", and has been careless in executing some of his attacks. This situation reaches a climax in mid-1942, when the Axis player has a critical lapse of concentration (and perhaps judgement).
During the Axis Jul I 42 turn the Axis player executes his move in accordance with his early summer campaign plan to capture Moscow and Rostov while driving east in the center. Moscow is "in the bag" due to one of the aforementioned blunders and the panzers are moving unopposed towards the Volga via Voronezh. Rostov, however, is well defended and so the Axis player is busy moving assault forces into place. Two large stacks of railroad artillery and numerous fighter aircraft groups have arrived in the area in anticipation of a siege lasting into August. The Axis player is confident he will ultimately prevail and capture the "Gateway to the Caucasus", as he has already gained control of four of the hexes adjacent to the city.
Play proceeds to the combat phase and the Axis player is wielding a hot die. After making his planned attacks he has racked up 150 points of Soviet losses, and remarkably lost nothing himself. The Axis player states that he is feeling lucky, and proceeds to search the board for an additional attack. He realizes this attack will be risky, but he feels he can risk "a bloody nose'. As fate has it, he turns his gaze towards Rostov.
The Axis player had investigated an attack on Rostov the previous turn, and has a fairly good impression of his assets in the area. After making a cursory inspection of the Soviet defensive forces in Rostov, which contains no fort, the Axis player announces that he is going to step up his time table and make an early assault. An NKVD unit and several Guards divisions will prevent the capture of the city this turn, but the Axis player feels that he may be able to begin the process of softening the city up.
The Soviet player counsels against making the attack, stating bluntly that it is ill-advised. Our rash German shrugs this off, stating that he will "just have to take his chances". Things almost immediately go awry, as the Axis player forgets to make his AA roll prior to rolling the combat. The combat roll, announced as 3:1 (-1), comes up a "'1" yielding an apparent result of AR. As the Axis player begins to make his retreat, he notes that one of his stacks is surrounded and that his railroad guns and fighter air units will be exposed to Soviet attacks in the next player turn, as his nearest c/m units are far away at Stalingrad.
Faced with a disaster that will "compromise his entire 1942 strategy", the Axis player finishes his retreat, but continues mulling the situation over, stating that "the German just cannot take these losses". Suddenly it occurs to him that he forgot to fire his AA against the Soviet DAS units flying over Rostov, and demands that he be allowed to make the AA roll. The Soviet player demurs, stating that he is not bond to allow this AA roll after the fact. The Axis player rolls the AA anyway, and as luck would have it, apparently returns enough enemy air units with his announced 2-point shot to raise the odds to 4:1 (-1). The Axis player now demands that the combat be declared an AS. With the two players unable to agree on this conclusion, the Axis player departs, asking the Soviet player to think things over and "do the right thing".
During this interlude, however, a horrible thought sinks into the Axis player's consciousness-he recalls that since he had examined the situation the previous turn, he had moved some of his combat engineers back a hex to build temporary airbases for the newly-arriving fighter aircraft. This would have lowered his engineer ratio in the Rostov attack to less than the required 117th, resulting in a -2 modifier!
The Soviet player, apprised of this, does some further checking of his own and discovers that the Axis player did not have a 2-point AA shot as announced, but only a 1-point AA shot. Thus, only one DAS air unit would have been chased off, not three as thought. Given this, the odds would have remained 3:1.
Since the combination of this ex post facto analysis shows that the "real" odds and mods of the Rostov attack were 3:1 (-2), the Soviet player demands that the Axis player implement an amended result of AH. The Axis player refuses, claiming that had he known the proper odds and mods in advance, he would never have made the combat roll in the first place. He further rationalizes that this is also equivalent to an AS.
Some half-hearted negotiations failed to produce a compromise, so the players turned to Rules Court to settle the dispute. Each player chose a GR/D employee to judge the case and agreed that if the two judges arrived at a unanimous decision, they would abide by the results. The two judges chosen were Rick Gayler, author of this column, and Roy Lane, coordinator of the GEnie Europa topic. Both judges studied the case, consulted expert "authorities", and finally arrived at the conclusion that the result should be an AR. The detailed verdicts of the two judges follow.
Rules Court The Verdict of the Rostov Attack: Part 2
Rules Court The Case of the Rostov Attack: Part 1
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