One of the most difficult tasks facing a Europa developer or editor is evaluating feedback on play balance. There is no shortage of this information: it comes to GR/D through telephone and personal conversations, written correspondence, battlefield and playtest reports, GEnie diatribes, and game reviews. In fact, sometimes it's hard to hear for all the noise!

Making any sense of these sometimes conflicting assertions often requires background investigation. Moreover, a firsthand review of the facts often reveals that the data is tainted. A few illustrations will serve to highlight play balance pitfalls.

Rule One: Look Before You Leap

A reader wrote in and asserted that he could easily take Minsk on the Jun II 41 turn against my Soviet opening set up as presented in TEMs #21 and #22. Now I won't state unequivocably that this can not be done, but I was interested in hearing how the feat was accomplished-such a mishap was certainly not part of the Soviet plan! Victor phoned the reader to get some more details on the German Minsk operation.

After a short conversation, it evolved that the German player was attacking the defensive positions of the 13th Army and Western MD Reserves from hex 1B:3214 during the Jun II 41 regular turn, breaking through the line in the combat phase, and overrunning Minsk in the exploitation phase (since Minsk is treated as a dot city on Jun II 41, the 3-point stack positioned there can be easily overrun by a stack of c/m units).

Now there is only one problem with this scheme: there is a Soviet permanent airbase in hex 1B:3214 and so a point of position AA will be placed there when the Soviet player deploys his interior forces-the order of battle demands this, as listed in TEM #22. Because of the presence of these mighty AAnts, the Germans can only enter 1B:3214 via overrun. However, due to the placement of the first line and various ZOCs, German units can not quite reach this hex and overrun it--they are 1 MP short. (This ploy sets off fits of rage in some finicky players, but that is a topic for another day.)

Rule Two: Never Say Never Again

Another member of the Europa Association maintained that the German player could NEVER take even one hex of Leningrad in the Leningrad: 1941 scenario. In a brief face-to-face match at Origins 1992, this player quickly found himself contemplating several stacks of German panzer divisions frolicking in the middle of Leningrad by the end of the Jul I 41 turn. Don't ever underestimate German potential!

Rule Three: Obey All Rules

It is very common to hear from players who claim the Germans don't have a fair chance of winning Scorched Earth. In an extreme case, a group of Europa players testified that the norm in their games was for the Soviets to take Warsaw before the end of the first year. While discussing the dynamics of this phenomenon with the complainants, the focus turned to overruns. "It is almost impossible to overrun anything," the dissidents maintained, "even 3- and 4-point stacks of Russians cannot be overrun."

Needless to say, this didn't square with our experience, so we pressed the point. It turned out that these players were under the impression that units could only perform overruns as a stack if they began the movement or exploitation phase stacked together. It's hard to imagine just how severely this interpretation would hamstring tactical German play!

After explaining the correct interpretation of the rule, the conversation quickly ended. Any game played under this misconception (and likely others) would be too compromised to warrant further study. Such encounters do serve to underline the importance of careful rule wording and ample examples, however.

Rule Four: Prove It!

If the data received is totally out of line with what the GR/D staff has personally witnessed (and we've just about seen it all) and there is no way to independently verify the facts, then we have no reasonable choice but to reject the data. A point of contention arose recently on GEnie concerning Non-Overrunable Double Lines (NODLs, pronounced "noodles" hereabouts).

One of the GEniuses came on line and maintained that NODLs were not a problem for him, he simply wiped out the entire front line. When it was pointed out that this did not solve the problem (the Soviet player simply absorbs his losses and sets up another NODL) he replied that they wouldn't do this for long, as he routinely eliminates 600 points of Soviet units per turn. Attempts at verification prompted a vague tale of a playtest of Fire in the East at some undisclosed convention in the early 1980s.

Well, convention play isn't a very good competitive measurement-the contestants are frequently bleary-eyed from lack of sleep or harried for time. Finally, I recently stood and fought Roy Lane with an overstrength NODL on the Aug II 41 game turn. This experiment produced 297 attack strength points of Soviet losses, including 56 in my turn when I rolled eight 1's out of 14 combat rolls. Whole armies died. It may be possible for the Soviets to be more abused, but I'll have to see it to believe it!