The Europa game system is blessed not only with a wealth of detail found in few wargames, but a strong cadre of players who support it both financially and intellectually. As an ever-evolving system, Europa often draws its best new ideas from the readership of the Europa Magazine. Yet, it seems to me that Europa players often focus only on the trees and ignore the forest.

Specifically, I refer to the wealth of effort devoted to OB research, game tactics, and rule mechanics but a lack of concern regarding the ultimate point of the game (besides having fun)--how to win. Europa suffers from a lack of strategic discussion and abounds with technicians of the game. I'm not the first to point out this phenomenon: Mark Pitcavage noted it as far back as TEM #12 in his article "Hexagon War: Strategy and the Europa System".

Early in his article, Mark asked: are Europa Games ill suited for strategic analysis? The answer, as Mark said, must be yes. The reason for this lack of strategic focus lies in a failure of the game system itself-inadequate and vaguely defined victory-point systems. Without a proper victory-point system a wargame becomes meaningless as both a competitive venture and a historical simulation.

This, too, explains the average Europa player's fixation (dare I say obsession?) with how many antiaircraft guns a panzer division contains, the rate of climb of the Me 109G10, etc. Without a proper strategic justification for a wargame, players can only direct their attentions to OB concerns. This also goes far in explaining the abundance of homebrew rules: Europa to some extent resembles a largely empty canvas containing excellent OBs and maps but little else, and players naturally wish to fill this canvas.

All this is somewhat overstated, of course. And I don't wish to denigrate the superb and indispensable efforts at historicity made by both GR/D's official staff and those equally important unofficial contributions made by the rest of Europadom. My point is that when victory points become as they have the forgotten stepchild of wargaming rules, it almost doesn't matter how accurate a game is. Europa games, breathtakingly beautiful ships though they may be, are sailing off into a sea of strategic oblivion...

Inadequate victory-point systems lead to ahistorical play. No amount of tinkering with unit strengths, supply rules, or air ratings will ultimately fix ahistorical play. And such play frustrates players who intuitively grasp that for all of Europa's undeniable OB accuracy, it somehow fails as a game.

For example, witness the common slick trick of the Arctic Runaway. This gambit, for those who don't know, involves the wholesale abandonment of the Murmansk and Karelia sectors at the beginning of FitE/SE. It's a brilliant strategy except for one problem: any Soviet theater commander who ordered such a "stalwart" defense would be shot. The same problem, writ large, occurs with those who execute marathon-like runaways across the breadth of the Russian Front, knowing that the German supply lines can't keep up. German players, infuriated by such Soviet "slime," demand fixes to the supply system--give us more rail engineers! they say. But then they receive too many, and the Soviet players begin to holler...

There's a problem with such runaways on the Eastern front. But they're not going to be solved by tweaking OBs. Yet, so entranced have we become with OBs that like drug addicts we reactively grasp at them as solutions to all our problems. The problem, my dear Europa players, lies not in the orders of battle, but in the lack of political constraints.

Wait a minute! Political rules? This is Europa! An operational simulation! Sure, eventually we'll get to political rules in Grand Europa, sometime in the 23rd century, no doubt...

But yes, we do need to incorporate these political constraints into our current games. I concede that Europa games approach their subject matter from an operational perspective. However, operational decisions cannot be made in a political vacuum. Europa players seeking such a "pure" military framework forget Clausewitz's dictum about war being a pursuit of political goals by another means. And without such built-in restrictions, we Europa gamers, tricky devils that we are, will resort to ahistorical play. After all, we want to win, and if the system allows us to win in a ridiculous fashion, then we'll take advantage of it.

The Russian Front in particular demands such changes because its scope almost transcends the operational level and becomes strategic in nature. But problems in VP systems resulting from a lack of political effects don't only arise in FitE/SE. Balkan Front also demonstrates similar inadequacies, as Jason Long and myself discovered and described in our article in TEM #26.

Briefly stated, BF runs into difficulties in determining VPs based largely on force losses (and only certain losses as it ignores the Greeks) without taking into sufficient account territorial acquisition. BF, peculiarly enough, like FitE/SE allows Allied players to execute quirky runaways and win.

The best way to account for the political constraints commanders must face in making operational decisions is to build them into the VP system. Some players may feel this is too much of a straightjacket and will tend to force them into certain strategic choices that are less than optimal. Well, they're right to the extent that they will no longer possess total operational freedom. But such constraints are realistic and if Europa aspires to become the most realistic simulation of the ETO in WWII it cannot ignore the larger political background.

Assuming that we want to revise our VPs, how should we do so? This is a complex question and depends upon the conditions of the particular campaign. Obviously factors like force losses and territorial loss/acquisition within certain time periods matter. But the degree to which they impact a campaign is open to debate and is one of the reasons Europa's VPs remain as vague as they are. People can, and will, disagree about the costs of such actions as the Arctic Runaway.

The Russian Front, especially, poses many problems. I agree with Rick Gayler that the possibility of a victory based on the political collapse of Stalin's regime must be considered, yet many will not agree. And even those who do will disagree upon the likelihood of such a collapse and the factors necessary to bring it about. For example, it's an open question whether Stalin would have been overthrown or would sue for peace in the unlikely event that the Germans actually take Leningrad and Moscow by autumn 1941. It's also an open question whether Hitler would be open to a compromise peace at all.

Moreover, political consequences in the East may have to be factored beyond the VP system. One possibility is a reduction of replacements and/or reinforcements based on growing demoralization, although given the utter brutality of the German occupation, one doubts that such demoralization may have ever occurred. But this goes beyond the scope of this article. The important thing is to account for the political ebb and flow of a campaign in the VP schedule to the degree possible.

Another difficulty is whether VP schedules should aim towards grading a player's performance historically or competitively. If, as many people feel, victory in Russia lay beyond the reach of Nazi Germany, then perhaps VPs should be based upon performance relative to one's historical counterparts' not on some absolute measure of victory.

For example, a German player holding on to Riga, Odessa, and Minsk into late 1944 cannot be said to have won the campaign in the East in absolute terms, yet this achievement exceeds that of the Germans in real life and, in my opinion, should be rewarded on that basis.

The Western Desert VP schedule is a good place to start. It is, in my opinion, the most balanced VP system in all of Europa. This is partially because the very nature of that conflict involved fewer purely political objectives than elsewhere. But even here, politics intervened: Churchill's determination to hold on to Tobruk and Hitler's refusal to allow Rommel to withdraw from El Alamein come to mind. The schedule brilliantly accounts for these external demands by tying in territorial possession with time. The time dimension must be brought into other games.

For example, gaining Kiev in July must be counted as a far greater achievement than in October. Losses on both sides should also count for something--a German player who seizes Rostov and holds it through the winter of 1941-42 at a hideous cost to AGS will ask himself, at what price victory?

Obviously, redesigning VP schedules will take time because of the many questions that need to be resolved. Therefore, I urge all of you Europa players to start considering these problems and submitting your opinions to the magazine. Then, having formed some kind of consensus as to what victory is, we can begin a true strategic debate on how to reach it.