Let's look at "Scorched Earth Partisan Rule 40 Revised" in Issue 30. First, some commentary on its introduction:

• Hex Blockage: The article mentions that players use partisans to try to block the enemy out of hexes.

  1) In particular, players put partisans in rail hexes to try to hinder German railroad regauging efforts. But, this is exactly the problem the Germans encountered when they tried to get the Soviet railroads into operation: they had to first clean out the partisans, survivors of smashed Soviet units, and other riff- raff from the rail lines.

  2) Players also put partisans immediately behind the Axis lines where a Soviet offensive is scheduled to come in, to force the Axis to retreat further than usual. Again, this is indeed historical: this was the mission, for example, given the partisans for the assault on Army Group Center in 1944. (The Soviets actually hoped the partisans could block German units from retreating at all, so that the assaulting forces could destroy them outright, but this was beyond the partisans' abilities.)

  The hex blockage component of the partisan rules was included to cover these historical considerations. The case can be made that perhaps hex blockage is more effective than it should be, but the rules aren't wrong per se for including hex blockage.

• Sabotage (Part 1): The article asks: "Why can partisans blow ports while actual combat units cannot?" In my opinion, most combat units just don't contain the expertise to wreck a port. They can do some superficial damage, sure, but the historical evidence isn't there for most units doing anything substantial to ports. To do that, you need to bring in experts, and the best way to represent this in the game system is to restrict port demolition to engineers.

  Partisans are different: they get lots of demolition experience of all types. Further, the Soviets could and did send in experts (by air at night) to assist and control the partisans' efforts. With this in mind, if the Germans let partisans run around loose in a port, you can bet the Soviets will find the means to damage it.

• Sabotage (Part 2): "There seems to be evidence indicating that partisans performed few, if any, acts of sabotage against airfields and air units." There is a reason for that, and it's not that partisans are too stupid to recognize enemy airbases when they see them. It's that the Germans guarded their airbases, so that a band of men with submachineguns and hand grenades wouldn't destroy expensive aircraft. The partisans, not being stupid at all, preferred to blow up unguarded rail lines than to attack guarded airbases. Had the airbases not been guarded, you can bet, again, that the partisans would be taking out aircraft left and right. The rules, thus, recreate this situation: if you do not guard your airbases, you must take your lumps.

The article goes on to revise the partisans in two significant areas: attack ability and displacement.

• Attack Ability: The rule gives partisans a quarter-strength attack ability against regular combat units, with dire results to the partisans if they get anything other than DR, DH, or DE. The main effect of this seems to be to give the partisans the ability to scrag Axis position AA at will. (This makes airbases even more vulnerable to partisans, paradoxical to the article's earlier complaint!) The attack ability is at once too liberal and too restrictive.

  I designed a partisan vs. regulars combat system for the SE partisan rules. I never put it into formal rules language, as it seemed an unnecessary complication to an already-complex situation: partisan vs. regulars happened so rarely in this theater that it could be ignored. (The situation in the Balkans is different, and I planned to bring out the system when we eventually covered the Balkan partisans.) Well, I guess it's time to bring it out.

  A partisan unit represents many small partisans bands, operating more or less independently, scattered throughout the hex. To collect the bands up into an effective fighting force, able to attack large (battalion-sized or bigger) regular units requires time and organization. Further, collecting the bands into a coherent unit means the partisans lose their special abilities. There's too many of them in one place, under regular military discipline to boot, for them to effectively elude enemy forces or to merge successfully into the civilian population. To represent these considerations, at the end of a Soviet player turn, the Soviet player may convert any of his partisan units from 14 partisan mode" to "regular mode," by flipping the counters over to their revealed sides. (The current partisan rules define partisan-mode abilities.) A regular-mode partisan unit functions exactly like a regular combat unit (can be overrun, no retreat before combat, supply, support, etc.), including the ability to attack. Note that the Axis gets a turn to react to a concentrating regular-mode partisan unit.

  Also at the end of any Soviet player turn, the Soviet player can convert any regular-mode partisan units to partisan mode.

  Partisan units are always recruited in partisan mode, never in regular mode.

  With regular mode, we can lose the hex blockage mechanics from partisan mode. If a player really wants to block a hex, he'll convert partisans there to regular mode.

• Displacement: I've advocated displacement for partisans in the past, but now that I've seen it in print, I'm less sure. It seems open to abuse: the Germans can place chaff units in lots of hexes and then "herd" the partisans to particular hexes where antipartisan units will finish off the "roundup." I can just see a bunch of construction regiments and the like carpeting an area, so that a security division can then force local partisans to displace to a particular hex. This seems very gamey and possibly fatally flawed.

Instead of displacement, I suggest "mixed stacking:" partisanmode partisans and enemy regular units are allowed to stack in the same hex. This was my original system, which I abandoned solely for game play considerations-historically, partisans and enemy regular units could and did "share the same hex." It proved difficult to play the game with this mechanic. Soviet players would stick partisans at the bottom of Axis stacks and hope the German player would forget the partisans were there. German players typically would spend a significant amount of time each turn checking stacks simply to find partisan counters. This slowed the game down too much, so I adopted the current SE system.

Well, I've thought of a way to make it work without slowing down the game. When partisans and enemy units are in the same hex, always place the partisan counters at the top of the stack of counters in the hex. That way, players can quickly see where all the partisans are without endlessly thumbing through stacks. (There is one slick trick the Soviet player can pull if using this rule: place a partisan in a hex with a single Axis unit and hope the German player thinks the stack consists of two partisans and thus forgets about his unit. This doesn't seem a major problem, as my experience indicates the German player typically has a good idea where his units are and anyway usually checks out visible partisan stacks to make sure they aren't up to anything important.)

Mixed stacking works with few modifications to the current rules:

• APZOCs: APZOCs of units in a hex that contains enemy partisans have no effect on the partisans in that hex. (Due to the intermingling of the regulars and partisans in the hex, it's assumed the regulars there are unable to form effective cordons against the partisans. Note that antipartisan units in other hexes still have effective APZOCs against the partisans in the hex, and that the anti-partisan units in the hex do have effective APZOCs against partisans in other hexes.)

  Example: A German security division is in a hex with a partisan-mode partisan unit, attacking it in the German combat phase. The combat result requires the partisan to retreat, and the APZOC of the security division is ignored for the retreat.

• Combat: Units may (but are never required to) attack enemy partisan-mode units in their hex. (Units in adjacent hexes may attack, too).
• Regular-Mode Partisans: A partisan-mode partisan may convert to regular-mode even if the unit is in an enemyoccupied hex. In the following enemy player turn, the enemy units in the hex may move from the hex during the movement phase, or they may stay in the hex and must attack the regular-mode partisans there during the combat phase, per the same-hex combat provisions of Rule 25C.

  (Note: It is conceivable that a partisan unit could convert to regular mode in a hex containing a 0-attack strength enemy unit, which subsequently remains in the hex for whatever reason. To handle this situation, modify Rule 9G, Zero Strength Units, to allow 0-attack strength units to attack. However, if the total attack strength of the attacking ground units is 0, then the attackers receive an automatic AE result.)

Dismissal: With regular mode added in the game and with hex blockage no longer a feature of partisan-mode, we can dispense with mandatory dismissal.

Conclusion: These partisan rules aren't written up rigorously, but they outline how things work. If you have a "reasonable" opponent, you can incorporate them into your game. I invite the partisan revisers of the Issue 29 article to work through these cases and to formalize their language.

Inside Europa You Ask, I Answer

Questions and Answers
Victory in Europa
Mountain Units and Operational Flexibility
Grand Europa Economics
Partisans
Finland
HX: Exchange Commentary
Army Group North Operations
Leningrad 1941 Tournament Cancelled
Overrun-Proof Lines