Charles Sharp, Washington

Inside, Outside, All Around Europa...

In his "Inside Europa" column for TEM #31, John Astell had some interesting comments on the "Eastern front" games. Since many of the things he commented on are the same things that the local group and I have been fiddling with for quite a while, I'd like to throw in my rubles' worth...

With reference to Runaway Defenses, I see the ability to abandon territory, or "trade space for time and troops," to put a better face on it, as a function of several things:

1. Force ratios. If you can stand and fight, you will. Even against Charles XII (Sweden-1709) and Napoleon (1812), the Russians did not use their space until they realized that they didn't have enough force to fight on the frontiers.

2. Willingness to accept the penalties of withdrawal. This, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter. In real life, the major penalty to retreating before the enemy is in morale-both civilian and military. We have no morale rules as such in Europa.

The next major penalty is in losing strategic strength: factories, raw materials, population. This is inadequately represented in Europa, in that only factories that could be evacuated are shown (and, consequently, they are evacuated--when was the last time a German player captured a Soviet factory in a game?). Furthermore, only a superficial raw material is indicated (2 RPs for Baku? Get Real!). That leaves population, in the form of cities worth infantry replacements and victory points, as the only real penalty to withdrawal.

The Arctic is not the major "runaway" problem area. For those who didn't realize it, the Soviets conserved manpower on this front for most of the war. By their calculations, they had just half the strength in the Karelia Front as the Finns and Germans had opposite them from May 1942 to May 1944.

On the main front, however, there are some political ("morale") and material calculations that penalized Runaway Defenses, and they aren't in the game. 70% of the iron ore in the Soviet Union was mined along the Ingulets River around Krivoi Rog in the Ukraine, and the complete loss of the Donbass in late 1941, even though it was partially recovered for a while in 1942, dropped the overall Soviet production index (total of manufactures of all kinds) to less than 50% of the prewar (1940) level.

As if this major material consideration wasn't enough, according to the latest, postglasnost, edition of Zhukov's memoirs, Stalin and the political high command were convinced that abandoning Kiev would result in the Ukrainians deserting or even changing sides! Whether they actually would have in the face of German racial policies is another matter: that the Soviets believed the possibility was real changed the options they were able to consider. Runaway in the south was simply not a realistic option for the Soviets.

In fact, as the edition of Zhukov mentioned above now makes clear, suggesting that option (abandoning Kiev to gain reserves) got Zhukov fired as Soviet Chief of Staff in July 1941.

This ties in with John's comments on strategic materials and economics for Grand Europa. Morale rules are very tricky things to write and to play with, but limitations from economics are somewhat easier to pin down (not easy, just "easier").

For instance, limitations on the number of Soviet factories that can produce goodies based on the number of Strategic Raw Material hexes held would show the importance of the Ukraine and the Donbass, and give the Soviet player the realistic penalties associated with Runaway Defense options. These penalties, by the way, lessen by mid1942, when the Urals sources of iron and coal were exploited to make up some of the losses. By no coincidence, late 1942 is when the Soviet production of military goods reached its peak- the rest of the war saw changes in quality and types of goods produced, but no great increase in total quantity.

Speaking of strategic materials, there are some very specific limitations in the Soviet war economy which affect our Europa counters. The Soviet aircraft industry for the first half of the war suffered from a serious shortage of aluminum and similar light alloys for aircraft structures. Guess where 90% of the Soviet bauxite mining and refining was done? Does Tikhvin (Map 2A: 1224) ring a bell? After the Germans occupied it for less than a month in 1941, and then both sides fought through it for a week or so, Soviet aluminum production never recovered to prewar levels until well after 1945.

This meant that until Lend Lease deliveries of aluminum and other alloys was assured in 1943, Soviet aircraft suffered serious penalties in structural weight compared to their German opponents. In fact, lose Tikhvin and don't get Lend Lease, and there will be no production of Yak-913, Yak-9DD, La-7, Yak- 3U, or Tu-2 aircraft-all of them required the use of the light alloys.

John doesn't see a problem with "Overrun-Proof Lines" in Europa. Let's take a look at John's own arguments:

1.Overrun Proof Lines (OPLs) represent "defense in depth" and stifle advances. True, but they exaggerate the depth considerably. The lines at Kursk were 40 km deep, on average, or about 1.5 hexes. For the rest of the war, on both sides, the defenses ranged from 5 - 25 km deep-that's I hex or less (I've got a whole bunch of figures on this, if you want to see them).

Defense in Depth did not stifle an advance so much as it slowed it down long enough for reserves to intervene. In virtually every case of a corps or army-level attack, which is what we represent in Europa, that intervention took place within 1-3 days, or it was too late to prevent a breakthough, and you ended up with a mobile battle, which the Germans won in the first half of the war, but less often and less convincingly as you get into 1943.

What the current OPL does, therefore, is stretch both the time and distance scale for combat from a 1 hex, 3 day operational action to a 2-3 hex, 2-4 week operation. It also makes reserves in the military sense ("uncommitted forces") of little use in the game. Every unit is instead committed to one or more OPLs.

2. OPLs control advances. John used the Soviets in 1941 as an example of controlling the enemy advance with successive OPLs ("Groups of Reserve Armies"). Unfortunately for the argument, the Soviets are proudest of the fact that they stopped operating that way as soon as they could!

Stringing reserve forces in successive lines, as they did in July-September 1941, was a wretchedly expensive way to fight, and was done mainly because army and front reserves and their respective HQs simply could not react fast enough to contain German breakthroughs. The lines were not, in fact "OPLs"-they were overrun constantly until October.

Kursk was not a victory for OPLs, but of overwhelming reserve armor and artillery (and air power) which was fast enough to react to and stifle the German advance. The southern German pincer at Kursk had, in fact, overrun the Kursk OPL in our Europa game terms: in 6 days it was 40 km behind the original front, and there were no fixed defenses at Prokhorovka-just lots of Soviet reserves, who had moved 150 kin in three days to get there.

Historically, I don't think that OPLs ever really controlled advances. If there was a breakthrough, or "overrun," if you prefer, then what controlled the advance was reserves that reacted or the exhaustion of the attackers' forces or supplies. OPLs simply turned the advance into a rolling battle of attrition.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, a 1 hex/turn advance is 25 km in 14 days, or about 1 mile a day. In German, Soviet or US doctrine, that is a failed offensive. Mathematically precluded breakthroughs aside, the Europa problem is that we have no provision for defensive reserves ("reaction rules"), CRTs that rarely exhaust (EX, AX, AE) the attacker unless he's a fool and supply rules that are, by and large, far too liberal.

3. Optimizing Play. John is right on here. War has no rules. Whatever any commander can conceive of doing, he is free to at least attempt, with varying possibilities of success. In a game, there are always finite limits that no "commander" can exceed. No matter how you rewrite the rules, the fact that you have rules at all differentiates game from reality. The problem lies in how Europa play has been optimized.

"For OPLs, the basic idea is that defense in depth works." (-John Astell, TEM #31, pg. 8). Actually, the point of defense in depth is that it slows down the attacker long enough for reserves to intervene before the attack "breaks into the open."

An OPL, then, is representing both the defense and the operational reserves, all in one. In other words, Europa is abstracting the entire operational art of the defense. Furthermore, by making the breakthrough a mathematical impossibility, it also makes offensive operational art as practiced in WWII virtually impossible.

John went on to propose specialized rules to represent the blitzkrieg in the east during June-July 1941. I'll come back to that in a bit, but right now, I would like to point out that every major operationalstrategic breakthrough operation that Europa has tried to simulate in WWII has required specialized rules: France in 1940 and Greece and Barbarossa in 1941. Does that, perhaps, suggest something about the basic game system?

For discussion, I'd like to propose the following:

1. Make "overruns" possible at lower odds, but with increased penalties in movement and casualties as the odds get lower. This would make both the attacker and the defender sweat a little more: nothing is safe, but a rash attacker can disembowel himself trying too hard.

2. Add a Reaction Rule, or Phase. John started on this for the Soviet "reaction" to the German Jun 41 attack, but given the importance of reserves as part of the operational art in WWII, why should this be only for special situations?

By varying the effectiveness of reserves by time and army, some of the real limitations of the WWII forces can be modeled without fiddling with unit strengths.

A Soviet unit attempting to react in 1941, for instance, might be able to move only half its MPs, and could not stack with any friendly unit it does not start the Reaction Phase stacked with. In other words, if Reserves are scattered to protect the rear area, they are likely to be defeated in detail by exploiting panzers.

The disadvantage of a Reaction Phase is that it complicates the Turn Sequence. How much, and how badly, depends on the rules as written and the number of die rolls involved. I think reaction penalties and rules can be written to avoid die rolls, and I think the combination of defenses that are not mathematically perfect and reserves that vary in effectiveness add excitement and operational uncertainty to the turn that is worth the complicationsno more sitting back for hours while your opponent moves in Scorched Earth: you have critical reserve movement decisions to make during his turn...

3. Jack up attacker casualties. There have been lots of modified CRTs made up, some of them trash and some mathematically very sophisticated. With the current CRT, a front-wide attrition turn after turn is a perfectly valid tactic as long as you have unit superiority, and the attacker casualties do not reflect the real attrition suffered in such actions. Possibly, allowing reserves in the Reaction Phase to add to a defending stack, thus changing the attack odds for the worse, would correct this. I don't know.

I do know that too many actual offensives in WWII came to a temporary or permanent halt because the attacking forces were worn out by attritional casualties, and that does not happen often enough in the game. We certainly don't need step reduction in Europa (Order to printer: "We need another 300,000 counter sheets for Second Front..." ).

Here's one possibility to think about. Increase the casualties suffered in the CRT by about 100 %, but make a higher percentage of those casualties Special Replacements. For instance, if you exchange 15 Attack Factors to match 10 Defense Factors, the extra 5 factors are immediate Special Replacements. Exchange based on the modified defense strength in the hex: doubled, tripled, etc.

Make cadres hard to replace (I believe Second Front has a time requirement to replace a cadre; making cadres require scarce Artillery or Equipment/Truck factors might also work) and the attacker cannot afford to leave reduced units at the front, and after a few turns has to relieve the attacking units to rebuild them with the accumulated Special Replacements. Without reserves, the attack grinds to a halt: not too unrealistic.

I think we need to playtest the combinations: does a reaction phase rule, with low odds overruns and higher attack casualties give an operational level simulation that is too complicated to play? What is the change in turn llength, especially in a Grosser Game like Scorched Earth or Second Front? How do the rules and changes have to be "fiddled" with so that the defense or the attack doesn't have it too easy?

Now about the beginning of Barbarossa...

John has proposed a revised Soviet initial set-up for Fire in the East/Scorched Earth. As it happens, I just finished reading a couple of 1991 Soviet works on this period: 22 June-July 1941, which includes some more statistics and details of the initial Soviet deployments. The differences from what John proposed are relatively minor.

The Soviets officially divided the forces in the "Western Border Military Districts" into 3 echelons:

First (Tactical) Echelon: 1-50 km from national border; total 56 divisions and 2 brigades.

Second (Army) Echelon: 51-100 km from national border; total 51 divisions ' including 24 tank, 12 mot, 4 cavalry divisions.

Front Reserves: 101-400 km from national border; total 63 divisions.

Behind and sometimes in the Western Districts was: 2nd Strategic Echelon: 7 army HQ, 62 divisions.

This neatly breaks down, in game terms, into bands of forces 1-2 hexes, 3-4 hexes, and 5+ hexes from the border. For those who want to test the "actual" Soviet deployment, I have a "revised draft" Soviet OB which includes the initial forces divided by echelon (including non divisional forces) and reinforcements through the end of FitE.

The local group, using my draft Soviet OB, tested a slightly different version of a "Barbarossa Blitz" than John suggested, and it seemed to work pretty well. Based on the fact that some Military District commanders, notably Kiev and Odessa, had slightly upgraded their readiness before the attack (contrary to Stalin's direct orders to "avoid provocations") we set up a simple table, for a Soviet die roll after the German set-up but before the first German move:

Die Roll
District with Upgraded Readiness
1 Baltic Special
2 Western Special
3 Kiev Special
4 Odessa
5Kiev Special and Odessa
6 None

An Upgraded District gets a Reaction Move and forts in the district get to act as forts during the German Surprise and First turn (some of the fort counters, unfortunately for the Soviets, are valued at 0 strength-a fact not known until the Germans hit them: Soviet army commanders had been kept utterly ignorant of the status of the construction going on in their areas before the war ... ).

We did not see any need for a Random Movement die roll in the Reaction Phase-this may be the first time in 8+ years that John has proposed more die rolls in a turn than I have. Instead, only units not in contact or ZOC of a German ground combat unit could "react", and then only up to 1/2 their printed movement rates.

I hate to burst one of the great myths of World War II, but in fact very few Soviet tanks got stuck in the swamps due to command confusion. Recently-published archive documents from one of the divisions that supposedly got "stuck" show that the bulk of the tanks were simply lost due to breakdowns on the move--a problem endemic to the Soviet armored force in 1941, when lack of recovery units and mechanics cost them more armor than any single thing the Germans did to them.

Finally, a comment on Finland and the Soviets in 1944. I did one of my undergraduate theses in college (years and years ago!) on Finland's situation at the end of WWII, and in the process also analyzed the reasons for Finland existing at all, unoccupied, at that time.

Basically, the attack in June 1944 that knocked Finland out of the Axis required about 10% of the Soviet artillery, rifle and air forces to accomplish. Given the primary mission of defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviets simply were not willing to tie up a reinforced artillery corps, two Long Range Bomber Corps, and the equivalent of an army of reinforced rifle divisions in a secondary theater.

As soon as the breakthrough was made to Viipuri and over the Svir River, most of the artillery and air assets were shuttled south to East Prussia and the Baltic States. The final northern thrust in the Arctic out of Murmansk in October 1944 was made with rifle and other reinforcing units from within the northern front- no major units were sent in from the "main front."

If such reinforcement had been required, given that East Prussia, Hungary, and western Poland were still in front of them, I doubt that the Soviets would have bothered attacking in Finland at all. Remember, even after the Winter War, when they had no other overt enemy on the continent and were in fact allied with Germany, the Soviets contented themselves with some buffer territory in front of Leningrad and Murmansk.

Enough already. I hope there is some food for thought in all of this. A reminder to all the serious Europaniks out there: with Second Front finally ready to see light of day, we have a few years, according to the proposed GRD production schedule, before the next monster game comes out. Let's use this time to propose, revise and playtest ideas and revisions to the system and to consider individual "special situations." We've got the time, and plenty of interested people out there--let's use both to best advantage.

Jay Kaufman, Minnesota

Issue number 29 was, as usual, excellent. I was particularly interested in the two articles by Frank E. Watson and Flavio Carrillo. Now is the best time to begin discussing how Europa will deal with the Grand Strategic issues of diplomacy, politics and economics.

Watson's "A Grand Europa Economic System" was purest gold! I found myself admiring his ideas and agreeing enthusiastically with all his contentions. His points are very well thought out. An economic system by itself is going to be a rather boring adjunct to the Europa system.

I believe Europa's treatment of economics should be to put simplicity first, over realism, and to permit economics to intrude as little as possible into gaming. Economics isn't engrossing enough to make a good game in itself. The economic system should present players with tough decisions and real control over the game and their war effort, but shouldn't require enough work to distract from the centerpiece of the system: the ground war. I believe Mr. Watson has the issue well in hand, describing an economic simulation which would combine realism, simplicity and lack of distraction from the "real" Europa, with opportunities for serious strategic planning. Outstanding!

Flavio Carrillo is less detailed in his treatment of "Victory Points and Strategy in Europa." [Note that Mr. Carrillo remedies this with an in-depth rule for FitE in this issue. -RMG] I'd like to add some points and ideas to his.

Like economics, diplomacy and internal politics threaten to distract gainers from the fun part of Europa. They should exist only as an adjunct to warfighting, characterized by simplicity and ease of play, a degree of realism consonant with the Europa system, and present the players with meaningful Grand Strategic decisions. I believe most E-gamers would agree with this.

That said, let me suggest how political collapse of a state like Stalin's Russia might manifest itself in Europa. I agree fully that a popular uprising would be most unlikely. The Soviet police-state was too powerful. However, low "National Morale" (referring to Mr. Watson's article) in the USSR should cause troops to fight less well.

Perhaps the Militia Unreliability Table (MUT) from For Whom the Bell Tolls could be used whenever a country's morale drops to a certain level, or when poorly trained troops take the field. A local house rule is to use this table for all Soviet "Militia" units in SE. We've also been bouncing around the concept of having all nonGuards Soviets roll on this table, but on a new, higher column where the troops can also fight at doubled strength with a lucky die roll.

The use of the MUT is a very sophisticated means of applying the effects of substandard national morale or of using irregular troops. Something simpler might see the halving of combat strengths under situations such as the capture or evacuation of the national capital counter, or the loss of enough VPs worth of territory/cities/combat strength points in a turn.

Another way to track low morale would be to lower the "special replacement" rate for a country. Certainly mass surrenders in 1941 by Soviet troops were indicative of their dislike for their government and for the military failures of the Red Army. Lastly, it should be possible for a coup to overthrow the government of a state, due to low national morale.

When the national morale falls below a certain milestone on the National Morale Track, then that player should have to roll every turn to see if a coup has been attempted. The chance, perhaps a result of "2" on a roll of two dice, would rise as the morale drops further. Each country's National Data Sheet would describe the political actors who might attempt a coup. How a new regime proceeds would also depend to a great extent on qualities unique to each country.

Again the NDS would specify who might succeed an overthrown government, and what the effects of each particular successor would be upon the country's war effort and foreign relations. Even in states like the USSR and Nazi Germany there were always potential rivals to the governing regime.

In the USSR either the Red Army or the NKVD could aspire to overthrow Stalin and his CPSU. Stalin himself was very conscious of a potential threat from the Red Army.

In Nazi Germany there were several political centers which could have stepped into Hitter's shoes, and would have attempted to do so if he died before the end of the war; these include Nazi political actors such as Goring, Himmler and the SS, Bormann and the NSDAP apparatus, as well as the Wehrmacht, the Social Democrats, who had some subversive potential (though not the German communists who were quite destroyed by 1939, acting only as spies). Most of these might have attempted a coup, as the army of course did, and they would have fought among themselves should Hitler have died earlier.

Lastly, it should be possible for foreign countries to dabble in others' politics, fomenting coups directly, and indirectly by trying to lower National Morale. Romania and Italy are both prominently successful examples of Allied efforts to persuade the wartime governments to switch sides. This ability should tie into the Partisan rules.

On another topic, I wish to see GloryTM dovetail with Europa, else I'll have much reduced interest in that series.

Meanwhile, looking back at TEM #23, in my amicus curiae capacity to the Rules Court, I have one very important comment to make: I hope the individuals before the bench kept the situation in perspective and did not allow bitter feelings to spoil their game and especially their friendship. I don't think I've ever seen two people actually ruin a friendship over a disagreement in a game, but I have seen angry words (and NOT directed at the dice -- a fair pair of targets), ugly shouting matches, sulking, tipped mapboards, and scattered pieces (though happily this last phenomenon usually was merely a decisive way of surrendering and ending someone else's ego trip: "I no longer wish to be Germany's punching bag, thank you.")

[I'm happy to report that the friendship of the two players did, in fact, survive this game, and continues to prosper. - RGM]

On the subject of the game itself, I favored letting the battle stand. It does happen that gainers get carried away in attacking. You get your blood up. You can't be dissuaded by ordinary reservations. Like General Lee, once you've got your head up you will keep rolling the dice to force your will upon the game and your opponent. Thank god for this! If you play with chess-like precision, where you always squeeze every last miserable advantage out of each situation, first, you're not playing fast enough, and second, you're not having as much fun as you might. Not only is it impossible to play well without taking risks--failing to make occasional risky attacks is an impoverished example of game-playing.

Yes, forgetting to include enough engineers/exclude enough non-engineers to negate the -1 terrain mod was a blunder, blown up in the German player's face by an unlucky die roll. Wonderful!

The situation in the south is thrown into a quandary. Play it out and see what happens! As the German player discovered, he was not bundled out of Russia as a result of this one fight, and both players probably encountered several more blunders each before the game ended.

Finally, here's a suggestion for an interesting variant to the "Operation Groza" scenario. If the Soviets decline to invade Hungary on the first turn, why not give the Germans the option of invading that country? This might prove an attractive way to reestablish contact with Romania if the Soviets have sealed off the trans-Hungarian rail lines. And it would open up more space for mobile combat, at which the Germans possess a decided advantage.

Flavio Carrillo, Illinois

I just received issue #31 and read it with great interest. John Astell's "Inside Europa" article, in particular, drew my attention and I feel I must clarify and defend the issue of victory points that I addressed back in TEM #29.

I admit that my language in #29 might have been a bit caustic, but I honestly did not intend it to be an ad hominem attack on John, or anyone else. I have the utmost respect for John and his indispensable efforts, and I can well understand John's natural desire to keep the Europa system in some semblance of unified order in the face of the multiple forces pulling it apart, i.e., the fact that apparently every Europa player has a pet rule that he feels must be incorporated.

Ultimately, someone has to make decisions, and John is that person in Europa and this is how it should be. Of course, no matter what John decides to do, he will inevitably find a Europa gamer who not only disagrees with him, but possesses an ego that makes him certain that he knows better than the game designer!

That having been said, however, I feel that John missed the larger point that I was attempting to make regarding victory points. He took me to task on my example of the Arctic Runaway. This may or may not be a good example of a politically inviable action. I think that it is politically difficult, but am willing to concede that it may not be an optimal example. However, I strongly believe that examples do exist where a firm consensus agrees that otherwise militarily senseless or dubious actions were forced by wartime leaders on their military commanders for political/economic or prestige purposes. To name a few:

• Stalin's insistence on holding Kiev despite clear indications that the Germans were preparing a massive double envelopment that would eventually annihilate the Southwestern Front and lead to not only the loss of Kiev, but most of the Ukraine as well, something possibly avoidable given a reasonable withdrawal.
• Hitler's refusal to give up an inch of ground, starting in the winter of 1941 and becoming progressively worse as the war dragged on, e.g. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the Kuban Peninsula, the Crimea, Tunisia, the Dnepr bend, the Mortain counterattack, etc. Here we have a wealth of examples of militarily ridiculous intransigence in the face of superior enemy positions and forces. As Guderian said in his memoirs: "Ostrich politics leads to ostrich strategy." Hitler's well known proclivity to stick his head in the ground and ignore reality would result in Germany being buried as well.
• Churchill's Balkan misadventure, wherein the Commonwealth dispersed its very slender resources and forewent the early opportunity to knock out the Axis from Africa entirely. To this I would add his constant pressures on successive Middle Eastern commanders to undertake offensives prior to amassing adequate forces. This led to the eventual dismissal of Wavell and Auchinleck, two fine leaders, with Alexander and Montgomery succeeding only when they possessed a military superiority wholly denied to Wavell and Auchinleck. (As an aside, of these leaders who would you choose? I suspect few of you would pick the ponderous pair that Churchill eventually settled on.)
• Churchill's fixation on Tobruk in 1942, despite clear warnings by Auchinleck that Tobruk could not and would not be defended as it had been in 1941.
• Stalin's desperate, front-wide lunges in the winter and spring of 1942 despite advice from his commanders that the Soviet Union lacked the strength for a broad push along multiple axes. These abortive offensives created disasters at Kharkov and in the Crimea that left the Soviet Union vulnerable to the German southern push in 1942.
• Mussolini's adventurism in Greece launched with totally inadequate forces which in turn gave rise to a variety of political problems in the Balkans requiring German intervention prior to Fall Barbarossa.
• Hitler's totally unnecessary declaration of war on the U.S. following Pearl Harbor. 'Nuff said.

This list could go on and on, but the point is clear: the political leadership in WWII frequently, not occasionally, pressed their troops and commanders into militarily untenable and operationally absurd situations in pursuit of immediate political gain. That these goals usually proved to be so many glittering El Dorados did not prevent political leaders from chasing their cherished windmills.

Europa's record in dealing with these larger political constraints is mixed. On the one hand, the Western Desert OB requires that the British send units to Greece and, moreover, provides a victory schedule that takes into account territorial possession within a time frame.

These two factors present the players with the kind of political constraints their historical counterparts faced. The tension thus created, rather than bogging the game down or strictly limiting it to historical outcomes, instead increases the gaming experience. Playing Western Desert makes you feel like Rommel or Wavell, and allows you- to appreciate and sympathize with their concerns. As a result, Western Desert possesses a richness and depth not always found in Europa games because it approaches its subject not as some kind of sterile staff study, but as a broad simulation of the North African campaign including the political constraints faced by the theatre commanders. Western Desert succeeds brilliantly as a simulation precisely because it realistically builds the political constraints of the North African campaign into the OB and the VP schedule and provides players with a high level of gaming tension.

Sadly, however, the approach pioneered in Western Desert has not been replicated elsewhere. To be sure, the OBs in all Europa games are the best of their type anywhere. However, all other VP schedules in Europa games fail to incorporate those political elements shown in Western Desert.

And without these political effects I submit that no Europa game can accurately present itself as a true simulation. Rather, they are at best theoretical staff studies lacking clear political objectives. The reason I focus on VP systems to solve this problem is because they represent the best way to show the political problems faced by a theatre commander without forcing him into a rigid straitjacket.

John is absolutely correct is saying that any game where the strategy and outcome are totally predetermined will not be of much interest. But a properly crafted VP system in conjunction with a good OB such as that found in Western Desert encourages players to conduct themselves historically without forcing them to do so. Players who ignore these schedules, play differently, and lose the game can consider themselves to have been sacked.

A player may say that he thinks he has won by any rational military basis, but a player, like a theatre commander, cannot expect to define the ultimate political objectives of a campaign: that's what his Prime Minister, Fuhrer, President, and/or Generalissimo are for. And if your leader wants you to do something you regard as silly, you'd better do it, or be prepared to be sacked or shot.

When these constraints have been factored in I think players will be pleasantly surprised at how much more closely the game will follow history and will also have more fun playing it, knowing (if they win) that they faced similar problems as their historical counterparts and won nevertheless. The greater the challenge, the greater the rewards.

The problem here is that most Europa games demonstrably do not possess victory conditions that reflect the historical strategic goals of a campaign. Simply put, an Eastern front game that allows unrestricted operational freedom to conduct bloody forward defenses or marathon-like runaways such as FitE/SE does not, in my book, represent the strategic goals of both sides in sufficient depth.

A system that says "you win as the Germans if you take Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad and you win as the Soviets if you take Konigsberg, Warsaw and Bucharest" is not enough. How and when you achieve these geographical objectives, the importance attached to these objectives by the political leadership, and at what cost to your nation and its armed forces are equally as important.

John concedes as much both in his article and by the fact that at least one of his games, Western Desert, adopts this approach. For example, in Western Desert, taking Tripoli is not necessarily enough and may, or may not win the game. If the Axis player controls Cyrenaica long enough and threatens Egypt sufficiently, he may be judged to have actually won the game.

Similarly, in the Eastern Front and elsewhere these sorts of decision cycles must be adopted so that players do not blithely abandon Kiev or throw away hundreds of points of units per turn in rigid forward defenses without incurring some displeasure from Stalin, not to mention morale effects on the army and nation. We must broaden our horizons as to what victory really is.

On a different note, I fully agree with John's comments regarding NODLs (or OPLs, if you prefer). A NODL is nothing more than Europa's version of a prepared defense in depth, and if you tinker with the system you'll simply force players to achieve the same result with a different approach.

The problem is not that Europa allows Soviet NODLs in the Eastern campaign (indeed, in many ways, particularly the CRT and inadequate fort rules the game greatly favors the offense), but that it allows them to be created too early.

We must find ways to build in the chaos and tactical and operational ineptitude plaguing the Soviets in the early period of the war without destroying their ability to form such defenses in depth later on when they shake off the effects of shock and surprise.

I like John's approach of fixing the start-up deployment, although I'm not sure it goes far enough (I tend to favor the more radical approach of adopting Charles Sharp's truly execrable historical deployment which will prevent such early NODLs, you can be sure!)

Once Jason Long and I finish playtesting Second Front, playtesting John's proposal is my number one priority, so stay tuned (I can't wait to start playing the Eastern Front again! I'm tired of all these airplanes and naval units and airborne troops and planned operations...

Kevin Schnetter, Washington

Let me say that we have a great product! When I say "we," I'm talking about the Association. The Europa system works from the sands of North Africa to the ice fields of the Arctic. It is a dynamic system, always on the move, being streamlined and improved with time and experience.

My local hobby store does not carry any Europa titles. The owner has told me that roleplaying games are where the money's at. Times sure have changed.

It's the responsibility of the members of the Association to promote our product. I play solitaire because I have not found an opponent. Admittedly, I have not previously tried very hard. To do my part, I have put up a request at the local hobby store for players to play the game with or to teach it to.

To aid Europa gamers in such efforts, why not make a video on how to play the game? Now I am not talking about a $100,000, four-hour epic, just a little homemade video tape. Maybe you could show some examples of strategies, combat, movement and how best to stack units. There is nothing quite like having someone show you how to do something.

[Like so many of the good ideas put forth by our members, I fear this one will fall victim to limited time and resources. By the way, computer guru Mark van Roekel produced a Europa promotional video for a past Origins, but it did not include play instructions. -RMG]