The time has come for a major reassessment of the Europa ground system. Second Front incorporates numerous changes to the naval and air systems that will take some time to absorb, but the core ground system remains virtually intact. This disappoints me, since I believe the most important problems with Europa lay precisely in this area. Europa fails to properly model mobile warfare, combat attrition, and logistics. Many people have already noted these individually, leading to apparent contradictions. The casual observer might conclude that these separate critiques constitute bellyaching, but a closer examination reveals a tight interrelationship between them. Essentially, solving one area without addressing the others would grossly distort the ground system, and perhaps worsen it. Thus, these areas cannot be addressed in isolation. Rather, Europa should move towards a new "Grand Unified Theory" of ground combat and aim at the outset for a synergistic solution.

The longevity of the ground system allows us to reasonably comment on its foibles. Europa's evolution to date mainly concentrates on the peripheral areas such as the naval and air system. The ground system, however, survives with only modest changes. Europa, at its heart, remains a game dedicated primarily to ground combat, so the simulation failures in this area are paradoxically both the most important and the least confronted. Europa is now the Grand Old Dame of wargaming, having survived for over two decades as a popular game system. Yet even a Grand Old Dame can stand an occasional change of wardrobe and perhaps even a face-lift. Otherwise, she may lose the affections of her admirers to younger, more vigorous rivals.

"The Holy Trinity"

Ground combat systems in wargaming must model three areas in particular: mobile warfare, combat attrition, and logistics. These three dynamically relate to each other, and problems in one inevitably result in perversions in the others. This creates a difficult design problem: how to both create realistic models for each of these, while ensuring that they fit together as a seamless whole. The magnitude of the design difficulty increases exponentially when you add the need for a model that is not only realistic, but playable.

The limits of the board gaming medium preclude brute force, bookkeeping type systems such as those found in computer wargames. Things that function well in a computer wargame would unbearably burden boardgamers, who must rely entirely upon themselves to track all the myriad elements of a game. A board game design must strive for elegance in lieu of complexity in its system. This is one reason that boardgames can compare favorably even today to computer wargames: computer game designers can ignore the subtleties of game design and fall back to the personal computer's increasing ability to grind numbers.

The board game designer triumphs as an artist over the computer wargame designer; the board game medium disciplines and tempers the designer from pursuing inelegant, and thus unplayable solutions. But elegance alone without a certain realism is insufficient in a wargame. A board wargame by definition must gracefully compromise between playability and realism.

Why mobile warfare, attrition, and logistics? These three comprise the essential elements of World War II combat. With mobile warfare, the attacker can break through enemy lines, and spread confusion in the rear. Attrition shows the cost of combat in lives and equipment, and the desirability of mobile warfare as a means to lower this cost. Logistics show the very real limits supply places on all combat units to maneuver and press attacks, or even to defend against them. How a wargame models these three defines how realistically and enjoyably the game recreates history. No World War II simulation can avoid this trinity and hope to succeed as a game. 

Europa takes a peculiar approach to this trinity. Basically, Europa strangles the ability to conduct maneuver warfare while placing few logistical constraints or losses on the attacker. This results in an odd bastardization of World War I and II: breakthroughs become elusive, yet the attacker can constantly hammer away, hoping to achieve through the bludgeon what he cannot achieve with the rapier. No student of WWII can observe this mix with satisfaction. True maneuver warfare only occurs in Europa as a result of special attack rules and initial setups, never to be seen again. On the other hand, the CRT and liberal logistics allow the strategic attacker to endlessly batter away, with nary a combat loss or supply shortage. This beast resembles neither fish nor fowl, nor the Second World War.

NODL is a Four Letter Word

The non-overrunable double line (NODL) made its first appearance in Europa literature in TEM #29, causing quite a splash. Europa strictly limits overruns to stacks possessing the required movement points and 10:1 odds versus the defender. A canny defender with a rudimentary grasp of mathematics can simply count factors and movement points, and assemble two lines barely, but surely, sufficient to prevent a breakthrough.

The Eastern Front particularly falls victim to this pernicious tactic. Mighty panzer corps timidly stop before 5-7 point stacks of Soviet infantry. They may well demolish these stacks in great numbers during combat, but can then go no further thanks to the second line, which usually contains most of the armor and artillery. The Soviets, suffering from no infantry shortage, simply fall back a hexrow and establish another line of expendable heroes. The armor and artillery again form a non-overrunable back line, and, taking no losses, gradually build up to enormous quantities. The Soviets may lose vast numbers of riflemen, but can well absorb these casualties until the mud and snow arrive. The Germans advance at the breathtaking rate of one hexrow a turn, while they encounter an increasing number of rapidly constructed forts, further limiting Soviet casualties.

The unevacuated Soviet factories churn out a never ending stream of guns and tanks, while many cities historically taken by the Wehrmacht lay hundreds of miles east of the front line. The Soviets can judiciously fall back just beyond the range of the German infantry, and further limit attacks to those few mobile units at the front. The slow movement ability of German infantry and the short campaign season combine to keep many of these out of the action throughout 1941. Eventually, the mass of German infantry arrives to increase the front line attack potential, but by this point the Soviets will be well dug in and difficult to root out, and only a few turns away from mud and snow.

The NODL strategy requires careful maintenance of rail lines. With difficulty, the Germans can use the Luftwaffe to harass and break rail lines, but this simply moves the NODL further east, where Soviet fighter cover prevents such Luftwaffe disruption. A few strategically placed engineers can also deal with rail hits; the Red Army contains many 0-5 and 0-1-5 construction regiments/brigades well suited for this.

The Europa GEnie contributors, vexed by NODLs, strongly criticized their inhibiting effects. John Astell replied to these complaints in TEM #31 by claiming that the problem arose from NODLs occurring too early; he did not think that NODLs in themselves were wrong. He proposed a fix that increased Soviet command control problems during the first few turns, preventing their ability to form NODLs and aiding the initial German advance.

At first, I agreed with this solution and was fairly enthusiastic about it; it certainly fixed the NODL problem for the June/July period of FitE/SE . However, NODLs soon reappear afterwards.

I discovered the enduring nature of the NODL problem while designing a Europa scenario for the Battle for Moscow, 1941. The Soviets prior to the battle possessed sufficient forces to form a NODL. Thus, the Germans can not recreate the 600,000-man pockets around Orel and Vyazma, nor march into Kalinin or Orel on the Oct I 41 turn as they did historically.

The only fixes available, without creating new rules, lay in artificial restrictions for the initial deployment, and/or a surprise attack! This problem will arise in any situation where the defender possesses the force density to create a NODL. Many historical breakthroughs and encirclements simply cannot occur under the Europa overrun rule. A scenario designer approaching such a battle must resort to ponderous and heavy-handed means in order to even approach historicity. 

Of course, scenarios set in the middle of a war necessarily contain special circumstances. Nevertheless, breakthroughs followed by mobile warfare occurred with some frequency in WWII, and shouldn't be so exceptional as to require special scenario rules. In the context of a long game, breakthroughs will vanish until the attacker grinds the defender to the point where NODLs become impossible. I think the game system should liberalize or change the overrun rules to allow for maneuver warfare at any point. Such a change might permit us to dispense with the kind of surprise/idiot rules found in Fall of France and FitE/SE .

Assuming a NODL is a problem, how do we solve it? There are currently two schools of thought. The first involves loosening the rigid 10:1 requirement to allow overruns at lower odds. An example of this can be found in Jim Arnold's Lunge to Stalingrad scenario in TEM #34. The basic approach allows overruns at lower odds, but with uncertain results; a failed overrun leaves mobile units poorly positioned, since Arnold's rule penalizes failed overruns by expending units' entire movement allowances. The second option, described in TEM #34's EXchange column by James Steel, involves letting reserve mobile units advance into a cleared hex and immediately perform a second, breakthrough attack.

Both of these contain problems. The variable overrun, in my opinion, doesn't sufficiently penalize the mobile attacker because it fails to generate attacker losses. Miscarried mobile assaults historically saw the attackers impale themselves; I offer as two good examples Operation Goodwood and Kursk. In both cases, the mobile attacker wasn't merely stopped, he was pummeled. This isn't to say all failed mobile assaults should automatically result in losses, but the possibility should exist. Some may object to this since this can result in cadred units, an especially harsh penalty. Perhaps mobile units should have more than two steps; also, I suspect that failed mobile assaults will frequently satisfy losses by losing ants. In the case of required losses, we're all familiar with the tactic of losing assault gun battalions instead of cadreing panzer divisions.

As for the breakthrough attack, this can be nullified by a spaced NODL. The defender merely places the second line two hexrows behind the first, leaving it beyond the range of the breakthrough units. The Soviets can afford such minimal territorial losses in order to preclude a clean breakthrough into the deep, operational rear. The spaced NODL is an inefficient NODL, but a NODL nonetheless.

I have another objection to these, or any other proposed transformations in the overrun rules: any such change, by itself, may hopelessly unbalance the game when combined with the excessively kind CRT and lack of logistical limits. An attacker armed with the ability to overcome NODLs and capable of ignoring casualties and supply considerations will demolish the defender. We cannot resolve the NODL issue without considering these other areas as well.

The Butcher's Bill

If Europa penalizes the attacker by denying him maneuver, it overcompensates him by virtually eliminating attacker casualties. This problem has long been recognized in Europa; over the years we've seen a number of proposed CRTs, all sharing one similarity: they increase attacker casualties.

The current CRT, combined with ZOCs and armor effects, allows the attacker to relentlessly batter away. Standard Eastern Front play involves high odds attacks on two end hexes of a three-hex line so as to place ZOCs on the center hex. The center hex defenders, forced to retreat through ZOCs, need only be attacked by sufficient forces to guarantee a DR. If the defender lacks cadres (as is frequently the case with the Soviets), he can kiss the stack goodbye. With armor effects, this becomes easy: a 3:1 (+3) with blocking ZOCs is a guaranteed kill.

Repeat said procedure across the front, and the Germans can annihilate most of an entire hexrow each turn. This wouldn't be so terrible if the Germans took their lumps in return. Then, at least, a gradual reduction in combat power would slowly lower the attacker's ability to prosecute attrition. But here the attrition is entirely one-sided.

Standard frontal combat is expensive. World War I proved that. That's what made panzers so revolutionary; they reintroduced mobile attacks on the flanks and rear and the creation of pockets. Such methods are almost axiomatically cheaper on the attacker than assaults on an unturned defender. The Europa attacker, while often denied the benefits of maneuver warfare thanks to NODLs, can still cheaply mount frontal assaults. 

Some might argue that ZOCs represent the effects of flank or rear attacks. But ZOCs have nothing to do with deep penetration into the operational rear, or the pocketing of defenders. A ZOC attack is, at best, a minor tactical maneuver, and a rather cramped one at that. This tactic, amounting to little more than a wargaming artifact, bears no resemblance to Vernichtungsgedanke, the German term for decisive operational maneuver.

The proof is in the pudding: take a look at the German OBs for the 1942 scenario. How many of you have played FitE/SE to this point and taken a similar number of casualties? The problem arises even earlier than this. My research into the Typhoon scenario showed over 550,000 German casualties by the end of September, overwhelmingly concentrated in riflemen.

Of the 70 odd German infantry divisions participating in Typhoon, roughly one third would be cadred in Europa terms. This is before the Russian winter, mind you, or even the mud.

By March 1942, every single combat motorized division should be cadred. At this point the Germans possessed a grand total of 140 operational tanks along the entire Eastern Front. Even taking into account temporary breakdowns, it's clear the German mobile forces lost a substantial portion of their striking power during the brutal fighting of the 1941 campaign. Furthermore, the Germans suffered these losses in the midst of constant breakthroughs and pockets, as opposed to far more sanguinary frontal attacks. The Europa CRT simply does not generate these kind of attacker casualties. Armor losses, in particular, seem to be vastly understated in Eumpa games.

This lack of attacker casualties eventually rebounds on the Germans. The Soviet records show that even in 1944 they lost a staggering 23,700 AFVs, equal to 81% of their annual production. Soviet armor losses during the 1943 scenario, like German armor losses in the 1941 scenario, come nowhere near those seen historically. Soviet infantry losses are substantial during the 1943 scenario, but only as a result of German counterattacks; without these, they'd be extremely modest. The only way to force losses in Europa is to attack. A passive defender can only infrequently expect an HX, much less a full exchange.

This phenomenon will almost certainly recur in Second Front. According to Dupuy, the Germans inflicted 1.2 casualties for every 1 they lost to the Western Allies during combat. The Allies made up for this by surrounding and bypassing hundreds of thousands of Germans, thus cheaply rendering them combat ineffective. But positional warfare against the Germans, even with overwhelming armor, artillery, naval, and air support, was a bloody affair. Frontal combat at 5:1 odds or more often ended inconclusively, especially in Normandy, Italy, and the Westwall. I have only limited play experience with Second Front at this point, but I'm willing to bet that our cardboard Allies shall endure fewer losses than their historical counterparts.

The obvious solution to this is some modification to the CRT. I've seen many variations on this theme: 2d6 tables, ldlO tables, tables with exotic combat results like attacker exchange, attacker quartered, and the like. I'm sure that one of these should do the trick, or at least get us closer to two-sided attrition.

Another possibility came up some time ago in Combined Arms #2. David Hughes outlined a fascinating system his group uses in Canada that eschews CRTs altogether. Rather, both sides roll 2d6, modify the die roll according to terrain, AEC, and other effects, and multiply the result by 10%. This percentage is then applied against the combat value of the rolling side to calculate losses inflicted. If the attacker inflicts three times the casualties the defender causes on him, the defender must retreat.

I've yet to try this out myself, and I've gotten mixed reports on it, but the sheer novelty of the idea appeals to me. It certainly generates attrition, and speeds up play since it demands no particular combat ratio to achieve success or failure, or to ensure either. On the other hand, it might be too brutal, especially if adopted without any other rules modifications to affect things like NODLs.

I'm not sure which of these would best resolve the attrition problem. Frankly, at this point, I don't greatly care about the details. I'm more concerned with focusing on the fact that the problem exists. Once we acknowledge the problem, then we can devote our energy towards a specific solution.

Of course, increasing attacker attrition by itself is no total solution. Any change in attrition without commensurate modifications in the area of maneuver warfare will only move Europa in the direction of World War I. Like NODLs, attrition must be resolved within the context of the "Holy Trinity," and not as a stand-alone issue.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Redux

Rommel, sadly reflecting on his North African experience, once commented that quartermasters determine the outcome of a battle before the first shot is fired. Modern warfare consumes fuel, men, and material in huge quantities. An army lacking proper supplies cannot expect decisive results, at least not positive ones. The attacker in particular must possess sufficient supplies to both maneuver and fire against a defending enemy. His logistical problems exceed those of the defender for two reasons: first, the attacker usually needs a greater amount of logistical support because he'll generally have more forces at the breakthrough point, and second, as those assault forces break into the enemy rear, the attacker must then keep the supplies moving forward an ever increasing distance. Clausewitz argued that friction in war affects the attacker more than the relatively static defender, and this makes the role of the defender easier to conduct. If so, logistics contributes greatly towards the attacker's higher level of battlefield entropy.

Europa largely ignores the friction caused by logistics. The strategic attacker in Europa can apply his combat power closer to theoretical maximums than real life armies can. The sole limit most Europa games impose for supply is supply line length. So long as a player meets this restriction, he can do whatever he wants. He need never fear shortages of ammunition, POL, or motor transport; Europa presupposes an infinite quantity of these, given a short enough distance to a supply source. The infinitely numerous railcars and overland transport never break down, and carry infinite loads of these infinite supplies, delivered with infinite efficiency by the quartermasters, who never send cargoes to wrong destinations filled with the wrong kinds of supplies, and unload them in the shortest possible time. Thus, Europa makes it entirely possible for, say, a 200-division army to attack along a 2000 mile front every turn with every factor.

In reality, no army has ever approached this kind of logistical perfection. On the Eastern Front, many German and Soviet offensives halted due to logistical failures. FitE/SE feebly attempts to show this through the regauging rules. Once a player regauges his lines to the appropriate gauge, he's good to go. Never mind the limited carrying capacity of the rail lines, particularly in the case of a German player, or the shortage of trains. The Germans actually regauged the line to Smolensk by 16 August 1941; yet the lines rarely carried even 50% of AGC's supply needs. This, as much as anything else, mandated a pause in the Central sector.

Our Europa AGC commander can rely on that regauged line to Smolensk to a degree Guderian would envy. The winterization rules also reflect a casual approach towards logistics; the Wehrmacht's actual problem in the 1941-42 winter wasn't a lack of winterized equipment, or even lines regauged relatively close to the front. In truth, they possessed both the equipment and the standard gauge lines. The harsh winter, however, rendered the few German trains immobile, and temporarily dropped the already low efficiency of these lines to zero.

In other words, the entire Wehrmacht went out of supply for several weeks. Parkas, antifreeze, ammunition, all existed in adequate quantities... in Germany.

This problem recurs later with the Soviets. The Soviets needed to take long pauses between offensives to stockpile sufficient supplies further west. In FitE/SE the Soviet regauging ability can easily keep up with the advance, allowing them to relentlessly batter away at the hapless Wehrmacht, which they can do effectively thanks to the CRT. By mid-1944, the Germans melt away, regardless of any strategy chosen; they can neither run from nor fight a tremendously superior Red Army. To be sure, the German army was a shell of its former self by this time, historically, but never to the degree seen in the game. Oh, by the way, like the Germans in 1941, the Soviets don't lose anybody when they attack, either.

In this way, the lack of logistics and the CRT combine disastrously. The first largely negates the efficiency of withdrawals, since the attacker's advance never suffers from true supply limitations, and the latter prevents the defender from being able to stand and fight to inflict losses. 

Second Front, if anything, worsens this problem. An Allied landing in Normandy can count on the eventual capture of Rouen (17A:1205), a major port only six hexes from the historical Normandy beaches. Rouen serves as an unlimited supply base for the Allies; their supply lines during clear weather extend 17 hexes out including both road and overland elements. Seventeen hexes east from Rouen gets you past the Westwall, and nearly across the Rhine with the entire Allied army in supply.

Historically, the Allies did get this far, but only with certain portions of the Allied armies, and only by immobilizing other portions. They did not possess either sufficient overland transport or supplies to fuel a rapid advance for more than a small part of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This logistical constraint led to the famous broad front versus narrow thrust debate: had the Allies possessed the logistical ability to advance with all forces equally, no such debate would have occurred. As it was, the Allied commanders squabbled furiously amongst themselves for a piece of the small supply pie. The forward elements employed extraordinary means, such as the Red Ball Express, or Patton's notorious licensing of logistical larceny. In Second Front you need not limit your advance to the Westwall to those units under Patton and Montgomery. The Europa Allies can happily link arms and all march forward together, 60+ divisions strong, with salutary effects on cardboard interallied cooperation.

There is an exception to this otherwise lamentable tale: War in the Desert . WitD explicitly shows all the major elements of the historical supply situation: the supplies themselves, the ports, and the overland transport. WitD brilliantly models logistics. So why not use the WitD system throughout Europa?

Answer: Playability. The WitD system works with small numbers of units; in a larger theater, the system would be incredibly burdensome; imagine moving dozens of supply counters and counting hundreds of REs for attack supply. This is a general problem with modeling supply in a board wargame. Supply presents greater challenges to playability than most other areas. It seems that even marginal gains in realism for supply come at a high cost in playability. Supply is war by accountants, and nobody wants to deal with extravagant bookkeeping in a wargame. Let's face it; it's just not sexy.

Yet, supply represents such a fundamental part of modem warfare that it cannot be ignored altogether. The general Europa approach to logistics errs far too much on the side of playability, but many of the proposed alternatives I've seen go too far in the other direction. Supply spotlights the constraints of the board gaming medium; here's where a computer would be advantageous.

Of the three areas of the "Holy Trinity" that need fixing, I think logistics will be by far the most difficult. But we must firmly resolve to stand in the Europa cracker line. Otherwise, any changes in the other two areas will be hopelessly distorted by logistical perfection.

Conclusions

My purpose here isn't so much to propose specific rules changes. Too often, we submit rules changes taken out of context of the game system. These ideas, while well thought out individually, rarely consider the synergistic effects on the rest of the system. It isn't enough to focus singly on the problems of NODLs, attacker attrition, or logistics. Variable overruns or breakthrough attacks combined with the present CRT will destroy game balance, and remove any limits from the attacker, leaving the defender with no hope. Similarly, a changed CRT by itself will only serve to further stymie the Europa attacker, presenting him with an endless series of Verduns and Passchendaeles. Finally, neither changes in the CRT nor overruns mean much in the absence of a sound model of logistics. Therefore, the first step in improving the Europa ground system involves a broad, philosophical framework of what it should simulate.

History can serve as a guide to our model of ground combat. Any changes must be simple, yet realistic, to the extent such compromise is possible.

Once decided upon a common framework, we can then proceed from the general to the specific, without losing sight of our overall goals.

Some of you may disagree with my "Grand Unified Theory of Ground Combat." If so, I urge you to present your alternate vision of Europa. Consensus will eventually emerge. This debate will keep Europa growing and evolving as a game system, so that she will remain a lively, relevant game well into the next century.