Stepping in once again for Bill Stone (whose duties as GDW's business manager keeps him rather busy during the Christmas season), I was at first at a loss on what to write for the column. As I assembled the material for this issue's "Rumors", it occurred to me that I had enough material to do a status report on The Fall of France, a subject which I hope is of interest to Europa fans.

The Fall of France (FoF) has been proceeding intermittently for most of 1980. The maps have been finished since May (although I have not been able to resist altering a woods hex here and there as I rechecked my sources). Several new features make their Europa appearances on these maps, such as bocage, the Maginot Line, and the Westwall, while canal-intensive hexes (which made a mysterious cameo appearance in Case White) are finally used. Bocage has little effect on the game (it's fairly clear who has won the game if the fighting reaches the bocage country), but the Maginot Line and the Westwall are quite important. Incidentally, I use the term Maginot Line only in a restricted game sense, as only the major ouvrages are depicted on the map with the rest of the actual Maginot Line being fortified hexside counters. Of course, other French fortifications such as the Belfort region, the Rhine defenses, and the little Maginot Line (the wartime fortifications north of Longuyon along the Meuse) are also represented in the game by a variety of means.

I had felt that the biggest obstacle to the design would be the two-week Europa turn structure, for two reasons:

1) it would make a rather short game (the historical campaign lasts only four turns - May I, May II, June I, and June II - in game terms), and

2) it would be difficult to recreate the events of the actual breakout at Sedan and drive to the sea in a two week turn.

I went into the project more than half convinced that a Case White style threeday turn would be necessary. Surprisingly, neither objection turned out to be much of a problem. While the game is brief when counting the number of game turns, each game turn resembles almost a game in itself. Nearly the entire German Army is present in the campaign (a few units are garrisoning Poland and Czechoslovakia or operating in Norway), and it is opposed by the large French Army, most of which is concentrated, of course, in France. While the other contingents such as the BEF, Belgians, or Italians are not nearly as large as the French or Germans, neither are they inconsequential.

All this adds up to a large number of units controlled by each player and results in a game turn with quite a bit of activity packed into it. As to the other objection, a simple development of the invasion turn from Marita-Merkur was sufficient to handle the events of May 1940. In Marita-Merkur, (and as noted for Europa level Case White), the invasion turn consists of a regular German player turn minus the exploitation phase immediately prior to the standard German first player turn. This invasion turn represents, among other things, the precampaign operational planning.

Unlike the Poles or Yugoslavs, the Allies had a definite plan of campaign as well as the Germans. Approached from this angle, it was entirely logical to add an Allied reaction phase in between the German invasion turn and the German first player turn. A later refinement was to allow the Dutch and Belgians to move (if invaded) during the reaction phase, in line with their own plans (which were mostly to pull back outlying units and wait for French and British aid to arrive). From the first playing, it was clear that the system worked well for FoF in specific and as an Europa rule in general. Thus, the first game turn assumed a layered structure of German invasion, Allied reaction, German first player turn, and Allied first player turn.

With that out of the way, major rules work was done in the air combat and antiaircraft systems. I had long felt that the Europa air combat results table had certain practical and conceptual problems. First of all, it seemed that aircraft types and ratings mattered little despite their detailed ratings, as long as the air units were organized into three-unit waves.

As such, the natural tendency of air combat was that most combats were resolved on the 1 :2, 1: 1, and 1.5: 1 odds columns. This seemed to take away the unique character the ratings provided, and most air combat was inconsequential in result (2/3 chance of no effect at these odds). Also, this required a player to have massive air superiority at a point to have even a fair chance of turning back most of a single enemy wave.

Secondly, the higher odds had a logical inconsistency. For example, a roll of 1 at 5:1 resulted in KKA, eliminating two air units and aborting a third. However, except under extremely rare circumstances, the only way for an attacker to achieve 5:1 odds was to have a wave of three air units attack a single enemy air unit. This makes the KKA result no different from the K result - a peculiar state of affairs. The solution to these problems seemed to lie in a differential air combat results table, where the difference in the ratings between opposing individual air units is used. I came up with an acceptable table after only much work and many trials. The new table works better than the old table for FoF; however, I am as yet uncertain if the table is applicable to Europa as a whole. More testing outside the confines of FoF is needed to determine this.

The antiaircraft (called AA for brevity) system was also in need of an overhaul. From the start, it seemed to me that basing the AA system around the air defense factor of an air unit was convenient but inaccurate: the factors involved for a good defense rating in air combat were not necesarily the same in insuring the aircraft was resistant to AA fire.

Furthermore the old table made AA fire mostly a meaningless gesture no matter how much AA ability was concentrated at one point. A new table was drawn up, based upon the concentration of AA fire and modified by air unit type. Two new types of air units were added, types A and HB. Type A air units are assault bombers, ground attack aircraft, and the like; they are more vulnerable to AA fire than the higher-flying level bombers are.

Type HB air units are heavy bombers capable of flying at high altitudes; they are less vulnerable to AA at high altitudes than at lower ones (the HB type is an Europa consideration not appearing in the play of FoF).

AA units have a two-fold categorization, as follows.

1) AA units are divided into combat, position, and airfield types. Combat AA are the AA units operating with the field forces; they are the familiar AA units already in Europa. Position and airfield AA are new additions. Basically, these are not really units but simply factors that a player can shuffle around like small change. Airfield AA protects airfields while position AA protects everything else in a hex. This allows AA to be represented in Europa better than it has in the past. For example, the old question "if a side captures a city, can it use the city's intrinsic AA factor?" is answered (cities no longer have intrinsic AA factors).

2) Within a type, AA may be either light or heavy. Without the type HB air units, this distinction matters little for the AA system. However, heavy AA combat units have an ATEC (antitank effects capability) rating, which is fine for FoF and necessary for the DNO revision.

The remaining Europa-structure rules plugged into the game with little difficulty. As with all Europa games, the rules reflect both the evolution of the Europa system and the needs of the particular campaign being studied. The stacking system of Case White and Marita-Marita (which went beyond the old "shovel them into the hex" method of DNO by considering command and control factors in the stacking limits) has evolved slightly.

Stated in context to the Marita-Merkur rule, a player may now count a non-divisional unit as a divisional unit for stacking purposes. The artillery rule (making artillery somewhat ineffective when defending alone) from DNO appears in its modern version in FoF because of the number of artillery units present in the game (the French in particular are well endowed with artillery). This rule did not appear in Case White and MaritaMerkur for reasons of simplicity - the amount of independent artillery in those games was not sufficient to warrant the extra complexity the rule would have added to the game. This is not to say that the rule is inappropriate, and I expect that the die-hard Europa grognards will retrofit the rule to those games.

While the structural rules provide the core of the game, the rules illuminating the campaign display the game's character. As with the other games in the series, FoF is an operational game, which means that certain strategical decisions are predetermined. The Allied player, for example, can not invade a neutral Italy, thus pre-empting any Italian intervention. In particular, the Allied player is cast into the viewpoint of the French command. Thus, the decision of having limited or unlimited support from the RAF for the defense of France has already been made. Players wishing to explore these decisions of strategy must wait for Europa to come together on a larger scale so that such decisions can be made in context.

An early decision in the design process was to provide two versions of the spring campaign - the historical campaign and a free deployment option. The historical campaign uses precise historic deployments and a set of rules that removes some operational control from the Allied player. In particular, a (German) invasion of Belgium provokes an Allied advance into northern Belgium (though which "plan" - Escaut, Dyle, Albert Canal, or something else - is up to the Allied player), and the French sluggishness to shift forces is specified.

These two rules are necessary to recreate the historical campaign, as the effects of hindsight coupled with the display on the map of where the enemy main effort is located (historically, even after German Army Groups B and A had invaded the Low Countries and as the panzer divisions were crossing the Meuse around Sedan, the French high command was wondering if the German main effort was going to be an invasion of France through Switzerland) preclude any sensible Allied player from following the course of the actual commanders.

These rules produce a lively game, but a German victory - often a dramatic one - is almost a foregone conclusion. Thus, rules are included which allow players free deployment of armies and remove the above operational restrictions from the Allies. However, the Allied player also gains a few new problems, as a German incursion via Switzerland is now a viable option. In either version, the French suffer both from the effects of planning to fight another World War I and from their inexperience in battle - in the game, the French are well prepared to fight a setpiece battle but are much less effective in a battle of encounter and maneuver.

The major delay in finishing the game has been the research. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why Europa as a whole progresses so slowly. The research that is required for these games is very time consuming, as the detail and accuracy of the orders of battle have become two of the cornerstones of Europa. Even so, mistakes happen. For example, it appears that the infantry divisions of the LI and LII Corps of the German Second Army in MaritaMerkur have been swapped.

The game has the divisions of LII Corps, which arrived too late to participate in operations, and does not have the infantry divisions of LI Corps, which did participate. Players wishing to correct this may simply take the 8-6 79th and 7-6 125th Infantry Divisions (both of LII Corps) from the reinforcements and add them to the Second Army deployment or alternately make two 7-6 infantry division counters (the LI Corps' 132nd and 183rd) and add them to the Second Army deployment while keeping everything else the same.

The FoF research is a monumental task, as it requires research on the entire armed forces of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland and the sizeable British and Italian contingents. I have intentionally used the word "is" - the research, at the time of this writing, is still ongoing (various details on the Italians are particularly difficult to discover) but is nearing completion. I intend to save the story of the research for my designer's notes to the game, but I would like to thank two volunteers for their help: David Hughes for his work with the Allied orders of battle (particularly the French and Belgian Armies) and Frank Prieskop for his help on the Dutch and Axis forces.

As matters now stand, The Fall of France is in its final stages. Work remaining on the game is as follows:

1) rounding off the Axis and Swiss orders of battles;

2) writing a final rules draft (it seems desireable to change the order of presentation for a couple rules, and certain special rules, such as Italian intervention, are a bit too complicated for the effects they produce); and

3) doing some final playtesting to check on the effects of 1) and 2).

None of the above is an insurmountable barrier to the completion of the game in the near future, so I am hopeful that it will be released (at last!) some fine day in February.