Revising a game as popular as Bar-Lev is a risky business at best, and a lot of people have wondered why we did it. Actually, there were two reasons.

First off, the components of the old Bar-Lev wouldn't fit into the physical requirements of the new Conflict format, so to reprint it in its old form wasn't possible.

Second, a lot of new information had come to light since the publication of the original game which wasn't available when John Hill did the original research work, and we were getting an increasing amount of criticism of some of the game aspects.

(As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how some people assume that a game was published the day before they bought it. In doing the revision work for Bar- Lev I accumulated a large bulging pile of correspondence of which a rather large proportion was letters from people quoting, for example, a 1976 edition of Aviation Week and Space Technology which listed newly released information on the Arab air forces and then asking why Bar-Lev didn't agree with the information in the article. Don't we read Aviation Week and Space Technology? Not two years before it's published, we don't.)

So, we decided to go ahead and do the revision. While I wanted to remain as faithful to John's original design as possible, it's really not possible to just plug in a new order of battle into an old game system and expect things to come out the same. John's system was designed to work with the force level he included. Consider taking the old Bar-Lev and about doubling the amount of Israeli mechanized infantry (tripling would be closer), changing most of the Israeli tanks to Centurions, changing most of the Egyptian tanks to T-55's, and cutting out a lot of Egyptian reserve infantry. You wind up with an Israeli romp. So I ended up doing a lot of incidental tinkering with the system and redesigned the maps based on the more detailed maps that had appeared by then.

In sorting through my memory of comments I've received on the new edition, four main criticisms stand out in my mind, two of which I consider to be actual problems with the game. First, some are unhappy with the very high tank casualties in the game. Tanks being battalions (with infantry in brigades) makes them more "conspicuous" targets in game terms. Their defense factors are lower and thus it's easier to get good odds on them.

They are also more lucrative targets as their defense factors are lower than their attack factors, and thus the same amount of firepower applied to a tank unit is more likely to take out more enemy offensive capability than if it were applied to an infantry unit (which tends to have an attack factor about the same or lower than its defense factor). As a result, tanks tend to get shot at a lot and go away fast. This is offered as a criticism, but it's just fine with me, since that's exactly what I intended. Tanks are both more conspicuous and more lucrative targets than infantry. Tanks do get shot at more. Tank losses were astronomical in the '73 war. All of that is as it should be. The big advantage of the Israelis (one of them, anyway) was their ability to get tanks back into action quicker than the Arabs (one source puts the number returned to action in the first week of the war by the Israelis at over 1,000).

In the game this means that the Arabs have to save their armor for big operations, because once it's committed, it isn't going to be around for long. The Israelis, on the other hand, can keep a fairly high proportion of tanks running all the time. As I read it, that's pretty close to what happened.

Second criticism: the Syrian Front doesn't play right. The Syrians blow away the Israelis on the first turn and overrun nearly everything (except for the odd bunker that holds out here and there) and the Israeli first turn reserves end up fighting like hell right away to hold onto anything east of the Jordan River.

Actually (this line of arguments goes) the Israelis conducted a series of staged withdrawals from one prepared position to another. The Israelis may indeed have done that, but it was all over in about one day, and that's how long a turn is in Bar-Uv. By the end of the first day, Syrian armor was on top of the escarpment overlooking the Jordan River and all there was left of the two Israeli brigades on the Golan were isolated detachments holding out in a few positions along the anti-tank ditch and further back. Of course, to do that a lot of Syrian units outran their administrative support and got clobbered the next day by the Israeli incoming reserve units, which in the game is covered by the inability of headquarters units to move during exploitation. Syrian units end up out of command control if they go too far, and generally end up fragmented anyway. All in all, I'm much happier with the way the Syrian front plays in the new game than I am with the Egyptian front.

Now we get to the first criticism which I tend to agree with: Air Power has been screwed. I admit it, I messed that one up. Here I made my mistake by violating an earlier rule I made for myself: don't just plug in a new OB into an old system. Admittedly there are a lot of changes in the old system. The Arabs can't do much of anything as far as air superiority goes now. Israelis can bounce Arabs under the SAM umbrella. But when you come right down to it, the mechanics of the system remain the same. After all, the mechanics are a lot of fun; why mess around with them?

Unfortunately, with the new Air OB, the Israelis can't do a whole lot. An important part of the old system which I missed was not only the number of aircraft and their CRT values, but also the mix of aircraft available to the Israelis. By changing their mix, and in effect eliminating the large number of Mirage III's, they end up weaker with the same number of aircraft. What I should have done was alter the number of aircraft per counter so that both sides had more planes in the game.

(For those of you hot to put a little zing back into the air system, add the following: Israel - 3x F4, 4x A4, 1x Mirage III; Egypt - 6x Mig2l, 3x Mig17, 2x Su7; Syria - 4x Mig 21, 2x Mig 17, 1x Su7; Iraq - 1x Mig2l.)

Another good optional rule was proposed by John Hill in another article not long ago: triple the Israelis when bouncing, and double the Arabs.

A fourth criticism was touched upon by Phil Kosnett in his review: the vulnerablility of armor to indirect fire. I have to say that I don't completely agree with Phil on this, at least to the extent that he carries it. Bar-Lev is an operational game, not tactical, and on an operational level armored units do not live by tanks alone.

Given a couple battalions of good field artillery and one day turns, any artilleryman worth his salt can scramble up a battalion or brigade sized armored unit pretty badly. Even on a tactical level Phil's feeling that artillery can only make tanks button up, especially when dealing with tanks of Soviet manufacture, is a gross exaggeration. External fuel cells make any large tank concentration awfully vulnerable to a battery salvo of HE (to rupture the cells) followed by a battery salvo of white phosphorus (to ignite the fumes). This is standard operating procedure in a lot of places, and although I don't know for sure that the Israelis used this method, I'd be very surprised to find that they didn't.

All of this notwithstanding, the question remains: are tanks that vulnerable to artillery fire? Probably not. I added the die roll modification for armor for that specific reason, but in retrospect I think I didn't go quite far enough. If you feel like tinkering here, add two to the die roll when using indirect fire at armored units (instead of one). This cuts down the chances of a kill considerably, but doesn't eliminate it completely. Phil's suggestion that all kills be replaced by neutralization strikes me as ignoring the difference between destroying one tank and putting an armored battalion out of action.

More Bar Lev

Introduction
Bar Lev 1
Bar Lev 2
Bar Lev 3
Second Thoughts: Looking Back on Bar-Lev