I just recently read your little piece on TMAG in PA. I do not know if you are aware of it, but most of the complaints I have heard about "killer stacks" has been from the defender's perspective-- that is, that the attacker can form killer stacks that roll over everything in their path. Yours is the first comment on the opposite problem. I must admit that I had never considered this as a problem, but I may have to reconsider. My thinking had been roughly as follows. For normal, tactical flanking moves (within the areas as assaults take place), the dice roll differential (that is, the actual roll of the dice) captures the vagaries of success and failure by both sides. If I have what amounts to an entire corps in position (one of your defensive monsters), then I am crediting it with careful deployment, screening and refusing of flanks, well-placed and alert reserves, and all such things that make an attack upon it a chancy affair, and effective flanking less likely. I think this is entirely consistent with the overall approach. But, it does appear to create problems of the sort you describe. As I see it, however, the problem is not the possible existence of such hedgehogs, but the lack of a means of making the user pay more of a price for them. In other words, if I work a grand tactical flanking movement such as Lee intended Longstreet's on 2 July to be, how do I reap the benefits if the flank of the opposing army is a corps stack? That, I believe, is the essence of your concerns. The answer should be to make such a large-scale move more threatening to the army as a whole, requiring the well-positioned corps to react by moving and so breaking up its position. (If I have enough troops and a strong enough position, why should not I be able to hold off repeated assaults? Indeed, with all the whining people have been doing about how the attacker is too strong in this system, this new concern is a refreshing breath of fresh air.) One way of doing this might be to introduce lines of communication, or Army supply trains, or some such mechanism that would punish a player for maintaining a strong and invulnerable tactical position while watching the army's operational/strategic position go down the tubes. I have not had much time to think about this myself, so I have no strong opinions. Any comments and suggestions you and yours might make would be most welcome. CHV: There is some relationship between (1) maximum stack size, (2) the capacity to inflict and absorb losses, and (3) the stacking as to whether more than one attack can be delivered that needs to be explored here. The killer attack stacks are simply those encountering opponents at the lower end of the range where the defence has weak gravity, at the top of the range it has "strong" gravity - giving us the Hedgehog ("See the shells bounce off them"). Of course one way around is my one - units do not automatically unSpend at the end of each Turn this makes Spending a more dangerous result than in TMAG. Back to Perfidious Albion #95 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com