Another Dodgy Optional Rule?

[Eckerslyke]

(Prompted by witnessing an unlikely, unrealistic outcome of a melee caused by possible misuse of one (or a combination) of optional rules.)

I sometimes wonder how well I would fare in these battles if my opponent were Bonaparte himself.

My vocabulary of French expletives would be greatly enriched by hearing his reaction if I tried that trick of stacking so many troops or counters in hexes just behind the front line so that retreat by my defeated troops in the face of his brilliantly-conceived and overwhelming advance was not possible. He would be surprised and dismayed to find his advance thwarted in this manner.

(I might even pick up some Corsican insults too for use on holiday later this year.)

If I defeated him by resorting to a feature of our software of which he would not be aware in spite of his extensive battlefield experience, then I would have to conclude that the particular feature of the software which permitted this was not realistic. The deliberate use of such an unrealistic tactic would have no place in the repertoire of any self-respecting virtual battler.

In my own case, my advance northward into and through a vacant hex was prevented by the presence of two small infantry columns, one either side of the vacant hex, pointing SE and SW respectively and threatening to cause any unit entering the vacant hex to have to stop there until next turn. Fair enough, that seemed to be legitimate use of ZOC rules.

So I attacked the unit on the left, with an overwhelming superiority of force, and defeated it. But it could not retreat, due to the surrounding hexes already being full. Crucially, the defeated unit did not even change facing, so the ZOC covering the vacant hex remained in force.

'Sacre Bleu' doesn't even begin to express my frustration.

I'm not sure which optional rule (or combination of rules) opens up that particular avenue of unrealistic, gamey play. Something about no partial retreats, and no melee eliminations, I suspect. I would welcome clarification of precisely how it is achieved so that I can avoid that rule (or combination of rules) in future.

However, there is probably a good reason for having these rules, individually. It's just that, in the heat of battle, if a rule (or combination of rules) is amenable to abuse, it is hard to resist the temptation to do so. And sometimes the apparent abuse of a rule can be unintentional.

If I could identify, with the assistance of other members, which rule or combination of rules is being abused here, I might be able to figure out the original, separate reasons why those rules were included. Then perhaps I could work out some way to address the original problems they were intended to address, without resorting to use of those optional rules.

Any thoughts?

[agmoss99]

Actually you don't need a huge stack of counters, a single skirmisher of a different nationality will do the trick......

For NME to work properly, Partial Retreats has to be off. Something to do with the coding. I think if you check Partial Retreats then in theory a beaten unit can fall back onto the adjacent stack unless the stack is at maximum limit already. I'm unsure what effect though checking it has on NME.

[Eckerslyke]

Actually you don't need a huge stack of counters, a single skirmisher of a different nationality will do the trick......

Good point . You put me in mind of one of the optional rules I am more comfortable with, the one which prevents an overrun by a defeated unit into a hex occupied by skirmishers. It makes sense to have that OFF, as BigDuke66 suggests.

OT, but as an interesting aside, when one side in a battle is an alliance of more than one nationality, could an overrun by a defeated unit take place into a hex occupied by allied skirmishers, rather than just those of the attacker's nationality? I'm not sure. I see no reason why it should not. Worth experimenting with, perhaps.

For NME to work properly, Partial Retreats has to be off. Something to do with the coding. I think if you check Partial Retreats then in theory a beaten unit can fall back onto the adjacent stack unless the stack is at maximum limit already. I'm unsure what effect though checking it has on NME.

Am I right in thinking, then, that the phenomenon I described earlier, of a small defeated force not vacating a hex simply because all the retreat hexes were 'full', is solely due to these two rules, i.e. partial retreats off and NME on? If that is the case, then I certainly think they cannot be used together without some safeguard against their misuse by a 'gamey' battler simply to prevent movement by victorious units into territory which is theirs by right, having won it fair and square.

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You correctly identify a big part of the problem here, which is that the optional rules are not well documented or understood, particularly in the effect they have when used together. I certainly don't understand them fully, and I can understand SnakeEyes' comment (in another thread about optional rules) that the topic tended to make his head hurt. I know the feeling! The problem for me is particularly acute because I enjoy big battles, long scenarios, and if the optional rules are not selected carefully, I suffer from any mistake I may have made for a long, long time. If my scenarios were smaller or shorter, at least the suffering of having to put up with the consequences of choosing the wrong set of optional rules would not be as prolonged!