Chaning attachments

[JonS1]

Our feeling is the Corps Attachment Rules are complex enough as they are when you consider that things are all kept track of in lists. And there are some Huges OOBs like France 40 which would be quite unmanagle at this level of detail.

True, but that's only because the chosen UI for this is extraordinarily inelegant.

If units to be re-attached were selected on the main map, and the reattachment wiondoww bought up from there, and units could only re-attach horizontally within it's current chain of command, or attach 'up' or 'down' one level, and only valid 'target' attachment points were displayed, then the 'list' would be more than manageable.

For example, lets consider the classic threes.
* An army group has three armies
* each of those armies has three corps
* each of those corps has three divisions
* each of those divisions has three regiments
* Each regiment has has three bns.

Thats a total of
1 x Army Group
3 x Armies
9 x Corps
27 x Divisions
81 x Regts
243 x bns

A full list of divs regts and bns would be utterly unweildy. So don't do that, instread look at it the other way round.

Each bn can reattach to one of the three regts in it's division, or 'up' to division HQ. So its list is a total of four long. Each regt can reattach to one of the three divisions in its corps or up to the corps HQ, so its list has a total of four entries also. Each division can attach to any of the Corps in its army or up to its Army (four total) and each corps can switch between armies or shift up to Army Group. Armys ... well, they're stuck in the one army group. There is nothing unweildy or unmanageable about a list that has four entries.

Granted, over time the nice 'threes' organisation would break down as units are switched between HQs - and indeed it you kept bumping bns up to, say, Army level it could then attach 'up' to Army Group or 'down' to Corps ... the list is still only four entries long.

Concentrating multiple HQs at a given level would cause the lists to grow longer (eg, have five Corps in a single Army, or four Regts in a single Division), but not unmanageably so. And if you - as a player - do manage to cram all the regiments in the army group into a single division, well, the resulting confusion serves you right ;)

Semi-independant units at Division, Corps, and Army levels (usually things like engineers, A-Tk, artillery, recon, etc) fit in with schema quite elegantly as they could attach 'up' or 'down' just like any other unit.

An even simpler scehma is to only allow attaching up or down one level per day, with no horizontal attachments allowed. That would greatly limit the number of entries in the list, and also priovide a mild dis-incentive to moving units around willy nilly. For example, to move a bn from one regt to another in the same division would require going 'up' to division on the first day, then 'down' to the next regiment on the second day.

Various combinations of the above could be used to reflect more or less flexible command arrangements. For example, the Germans might be allowed one shift up, down or horizontally per unit/HQ per day. The Western Allies might be allowed two shifts up or down per day, but no horizontal movement. The Russians might be allowed just one shift up or down per day. Etc. Ideally, the degree of flexibility in reattaching would be settable in scenario parameters.