What's a Greenhorn General to do?

[Dog Soldier]

I can not think of a single scenario, except the beach or air invasion ones like N44, Sicily43, Salerno, Anzio, Crete where on the first turn you can not see at least most of the front lines and guess where the rest of the front is that can not be seen. The enemy does not appear "from the mist". Add that you have an excellent map of the terrain (Germans invading and British defending in France 1940 used Michelin tourist maps and outdated WW1 maps where roads, villages etc were not entirely accurate) where your units never get lost and I just do not understand why this thread's topic is considered a problem? You also have a perfect sense of how far your units can travel. They always go where you point them. Unless your crafty adversary has something just over that ridge to mess up your day...)

I can not stress enough (from my humble experience) how much the map will shape the way the game goes. Too many players actually ignore the terrain and focus only on the hex grid. Big mistake, huge!

I think it is the beauty and strength of the PzC series that even if you have played the scenario before, there are many different ways to approach these scenarios and still win. Thus, no two games of the same scenario are the same. The designers take great pains to make sure no scenario has a "perfect solution" on turn one. Of the hundreds of scenarios in the game titles, I can count on one hand the few scenarios that do seem to have such a flaw that is fatal to the defender.

Small scenarios of 10 turns or a single day are for refining your tactics. Strategy is pretty straight forward in those scenarios. Getting to know the capabilities of your forces (and those of the enemy) is another use of the small scenarios.

The medium scenarios, 15 - 30 turns (up to three or four days) are the meat of the series to me. These never play out the same way against different opponents or even the same opponent with different sides than our first game in my experience. These scenarios are large enough to discount what anyone will know by examining the initial set ups. After the first day, both sides will have their plans in full motion. Nothing will be the same as when at start, that is for sure by the end of the first day.

The CG scenarios are what they are in that there may be some obvious things to do on the first day, all bets are off after that. And if you do the obvious, there are members here like RickyB, VM, Indragnir, LBouton, TET2, Heinz, sja_ski, Foul, Beerweasel, Steel God (some call him Templar now) and others that will make you wish you had not.

The best scenarios in the system, IMHO, are the many ones where the map is too big for the forces to simply line up from map edge to map edge and march their way across the screen. With open flanks, lots of ground on the map, you have to face the real decisions and anxieties of the historical commanders. You have to take risks based on incomplete information which sometimes pay off (then you think you are a genius!) or fail miserably as your opponent was looking for just such an opening. In the latter case you were playing RickyB, Foul, etc. named above.

Now where is my head? RickyB took it off in our last tournament game in the AAR section.....could he please return it? The trophy is probably in a box in his garage now as he has many others to display on the shelf.

Dog Soldier