Kill Points or VP Points

[Strela]

It's always good to be devil's advocate, Ed! :)

I think Jon has got the intent - throwing your units away in Kharkov '43 to try and win a stage will severely impact you for any later stages. Even if you waited till the last stage to do that you hopefully would have seen sensible play in the first two scoring rounds. It is interesting that the team playing it are seeing a different style and that was what was hoped for. What helps in the Kharkov operation is that there is more than one scoring round which keeps some shackles on. In the third one the Germans have a lot of ground to cover and mud etc to contend with, so even if they throw everything in it will still be a struggle AND close to what happened historically...

What this conversation has done is draw out some of issues that John Tiller has put up around changing the victory points - it can change the whole nature of the game and spawn unexpected consequences.

I can't reiterate enough how hard it is to balance these scenarios, particularly when we take into account how experienced some of the players here at the Blitz are. While play testing Kharkov we tried to get players of various skill levels to try and see what the spread of results were and then set the target victory points. Trust me it is not easy and having points that challange the elite player maybe enough to put off the novices we need to attract to our hobby. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes and I am certain Ed saw the same thing in preparing France '14.

Anyway a great topic and interesting for us who are lucky enough to do some development and design work to hear what people think.

David