Some questions about France '40

[Volcano Man]

Look at it this way, what do you think the answer would be if you were to ask a militairy historian to rate the chances of the germans decisivisely defeating the allies as they did under the following conditions:
a) french 7th army is kept as strategic reserve as originally planned instead of sending them north to link up with the dutch.
b) no strategic surprise; ie the allies either suspect/know of an attack through the ardennes or at the very least recognize the potential and deploy accordingly.

I agree with most of what you are saying, but it is the chicken and the egg argument. For allies do have the gift of hindsight so that has to be taken into account when determining much of these things. But for the most part, that hindsight can be negated with the "Allies cast the die" scenario, but not entirely.

Other than that, the official approach in the design process was (I believe) something similar to what I did in Compass '40 add-on, and probably what would have to be done if there were ever a Poland '39: basically time itself is the enemy; spectacular expectations are placed upon the Germans to achieve a victory in that they have to destroy lots of enemy units and capture nearly all the important high value objectives, and time is short. With that in mind, it is just as much a balance as going the other way: that is, making the French tough as nails and expecting the Germans to pull off some kind of miracle. I guess it all comes down to what people expect to experience. If it was too tough on the Germans in the sense that they have to have a miracle to gain substantial ground, then no doubt those on the other side of the coin will complain - and for a valid reason too. In the end however, it is all irrelevant if the VP levels are (or are not) balanced, the other stuff is just a means to how it plays out to the end conclusion. If the VP levels are balanced to where it is tough for the Germans to win, even if they are destroying the allies wholesale, then the campaign "works" well enough.

This is really a very difficult campaign to pull off in a wargame. We have to give the original designers the benefit of the doubt in that they did take a campaign that can/is considered by some as "unwargamable" and made it into a wargame. I am also not totally convinced that the current approach (where time is the enemy) is the wrong approach, BUT perhaps it should not be stressed so much so as to meet in the middle ground between both design philosophies. More about that later.

The current france '40 campaign games have had to incorporate a number of unrealistic elements just so to make the historical outcome a likely one:
- german morale ratings are too high for some units (IMO no german units except the three platoons at Eben Emael should be rated A)

Actually, no, the quality of the panzer battalions are NOT literal. Leaving out the apparently controversial GD, just about the only other units that have A ratings are the panzer battalions. The A rated panzer battalions represent intangible advantages that *cannot* be represented any other way. It is well known that the allied armor (most notably French armor) totally outclassed the German panzers, and they certainly do outclass them in F40 unit rating wise. However where the panzer excelled was in their tactical doctrine, radios (French were still using flags and hand signals), crew training, and so on. Where it any other way then the German panzer formations would have been totally useless, but these intangibles have to be represented, and the only way to do that within the scope of F40 was to give them A quality. If they were relegated to B quality, then the French armor would have to be rated even lower in quality to represent the gap here, which was no desirable. This is all covered in the notes AFAICR. However, I suppose it is all debatable whether a quality of B instead of A gets the intangible differences across sufficiently enough.

- allied morale too low for some units; the french should have a number of B morale formations, especially among some of the North African formations (these were essentially professionals with combat experience who did well in 1940)
- german artillery twice as effective as allied artillery
- french (and later belgian) units starting to disappear randomly from the 13th on

All of these are good/valid points. However, keep in mind that the randomly disappearing (surrendering) French/Belgian units relies on luck (a 1% to 2% chance per unit, per turn), which is something you say the Germans should need to rely on.

- and IMO german soft attack values are in many case too high compared to those of comparable allied units (or the other way around).

Well, the _Alt and stock ratings may be similar in this regard, but it is for a good reason: German infantry were simply better equipped than the French at the squad/platoon level. AFAICR, the French had nothing like the MG34 (the LMG employed at the squad level), one of these in every squad/platoon alone is worth 3 soft attack points, although that is not the only difference that this increase represents. ;)

Anyway, I think a good approach (if I were to make any future adjustments to the _Alt at least) would be to take something in the middle ground. IMO, you cannot make all of the above suggested changes and expect it to be a "fair" representation of the campaign (it would tilt it too far the other direction I think, especially with hindsight). Some of the changes could be made to make it a more of a tougher fight for the Germans, which sounds like would be the ideal approach: a tougher fight but not a miracle fight.

BTW, I started a discussion about this as vmods.com forum for F40_Alt feedback, since apparently no one else intends on doing so...