3 things I'm tired of

[Askari19]

One final point - Allied tactics do have to come into play when playing against Panthers and Tigers - shooting them not at ideal ranges or front on will not cut it in this game.

I'm with Earl on EA - prefer it over the silly "disrupt-surround-destroy" business, although it does make a hash of the some of the earlier scenarios.

However, I think AF is quite appropriate at this scale, and I enjoy the challenge of fighting the big cats, and remembering "front toward enemy" with everyone else as well. The problems aren't with the AF rule, they are in its interaction with the retreat rule (I've always wanted an AFV retreat rule that allow a unit to maintain its facing - or face toward the incoming fire - and back out of a hex); and with the juvenile "Axis bias" that loads up scenarios with unrealistic numbers of Pz V's and VI's.

That "Axis superman" or "German bias" thing has been a plague on the wargaming hobby, and an embarassment, since the 1960s. (Warning, another old curmudgeon mounting soapbox...) :stir:

It's everywhere - on box cover art, in the ubiquity of Nazi & SS subjects in the military history section of the bookstore, in our usernames here, and in too many scenario designs. It's one thing to recognize the strengths (such as they were, and no, they weren't ten feet tall) of the WW2 German military; but something else entirely to identify with them, or glorify them. Professionalism and proficiency in an evil cause is still essentially evil.

Anybody remember Jack Radey, the founder of People's Wargames? His doctrinaire Marxism was repellant, but at least his research and game designs were brilliant and unbiased, and were a refreshing change to the pro-German bias in the hobby.

Bill