3 things I'm tired of

[Askari19]

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.

If you would not have used the word "silly" I might agree with you.
EA does not make "hash" of anything. It fundamentally changes the game.
I may think EA is "silly" but I never describe it that way because it does not define those that play with it on.
And, I do not find myself "silly" for wanting "disrupt-surround-destroy". I'm playing one now with EA off and the fight has been tough all the way.

HSL

No offense intended to any players or their choices. I've played a lot of "silly" rules and a lot of "silly" games, and play EA-off when it's necessary or my opponent insists, and I don't think it makes me "silly" either. :fireman3:

But this is a "silly" rule for a game that strives for realism, harking back to the old Zone of Control and retreat rules from 60s-era AH operational scale games, wildly inapplicable to a 250m-hex tactical game.

For that reason, I'll call it "lazy" as well as "silly", because it saved the designer the effort of crafting assault rules that fit the scale and period. The ZOC concept works on larger scales, where the unit counter is an abstraction of the unit (usually a battalion or larger), and its subunits, patrols, and fields of fire can reasonably be assumed to cover a wider area than the hex the counter occupies (usually mile a more in diameter).

In CS, we represent platoons and sections with ranged fire. I'll accept that a retreating enemy can't move through a hex that my unit occupies (although even that is an abstraction; 250 meters of urban or forest terrain can't be cordoned off by a step or two of anything), but CS tells me that my unit can lock down an area three times that size by fire? When it can't do that 100% in normal movement and combat?? Well, let's just let Opportunity Fire settle whether that's the case or not! We already have "extra" Opportunity Fire triggered randomly by units moving adjacent; the probability of that OF could be tweaked upward in the case of an enemy retreating from assault, or not... But that kind of work, as well as addressing the facing questions we're talking about here, and the level of detail that the EA argument addresses, is the level of effort we ought to see in a tactical game design.

In a quiet moment, I could crack a dozen very well-crafted and wildly dissimilar tactical boardgames with similar subjects and scales and compare their assault/retreat treatments to JTCS. JTCS (especially JTCS pre-EA) would not compare favorably. So I stick to my choice of adjectives.

Despite which, I respect and enjoy the game and it's aficionados immensely.