Improving Night Move Disruption

[Dog Soldier]

The primary purpose of the night disruption rule was to prevent the 24/7 operations at full scale. Some night movement is still possible. Full scale movement as during the day no longer is practical. The addition of a night disruption percentage addressed a problem that had existed in the series for a long time.

Night turns are four to six hours long depending on the title. While movement costs and movement allowance (including the movement cost to assault) are unchanged, the longer time period represented in night turns models the planned, short-distance, moves in friendly territory. It essentially requires 2x or 3x the time at night to cover one hex in deployed mode at night than during the day.

Units are not blundering around. A sentry could accidentally shoot an officer rendering the moving unit 'less effective' when dawn comes. An enemy sniper might accomplish the same. Also enemy firing a machine gun burst at 'noise' or dropping a few small mortar rounds in the direction of noise or light sources could cause a unit to go to ground for a time, maybe even be pinned until daylight. There are many reasons. At the scale of the game, there is no need to have a direct fire attack resolved to simulate this. The disruption at night from the rule simulates these and many other events that caused units to be unable to fully function at dawn after a night maneuver. The disruption of the unit is temporary again achieving the feel we were looking for without a complex set of variables to program to simulate a variable time frame for a unit to reorganize after a night move. I think the rule elegantly achieves the uncertainty for the player that a night moving unit will be ready to go at dawn every time.

I had originally proposed that all movement at night had to be in travel mode, not just that confined to roads to avoid night disruption. The idea was that units could make limited moves at night. They would be vulnerable to night disruption or enemy fire in travel mode if the rotation of the units was discovered by the enemy. Such discovery in game turns could be disastrous if a unit disrupted in travel mode and had to endure the other player's turn in such a state. My thought was this risk would make players more cautious as they should be about night movement. Inexperienced players would learn fast.

Not all rotation of units at night was successful. I would disagree with your proposal to have a 'free move' of one hex at night. Perhaps on a static quiet front the maneuver has a high probability of success. During a break through by the attacking side or after extensive fighting perhaps the chances of success are less.

Terrain and which game title was being simulated would make a big difference. The steppes around Stalingrad in winter would be vastly different than in the city. Making a rotation in the desert would be different in Crusader (where there are several accounts of units becoming lost or simply passing the enemy at close range, neither side realizing who the other was) than in Alamein which was a more set piece battle. Tunisia was another case altogether with an excellent road network.

How would you compare night movement in France 1940 with movement in Moscow 1942? Summer versus winter, variances in the light provided by the moon or lack of such due to clouds. All fairly complex modeling which JT did not want to get into.

The night disruption percentage as it is now a broad brush stroke to simulate the 'feel' of night movement at the operational level of the game system rather than to capture an exact situation. One can and does make night movements with high quality units (read better leaders not represented at the unit level) even in M42 with 60% chance of disruption. If the unit disrupts, how quickly can it rally? In game terms those attacking units can move up at night , then rally (read reorganize) to be ready for a dawn assault. The game mechanism works quite well in this case. Poor leadership units (average and lower quality) do not work so well at night and are better left to rest.

As to your second point about night assaults, they may work well against disrupted enemy units that have already yellow or red fatigue from the day's fighting. They may fail more often against units with low fatigue (less than 50 fatigue points). Against the AI things work much better than against a human opponent in PzC. Most all play testing of new concepts like the night disruption rule was geared toward PBEM play by very experienced PBEM players.

Your chance of severe fatigue from a failed assault may render the attacking unit from green to red fatigue requiring the better part of a day or more to recover in most titles. Once you get burned with a night attack, you will reconsider the value of assaulting at night.

Dog Soldier