Bolt out of the Blue 5.3

[Elxaime]

It might be a new years present, GF has gotten into legal trouble and i haven't been doin anything.

Aaron

Yes, RL comes first! Happy Holidays and best wishes for the New Year.

BTW - just curious how the playtest is going of 5.2? I really had only two issues with the proposed changes to 5.2 left and am wondering how they are playing out:

- the terrain values for built-up areas, with the lowered trench values, seem a touch low. Heavy urban areas should take a while to reduce, even for heavy modern artillery. The lower city values seem to make Berlin, in particular, more of a cakewalk than it should be for the Pact

- equalizing the Pact and Nato recovery rates seems to cut against the traditional approach taken by D85 scenario designers to their differing doctrines, namely that the Pact didn't reinforce the ranks of existing units as much as burn them out, then shuffle them out of the front. This may not have been the designers intent, but I also viewed lower Pact recovery rates as reflecting the likelihood, in 1989, that a surprise Pact offensive on Germany would be politically unpopular even in the Soviet Union and would be reflected by high draft dodging which would also affect maintenance and repair units as well as recruits. This political aspect is reflected in 5.2 by the Polish withdrawal system, so I see you are factoring such possibilities into the game. Second, as a game balance issue, I am also wondering if it makes a straight up attrition grind a win-win approach for the Pact. As a Pact player, I often found the best approach was simply to grind up NATO with artillery and WW1 style slow set piece advances - not flashy but there wasn't much of a NATO counter except time + their higher recovery rates. But with equal recovery rates, I see this as perhaps tilting the field too much towards the Pact....