JTS East Prussia '14 Released

[ComradeP]

I'm really curious what penalties are imposed on the Russians, I guess I'll find that in the designer notes.

My biggest fear with campaign-sized scenarios is that as you are the commander and HQ's don't directly influence non-quality values for units, historically poor commanders won't have as much of an impact on the battle as they did historically. Likewise, poor initial deployments are compensated by having plenty of turns to move units around in. 206 turns is fairly tight, however.

In theory, it seems unlikely that a player will fight as poorly as the historical Russian forces during their initial invasion of East Prussia, as he knows where all of his units are and he can make everyone cooperate.

The simplified logistics and command system, which imposes no limits on how many units can be concentrated in a single area or units under a certain HQ also favours very efficient unit control. In a long scenario, the penalty of units being placed far away from eachother can be nullified over time if you have the time to move them. Of all the Panzer/First World War Campaigns battles titles thus far, this is probably the title where poor C&C from one side dictated the outcome to a significant extent.

I'll probably buy it after the summer.

Edit: As usual, the designer notes are well written. The way the game forces penalties on the Russians also sounds good. I'm looking forward to testing the Fragile Morale rule, as players tend to direct (for the period) serious amounts of violence at single units during a breakthrough, which could cause units to break (and thus often shatter if you can cut off retreat routes) more easily than might be intended. Still, the OOB isn't huge and you don't have numerous units to spare, so this might be more of a problem for Galicia or the 1915 and 1916 campaigns on the Eastern Front than East Prussia.