The Battle for the Dak To Hills

[TheBigRedOne]

This illustrates the range effect in SB, as well as the effect of the firing unit's effectiveness. These are huge factors in overall impact of the damage you'll inflict on your enemy. Hold Fire is your friend!


Range Effect

Range Effect applies to any non-Guided Missile weapon not capable of Indirect Fire. If the effective range of the weapon is R and the distance from the firing hex to the target hex is D, then the fire value is modified as follows:

• If D = 1, then the fire value is multiplied by 2.
• If D is greater than 1 but less than or equal to R / 2, then the fire value is unchanged.
• If D is greater than R / 2, then the fire value is halved.
However, for a weapon firing using Indirect Fire with no Line-of-Sight to the target hex, the fire value is halved.

Firing Unit Effect

The fire value of the weapon is affected by the condition of the unit doing the firing in the following ways:

• The fire value of the weapon is multiplied by the Effectiveness of the firing unit. For weapons on Vehicles, the Effectiveness of the Vehicle is used in this calculation.
• If the firing unit is Disrupted or Pinned, the fire value is halved.
• If the firing unit is Demoralized, the fire value is quartered (divided by 4).
• If the Weapon unit requires a crew of strength S and the firing unit only has a strength of C, then the fire value is multiplied by C / S.

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As usual the point I am making is that one thing is to beat the AI, but the proof can only be in defeating a human opponent. I have been studying the Vietnam War in great detail since 2004, made it a part of a master thesis of mine and have also been playing both Vietnam and ToD ( along with other wargames and simulation covering the conflict )since 2012 regularly in the PBEM mode; one of the lessons learnt that way is that a lot of fellow grognards seemed to avoid playing either of the games as being very unbalanced and objectives often unattainable. At some point, yet before 2012 when I got back to it, I also deemed the level of losses taken by MACV forces in most of the scenarios and a couple of other factors present in the game - ahistoric OrBat and leaders preventing from enhancing the gaming experience with learning some history behind and all for a false assumption of violating "political correctness" otherwise- as unacceptably unrealistic according to what I had learnt about the war from lots of sources available.

The reason that VN and TOD don't play as well as most of the recent games is fairly simple. They were the first games created and Tiller wasn't that accomplished of a scenario designer compared to guys like Ozgur, Mike Cox, Joao and Jeff Connor (my opinion, of course). The last 5 games or so had the advantage of years of playing experience and many enhancements to the engine as the backbone along with several outstanding scenario designers coming to the forefront. Dien Bien Phu illustrates this by really re-creating the feel and play of that conflict. If Vietnam/TOD were to be designed today, I think the games would be very, very different and probably play really well. I've always said that it is unfortunate these games weren't created later. The TOD battlepack by Mike Cox a few years back was a really great set of scenarios.

The other reason these games don't get as much play is that the WWII games are much more popular, by a long stretch.