EP '14 mechanics/balance

[ComradeP]

I've always wondered why some units never get any replacements. Is every loss a death or incapacitation for those units only? Surely some could make it back in a 30 day period. Same with artillery, couldn't some be repaired? These same units get replacement in the smaller scenarios but not in the long campaigns, at least in France '14.

It's a guess, but I'm guessing it is primarily meant to give a way to kill them. There's no rarity modifier for equipment that is produced in limited numbers or troops with very, very limited replacements like Guards.

When it comes to never recovering something, the only thing I still don't understand is why the bridging system is so inflexible in JTS games. In most wargames with bridging, you can build a bridge and move on. That's also not very realistic, but having to maintain every single bridge with units that never get their bridging equipment back if they leave the bridge never feels "right" and it can become downright problematic if you have only a handful of bridging units to cover several rivers or have situations like with 1st Army in Clash of Empires where you build a bridge and then your men become Fixed, so the enemy can move in and force you to leave the bridge or lose the bridging unit.

Just like many operational ideas were Napoleonic in WWI, so were the bridges which consisted of the usual boats or wooden bridges as far as I know. Modern specialist bridge building equipment didn't exist at the time, or not in today's quantities.

A rare tank, or all the vehicles of a battalion can be recovered either over time or in an instant, but not bridging equipment. I fear that's one of the things that will never feel "right".

A "best practice" is to save a game copy with installed mods to a CD! That way, if your original install gets corrupted, you'll always have a backup copy available to reinstall.

I know, my other installers were all saved on a USB stick, but the France '14 installer got corrupted when I moved it somehow.

I disagree on the fatigue---I think F14 (and EP14) does a better job than the other Tiller games of preventing endless fighting and fighting to the last man. improving the recovery rate or lowering the accrual rate will change the game a fair amount and make it more bloody. It is already plenty bloody, imho....

Well, regard for human life wasn't as high in early WWI as in WWII, and men were willing to make sacrifices that most people wouldn't consider either in WWII or today. They could also recover from a slaughter, many troops being from the lower social economic classes who at that time often still had a rough life. I mean: standard tactics came down to loose lines of men charging MG's and (entrenched) enemy positions with limited supporting fire and they could do that for a while before breaking down.

I agree that fatigue can be sort of ignored too easily in the WWII games with limited numbers of units, but in FWWC it can increase very rapidly. Battalions can take losses in terms of strength as they're big, but the fatigue from even limited attacks can be severe.

No! This is correct. The releases are assigned to them for the other strategies (when they choose a defensive strategy, otherwise they would get a "head start" on the move over the offensive strategies in some places). Historically they were marching into the Ardnennes before the Germans were.  I appreciate your evaluations, but don't worry I have it under control.  ;)

If you pick the historical options, it deliberately doesn't play out like it historically would? That seems odd, as the Ardennes area is the only area where that seems possible. Further to the (south)east and in Belgium the movements can evolve in such a way that they will be close to the situation in the start of the normal early campaign, but in the Ardennes the French have an edge over their historical counterparts.

I made a mistake when counting the VP's, as I counted the Belgian VP's as German at the start, so the French marching in there wouldn't actually lower the German VP's. Still, it does seem strange that with the historical options for both sides, the French get to make an orderly advance deep into the Ardennes before the Germans get there.

To bad there isn't a marker for each day a unit fights so after so many days fatigue would be regained at a much slower rate. Then you could increase the daily recovery rate so that units who completely rested overnight would be relatively fresh in the morning but they would burn out if they remained in combat for say 7 days straight.

If such a feature would be included, movement distances would also need to be tracked, which makes things complicated. Currently, you can march from Berlin to Moscow without gaining fatigue provided you do it in daytime, that's just how the system works (like most wargame systems, which present an idealized war where movement and supply tend to be simplified compared to the combat mechanics) but making fatigue more detailed for combat would make the system seem more uneven when it comes to the way you normally gain fatigue.