Panzer Battles 111

[Sgt_Rock]

The series could stay in the Mediterranean for the next four titles and I'd be happy, but bouncing theaters makes more sense.

I also prefer the Med but also the Western Front over the Eastern Front for a couple of reasons:

1. Eastern front games have all of those Russian foot troops which take forever to move anywhere in a game turn in the large scenarios.

2. Western front offers more terrain variety. Russia is usually one endless set of clear terrain areas broken up by rivers and marshes and some woods. Frankly the mechanized actions are not that interesting with the Germans usually having the hammer. The static situations like at Rzhev '42 take "the patience of Job" to wait out before the bunkers fall.

Truly the Eastern Front had more static situations than the Western Front. The Germans and Russians would build lines which historians have said were more intensive than the WW1 trench lines! While this happened in the West (Atlantic Wall and West Wall) it doesn't take anywhere near as long to take out a defensive line as it does on the Eastern Front.

I enjoyed Smolensk '41, Stalingrad '42 and the Budapest '45 games the most. Plenty of mobile actions. Some of the others offered mobile action too and the Kharkov '42 game was decent too. I have yet to try out the newer Kharkov '43 game. It sounds like a good "Fire Brigade" action type game.

The Med beach battles were my fav. I hope that when they redo the Anzio battle they change the Allied and German fire values as the latter are just mauling the Allied forces - I have yet to play a game of Anzio where the Allies can hold the line after they land. The "12" firepower of the Germans just creams the Allies. Actually by this time in the war organic artillery and squad fire power for the US was on a par with the Germans. While the latter still were using two-three MGs (crewed) in a squad  the US were using all sorts of MGs and mortars as well to equalize the situation. In short, if the firepower of Anzio had been true then the Germans would have overrun Mark Clark's landing.

For the Desert battles - I hope that the small armored car units get removed or consolidated. The 2 vehicle units should be consolidated to something more like 6 vehicle units. Other than that - I love the Desert!

Bulge remains my favorite game. I have built many variants of the grand battle and also built a breakout scenario that uses the France '40 map. "Beyond the Meuse" or something like that is what I called it. I think I still have the setup for it on my system too.