Damage from minefields.

[Fhil]

Players tend to want to clean them up, even though units take only light damage when moving into a minefield. You could argue that the "psychological" impact that makes players want to remove mines might cause more difficulties than the actual minefields.

Minefields are much more annoying in Panzer Battles, because they're not penetrated for supply purposes after a unit moves into them. Units in minefields become Isolated next turn.

In PzC, the only times when strength 1 minefields have much of an impact on operations that I can think of is when you're trying to assault a hex with a unit not adjacent to the target, and can't assault it because the minefield removes part of your movement points. Strength 2 and 3 minefields can cause serious delays for units in T-mode, but the slightly increased casualties don't have much of an effect on combat.

Though I can see why the minefield percentage is low, as a 1x1 kilometre hex is covered with mines, I don't know why you'd want to create minefields except in very rare cases such as on "your" side of a ford or bridge so anyone moving up in T-mode can't deploy after moving in due to losing MP's to mines.

I agree with the above stated, mostly. Except for the last paragraph. I never saw a minefield hex as 1x1km of minefield. When you have a road hex mined for example, I though it represents basically a smaller area of the road with some mines within that 1x1 km hex where the road actually runs through. Many other aspects of warfare are treated as ´abstract´ in PzC system, so I also wouldn´t consider minefields being 1x1 kms of mines, there would have to be a few thousands of them in the ground. Also minefields without road hexes represent for me those 100m maybe of a real minefield?

 Also if this approach would be valid, than the scenario designs where there are 2 or 3x minefields would be strange, maybe except for Kursk where there actually were millions of mines. 

 There are sometimes smaller scenarios withing bigger battles where for example a given division is in retreat, it fortifies in some new area it has to defend and by the design there are already several new minefields around after a day in the new positions :/ Well, this is actually correct as this I believe was engineers´ job together with building up defenses, obstacles etc. But why not allowing the players to do so? One has to choose what to do with the engineers - bonus for building trenches? Laying minefields? Obstacles are not even a possibility. So I would be afraid that the players would be laying mines across the whole map.

 This discrepancy between design and player´s options always seemed strange to me, but it´s not really that much of an issue after all. In the end, one can alter this probability in the PDT file   It would just add to the game I think, there would be another ´engineers´ layer of the battle between players :) 

 Also agree with mines in PzB, they are more of a problem for the enemy there.