Winter Operations - Kharkov '43: Tiller Operational Campaigns Tournament No 2

[Partizanka]

If I read an earlier post correctly, I think we are  going to play with default plus Delayed disruption reporting for options. If so, for the benefit of players who have not played with this rule, I think we should describe its affect on the game. We often discuss rules in relation to realism but not as frequently as to who will benefit. Disruption is one of the rules that seemingly is more related to realism, but has a great deal to do with gameplay since when it occurs, first,  the disrupted unit loses a large portion of its defense capability against assault and second, the dramatic gain in fatigue for the losing units in the assault combined usually with an almost automatic disruption for the losing units. Disruption is an abstraction and though we argue for its justification, in TOC it is really a tool that benefits the attacker in pushing units out of defensive position and thus aids us in moving forward toward objectives and benefits the defender by disallowing disrupted units the opportunity to assault, so restricting them from moving forward. DDR would benefit the defender in some circumstances where the attacker would refrain from attempting an assault not knowing the status of the defending unit, but players with experience will be able to predict that status for a good percentage of the time once they are used to playing with DDR on. But another way DDR changes the game is by adding time for a unit to recover from disruption. This further aggravates the problem we are developing in the game from the use of modifiers when it comes to highly rated units as opposed to lowly rated units and is one where I feel m'ove closer to where the realism is lost when we have these supersoldiers, "A" or "B" rated units, matched against "D" and "E units in situations that not only stretch belief but are not much fun to play. 

This may be the case with the use of DDR here. I cannot remember the game clearly but a portion of our scenarios will be in the snow with limited movement except for ski troops and roads. There are a good number of "C" troops on the Russian side in some scenarios I am pretty sure but also a bulk of "D" rated troops whose progress off road will be one hex per turn, which would limit their assault capability to the turn in which they are adjacent to the enemy, probably following an artillery softening. The Germans will have "B" and "C" units and the benefit of defensive positions in most of the scenarios. I cannot remember the ratings of German leadership in the game but I imagine it is "C" or better for the most part. The designer would have designed these scenarios with that in mind and I question where an addition of DDR in this specific game would be of any benefit on the small scenario level except to the Germans, where they would gain a advantage from the delay in reporting to recover from the disruption. Personally, I don't see the need to give the Germans more advantage as these scenarios were pretty well drawn. But if we go with the change, I echo that only the reporting has changed, not the chance of disruption, so experienced players can gauge when a unit is disrupted to some degree. Still, inexperienced players will probably err either too cautionary or too aggressively which could affect outcomes dramatically either way.