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piratefish

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Aug 8, 2009
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The whole "movement is combat" thing seems a bit over-simplified to me. IRL, just because you begin moving your troops into enemy occupied territory does not gurantee that fighting will ensue immediately or even soon. There are plenty of real life instances where entire armies literally stumbled upon each other in the fog of war, and instances where two armies completely bypassed each other in a relatively small area.

To me, what would make more sense than needing to capture every single province in a given area (which often includes keeping a few low skill major generals with single divisions to race around "claiming" empty but still enemy controlled provinces in the rear) would be a system where each area has one or more strategic positions that need to be captured to bring the entire area under your control (this is much closer to how real world warfare happens). In other words, the taking of one or two key cities, airfileds, bridges or other such positions in an area would effectively give you the control of that sector. It would still be possible that enemy units might still be in the area that you would have to hunt down and destroy or chase out of the sector, but their ESE and GDE would be diminishing with time to simulate the precarious position they are in (essentially isolated and operating in enemy controlled territory). Supply and communication would not be totally cut-off for them (hence the need to hunt them down and deal with them), but niether would they be able to hang out indefinitely in that particular area without retaking the "keypoints" or getting "out of Dodge".

Simply put, what this new system would do is allow you to more realisticly focus on key strategic points of sectors rather than needing to send a division into literally every province on the map just to "control" it. True, you would eventually need to send forces to every significant nook and cranny, but there would be no need to do this up front when the fighting is still going on. Like in real life, in the following weeks and months garrisons would start trickling in to commence the business of occupation - usually enlisting the help of the local authorities to maintain order and control (and eliminating those who refuse to cooperate). Instead of having men in every single province, perhaps garrisons could be "programmed" to respond to trouble spots in their respective areas of assignment. In other words, if you placed one or two garrison divisions in, say, the Kiev sector after (and only after) ridding the entire sector of enemy units, these garrison forces would react to any single province that had its revolt risk rise above a certain level (maybe 20% or so). They might be stationed in Kiev or another province in that sector, but would move to the appropriate province in response to increased partisan activity.

This idea would not be difficult to incorporate into the game, and IMHO would make it much more realistic and enjoyable.
 
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