ORIGINAL: Neilster
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Yes, but as I've already explained, swift, crushing defeats of the sort you describe are not what land combat in WiF models. In the several days of combat that occurs, over a front about 100km long, plenty of information about what is happening would go up the chain of command. Take the destruction of Army Group Centre in June 1944 for example. The German armies were rapidly crushed by massive and fast moving Soviet forces and although Army Group HQ was unable to effectively intervene, they were all too aware of the strength of the opposition. Overruns might be an exception but that is destruction during movement and I have already argued for possible FoW for adjacent enemy units rather than automatic revelation.
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The status of smaller formations can often be ambiguous or unknown but for the reasons I've stated above, the status of 50 000 troops and their associated support infrastructures is likely to be quite well known, even if it's bad news. Also, if a unit is supposedly destroyed, someone, either the phasing or non phasing player, removes it from the map. You haven't explained how this can be handled or the case of shattered units. When you talk of units blundering into one another, you again seem not to grasp the scale of WiF's land units. Corps, and even divisions don't move without dedicated recon units probing ahead and local attacks being launched to find weak points. Small units can bumb into one another but not large formations.
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I'm perfectly aware of what you're on about, it's just not appropriate for the massive forces represented by WiF land units. A whole corps never loses its communications. It's a massive organisation consisting of dozens of organic or attached units, each with their own radios, runners, dispatch riders, carrier pigeons and landlines. A whole corps can't regain combat effectiveness without the enemy noticing because of the multitude of sources that would be providing evidence to the contrary. Battalion after battalion would be reporting stiffening resistance or local counterattacks. Regimental HQs would be passing on these reports. Again, you're underestimating the scale of the units involved.
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I think there is more of a place for friendly FOW in naval combat but it still has to be remembered that the naval counters in WiF don't typically represent single ships.
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As I've already pointed out, air actions represent several days of action. One's own losses and serviceability would be very obvious. A handful of pilots that were lost might turn up several months later after escaping but that's not worth modeling when there are hundreds in an air unit.
Cheers, Neilster
You're right, of course. I tend to think more tactically than strategically. With these kinds of numbers, it is hard to lose track of your own units.
On the other hand, this doesn't mean that a player should know everything about the enemy. A player should probably know pretty much where most of the enemy units are, though not necessarily what they are capable of until they actually fight them. I like the idea of hiding the game combat and movement values of a unit until the player or an ally has actually fought the unit. Units available at the start of a game would probably have known scores.
Also, as I have mentioned before, Fog of War can be implemented even in cardboard WiF by allowing stacks of units to be sorted so that a player-chosen unit is at the top, and then forbidding opponents from examining the contents of an enemy stack until an attack is declared. This should be easy for MWiF.
ORIGINAL: SamuraiProgrammer
I am not sure where my opinion falls on this issue. It is fairly obvious that there should be decent information about army groups in a hex even if the hex is off of the front line. Which unit may have been fairly easy to figure out from intel reports.
But Fog Of War may have had an instrumental part to play in the outcome....
Massive effort was put into a deception (coded radio messages and such) that made it look like Patton was in charge of a large force that would attack German holdings. I have always heard (correct me if I am wrong) that Hitler refused to release reserves to Rommel on D-Day because he was convinced that Normandy was a feint and the real invasion would occur somewhere else (Netherlands?). I have also heard it speculated that if Rommel had gotten the reserves, D-Day may have failed to hold the beachhead.
If all of this is true (IF IF IF), then the deception surrounding Patton's command may have been instrumental in success.
Also, I have always heard that the battle of Midway was won because we broke the code and knew what was happening. If (IF IF IF) we had not, or had not trusted the code breakers, part of the fleet might have been elsewhere (Alaska?) fending off an attack from a fleet that was not there.
If so (IF IF IF), then 'fog of war' would be an interesting addition to the game. I have seen very few board games that have been able to implement this. The only substantial game that comes to mind is Victory Games' Vietnam, In it, the VC counters had a side that had no information other than 'VC might be here'. You had to attack to find out if it were a VC or a decoy.
I have even heard that during the darkest hours of the Battle of Britain, cardboard replicas of Fighters were set up near airfields to increase the enemy's estimate of air power.
I think Fog Of War in some fashion is an interesting concept to add to a computer game if for no other reason than it is generally impossible to do with a board game but easy to do with a computer game.
I think it should be tied to air superiority in an area. For example, if a bomber gets through to a hex, then certainly, there should be more information available from the hexes along the flight path.
I also think it might be interesting to spend an O-chit on deception (ala Patton).
Just ideas... What does everyone else think? Are they tenable? Are they usable? Will they destroy balance in the game?
Perhaps it could be possible to build decoy units at a minimum cost that do nothing but look like real units until attacked, whereupon they disappear. Since players will get used to seeing units with nothing but question marks on them (if that sort of FoW is implemented), they will be indistinguishable from real units except that they do not move, or move only one hex per phase - and that's being generous. This would simulate the sort of deception employed by the Alies prior to D-Day that was aimed at axis aerial recon. This could be a fairly substantial departure from WiF though, so I'm not sure if anything like this will make it into MWiF.
