ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
Not true, since you don't know how long the attack will take to complete. The blockers don't have to be there at the start of the combat. Just at the end of it.
Leaving aside the mechanics of how to get what we want, this does create an interesting potential question: what if the mechanism we make creates the possibility that the surrounding unit may or may not have gotten into place by the time the defender breaks and retreats?
One could wind up with rather ahistorical incentives to
weaken the attack -- lest victory come too soon. Something to bear in mind as we move towards a solution to this problem.
Part of the final package might require a means for the attacker to choose to delay his attack to a specified round. Like, you decide (quite realistically, by the way) that you don't want this attack to happen until round three, as only then can you be sure the encircler will be in place on time. But in TOAW, you have very little assurance that your round one attacks won't wind up eating 70% of the turn. You shouldn't have to choose between a weak attack on round one, hoping for the desired delay, and waiting unnecessarily because some battle 500 miles away went into overtime.
However, all this may get too complex -- both for the designer to program and for the player to keep track of what is going on. Perhaps needless to say, I'm fonder of the relatively simple solution I outlined above. In cases where the defender is surrounded, the round the attack happens on is determined by the time the last hex was occupied.
