ORIGINAL: Ur_Vile_WEdge
An interesting strategic digression, but not directly related to the point at hand. The Italians had roughly two divisions operating in East Africa, (Not counting the Askaris) and were able to make an attack against admittedly weak opposition, and occupy an area some 130,000 km squared in size. In WiF terms, they'd be isolated the second war broke out, flipped the first time they'd try to move, and never be able to turn face up again in option 47.
This is correct. I handle this in one of a couple ways.
Option A: Taking Suez is obviously an easy solution, but not practical. However, threatening it while investigating option B can be effective.
Option B: Building Territorial Units is a tricky but potentially interesting option.
Building territorials (which cost 2), you attempt to create a connection through the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to connect to Libya's border directly. From there, if the rule worked correctly, Italian units can trace back to Italy through Libya if you had convoys in the Med.
However, even better, the territorial unit is always in supply in its home country, and this is valuable. Additionally the territorial, reorganizes if it traces to the capital of it's home country, not Italy. I have seen territorial warfare take large swaths of Africa by moving your territorials once a turn while out of supply. Nearly everyone forgets about Africa, although the CW has a decided advantage being able to provide naval supply while Italy cannot.
Option C: Transport Balbo to the Supply Unit. That will allow you to take an entire turn fully in supply to accomplish some goal. A turn is two months no matter how many impulses you get. That allows you to reorganize oil dependent units (The HQ), and all your Italian units again. I've never tried it, but it can be done.
With proper planning however, I'm sure you could establish an Italian colony in Ethiopia easily, if you only took that pesky Suez canal...
ORIGINAL: Ur_Vile_WEdge
And while it's an admittedly minor theater of the war, it's something that the game's all or nothing approach to supply does not model well; clearly the Italians were able to procure or manufacture enough stuff to keep them going, at least for the limited duties they were performing in that campaign. Here we have an example of Option 47 making the game less realistic, not more.
ORIGINAL: Ur_Vile_WEdge
True, but not what I was getting at. I slapped this picture together to get at what I was saying.
Bock and those three inf with him are all out of supply. He can still reorganize, and in doing so, can reorganize his out of supply buddies. Aside from 47, the concepts of "Supply or out of supply" and "reorganization" are not linked ones. I suspect for this more than any other reason is why it's an optional rule, to keep conceptual complexity to a minimum.
I was actually wondering if you were describing this situation.
In this situation you actually have a few options:
1) Use the HQ to re-organize your units,
2) Save the HQ to prevent the Soviets from attacking by providing Emergency HQ support, so that your land units are in supply when attacked, preventing the penalty of being face down and out of supply,
3) If the surrounded group gets some air support, you could drop a supply unit on the HQ and the HQ would get all those benefits of being a primary supply source, etc, for one turn.
For a new player, and perhaps other people, I can certainly see how this would be too complex. Your mileage might vary.
