Rebuilding Units

[brianreid]

Question: How are units rebuilt? It seems to me that units that are destroyed are rebuilt at an insanely fast rate. When I was playing a recent game of War in the West, I had carried out a couple of medium size cauldron battles where I destroyed around 10+ divisions in each cauldron. The cauldrons were completely "air tight", so no units escaped, even though I notice when allied units are surrounded, they don't surrender, they merely "retreat", even though in the combat box, it shows the unit being 100% destroyed. At any rate, a couple of turns after the pockets were cleared out, I started noticing some of these divisions were showing back up. I thought what the heck?! This is completely unhistorical. When units are completely destroyed, it takes months on average to build that unit back up. This same situation rears its ugly head in the War in the East game as well. Is there any way to tweak the speed at which units are rebuilt?

Brian B.

[loki100]

Both sides get auto-rebuilds in that the counter for a destroyed unit is placed back on the map. For the Axis these tend to return NE of Berlin, for the Allies in the UK (& often N Ireland).

The speed of rebuild then depends on the available assets. A CW/US formation might fill out very quickly after a while German units take an age (as the available assets start to run short this will worsen). For both sides they refit better on a NSS.

Now there is a second problem. These new elements have very low experience and it takes time to bring them up to a decent level.

A player is pretty careful over this, if I recall the AI is less aware of the issue so will return them to front line combat pretty quickly.

So they may well be there again, but they are now much weaker (possibly to the point of being fairly useless).

Not sure this is so ahistoric to be honest. Rebuilding formations from cadre was pretty common. For the British it made particular sense given the regional aspect to recruitment, all that infrastructure was untouched by the loss of the field formations so the designation was retained. As an eg, the 51 Highland was effectively destroyed at Dunkirk, raised again, took such heavy losses in the Tunisian battles that it effectively had to be raised again before the Sicily landings. The wounded in Italy were then assigned to other British formations when the 51 was pulled back to the UK for D-Day (& were replaced in the 51 by fresh raised replacements).

I'm not sure what you mean by:

ORIGINAL: brianreid

... even though I notice when allied units are surrounded, they don't surrender, they merely "retreat", even though in the combat box, it shows the unit being 100% destroyed. ...

If a unit was isolated at the start of the turn and has no retreat path it surrenders. Did they have supply via a port?

[cfulbright]

I'm not sure what you mean by:

quote:

ORIGINAL: brianreid

... even though I notice when allied units are surrounded, they don't surrender, they merely "retreat", even though in the combat box, it shows the unit being 100% destroyed. ...


If a unit was isolated at the start of the turn and has no retreat path it surrenders. Did they have supply via a port?

This is an important point that Loki made about and I will emphasize:

Units aren't destroyed merely by being surrounded by units or zones of controls in the current turn. If you grew up with SPI or Avalon Hill board games back in the day, as I did, you could surround a unit and then if it couldn't retreat it was removed from the map.

In WitW (and WitE), you need to isolate the unit for one turn, then attack and force it to retreat the next turn. If a unit is in a port hex, or has access to a port, it may not be isolated. The way to tell if it's isolated is to press Shift-r. Isolated units will be highlighted red. I've sometimes been surprised that units I thought were isolated weren't. The key thing is that it takes the extra turn for it to become isolated.

If a unit is isolated and destroyed, A long time ago I read on this forum that it's supposed to take 8 turns for it to reappear as Loki described, but in one 1943 campaign scenario I destroyed the Hermann Goering Pz division in Sicily in turn 3 and it reappeared in the Masuria/Pomerania area the next turn, admittedly with a 0 TOE. The AI put it back into the line in Italy on turn 9 via its usual teleportation, by which time it was at 60% TOE and an EXP rating of 70 points.

One last point. I'm pretty sure you don't get notified via the Reinforcements & Withdrawal screen (press "i" to see it) that a destroyed unit has been returned to the map, so if you lose a unit to destruction you'll need to look in the Commander's Report to find it.

Cary