Land Combat: Local leader or HQ leader?

[Nightcrawler]

I just reread the section of the manual on leaders, and from what it says it looks to me like there is very little reason to ever have a local "on the spot" leader, or even a leader in a subordinate HQ. Can this be right?

If you put your best land combat guy (with a high aggressiveness so he passes the morale check) in charge of the HQ, and don't assign any local leaders, the ace HQ leader would apparently command the combat everywhere in the whole HQ.

You could go even farther than that. You could put the ace in charge of a higher HQ (South Army for example), with no subordinate HQ or local leaders, and it sounds like that one guy would command all the combat in all of the subordinate Army HQs too. Assuming his aggressiveness is high enough to pass the morale check that is.

As far as I can tell, the only reason to have a leader at a local base would be if you have a local leader with as good a land combat rating as your ace HQ leader, that local leader gets a +1 bonus to his land attack rating. The only reason to have a HQ leader in an intermediate HQ (say, 25th Army in the South Army example), is that that leader's aggressiveness could allow you to get the HQ's preparation points above 125.

Even that might not be a good thing in some cases. As the Japanese player you might prefer any extra PPs go to Combined Fleet rather than an Army HQ.

If this is correct, it doesn't seem right that you should be able to use one guy, who may be 1000 miles away, to do all your land combat everywhere without penalty. Any thoughts?

[This message has been edited by Nightcrawler (edited December 05, 2000).]