ORIGINAL: obvert
ORIGINAL: fcharton
ORIGINAL: obvert
Am I wrong in thinking there is something gamey with this? It seems I've heard of other instances of players trying this and it being called out as not quite right there, but I can't remember in what games now. It certainly doesn't feel like a usual tactic that I see a lot.
So what do you all think?
It is not quite right, but it somehow makes some sense. The game lacks a probe/patrol, or some form of precise recon you get when you're in contact with the enemy, and bombardment plays this role.
Right now, if you don't bombard, you can be in the same hex as an enemy stack and not know its strength until you commit to a full fledged attack. If you are on the other side of a river, then you even need to shock attack (ie cross in strength) to get this information.
As such, I would say it is legit, even though having to use artillery units to do this seems extremely strange.
Francois
After thinking about this further it seems even worse than at first. I see what you're saying there, but from the air (recon) you already get numbers of troops, guns and vehicles. If you bomb you get individual unit names, usually most of them over the course of several mission.
This gives all of that plus actual strength and potentially more (combat factors like supply, leaders, etc). The whole point of defending a river crossing is to defend the crossing, so it's pretty unlikely a scouting party would make it through the entire Japanese army counting units and men and machines and assessing their combat strength as they got blown back to the other side.
Don't you also force the entire Japanese army to expend supplies to fight off this attack by one arty unit?
From the air you get numbers but not how many are combat and how many are support. If you bomb you get individual unit names. If there's a beef with the engine this would be the one IMO. How a pilot at 15,000 can see unit crests is beyond me. One ID looks pretty much like another.
This is a bombardment due to the attacking LCU type, so he's not going to get a read on fort levels, leaders, etc. If he had sent a small infantry unit--say a fragment of a para--would you have the same problem? The Allies had recon specific ground forces. That's what UDTs were at sea, and Marine Force Recon was and still is. Other nations had similar.
I don't know if the entire defense stack fires, or if they stop the loop when the attacker is 100% dead. I suspect the latter, but I don't know.
I'm down with the idea that the game lacks a Probe attack type. These have been wargame staples for generations. Don't know why GG left this out, especially in a small unit war like the PTO. But he also left out submarine photo recon, another staple of island hopping. If there's a "huh" here it's sending a no AV unit across a river to die. But maybe there's no huh even there. You got the VPs at no risk to your own balance. He got info. But you got some too--he's probing in advance of a crossing most probably. Would you prefer no warning and let him have the VPs back? Trade-off.
