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First time player here of DC: Ardennes Offensive. Love it so far, but I'm kind of puzzled now with the trucks column concept.

I just played a Trucks Column card and got this unit full of trucks. Great.

I started to replenish a few of my Panzergrenadier units which were lacking quite a lot of trucks compared to their TOE.

It worked fine until I reached the limit of 50 power points beyond which I cannot transfer any more trucks out of the column. So I'm left with a useless column unit of 47 Opel Blitz trucks in fine working order that I cannot transfer to anyone.

Am I doing something wrong here or what? What do you guys do to get all the trucks to other units?

This is a great question. I encountered the same issue when I was playing the campaign for the first time.

I think the way the game wants you to use the truck column units is to give a ride for your leg infantry that has fallen behind the mechanized/motorized units. So, think of the truck column as a battle taxi.

I think the "meta" way to play is to 1) give a ride to leg infantry to the front line, and then 2) replenish the motorized units that are leading the attack which have lost their mobility.

After this you are left off with two options: 1) form a kampfgruppe that can incorporate your left-over trucks or 2) keep left-over trucks as a battle taxi for small-sized units.

vege1 wrote: Thu Nov 30, 2023 2:00 pm
After this you are left off with two options: 1) form a kampfgruppe that can incorporate your left-over trucks or 2) keep left-over trucks as a battle taxi for small-sized units.

Thanks for the idea of creating a KG, because that in turn allows you to re-transfer trucks out to other units! Here's what I ended up doing:

1) First create a KG, and transfer everything from the panzergrenadier unit into this KG.
2) Entirely transfer all trucks of the trucks column into the new KG. Since a KG doesn't a fixed TOE, you can add as many trucks as you want.
3) Then, the new KG can transfer some of its trucks out to other units as needed.

It's not a perfect solution as it is a multi-step approach that will actually cost you PPs to create a KG while you actually don't need one. But I guess it's better than having this useless trucks column wandering around, although you could indeed still use it to ride some leg infantry units with it.

But ideally, the rule that prohibits you from ending up with a unit with less than 50 power points should not apply to trucks columns. This rule make sense for combat units, but a trucks column isn't a combat unit.