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simple cossack & guerrilla fix

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 7:51 pm
by Treefrog
It is both historically inaccurate and a wargaming irritation for cossacks to be wandering throughout western Europe when the closest Russian army is thousands of miles away. It ignores history because this simply never happened. It is a gaming conundrum because cossacks slip around like liquid mercury making it practically impossible to pin them down and destroy them unless you commit inordinate numbers of your own cavalry.

Being completely ignorant of computer programming, and thus unfettered by practicality, I offer a simple and obvious solution.

Cossacks cannot enter any province unless:

1. the province is within two provinces of Mother Russia (the area Russia starts the 1792 scenario with); this is reasonable because cossacks traditionally ranged, roamed and raided and would probably be found in these areas anyway absent control from the Russian government/army, or
2. the province is adjacent to a Russian land container unit commanded by an officer; this reflects the cloud of cossacks that sometimes preceded and surrounded major Russian armies on the march. It should tend to focus the cossack menace to the main theatre of action where cossacks would realistically be expected to be found harassing enemy supply lines, supply depots, foragers, etc.

I tend to think that guerrillos should be treated the same way. Home grown insurrectionists typically stay close to home for patently obvious reasons. There is a name for highly motivated people that abandon their daily routine, neighborhoods and families to serve a political agenda in foreign lands: such people are called soldiers and they function in the context of a military formation which feeds, clothes, houses, supplies and directs them.

The great Napoleonic Era insurrections were in Spain and Tyrolia, but they didn't spill over into adjacent areas to my knowledge. When the north German dissidents left their homeland to take it on the road with Napoleon they obtained uniforms and became the Brunswick Legion (the regiment of infantry and cavalry that wore black uniforms with the death's head on the shako).

Can anybody identify any instance in modern history where guerrillas swarmed outside their native lands to attack enemy homelands thousands of miles away? [&:]

RE: simple cossack & guerrilla fix

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 8:25 pm
by benpark
Good idea.

RE: simple cossack & guerrilla fix

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 9:13 pm
by Khornish

Can anybody identify any instance in modern history where guerrillas swarmed outside their native lands to attack enemy homelands thousands of miles away?

Uh, yes. The mass of Islamofacists traveling from all over the globe to fight against the Allied and Iraqi national forces in Iraq would cover this. In addition, an estimated hundreds to thousands of members of the same group are also thought to have established themselves in South America (I think there was something about this in the news within the past few days even) in an effort to support future attacks in the western hemisphere. This doesn't even get into what is feared to have already occured in Europe and parts of the former Soviet republics, not including what is going on in Chechnya.



There have been several posts on your subject previously, in fact I made comments about this as well. I believe the response was that it was being looked at.