Fog of War

[Tambu]

Pardon the rant, but the game is supposed to be enjoyable, with the excitement and unpredictability provided by your opponent's actions and the dice!
he gamey FOW rule makes it much easier to be the defending player in ALL cases. IMHO, it should never be compulsory as it makes playing PG much less enjoyable

[sagunto]

I agree with Tambu's assessment and the Tank Dinosaur's comments. Board gaming with others should be entertaining and fun to do. You should be able to play the game as one chooses, with an able opponent of your choice. It seems to me that if you bought a copy of the game, you may play it as you see fit, and should not be compelled to use rules that you and your opponent do not agree with or select.

[goosebrown]

Pardon the rant, but the game is supposed to be enjoyable, with the excitement and unpredictability provided by your opponent's actions and the dice!
he gamey FOW rule makes it much easier to be the defending player in ALL cases. IMHO, it should never be compulsory as it makes playing PG much less enjoyable

Personally I like FOW, but I never insist on it. It should be an option, not requirement.

[KirkH]

It's an optional rule for a reason.  As I expected when I first asked the question, there are lots of differing opinions.  Some like it, some don't, and some like it modified a bit.  I'm in the latter category.  I like the concept but think it can lead to some gameyness so I've added a couple tweaks.

[cjsiam]

Alas, my distinguished colleague, ignores that fact that the FOW forces also premature OBA bombardments and also air strikes.

I'm not sure....
You see in my perspective the "Friction of War" rule addresses the time spent by the commander making sure important orders are
carried out....He is not omnipresent and can't be everywhere at once, all the time....so he organizes his forces with subordinate activation chains
to get underlinings moving in mass without individual attention, and addresses the Important tasks before the FOW could rob him of the opportunity....

If OBA and air strikes are important---he does them before he does something else....he has to decide where to spend his time...

[cjsiam]

Looking at the posts above...The idea of having the option of subtracting the players initiative from the roll might have some merit...

If you are the attacker---you generally have higher initiative.....so you can reduce the # of times you are shorted turns as you keep your
initiative---but, you may choose not to do so....

Later in the game, as initiatives have lowered, there is less ability to avoid an FOW shortened turn---things get away from you....Friction of War....

I think this might have merit to address magnitude of the Defender bias it provides---doesn't remove it (an maybe it should not....defending is 
easier to do with sufficient forces...) but reduces # of times a well trained and motivated attacker is cut short....
hmmm
thoughts?
cj

[treadasaurusrex]

Agreed, incentizing the use of initiative number to decrease the stultifying possibility of the FOW rule artificially shortening turns might a logical first step in that direction. A second might be to delay the beginning of FOW roll to occurring after at least 4 game turns for both sides -- roughly an hour of combat time in this game's scale.

There should also be come consideration of creating a mechanism to allow a player's initiative to either recover, or be enhanced in longer scenarios, based on battlefield success factors.

[chaco]

Interesting views, I agree FOW makes it more gamey, usually helps the defense and can be very frustrating. However long scenario's without FOW can be tedious, but the best thing about FOW, and it should be a compulsory rule IMHO and no matter what Treadhead says, it makes you think about doing bigger  better and more realistic activations using the command chain.

This is an insulting post and it should be deleted!

[KirkH]

My only other comment in response to waynebaumer is that long scenarios with lots of units can get tedious regardless of whether FOW is in play or not.  I'm in the middle of one now where both sides (Slovaks and Hungarians) don't have great morale so the bulk of each turn is spent making recovery rolls trying to see which side will recover enough units to actually try to accomplish something.