PG New Editions

[Matt W]

Necessity is the mother of invention.  As I mentioned in the Designer's Notes to Fire in the Steppe, the fact that we were using the old Eastern Front counter sheets for the game meant that the tank units were not marked to permit leaders to be assigned to counters.  While Mike offered to include the tanks from the old Workers & Peasants product, reading about the Brody battles indicated that the Mechanized Corps fought well past the point at which the old leader rule would have permitted.  In cases nearly every AFV was committed and fought through the end of the action.

As Peter has noted, the attrition rate of the leaders is very low, for that purpose alone.  The rule itself is relatively simple.  Rather than assigning the number of leaders to individual counters, the number of tank leaders is used as a number of "tank" activations (using all the existing rules, including the ability to activate units in your hex as well as those in adjacent hexes).  As tank units take losses there is the chance to lose leaders (in FitS the chance is 1 in 6, reflecting the resiliency of the Mechanized Corps in the Southwestern Front).  I would not use the same loss ratio for other forces in other situations where the armor is not efficient.  One could make the argument, for example, that Slovak or French (or upcoming Belgian, etc.) armor would be far less resilient and may have double or triple the losses in leaders in order to portray that.  If you like the idea please try it out on some other scenarios and let me know how it plays.

If nothing else it makes the counters less busy and that is, for those of us with more years behind us than we wish to acknowledge, a good thing.