Heroes of the Soviet Union Playthrough

[triangular_cube]

Oh no, sorry, I don't play online. I prefer solo, although I occasionally game with my kids.

The "force morale" thing is a house rule I was playtesting, not a mechanic in the rules as written. The idea would be that as casualties mount across the entire force (battalion, regiment or whatever), command and control breaks down and that chaos causes lower-level commanders and platoons to panic or withdraw, assuming the battle is lost or unable to operate effectively without a consistent line of communication to the headquarters. It could generally represent the loss of runners, the breaking of communication lines, the depletion of ammunition or simply command confusion as well.

The system experimented with something similar to that in Beyond Normandy. It ultimately didnt get picked up in any other modules that I recall. My copies are buried right now or I'd dig up the details on it to compare.

I'd be really curious to know how Beyond Normandy handled it. Do you think you could post a reply here when you have a moment to look up the morale rules in that game?

Formation Morale:

The morale of the units belonging to a formation is affected by losses. Each step loss or leader lost counts as a step. All units of the formation have their morale reduced as follows when the losses equal the noted number.

Step Losses: Morale Reduction
8: -1/-
15: -1/-1
23: -2/-1

Units affected by formation morale will be noted in the special rules of a scenario and their starting total value designated. Thus a British Regiment that began a scenario with a morale of 8/7 would be reduced to a morale of 7/7 when step and leader losses totaled 8, to 7/6 when step and leader losses totaled 15, and 6/6 when step and leader losses totaled 23. Leader morale values are unaffected.

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IIRC without flipping through the whole booklet these applied to the Brits only, and the scenarios tended to be very large with many formations. Each having their own morale led to a lot of book keeping, which I suspect was in part why it was not continued in the series. There were also limitations on activating more than one formation at once and such. I suspect a direct port into another module would be pretty clunky. Balance aside you would probably have to tweak the loss levels in the chart.

Truth be told I really don't know how it actually played. Beyond Normandy has the busiest maps in the series, all with large footprints, and notoriously paper thin counters; so it never really made its way onto my play space back in the day. Hope to rectify that with Vassal one of these days and it always seemed interesting.

Peter, I'm guessing we have the alt colored symbols available for denoting formations as existed in the physical game on Vassal? Never messed around with those late war Brit extensions.