Hey Designers : How About BIG Battles

[Matt W]

Wayne,

Thanks for your comment. I have to admit a fatal weakness in my ability to write historical pieces. I simply haven't had enough experience reading other languages. As a good American citizen my foreign language of choice is Spanish, useful for the Western Hemisphere but hardly useful for European military history after the 19th century except briefly and catastrophically in the late 30's. While I have tried to piece together an idea of how to play through the Spanish Civil War I have found it difficult to appropriately portray the large number of political factions on each side and each faction's "victory condition".

PG is easy because everyone on one side typically is fighting together for a goal. This wasn't really the case for the Spanish Civil War. How to tactically show the disdain of the Soviet tankers for the International Brigades? How to model an anarcho-syndicalist leader structure? etc., etc.

But back to history. I am in awe of people like Chris Bellamy who can read Russian and have seen the RKKA archives. I only saw the maps concerning Brody and had to take several days to be sure that I knew which Cyrillic characters spelled "Brody" let alone that 8 MK was the 8th Mechanized Corps composed of 12md, 34md and some other division whose number and name escapes me now and that the nd's were infantry divisions and those damn backwards r's and things that look like the Greek letter pi but were really m's... Arrrgh!

I am, however, thinking of moving on to Avalanche and Anzio for some more large scenarios. The ground is open and the contending forces well defined. I might also look at Sicily, especially the American sector for some battles. Certainly there are a ton of possibilities in Russia but getting good information on battlefield strength requires too much reading in languages beyond my ability, regretfully.