Alan Snider - Sep 30, 2004 1:02 pm (#7188 Total: 7204) On the Playtest Table: Mark Herman's "Empire of the Sun"(GMT); and announcing the "Northern Knights Wargaming Group" in Vancouver, Canada GAMENIGHT(S) Sept 27th/28th: Terence Co and I had our long awaited introduction to S&T #76 "The China War". This game sports one of the finest looking maps I have ever seen, and a rules set which uses the "Panzergruppe Guderian" system, Terence took the PRC (Chinese), while I took the Soviet Union in this alternate history in the 1980's. The PRC units are quite a bit slower moving and less mobile as a fighting force, which with the PGG system can be a great advantage. This allowed the Soviets to have 2 phases of movement with nearly their entire force! (regular movement and reaction movement). This greatly contributed to the Soviets ability to pick and choose their battles. The real key, although it took several turns to realize the true "use-value" was with the overruns... Once I was able to do this, it became much easier to begin to push the PRC back, giving the Soviets a chance to take some resource hexes, which are after all the key to a potential Soviet victory. Terence was able to pull all his huge armies into 'mega-stacks' in the reaction phase to make much of the PRC troop locations into unattractive targets. If it wasn't for the tactical nukes, we both believed the Soviets would be hooped. It is only when using 15pts of nukes that the PRC retreat option (rather than retreating to avoid losses) disappears. The supply rules seem too broad, as it would appear impossible to put units out of supply, as the players have so few units to "man" the battlellines that there would always be a weak link to enable a breakout with such a strategy by either player. Attempting to put units out of supply is a "fool's gambit". The real trouble started when the North Korean entered the war on the PRC side, and the most inopportune time as far as the Soviets were concerned. Then something dawned on me as I sat there plotting my next move...as the Soviet movement is far greater than the bulk of the Chinese forces, there was nothing stopping me from blasting through a hole in the PRC line and marauding all over the Chinese provinces taking over resource hexes, and the Chinese forces could not possibly catch me! They would have to commmit all their forces to tighten a slow noose around the area, while trying to recover resource hexes. The PRC units are so slow, the Soviets could constantly build their totals of captured Chinese resources. Our game quickly broke down into fits of laughter by both players as we both agreed that I was right in this assertion. We set our game aside, hoping that the venerable Kim Meints or Brian Train could provide us some diection at this point: Have we missed something here?...as it seems this may be a gamebreaker. The one question we did have was with resource control or capture. It clearly states that "other industries" and "other minerals" are only counted if you occupy the hexes, but it appears to suggest any other resource hexes are controlled by the side which has the last unit to pass through the hex. Is this correct? Even if all resources require occupation to claim VP's, the Soviets simply run around til the last turn and take the resouce hexes worth the most in hopes of claiming victory. the only real hope that we could see would be to tinker with the supply rules outside ones own homeland.