From: Markus Stumptner Subject: The Legend Begins Deluxe Variant Alan, Just in case you did not pass by and see it, the following variant was posted in the TLBDL folder on consimworld, followed by an endorsement by Mark Simonitch, who thought it an excellent idea: ken mitsube - 09:16am Nov 4, 1999 PST (#51 of 54) I would like to post my house rule here about victory condition or something like "situation/balance indicator" in TLB. Please let me know your opinions. TLB is a very complete game and give us several different levels of satisfaction every time we play it. We get a great thrill in mobile desert battles and at the same time we can also have pleasure in building up our own Army (and very high standard of the components and Tank upgrades strengthen this latter aspects). However, there is one "possible" weakness (I dare say) even in TLB. In campaign game, there is nothing like "counting VPs to win the war", and the only victory condition of the campaign game is to have in supply units at the enemy edge of the game map. To attain that purpose, the most apparent and certain strategy for the Allies is to sit in the El Alamein line from the begining until late '42 and then start the big push---this is the common problem in many of the North African campaign games. But I don't think this can be a real problem in actual game play, because nobody wants to play such a boring game. If I were the Axis and my opponent takes such strategy, I would quit the game immediately. But still I think that it is interesting to have a method to measure if I am doing good or bad in the campaign. That's the reason why I made this house rule. (1) The followings are the objective hexes; each of SIX airfields (Bengazi, Derna, El Adem, Sidi Barani, Fuka and Creta) Tobruk hex (2) Count the number of objective hexes controlled by each side at the END of each MONTH (not the game turn). The side with more Objective hexes than the opponent gets one point. (3) If one side controls all six African objective hexes (exclude Creta), he can get one extra point. (4) Make a marker to record the accumulation of this point on the game track and adjust the position to that player's side (so, the marker can be at Axis side or Allied side or zero). With this method, the historical total points were as follows; (points at the Allied side are indicated with -) 1940 Sep 1 Oct 2 Nov 3 Dec 4 1941 Jan 3 Feb 1 Mar -1 Apr -2 May -2 Jun -1 Jul 0 Aug 1 Sep 2 Oct 3 Nov 4 Dec 2 1942 Jan 1 Feb 0 Mar -1 Apr -2 May -3 Jun -1 Jul 1 Aug 3 Sep 5 Oct 7 Nov 5 Dec 3 With this method, I think that we may be able to assess if we are doing better or worse than historical commanders just by comparing the historical point and your point at the same month. And as you can easily see here, the side with negative point was always the offensive side in history (Crusader Nov41, Gazala May 42 and El Alamein Oct 42). So negative side was "forced" to take offensive in the historical situation. It may be interesting to make an additional rule like "if the point goes up more than five points to the enemy side, that player is sentenced to be "much much" worse than historical commanders even when he can win the game at the end of the campaign".