About to be gone from Grogheads until Sunday night at the earliest; but a note about my video AAR series (and the screenshot/written AAR before it): I played through both of those games totally misunderstanding the rule about marching across roads/rivers (i.e. across LoCs).
Insurgent forces in COIN games, namely the NVA and VC in FitL, are less mobile than the government forces, so they can't travel
along roads and waterways as easily. But they do
cross LoCs without any problem.
In effect, LoC's don't count as separate spaces for insurgent forces (those with March capabilities) when the forces are
crossing the LoC. Or shooting artillery over the LoC -- my misunderstanding of the rule led to a weird artifact of what I thought was the game design, where NVA artillery could not shoot across a LoC because they could only shoot into adjacent spaces, and the LoC of course is a "space". (The only "space" that isn't an "area", areas being where bases can be built.)
This also resulted in a more usual fault, where insurgent forces could only March
onto or
off a LoC during a March operation. That's true if trying to March
along a LoC, but when Marching
across then there's no problem. By contrast, Government forces (the US and ARVN in FitL) can not only "Sweep"
across a LoC in one move, but also
along the LoC. (This all assumes the LoC is free of opposing forces, of course, which would otherwise stop the movement.)
So the two AARs end up showing some very goofy movements thanks to my misunderstanding! Fortunately, thanks to another rule -- which I did understand correctly -- much of the time this wasn't a problem: towns (the little black named dots) are nulls on the map connecting areas and LoCs together, so don't count as spaces. That means nothing can be put in towns (unlike in Cities), but it also means that forces can pass through (indeed must pass through) from one space to another without any hampering.
Thus, in many cases, insurgent forces could simply March
around the intervening LoC -- or even simply
shoot artillery "around" the LoC! -- by going through a connecting town spot. This provided an inadvertent workaround for my misunderstanding of the LoC adjacency rule, so that effectively my misunderstanding didn't affect gameplay all the time. But sometimes there were still odd situations.
Any future AARs I do will definitely fix this problem.
As will any demos I run next week or whenever.
