Bridge Building tricks

[Glenn Saunders]

In the official release of the Bulge game, the Eng are all in Btln units which can't subdivide and we tested and tested and retested until we were happy that the time it takes to build a bridge, given the various quality of the Eng was close to historical as we could get it. If anything it may seem long but often it is quicker to get those bridges up than was historically the case. If players are using a Mod where these Eng are in Coy and the result is that the chance is increased three times, than that would be a problem.

The original post was concerning F40 where the German Bridge percentage is 30%. You can subdivide a Btln in three Coys and just about make the bridge in one turn every time.

Conclusion - that is a problem and one that could be corrected by changing the PDT to 10% or making the change that will be implemented. If players want to undo the effect of the new change that can be done by tripling the Bridge value in the PDT.

In France 40, I was torn between making a single Bridge Coy for each Div which would be more accurate but would increase the stacking density beyond what I wanted to do and make the Bridge unit suspectible to added BF. Also, because the way the game works and the Bridge can't be left unattneded, having all coys with bridge ability allows players to move forward without leaving their entire Bridge capablity in the rear - just leaving a single coy with the bridge and the others move forward. So it works nicely - or so I thought.

Anyway - dividing an Eng into three Coys to triple the chance of building a bridge is a gamey tactic and the part in the manual about "Placing two or more Bridge Engineers will give you a higher chance of successfully completing the bridge." was not writen to give players a clue haw to do gamey things. It was likely added when the change we made to have the bridge chance modified by the quality and when Greg Smith was thinking in terms of BTLNs as Bulge was game five of the Series and I don't think we had figured out all these little rules loop holes players have found over time.

Glenn