JTCS - Viet Nam

[Crossroads]

So here goes,

From Panzerblitz to Campaign Series

Avalon Hill's PanzerBlitz, by Dunnigan and Redmondsen, 1970. The GrandTheftAuto of its time, with over 300 000 copies sold since.  Hexes represented 250 meters, a turn was 6 minutes, chits depicted companies and platoons. An instant classic it was.

Dunnigan and Redmondsen moved to S&T/SPI, while Avalon Hill continued the series with Panzer Leader in 1974 (my first boardgame in 1983), and Arab-Israeli Wars in 1977. Dunnigan gone, Reed et al took over the design responsibility.

So let us talk about the scale evolution. 



Infantry, in all three boardgames, all foot units have a movement factor of "1". (Movement is the stat on the lower right corner of each chit). One hex off road, two hexes at road speed. With 250m hexes, and six-minute turns, that translates to 2.5kph forced march off-road, and 5kph on roads. As detailed on my previous posts, Talonsoft doubled that. 10 kph on roads, and with Double Time, even more. 

Vehicles, and as I wrote earlier, with Arab-Israeli Wars, released seven years after PB came put, Avalon Hill took a bold step to break compatibility between PB and PL chits against AIW chits. They felt vehicular movement was off scale, breaking game play.

As the AIW design note below explains, PB and PL used a model where vehicle top speed was divided by 3 (mph) or 5 (kph) for its off road movement within the board game. That was changed to divide by 5 (mph) or 8 (kph). Quite a change.



Samples. Let us look at Sherman, per above. I don't have the JTCS oob files with me, as I am typing this from the office (a slow day, hush). CS Vietnam oob has a M4A3 with road speed of 38 kph. Tank Encyclopedia lists it with top speed of 42 kph. Regardless, so far so good. 

On paved roads, movement cost in movement.pdt is 1.00 for Tracked vehicles, a hex entry cost of 6, and 15 hexes per turn so a 38 kph road movement rate it is. 

Unpaved roads, movement factor is 1.50, giving a hex entry cost of 9, allowing for ten hexes per turn, or 25 kph.

Open terrain then, per the above AIW snippet? Movement factor is 2.00, hex entry cost double of the road movement, 13 AP, 7 hexes per turn, or 19 kph. That is very close what the PB and PL guideline of dividing mph by 3 is (8 hexes), but not what AIW recommends. Per AIW rule of thumb, cross country movement on Clear should be 5 hexes.

Firing cost, then. On boardgames, units can fire once per turn, on CS, twice. While I don't see issues with direct fire units performing two fire missions, the indirect weapons kept to one fire mission for the heavier pieces (AP fire cost 100), while doubled it for lighter pieces (AP fire cost of 50), resulting in quite unrealistic rate of two fire missions per turn. Given a basic battery fire mission of one minute (ten rounds per minute), that's just two minutes allowed for all the required procedures for a new fire mission. 


To summarize: Talonsoft doubled the infantry movement rate for Campaign Series, while vehicular movement was more closely followed. Rate of fire was doubled. Scale was deemed still to be six minutes per turn. 

For the reasons explained (only partially, we've gone to great depths over the years), the revised CS game titles regard the unchanged platoon data to be based on a scale of ten minute turns. Hex size definition stays. 


As a sidenote: Interestingly, after the demise of Avalon Hill, MMP (MultiMan Publishing, an esteemed board game company) bought the Panzerblitz rights, and introduced the PanzerBlitz2 series games, with quite a different rule set, adding what have become board game standards since such as impulses, unit activations etc. It defined the scale as 250 yard hexes and fifteen minute turns. 

Infantry movement rate was doubled, indirect still fires only one fire mission, as does direct fire, too.