It's a Long Way to Tipperary Tournament - Round 3 - S43 DIME Beach

[Steel God]

Situation at the end of Turn 20 – 1800 July 11th 1943

Well, the situation Brian was in left him few choices that didn’t involve risking a Minor Loss for almost no chance of a Minor Victory, so he did the prudent thing and extracted all his isolated troops and fired where he could, moving the score 10 VPs in his favor (652).  There’s no way for me to come up with the 50+ VPs needed for the Allied Win, and even if there was, he’d only have to shave a few VPs off to knock it back to a Draw.  Conversely there’s no way he can capture 100VPs worth of objectives to push this to a Minor Axis Victory because he’s too far away from the objectives.  So, this one will fizzle out with each of us just trying to move the needle by whatever small amount we can to earn the best score for the Tournament.  

An interesting side note – the Allies still have a Light Armored unit from turn 5 that has not landed, and the divisional artillery battalions from the 45th ID have never set up.  The latter is just bad luck but the PDT values have Artillery Set Up at 100% for the Axis and at 75% for the Allies, so it's a luck issue the Axis never has to contend with.  The former issue with the never arriving armored unit, however, is just the best argument I can think of for not having variable reinforcements in a short game.  Variable is fine in large campaign games, but in a short game it can be a real balance killer.  Not the case here since I don’t think that unit makes a great impact, but the principle is the same, and what if instead of a light armor unit it was the 1st ID HQ instead?  

And that’s that – fired my artillery off, exchanged SA fires where profitable, focused on the HG Engineer unit stacked with the Livorno because that’s what I would have done in a campaign scenario, blew up the bridge at Ponte Drillo so he couldn’t sneak across in a miracle T mounted attack and steal 50 VPs, and pulled back the defenders east of the Acale to minimize his opportunities for good exchange rates.  Pushed the score to 680, which he will shave down by a dozen or so, but a Draw it was destined to be and a Draw it remained.  Be most interested to read Brain’s side of this tale when it’s posted.