F 40 Gold: Expiring Objectives

[jonnymacbrown]

Hi Johnny, 

Yes - for clarification, Belgian and Dutch surrender does not give the German player an automatic minor victor per se, but rather the points taken from the objective hexes that the Germans must capture to trigger Belgian and Dutch surrender (and those hexes that aren't surrender hexes but are almost certainly going to be captured along the way) should usually be sufficient to give the German player a minor victory.

There are two reasons behind this. First, I think the occupation of the Low Countries, even without a further advance into France, could reasonably be described as a German victory - doing so would have given Germany airbases from which to strike Britain and additional ports on the North Sea, and would have broadened Germans options for a continued offensive into France while narrowing the Allies' potential invasion routes into Germany. Secondly, attaching so many points to Belgian and Dutch objective hexes all but forces the Allied player to attempt to intervene in the Low Countries. Otherwise it would be to his advantage simply to have French and British forces stay put and leave the Belgians and Dutch to their fate - not at all historic behavior and not a good representation of Allied policies and objectives.

A few more things to consider - having surrender hexes expire could lead to some really weird situations. For instance, if Belgian and Dutch objective hexes were progressively removed, you could conceivably have a situation where the German player triggers Belgian surrender, but, because the Dutch objectives have expired, the Netherlands fights to last man isolated. Or perhaps, if the Dutch Army couldn't surrender and many of the objectives in the country had the expired, the Allied player might derive some benefit from send the Dutch Army south into Belgium. Or some other weird thing like that...So to me it seems safer just to keep them on the map and leave the possibility of Belgian and Dutch surrender open the entire scenario.

Also I don't believe Belgian surrender is inevitable. Depending on the actions of both players I think it is possible for the Belgians to hang on to the end. Dutch surrender is probably close to unavoidable, but it's entirely possible that the Dutch could hang in there longer than they historically did (deploying III Corps to the Peel-Raam Line rather than recreating the historic withdrawal to the north all but guarantees this)

-Mike Prucha

Mike; you say Belgian occupation should give Germany a minor victory. So the Allied player has to try and hold Belgium? But realistically or shall we say historically, just taking Belgium without making inroads into France is going to lose Germany the war, WWI redux, no? Maybe I just don't get it. I'm not trying to be difficult nor contrary.   jonny