Not sure what it would remove other than the bother. I had very few circumstances where
I couldn't get things balanced the way I wanted. I suppose some story is lost, if you don't
know that that's the 3/34/II or something, but honestly, all the fiddling made the story
largely disappear anyhow. Only when I backed up and looked from on high did I get a
good view of what was going on.


It's completely historical to track water, fuel, different types of ammo, spare parts, ect.
But I sure wouldn't want to play it.

I've fiddled with the rules a bit, but this makes me concerned.  I'm surprised there's no "overrun" or breakthrough rules that allow you knock big chinks into that armor.  Incidentally, they spend A LOT of time in the rulebook talking about encirclement, but it appears that you were able to create a contiguous front.  Is that a specific scenario you're playing or is it really that hard for the Germans to encircle the Russians in this game?

Ok, so I have a specific criticism to it - the specific unit counters end
up making the game far more difficult to play than a pure strength point
system would be, with little added information. At least on the Western
Front, I'm spending most of my effort pulling units off the line and then
trying to rebalance everything. Terrible? No. But it does degrade the experience
for me greatly.

And yes, the maps are jarringly disturbing. I get used to them, and so long
as I don't get too close, they're no worse than WiF's, but that's not a great standard.

A buddy of mine made claims (also with regard to the Schlieffen scenario) that the whole
Belgian invasion cannot proceed historically (fortress being too strong I think), but I can't
speak to that. Overall, I didn't find any historical glaring issues in my one play.

So is the sponge defense just laying out the Russians so they're two-three hexes deep all along the line?