Question on using campaign specific squads

[Enquiring_Mind]

Hi everyone,
bear with me on this one….
I’m currently interested in late war Eastern Front (Operation Bagration onwards) and I’ve been looking at Theatre Selectors and what sort of forces I can use. I’ll use these forces to illustrate my question.

There seems to be a hierachy to the various books and the theatre selectors in them. You start with the highest level such as the ‘Armies of Germany’ before getting more focused on a specifc theatre such as ‘Ostfront’ before getting down to individual campaigns such as ‘Fortress Budapest’.

It occurred to me that you see certain squads that appear in the certain books would work really well in theatre selectors from other books.

E.G. The SS-Charlemagne Squad from ‘Ostfront’ seems perfect for the Forlorn Theatre selector from ‘Road to Berlin’.

Also the Panzer-Zerstorer Squad from ‘Road to Berlin’ seems appropriate for numerous late war fights. It’s only mentioned in the Extended Last Levy list, and doesn’t have any rules on where else to include it.

I was wondering what the situation was with this. Can you tweak Theatre Selectors like this? I would be doing this for historical reasons, not to try and produce the all-conquering list of doom!

I’m interested to hear your opinions. 🙂

[Stuart Harrison]

The following is from the FAQ/Errata:

“With the few exceptions below, there are no plans to compile errata and FAQs for these books. Even more than the rest of the BA range, these are written in a spirit of fun and cooperation between the players. Some of the rules in them are fairly extreme and game changing (amphibious assaults, snow & ice, Maginot Line fortifications…), and to be honest the normal rules of BA struggle to accommodate such different situations and had to be pushed to the limit… and beyond! We assume therefore that players will resolve any conflict
arising from rules included in these books in a friendly and fun manner, or roll a die and move on with the game. For example, when using a legendary, named character (such as John Frost, Wittmann, or Dick Winters), what slot do they take in a reinforced platoon? Well, use common sense. For example, if they are an officer, they should use up the slot that most closely represents their rank. If the character fought with several different ranks throughout the war, choose the rank that best suits your force.”

Particular reference to “Even more than the rest of the BA range, these are written in a spirit of fun and cooperation between the players. Some of the rules in them are fairly extreme and game changing”

There are units in the theatre books and campaign books that are ridiculously powerful outside their context and should have a thorough review/revision before being allowed near a generic reinforced platoon or an event. There are others that have major unresolved questions about how they function in games. This leads to a clash of interests between those that want to keep these units out of events due to not being balanced/playable, and those that have paid for and built their new force and want to take it out and play with it (giving the benefit of the doubt that the majority didn’t specifically go for that force simply because it’s overly powerful/more powerful than the other options available to them).

It’s easy enough to adapt things for a friendly game (testing and adjusting for the next game), not so easy to adjudicate all these inconsistencies across an event, so some TOs will simply rule out theatre and campaign book units/lists.

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