Finally back from road trip. Now I can post Tim’s observations about the game. We have another session scheduled for Mid-December.
Here are my thoughts about Fire in the Lake-
- We made a big mistake on the tunneled base rules. They are much more difficult to remove than the regular bases. I’m not sure it would have made a big difference in our game, but definitely something to note for future games. BTW, I didn’t like the term ‘tunneled’. I wish they’d used something different like ‘fortified’ or ‘entrenched’.
- I wish I’d spotted the rules about South Vietnamese Rangers being able to raid across national borders. It was really frustrating to watch the NVA building up in Laos and Cambodia.
- The charts were very good.
- I’m still laughing about the mistake of tracking ‘available’ units…We made that much harder than it had to be…:)
- Very few of my units could both move and attack at the same time. It felt like I was playing Paths of Glory!
- Bombardment missions can really pay off for the NVA in the long run. They provide a relatively cheap way of attritioning the COIN player. I’m not sure if we removed to adjust ARVN aid to reflect US casualties (I think its something like -3 per unit killed– that adds up).
- The VC need to adopt a ‘fleet-in-being’ strategy. Admittedly the mistake about tunneled bases didn’t help, but they were rapidly wiped out in our game. At one point you were using rally phases to make activate guerillas inactive. It is really frustrating for the COIN player to see guerillas that have been activated by sweep operations go inactive during rally phases…A nice modeling of the frustrations of COIN operations.
- On the rare turns when both of my factions started eligible it was a real dilemma whether or not to have them both run operations or have one pass so I would get a chance to respond to your moves during the next turn.
- That game would play very differently with four players. I don’t think the VC would let themselves get wiped out to the last man or the ARVN would let the Americans transfer large amounts of patronage to resources….
- I kept forgetting to move the police out into the provinces, which hindered my pacification efforts.
- Neither one of us did much fighting for the LOCS– I wonder if mass attacks on the LOCs would yield better results for the insurgent player.