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xenovin

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Should be a scenario or two in there! Thanks for sharing
 

Mister T

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Very nice article, unfortunate that CH has put its hands on the Stonne topic, could have been a nice small HASL.
 

von Marwitz

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Very nice article, unfortunate that CH has put its hands on the Stonne topic, could have been a nice small HASL.
CH having published some Stonne stuff waaay back should not necessarily prevent others from doing so now.

I have not played the two Stonne publications by CH, but IIRC there were some balance issues with (at least) one of them with the Germans having a hard time getting up that road into the village because the putting of fire into one key hex seemed to make that highly unlikely.

von Marwitz
 

Philippe D.

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I (and, I think, many others) won't consider buying CH products anymore, so if someone more serious produces a HASL module based on a battle that CH has touched, it won't matter much to me - I'll buy it or not based on what I read in reviews (and, possibly, the producer's reputation).
 

Robin Reeve

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The CH Stonne module has a flaw: there is a road hex that all German tanks must come through (they cannot move through woods by SSR and they emerge from a sunken road).
So the French can concentrate their AT resources on that hex.
As the Stonne HASL was designed before CH went south (Pedro Ramis, from ASL News, was the designer IIRC), I wouldn't place it among the dubious products of that TPP.
 
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Paul M. Weir

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I would agree that Stonne had a problem with the "road hex of death" from a game breaking point of view. Unfortunately I never was able to figure out whether historically that was the case. It might have been the case that it could have been a major problem for the Germans but they had neutralised or bypassed that threat before it became a problem for their arriving armour. I ended up with v1 and v2 of that product and was quite happy at the time (it's been many years since I got it out). V2 of Stonne was amongst the last wave of CH items (I got a couple of Korea modules then as well) before I decided I simply could not keep up with CH's flood of stuff. CH's subsequently was going over the edge from sometimes dubiously tested but cheapish and reasonably good stuff to floods of untested, blatantly copied and incompatible (to previous standards, like board/hex size). Stonne was one of the last of the original series of pretty decent but not perfect stuff that CH was known for.

For those interested it would be worth getting a cheap 2nd hand version of Stonne v1 or v2. Worth for a curiosity and even fun game but not to decide who gets fed to the volcano gods/goddesses.
 

R Hooks

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I played Stonne several times and don't recall the road as being impossible for Germans to carry. It was a battle, but it always seemed balanced enough to play out.
 

Brian W

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When I played it I thought it was doggy because the VC favored tank kills over most anything else. If you could kill tanks, what you lost in ground didn't make much difference.
 

Paul M. Weir

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When I played it I thought it was doggy because the VC favored tank kills over most anything else. If you could kill tanks, what you lost in ground didn't make much difference.
I suppose that looking at it from a tactical outlook that might seem not quite right, but looking at it from the (outer) operational level, killing AFV blunts the German sword far more than the loss of a town punctures the French shield. In the overall Fall Gleb scheme of things, I suspect the loss of a German supply truck would have a greater impact that that of a squad. Velocity mattering more than mass.
 

benj

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Should be a scenario or two in there! Thanks for sharing
The action at Saint-George de Didonne mentioned at the end of the article is depicted in a scenario (Indepenance Day) of the latest FTC.
 

Brian W

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I suppose that looking at it from a tactical outlook that might seem not quite right, but looking at it from the (outer) operational level, killing AFV blunts the German sword far more than the loss of a town punctures the French shield.
As I understand the reason there was a fight there, it is that the high ground over looked the road west. Taking Stonne protected the German breakthrough by keeping the actual assault axis free from French interdiction, while giving the Germans better interdiction to potential French staging areas for a French counter attack from the south at the base of the breakthrough. In the grand scheme of things, the winner/loser of the battle had little effect on the overall strategic picture.

That any German armor was committed kept that armor away from the channel, so if armor is to be an important VC consideration, any German purchase of armor should cost them in VP, regardless of their survival or not.
 
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