It also helps if you have tons of money to waste on counters you will probably never use.
I bought Blood and Jungle, which I love for the scenarios, but I have not bought PIF or this Kursk thing. Just far too expensive and non-essential. Tons of new mapboards not used by anyone else.
I am from an early SL era, not the first year it came out but before CoI. During the AH era and especially when AH was going down the tubes I bought many duplicates as my 'fix' looked like it would disappear.
While I have about 4k scenarios, my attitude to ASL is it is the best WW2 toybox out there. I gradually got together enough to do, say, any WW2 phase Soviet Tank brigade or a US Combat Command. While I have (solo) played little ASL over the last few years, the ability to recreate almost any action whether something I just read or something like "How would a late '41 Soviet Tank Brigade do against a late '41 Panzer Abteilung?", is what keeps my interest in ASL. So every new Unit/AFV/Gun and map that came out expanded my WW2 universe. So Map X is not simply just used in only Y scenarios, it's another arrow in the quiver of my WW2 imagination.
Being single, retired, mortgage free with a modest appetite and only 3 cats as dependants and no really expensive tastes, just books, the odd DVD and a few boardgame lines, I can afford to indulge my ASL habit. Having said all that, I don't really live in most people's real world. Though far from rich, I have enough to splurge a bit on something and ASL is it. When spread over years and the hours of playtime, ASL is quite cheap.
But everybody here has their own take on and available hours and money that they can allocate to ASL. Most here are scenario people, some regard CGs as their strong preference and I'm in the DYO camp. So whether you decide to tailor your purchases according to apparent usage or wish for the greatest variety, the important thing is that you are satisfied with that and still enjoy that.
Colors are my Achilles Heel which is why I probably did not end up in a UXB unit while serving. Worse are brown and green which makes those nice maps for KGP and now Operation Schmidt a pain to play on. It is probably also why I thought the original boards 9 and 10 as well as the original Ruweisat Ridge map were okay.
Sometimes curses are hidden blessings ... UXB disposal would definitely not have been a first choice for my career
. I still have my original boards 9, 10 and 11. Frightening colours and trapezoid buildings! I wonder if they still grow whatever the artist was smoking then. Though quite dreadful, they got some use as they added 3 new boards to the previous 6 non river boards that we were stuck with.
