I'm fine with bocage. I do think the revised WA rules feel excessive, but I can only assume they were all put in to resolve problems other people had with the old ones.
Having said that, bocage in ASL is not very "realistic" and does not penalize the attacker in some of the ways it historically "ought" to, which I think is why people decide it favors the attacker:
- Bocage was very easy to get lost in, or at least very hard to make sense of. With our omniscient view of the board, our attacking troops have far too much knowledge of the terrain ahead of them so they can sometimes move far too efficiently.
- It was very hard to spot defender fire from hedgerows. In ASL the defender always loses concealment to shoot; a more realistic version would be like the HIP gun rules and allow concealment to be maintained unless a 5 or 6 was rolled on the colored die.
- Just because a hedgerow blocked your LOS didn't necessarily mean you couldn't call in artillery. Real artillery can fire blind at grid references or semi-blind at "just past that hedgerow we can't see through", neither of which is possible in ASL. So our OBA is typically being called in only two or three hexes away, where it has a very high chance of scattering out of LOS and/or onto friends and/or onto the observer. This particularly reduces the effectiveness of the historically deadly German mortar barrages.
- Real bocage fields were much smaller than ASL ones. While the overall feel of an ASL board is usually right, the fact that it's at the wrong scale messes with a bunch of aspects of the ASL design. In particular, one-hex fields becoming unflankable mini-fortresses with all-around fields of fire is something that could never happen in the real thing.
John
:happy:
