Today in ASL I ... (Day to day ASL doings)

djohannsen

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The word "sleaze" is always a bad thing. No-one looks forward to being "sleazed".

The word you were looking for is tactic. The rules support many tactics; some of them are not desirable (in the sense that you don't want your opponent to do it to you) but that doesn't make them "sleazy". The best way to stop your opponent from using undesirable tactics against you is to ready a defense against them. If you have no defenses, then you're screwed anyway; at that point it's probably ok to spill your drink in your opponent's lap (or if you're using his map and counters, on the board!).
I agree fully with your more nuanced expression. The tactic was shown to me when the outcome of the scenario had long been decided and was intended as instruction. It seemed to me to be quite a useful tactic to have in one's arsenal.
 

bprobst

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Damn! :mad:

Now we need to go through about 50,000 threads with roughly 855,000 posts to purge the forum of the expression 'VBM sleaze' and to substitute it with 'VBM tactic'...
Yes, we do. It bugs the heck out of me when people talk about "VBM sleaze" (in a serious manner), like it's some massive cheating action that only cheaters use. It's a tactic fully supported by the rules, and it has several counter-tactics that can be used against it. Too many people use the term "sleaze" in a non-joking fashion when what they mean is "I'm upset that I didn't think of it first".
 

jrv

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Yep, I know that they get the free 10%, but as the Japanese were moving across the board to attack, I thought that HIP was irrelevant. (NRBH, but I imagine that entering the board and moving eight or ten hexes would probably result in loss of HIP.)
One can still use it while attacking if set up on board, but perhaps only once. If your opponent doesn't count, you can move "all" your units, and as you move your "last" stacks, your opponent blasts away with everything that can bear. Then you pull out your HIP units and skillfully walk across the board on a path that is restricted from SFF/FPF because of closer units. In some circumstances you can wait for a turn or two to reveal your HIP so that your opponent shifts his forces away from one area of the board.

This is not necessarily a great idea for game play because from now on your opponent is going to count your units, slowing down play.

JR
 

Philippe D.

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Unless you are playing Poland in Flames in Manila, there are no 7+1 leaders in the PTO. Who is teaching you? Stay away from him.

JR
I tend to interpret "7+1" as I would "5+2": a wounded 8-0 (or wounded 6+1). But then I don't think about the possibility of a PiF scenario. :)
 

Justiciar

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Yep, I know that they get the free 10%, but as the Japanese were moving across the board to attack, I thought that HIP was irrelevant. (NRBH, but I imagine that entering the board and moving eight or ten hexes would probably result in loss of HIP.)

Also, I understand the distinction of entered and attacking, but being but a novice I often express myself clumsily and incorrectly (but hope that the gist is reasonably clear).
If they set up on board and attack, and for example set these up on your right flank...but then attack enforce on your left, you may well move away units you had on your right to deal with the main attack...the Japanese then break cover and move through the hole/gap to create havoc / exit what have you. That was what I was getting at.
 

djohannsen

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That was what I was getting at.
Solid copy, that you can use the HIP to obfuscate the relative strengths of your attacking disposition. Not something that I would have necessarily thought through on my own. Also, that HIP cannot be used when entering (as in starting off board), is clear as well. It's a tough slog for me, but gradually I hope to learn to play this game.
 

Jacometti

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Today I booked our hotel room for ASLOK 2018 !

Chris Mazzei and I will arrive on Friday 28 September and will have to be dragged out of there on Monday 8 October.

10 days of ASL goodness.....one of the best weeks of my year, every year. Looking forward to it tremendously.
 

olli

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Sold one of my last copies of HP, and met the brother of an old ASL player that lived in the same town as myself .
 

Ganjulama

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Today I booked our hotel room for ASLOK 2018 !

Chris Mazzei and I will arrive on Friday 28 September and will have to be dragged out of there on Monday 8 October.

10 days of ASL goodness.....one of the best weeks of my year, every year. Looking forward to it tremendously.
The Nature Boy approves
 

jrv

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I restarted a project to scan my overlays, print copies and laminate those copies for use so that I no longer am at risk of losing the original overlays. In all the years I've owned them I have not (as far as I know) lost one, and have only slight damage to one from a tape accident. But having seen others rip the artwork off theirs, I decided that it would be worthwhile to create backups and not use the originals. This turns out to be a non-trivial amount of work: scanning, cleaning up the scans, generating backs (I like having overlays labeled on the back), printing, cutting, laminating and cutting the lamination. After a bit of trial-and-error, and some deeper learning of gimp than I really wanted to do, I have completed one sheet and have a procedure that should work for the rest. I still have a non-trivial amount of work to do, but at least I now see a path.

JR
 

hongkongwargamer

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I restarted a project to scan my overlays, print copies and laminate those copies for use so that I no longer am at risk of losing the original overlays. In all the years I've owned them I have not (as far as I know) lost one, and have only slight damage to one from a tape accident. But having seen others rip the artwork off theirs, I decided that it would be worthwhile to create backups and not use the originals. This turns out to be a non-trivial amount of work: scanning, cleaning up the scans, generating backs (I like having overlays labeled on the back), printing, cutting, laminating and cutting the lamination. After a bit of trial-and-error, and some deeper learning of gimp than I really wanted to do, I have completed one sheet and have a procedure that should work for the rest. I still have a non-trivial amount of work to do, but at least I now see a path.

JR
I imagine the tricky bit is to print them to the exact right size?
 

jrv

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I imagine the tricky bit is to print them to the exact right size?
Not exactly. It is a concern, and you have to tell all the software involved what the scale is and not to scale things from that. I scan the images at 200dpi. At higher resolutions I was seeing artifacts in the scanning. The scan produces a .pnm file, which apparently does not have scale metadata that gimp recognizes, although I could see that it had metadata with resolution_x and resolution_y as 200. gimp was having none of that, and it reported the .pnm file as 72dpi. I tried to find a way to convince gimp that the .pnm file was really 200dpi, but I never figured out how to do it. I then found a command line program (imagemagick) that will perform manipulations on images. This command below converts the .pnm file to a .png file while marking it with the correct resolution and as a bonus, cropping the image from legal size to letter. On the .png gimp somehow finds the correct resolution.

convert overlay-200dpi.pnm -set units PixelsPerInch -density 200 -crop 1700x2200+0+0 overlay-cropped-letter-200dpi.png

"convert" is one of the imagemagick programs. Once the image is loaded in gimp at 200 dpi, gimp doesn't touch that value. I print directly out of gimp, and at that point the printer driver software wanted to scale the image down. The gimp image is 8.5 inches x 11 inches, and the printer driver knows my printer can't print to the full page margins. On the printer dialog for my printer there is one option that says scale which needs to be at 100% and another option that says, "ignore margins". The first time I printed I didn't check this checkbox, and of course the image scaled (very slightly so that it was not noticeable at first). With the checkbox checked everything is as desired. Of course it is important to lay the graphics out so that nothing goes into your printer's "no-print" margins.

If you don't print directly from gimp but instead send the image to a .pdf or some other intermediate software, then you have another piece of software that you have to watch like a hawk. But it isn't tricky; it's usually just a question of finding all the tick boxes and ticking them or unticking them as appropriate. I like printing directly from gimp mostly because I know that it will not change resolution in a surprising manner, once the correct resolution is set.

JR
 
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JAGgamer

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Today, setting up Vierville for my 11 yr old and 13 yr old, I scaped my tweezers across a 7-4-7 counter and defaced it. All I can say is “Air Assault!” (In 1944, “Airborne”.) They’ll live to fight another day minus their hips and bottoms of their magazines!
 
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