Encirclement Exploit

[Jon Shafer]

If any of your armies ever gets encircled, while fighting a losing battle, just retreat towards your line... bang... You'll never lose an army to encirclement.

IMNSHO, this is a huge exploit... encircling armies was one of the best, most likely THE best way of cutting down your enemy's army. Unfortunately, as it is now you can simply keep retreating from every battle until you end up somewhere you want to be (i.e. back on your side).

Solution? Make retreating impossible from encircled provinces.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Helixx is correct.

And it gets worse even.

The problem is that you can retreat as many times as you want... just keep retreating until you end up adjacent to one of your own provinces, and you'll automatically retreat there.

You'll suffer no casualties, and you can 'move through' any sized defense force... if you have a 5 division army encircled with 25 divisions in every adjecent province 2 thick, you can simply retreat 'through' this force... encircling does NOTHING if you use this exploit. You can easily reform your front... surrendering inside of a pocket shouldn't be included in a game at all, since you can just retreat and make that useless. Should you be allowed to do this?

I think seriously needs to be addressed... often it's very difficult to destroy divisions outright, and this is one of the few ways to do so effectively.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by DalaMusketeer
Since their is no tactical withdrawal command, you only option is to retreat... meaning that your troops take what they can carrry and runs for it... being in no fighting condition.

But then the problem is you leave the battle at the same organization and strength level that you entered it in, encircled or not.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Stalingrad, Kiev and Dunkirk, in addition to Falaise, the Soviets along the Don before Stalingrad, almost Korsun, nearly the 1st Panzer Army in the Caucausus, and the end of nearly every campaign against the Germany (Africa, Sicily, etc.).

And how many divisions were/almost were destroyed in each of these? This doesn't count all of the encirclements of units smaller than armies or army groups either. Many, many times there were encirclements of corps and divisions, especially against the Soviets on the eastern front.

Keep in mind, a good player will see an encirclement far, far in advance (unless you have a massive offensive to the scale of Barbarossa... which you don't see every day) and make accomodations to deal with it and prevent it. Against the AI (which won't retreat anyways) this works much more than against human players, but like I said, human players are much better at seeing and avoiding encirclements.