Subject: Redline Korea Redline Korea appears in GameFix #6 and is Joe Miranda's strategic look at possible future conflicts in the Korean peninsula. About 100 back-printed units (basically corps & below) w/ combat strength/movement allowance on each. Map is nice and shows all of Korea w. ground attack, air interdiction, air superiority, communist air defense; Assault; Probe and Mobile charts. Victory is determined in large part by control of territory and elimination of units. This is a pretty basic game in the traditional sense of a wargame. If you are at all familiar with wargames, you will be able to play this one within seconds of skimming the rules. Each turn is one week and each hex is 33 km across. First, a note: the Scenarios Options page is not page 21 as it is referred to in the rules but on page 13. There is also a bit of confusion about sequence of play: the rule summary says weekly game turns are each further subdivided into Air Operations, followed by Comm. & UN player turns. The breakout of turn sequence shows Comm. turn / Air Power / UN turn. After flipping a coin, I chose the latter. Turn goes: reinforce/replace; move; combat; logistics; recovery. During Air Power: UN air units complete assigned missions. Interesting approach to Fog of War: UN can always check Comm. stacks. Comm. can only check UN stack at instant of combat. Movement, reinforcement/replacements, combat & supply are pretty traditional. Reinforcements come in at controlled cities or towns. Eliminated Comm. units come back, but only certain UN units. ZOCs stop movement, but can move out of them in the new turn. Airmobile & amphib movement allowed. In combat, choose a CRT: Probe, Mobile or Assault. There are various modifiers to combat strength including terrain. "Breakthrough" result allows immediate advance and further combat. Supply must be traced or unit is reduced. A finite amount of reduced units can recover if can trace LOC to friendly logistics unit. I like the Air Power solutions. UN assigns Available air units to missions a la Korea 1995: put them in the ground attack, interdiction, air superiority, close air support or reserve boxes. Comm. player rolls on Air Defense Track to elim. UN air units. Left-over units have certain effects. The key to this game is the Scenario Options chart which allows you to rapidly introduce different variables to each game. Sample UN options: free deployment, first strike, NK revolt, isolationist US, west Europe intervention, SK guerrillas, etc. Sample Comm. options: Pre- war infiltration, improved air force, surprise attack, counterintelligence, bad weather. I have set up and played through one game solitaire. The standard scenario is biased towards the UN: the UN was able to crush NK without too deep an initial invasion. Doug (dmurphy@wppost.depaul.edu) Hmmmm. After another play-through last evening, this game has more subtleties than I thought. There are a lot of assumption similarities IMHO to Korea 1995 by GMT but the design solutions are a bit different. ZOCs extend into enemy units and across otherwise prohibited terrain (any mech unit is pretty much road bound in most of the terrain on the map). Special Ops don't have ZOCs and are not affected by them, and other units which begin a turn in a ZOC can move directly to another enemy ZOC (two types of infiltration) Overstacking carries severe penalties reducing all units in a hex so you must make sure always to keep a retreat path open or you will end up retreating into a full stack and reducing every unit in it (reduction in this case represents a breakdown in cohesion and confusion, not actual losses). You can attack an enemy hex more than once (with different units). And reduced units are eliminated when reduced again in combat. So the combat tables allow some very interesting effects including deciding the intensity of combat. Probe tables allow the Communist to find out what's in a hex with say one unit or the Special Ops units) to see if they should hammer it on the Assault table. The Assault option is pretty bloody for both sides, much like in Kor'95. Miranda says it reflects outcomes comparable to Arab assaults on Israeli positions in the '73 war (I would say the reverse). The Mobile table can only be used in clear terrain (not much of that in Korea) and allow Breakthrough results for certain units. Breakthrough allows the victorious units to advance an extra hex regardless of ZOC and attack again. In last evenings game, the UN exploited this effect (much to my NK chagrin) to counterattack up the coast with three consecutive Breakthroughs from Kunsan to Suwon (an advance of about 132 km or 4 hexes: almost Desert Storm-like.) Combat is affected by terrain but effects are not cumulative. Units are mostly doubled (and tripled only if being attacked across the DMZ in rough terrain) Barrage points for the Comm. also have subtle effects: one point doubling one attacking unit. This is usually soaked off by terrain doubling for the defender or if its the UN defending an air unit (one in most terrain) or two in clear serving to shift a column (or two) in the defenders favor. Reduction and Recovery is pretty neat in how it represents the reorg of units at corps scale. Reduced units are not so much destroyed as unable to function due to losses, rear-area confusion, etc. Recovery is possible by simply tracing an LOC to a logistics unit (which is limited to a certain number of recoveries by a number on the unit). This represents I guess replacements, rallying of troops, new equipment arriving. The game is only 8 turns (2 months) which Miranda says is too short a time to reconstitute land units in general. But air units and logistics units return fairly quickly. Last evening, the NK crossed the DMZ in force, punched holes in the ROK lines and took Seoul (barely). The infiltration of units into rear areas to cut supply was especially effective. The UN managed to take back Seoul, reduced a huge number of NK units with Ground attacks to stall the offensive, taking pretty high air losses at the same time. However over the next turns, the air campaign shifted to reducing the NK air defenses and the ROK held on forming a defensive line to the south (with several units in a pocket around Seoul. The previously mentioned Breakthrough combat was pretty effective in demoralizing and distracting me. The combat rules also allow an attacker to restore reduced units at the end of his own turn while the defender (me) had to stay reduced through the end of my turn. I was able to surround and eliminate several ROK units because retreating through enemy ZOCs (even when occupied by another ROK) has such terrible effects. Miranda mentions Advanced rules in the next issue such as a two hex ZOC for US units. I'll be interested in seeing this. Doug (dmurphy@wppost.depaul.edu)