Miscellaneous Rules

  1. City Supply

    2. In the standard rules, it's almost useless to besiege a city, since your units can't rebuild and the units inside the city can. This means most land battles will be lightning successes or failures in city hexes. This rule helps create true sieges.

    1. A city can only produce 1 PP for each other city it can trace supply to. The production values of the other cities are irrelevant. Thus, a 3 PP city that can only trace supply to a single 2 PP city produces only 1 PP.

    2. Cities which cannot trace supply to another city may not act as a supply base for more units than the PP value of the city.

  2. Front Line Replacements

    3. Another rule to help take the fighting out of the cities and into more of that beautiful terrain that Columbia bothered to print on the maps. Taken straight out of the Civil War and Blockfront games.

    1. The production of a city may be spent to add steps to any existing unit that can trace supply to it. New units must still be built in cities.

  3. Infrastructure Damage

    4. These rules give you more strategic options, allowing you to damage your opponent's military machine indirectly. Note that the "healing" of the economy is automatic, and doesn't require PPs (nor is assiting the rebuilding possible). This is deliberate - Victory is a wargame, not an economic game. Balancing PP budgets is outside the scope of the game, and needlessly slows it down. It also forces players launching strategic bombing campaigns to keep up the effort or lose ground, just like real strategic assaults.

    1. Strategic Bombing. HB and MB may attack a city's infrastructure instead of the units in it. This must be declared for each participating HB and MB at the start of the battle, and remains true for ALL rounds of that battle (the HB and/or MB may not switch to another target). Every hit by strategic bombing causes 2 infrastructure hits.

    2. Artillery Bombardment. Naval units with a G attack factor and AY units may bombard a city instead of attacking units in the hex. Each hit causes 1 infrastructure hit. Land units at sea may not make such an attack.

    3. Collateral Damage. When a battle is fought in a city hex, every hit on a land unit also causes 1 infrastructure hit.

    4. Use a small die in the hex to add up infrastructure hits. Each time the die reaches 6, put down a destruction marker from the logistics counter set, and start the die counting from 0 again. At the end of the battle, remove the die - scores of less than 6 have no effect. Stop adding destruction markers once their number equals the PP value of the city (you can only destroy as many buildings as the city started with).

    5. Each destruction marker a city posesses in the Production phase reduces its PP output by 1. At the end of each Production phase, remove one destruction marker from each city. If playing with the City Supply rules, cities that are out of supply may not remove destruction markers.

    6. Destruction markers do not change a city's effects on movement and combat.

  4. Reinforcements

    5. An adaptation from the Civil War games, and probably not a very good idea in Victory, but here it is anyway. This should not be used with the Reserves rules, below, since both optional rules are ways of representing the same thing.

    1. Friendly land or naval units may join a battle from an adjacent hex, during the part of the combat round when units of that type are allowed to fire. They may not fire in the round that they enter the battle.

    2. The attacker brings in reinforcements first, then the defender.

    3. The hexside limit affects how many units may be brought in from an adjacent hex during the entire combat round.

  5. Reserves

    6. A way to make battles feel more like grand-tactical maneuvering contests, instead of crap-shoots. WARNING - this may overcomplicate and slow combat.

    1. Each player may start some (but not all) of his units in a battle in reserve. Units in reserve are not revealed and may not fire.

    2. Units may move out of reserve when it is their turn to fire (to "move" the unit, just reveal it). Once out of reserve, a unit may be fired upon, and may fire in the following combat rounds (but not in the round it comes out of reserve). Units may not return to the reserve (they must retreat to leave the battle).

    3. Units in reserve may retreat from the battle at the end of a round of battle (after all revealed units have had a chance to fire and/or retreat).

    4. Units in reserve may be attacked, but only under special conditions:
      • Air units may attack any enemy units in reserve if the enemy has no fighters in combat.
      • Submarines may attack any enemy units in reserve that are at sea (i.e., naval units and land units that haven't landed yet).
      • Other units may attack enemy units of their own type (land or naval) in the enemy reserve if there are no enemy units of their own type opposing them.

    5. When units in reserve are attacked, the attacking player must declare which type of unit he is attacking (air, land, naval or logistics) before seeing them. After this declaration, the entire reserve must be revealed. If there are no units of the type specified, nothing is attacked. Whether the attack succeeds or fails, hide the reserve units again when it is done.
      This rule is to represent that breakthroughs are rarely well-directed or surgical in nature. Units breaking through into the enemy rear must be given clear priorities beforehand or the opportunity to cause damage is misdirected and wasted. It's a very lucky force indeed that gets to stay in the enemy rear long enough to choose its targets.

  6. Flak

    7. These rules are intended to fix some of the problems with the way air units behave and interact with the other units in the game. Bombers can no longer intercept fighters, ground units no longer have to stop altogther to fight off airplanes, and flak is no longer capable of wiping out whole air forces.

    1. All units with an A attack rating except FA (fighters) may use flak against air units attacking them. Units with flak may not fire on other air units unless attacked by them.
      Note that this reclassifies bomber (TB, DB, HB and MB) A attack factors as flak.

    2. In a combat round, air units which fire are immediately attacked by any flak-equipped units of the type being attacked (Army, Air, Naval). Flak results take effect before the firing air units roll any dice.

    3. Air units lose one step for every two flak hits. Air units cannot be eliminated by flak.

    4. Units which fired flak do not count as having fired, and may still use one of their other attack factors (except flak) when it is their turn to fire.

  7. Elite Units

    8. These rules simulate the real-life source of an elite formation's effectiveness: veterans. In the real world, extra training and special equipment have only a minor impact on a unit's effectiveness, unless the unit is composed of highly motivated, hand-picked veterans of proven ability. The downside of this fact, of course, is the difficulty in replacing losses in elite units, which goes far beyond just economic costs. Veterans have a disproportionate value to their unit out of all relation to their numbers.

    1. Each step of an elite unit (FA or AR) costs only 1 PP.

    2. For each step added to an elite unit, 2 steps must be taken from from other units: one from a regular unit of the same specific type (i.e., armor or fighter), and one from a unit of the same general type (i.e., land or air). Units "robbed" for steps must be able to trace supply to the elite unit being built up.

  8. Revised Combat Sequence

    9. Fighters
    All Bombers
    Submarines
    Battleships
    Cruisers
    Destroyers
    Carriers
    Artillery
    Armor
    Mechanized
    All other army units
    Logistics units
    		This table is revised to take some of the unrealistic (and needlessly complicated) disparities out of combat. For instance, there is no particular reason Infantry, Marines, Mountain, Airborne, or Engineers should fire at different times. Likewise, when playing with the adjusted Flak rules above, the order in which bombers attack becomes irrelevant (as it should be).