Author	triangular_cube
Method	Solo
Victor	Britain, India, New Zealand
Play Date	2022-12-09
Language	English
Scenario	DeRa003

I think the balance of this one is heavily weighted towards one's interpretation of the Surrender rule. Those playing with the South African Surrender rule will likely tend towards a draw, those playing with the actual Desert Rats (me) are going to see a quick rout of the Italians. I don't apply the liberal interpretation, that tanks merely need to drive by enemy units to trigger surrenders, but at the time they could by parking by them. It does give me pause that the Brits have no assigned tank leaders as written. A posted errata added some, but I didn't go back through the old CSW archives to see where this was sourced. Maybe the tanks ARENT supposed to be able to close until the Italian guns are gone afterall?

Digression aside, close is what they did. They drove up to the Italian lines and the Italians rolled disasterously for surrender over 3 turns. Made quick work of everything and I packed it up. Based on my play with RAW near as I can tell, I'm tempted to rate this one a "1" which i very rarely do for balance reasons alone. RAW, i think the only way the Italians get anywhere close to where they need to be is if the Allies are extremely careless with their abundant APCs and run them into the guns, which they don't need to do, cause the invincible Matilda's do the job. Having played through Afrika Korps with the RAW surrender rule, I'm concerned at how Rats will work out. AK often had surrender, but with long stretches of entrenchments, with scarce Brit tanks to call them out. This scenario forced the Italians to set up in a tight singular hill, and gave the Brits 6 tank units... you just close the net really.

Italian desperation counter attacks were able to knock out 1 step of Matilda's though, so gold star for those guys. They surrendered shortly after though. Funnily enough, the New Zealand teamsters got demoralized from OP fire and took off. They were supposed to be the heroes here :).