Wall Advantage Edge Cases

I have been watching a couple of different discussions about Wall Advantage. In each instance, these Wall Advantage questions have been edge cases which will rarely come up in a game of ASL. You could probably safely ignore these instances and you probably wouldn’t ever come across them in a decade or more of ASL play. I find them interesting and I think you might too. There may even be a time when this knowledge can be used to tactical advantage. Let’s look at two edge cases. 

Pillboxes 

Referrer to Figure 1. Notice, the Pillbox is in Road hex, in a hex that has a hedge hexside. Since it is in Mandatory Wall Advantage terrain, many players assume the Pillbox has Wall Advantage over the hexside. This is not correct. Per B9.32, a unit in a Pillbox may not claim Wall Advantage. For long-time players, this is probably a change from what you remember. The v1 rules did not have the same limitation for units in Pillboxes. 

For LOS, this isn’t an issue. The Pillbox unit can see every Location in its CA and effectively fire into them. Except for BB8 and CC8, every hex is 0 TEM. BB8 and CC8 would automatically claim Wall Advantage over the shared hexside. This TEM could come as a surprise to your opponent. 

A nastier surprise awaits your opponent if all Hedges are Bocage. Bocage LOS differs from normal Wall/Hedge LOS. Per B9.521, a unit looking over a Bocage hexside over which it does not have Wall Advantage can only see into the next (e.g.adjacent) hex. Units in the Pillbox can fire on units in BB8/CC8 but any units in other hexes are out of LOS. A Concealed unit in DD10 could use Non-Assault Movement and move into CC8, keeping its Concealment (B9.55). Imagine some 8-3-8 Assault Engineers moving to the wall, taking the AFPh shot and then claiming Concealment in RPh since they have the Wall Advantage (B9.55).

A very nasty surprise indeed. 

A More Complex Example

Refer to Figure 2. The American unit in L3 has Wall Advantage over the German Panther. The American unit in K6 moves into K5. Who gets Wall Advantage over the K5/K4 hexside? 

According to D9.321, a unit which is denied Wall Advantage cannot claim Wall Advantage over any hexside of the same hex. When the 6-6-6 unit totes its BAZ 44 into K5, it automatically claims WA over the Panther since it is in a Mandatory Wall Advantage location. 

Now, the American unit in L3 is free to move some place else to avoid the Panther’s fire. 

This example would be even more interesting if the Hedge was a Wall or Bocage hexside. By claiming Wall Advantage over the K5/K4 hexside, the Panther would not be Hull Down to the BAZ attack. 

Deluxe Wall Advantage

Deluxe ASL has different rules for Wall Advantage. In Deluxe, units gain/maintain Wall Advantage on a hexside by hexside basis. Refer to Figure 2. The American unit, marked with a Wall Advantage counter, would have Wall Advantage over the K4/L3, L3/L4, L3/M4, and the L3/M3 hexsides. This isn’t any different from before. However, this time the Panther now has Wall Advantage over the K4/K5 hexside. If the American unit moved into K5, it would gain Wall Advantage over the J4/K5, K5/L4 and K5/L5 hexsides. Critically, it does not gain Wall Advantage over the K4/K5 hex

side so the Panther would be Hull Down to any BAZ shot. 

Conclusion

Sorry it has been a while since I have uploaded an article. I have been busy working on an article for the upcoming Journal. The back and forth with editors and people helping me to make the article better has been a little time consuming. What spare time I have had, I spent with my grandson.

In other news, I renewed my hosting license for another three years. It looks like I will write articles for the foreseeable future. If there is a topic you would like to see me cover, ask. As part of my renewal, I added a better caching system which should increase the performance of my blog. All images have are now optimized for speed too. Let me know if the performance isn’t there as I still need to tune the cache. 

Finally, from here on out, the PDF service I am offering is “best effort”. The PDF creation plugin requires custom code every time I update WordPress or any of the other plugins it interacts with. That is a very costly process. I never meant for offline reading to be anything more than a convenience. PDF articles will continue to be available, but they will not have any footnotes, the images may be improperly sized, and who knows what else might be wrong with them. I cannot continue to spend time on this issue. I hope you understand.