Readme.txt to The Central Front Series.

by Bryan Barnard, May 2005.

What is the Central Front Series?
The Central Front Series was a set of games made by SPI in the early 80s and was meant to cover a World War 3 ground war in West Germany. There were 5 games made for the series: Fifth Corps, Hof Gap, BAOR, North German Plain and Donau Front.  All games were made to link together with the maps made to a 4km per hex scale, units of battalion/regiment size.  The maps were a particularly good part of the game.

However, the game designers decided to re-write the rules completely with the issue of North German Plain, with further mods made to Donau Front.  These mods also included completely different counter values from Fifth Corps/Hof Gap/BAOR modules.  They were meant to update the original games, but as far as I know they never managed to.

What's included in this release?
1) An ADC v2.15 module for the Central Front Series based on the original rules (3Mb zip)
2) Scanned in copy of the original Rules from 1981 (8Mb zip)
3) Fifth Corps Exclusive rules (5Mb zip)
4) Hof Gap Exclusive rules (5Mb zip)
5) Extracts of Rules updates included in Moves magazine #55 (1.8Mb zip)
6) Extracts of Rules updates included in Moves magazine #59 (2Mb zip)
7) Extracts of Strategy and Tactics magazine #82 for Fifth Corps. (4.5Mb zip)

What's the difference to the BAOR and Donau Front ADC modules made by Peter Dietrich (pdietr@t-online.de)?
Firstly I'd like to say a big thanks to Peter for putting the original ADC modules together.
I have taken Peter's work and extended it in the following areas:
a) put all 5 maps together, creating the Hof Gap map from my original copy and tweeking the others according to my original copies
b) enlarged the terrain and counters by 50% for each zoom level
c) edited all the counters to make them readable (especially at Level 2)
d) edited the terrain graphics
e) created new counters for new nations, eg East German, Czech, Poland, Canada, France. All counters were given values relative to the original set of rules with estimates of unit values for North German Plain and Donau Front units.

Have fun,

Bryan Barnard

bryan_barnard2002 at yahoo dot co dot uk