Most of the changes look appropriate
, especially the one that slams the door on approach I used on Turn 13 to capture Köln and Bonn on the west bank of the Rhine; Düsseldorf, Essen, and Dortmund on the east bank; and by the end of Turn 20 to reduce the Germans to 5 scattered cities in das Vaterland plus 6 in Belgium and Holland.
The only change I have very serious questions about is:
Added new house rule whereby it is strictly forbidden to stack any air unit on top of your ground or naval units under any circumstances (exception: within cities or on airbases is allowed). Otherwise, this gives the Allied player a completely unfair advantage by preventing the AI from launching naval or ground attacks.
When CIV 2 first appeared, the stacking of aircraft with ground and naval units was the only way to prevent the destruction of an entire stack by a single successful attack. Before Mercator wrote his CIVSTACK utility, if a designer wanted stackable terrain he had to laboriously add a fortress to each map square. I have played only one scen where the designer actually did this. CIVSTACK changed all that, but scens that have stackable terrain tend to have all terrain types stackable.
If you think that it is unfair for players to stack aircraft with ground units it seems equally unfair to players to make naval stacks (including pontoon bridges) almost indefensible against a single U-boat or bomber that can destroy all ships as well as all ground units aboard the ships. Or, for that matter, unguided missiles that somehow can unerringly find a convoy hundreds of kilometers away and wipe it out.
IMHO, to redress the balance you might consider either making ocean terrain stackable or allowing aircraft in naval stacks.
I also have suggestions about a couple of more things.
1. Pontoon bridges (actually ships) with very limited carrying capacity are a part of your scheme to make it difficult for players to move units across the Rhine. However, historically, once they held both sides of the river, the Allies were quickly able to build enough pontoon bridges to be able to freely move both fighting units and endless columns of supply trucks across the Rhine. The scen grossly underestimates the incredible ability of Allied Combat Engineers to rapidly build both vehicular bridges, foot bridges and even railway bridges.
The only capacity figures I have seen are for the 3 pontoon bridges that were completed within a week of the capture of the Remagen bridge. Evidently they subsequently carried 60,000 vehicles in a week. I assume that this includes both eastbound traffic as well as westbound.
One can also deduce quite a bit from the US 9th army's crossing of the Rhine north of Düsseldorf. It crossed on March 24, 1945 and 11 days later had not only formed the northern arm of the Ruhr encirclement but also advanced eastward by 200 km to well beyond Bielefeld. Clearly, engineers had rapidly built enough pontoon and other bridges to allow its 3 corps (3 corps = 11 divisions = 33 regiments = 33 units in the scen) to cross the within a week and a half.
At the end of March, the Allies had 7 armies totalling nearly 90 divisions along the Rhine. All armies crossed the river between March 22 and March 26 and by April 4 all their divisions were across the Rhine and spearheads were 125-175 km east of it. In other words, engineers had in less than two weeks built sufficient bridges to carry 250+ regiments across the river. By contrast, in the scen, the maximum units that can be moved across the Rhine per week are 36 . . . . . 25 by pontoon bridges and 11 by landing craft.
I would suggest that you at least double, and preferably triple, the carrying capacity of pontoon bridges. Otherwise there is an artificial traffic bottleneck at the Rhine.
By far the best site for extremely detailed operational, logistical and other information about the U.S. army in WW2 that I have found on the net is the United States Military Academy History of World War II
http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/
2. Do the V-1 and V-2 really belong in this scen? I was reading about the bridge at Remagen when I came across the following paragraph:
http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Last/USA-E-Last-11.html
THE U.S. ARMY IN WW2
Chapter XI A Rhine Bridge at Remagen
p. 227
From 12 through 17 March a rocket unit with weapons emplaced in the Netherlands fired eleven supersonic V-2's in the direction of the bridge, the first and only tactical use of either of the so-called German V-weapons (Vergeltungswaffen, for vengeance) during World War II. One rocket hit a house 300 yards east of the bridge, killing three American soldiers and wounding fifteen. That was the only damage. Three landed in the river not far from the bridge, five others west of the bridge, and one near Cologne; one was never located.
This started me thinking about what kind of weapons the V-1 and V-2 actually were -"vengeance" missiles with primitive guidance systems, lucky to hit within a kilometer or two of the intended target. That is why initially both were used against London and southern England. Later, V-2's attempted to attack the harbor facilities at Antwerp. These were sufficienly large targets to offer a reasonable chance of actually hitting them.
Their only significant effect on the Allied armed forces was considerable pressure to rapidly overrun the V-1 launch sites along the Pas de Calais and end the V-1 bombardment of London and SE England. They were much too inaccurate to have any tactical effect on Allied ground or naval units.
The V-1 and V-2 definitely were not the long-range precision guided tactical weapons that they are in the scen. Cruise missiles required decades of new technology and additional development before they became usable tactical weapons.
3. I didnt notice this earlier, but is it you intent that the two shell units behave like helicopters?
155mm Shell, nil, 1, 2.,0,
240mm Shell, nil, 1, 3.,0,
If you make two minor changes, they become one-shot aircraft
155mm Shell, nil, 1, 2.,1,
240mm Shell, nil, 1, 3.,1,
.