Gaming the war in North Africa

My favorite wargaming topic is using miniatures to game the war in North Africa. I combine them with a map, so that we can use the map for the larger scale movement. When you come in contact, you go to the table top or floor to fight with miniatures. To make it work, you need to concoct an OOB and order of arrival and departure. You need to have replacement tanks, guns, armoured cars, and other vehicles arriving, as well. We also provided a way to repair knocked out tanks and return them to action. I may eventually publish something derived from our experience gaming the North African campaign. If you don't mind making some major compromises, you can just use something as crude as Afrikakorps, from Avalon Hill. Just use standard OOBs for units and accept that it is not going to be accurate. You still know general unit sizes and numbers of vehicles. We found that a 1:4 ratio between what we used in the game with what the units actually had for armoured vehicles and guns worked quite nicely. That way, a British field artillery unit with 24-25 pounders would have 6 guns in the game. You would at least give then quad gun tractors for the six guns. If you wanted to add to that, you could, but we were busy making compromises and didn't use any more than that. An armoured regiment or battalion would have 52 tanks in real life. We gave them 13: 1 command tank and three squadrons with 4 tanks each. You can get the idea. We really did bad things and didn't really use infantry. For infantry units, they just had vehicles and guns! You can use infantry, if you want to do the right thing. Anyway, that is some quick advice.