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The culminating point of the attack

Andrea di Cagno · 15 October 2026

Clausewitz called it the culminating point of the attack: the point where an offensive has used up its advantage, and what it has left is enough to hold the ground it took and no more. He wrote about it in Book VII of On War, published in 1832, the year after he died. The game is named after it.

The passage

The chapter is about a page long. In J. J. Graham’s 1873 translation the central part reads:

There are strategic attacks which have led to an immediate peace but such instances are rare; the majority, on the contrary, lead only to a point at which the forces remaining are just sufficient to maintain a defensive, and to wait for peace. Beyond that point the scale turns, there is a reaction; the violence of such a reaction is commonly much greater than the force of the blow. This we call the culminating point of the attack.

Clausewitz, On War, Book VII, chapter 5, translated by J. J. Graham (1873)

He does not present it as a failure. Most attacks reach it, in his view, and only a few end the war before they do. The trouble starts when an army keeps going past it, because the counter-attack that follows tends to be stronger than the attack was.

Why an attack runs down

The chapter before gives seven reasons why the attacker grows weaker as he advances:

  1. the occupation of the enemy’s country;
  2. the need to guard the country behind him, to keep his line of communication and his means of subsistence;
  3. losses in action and through sickness;
  4. the distance of the depots of supplies and reinforcements;
  5. sieges and blockades of fortresses;
  6. the relaxation of effort;
  7. allies dropping out.

The second and the fourth are about supply. The defender has the opposite situation: each time he falls back he gets closer to his own depots and reinforcements, so he gets stronger relative to the attacker even while he is losing ground.

Knowing where it is

Clausewitz gives no formula for finding the point. “Everything then depends on discovering the culminating point by the fine tact of judgment,” he writes, and in chapter 22 he explains why commanders tend to overshoot: an attacker can be “carried along by the stream of movement beyond the line of equilibrium, beyond the culminating point, without being aware of it”. His comparison is a horse pulling a load uphill, which finds it easier to keep going than to stop.

North Africa, 1941

A clear case is the Axis offensive in Libya in the spring of 1941. It crossed Cyrenaica in less than three weeks, reached the Egyptian border more than 1,500 km by road from Tripoli, and could neither go further nor take Tobruk, which it had left behind it. There is more in North Africa 1941: supply and the coast road.

In the game

In Culminating Point supply is counted in crates. A division carries 5 and uses up to 0.5 a day at rest, 1 on the march and 2.4 in battle. Depots send crates out by truck, and how far the trucks go depends on the depot’s level: 6 to 15 hexes of paved road, which is 90 to 225 km. Dirt roads and open country use up that reach faster.

A division beyond the reach of every depot lives on what it carries. When the last crate is gone it moves at 25% of its speed, and out of battle its strength drops to 25%. No rule in the game says where an offensive culminates. You see it on the map, usually when the leading divisions start running out.

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