I was just watching a video on Viet Nam and came across an interesting thing that relates a bit to the Twilight War.
(Note that this does not cover every area and time but is simply a broad generalisation.)
After about '68 the Viet Cong (not the NVA) switched tactics. Prior to this they'd been fighting large unit actions and encounters would be in the nature of battles that might run up to days of combat. However the preponderance of US firepower meant that this was a losing proposition. While some of the hard-fought battles might cause large US losses in some cases usually they'd inevitably lose more men and materiel the VC couldn't afford. After '68 they shifted to ambushes to fight an attritional war where combat rarely took longer than ten minutes. Before the US troops could marshal their support the VC would simply withdraw.
This had a strange effect on infantry fighting in that it totally destroyed any ability to manouevre. The US troops would go to ground, call in airstrikes or artillery and then by the time they'd got that sorted the fighting was over. The infantry rarely shifted position from when they'd first been hit. In the vast majority of cases the skilled US infantry didn't flank, didn't suppress and envelope or any of the advanced infantry fighting they'd been taught. They just shot back until the shells landed and then cautiously went over to see if they'd hit anyone. It was a major paradigm shift in combat and many of the soldiers had to relearn the fighting they had to do.
Now, to get to Twilight 2000.
This major shift in tactics will probably happen quite a few times and at varying times in different places. A GM who wanted to have different areas of the war fighting different types of fighting could do so. For instance, during The Siege of Warsaw you might see positional fighting with trenches, barbed wire, mines and artillery duels much like in The Second World War at The Siege of Sevastopol. In my campaign the siege is unsuccessful and NATO never gets into the city but if they did then you shift to the awful 'rattenkrieg' ('rat war') of Stalingrad where there's no armour to be seen and you can fight for days for three rooms of a ruined building while the civilians huddle in the basement. However on the river banks of the Vistula there might be the Mekong Delta hit-and-run tactics mentioned above and between there and the Oder on the plains you might see vehicle manouevre warfare with sweeping movements of mobile mechanised units.
Player characters moving between areas should be confronted with new types of fighting suited to the tactical realities of the areas. Trying to add flavour this way I think would start to differentiate between player backgrounds and experiences. One player might be a survivor of the trenches, another a brown water patroller and yet another a cavalry soldier as an example.
I don't recommend penalising players for being 'out of area' but I do recommend giving players a bonus for a specialty. A point on their initiative and cool for being in a combat situation they're (undoubtedly unwillingly) accustomed to might give a nice touch of difference.
Also this means that players can specialise in something they do quite a lot and the GM can promote their area of expertise. The specialist character might get Idea Rolls to come up with a helpful tactic if they're stuck ('You remember at Warsaw you crawled through a land drain and came out behind the enemy in a similar situation'). I'd use this cautiously as players resent the GM steering their players, it can make them feel a bit like a passenger in the game. But if they don't know what 'mouse-holing' is or what a flank sweep is then I can't see the harm with the GM providing an option.
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