The Importance of Rivers

[Admiral_Thrawn]

Who hasn’t watched a WWII movie where they have to capture, build, or destroy a bridge? The importance of rivers and other natural barriers is very important to strategic and tactical warfare. Probably the most important natural barrier in WWII was the Rhine River. The natural defense for Germany. I have read about the historical edition of Axis and Allies people have been working on and I don’t know everything you have included. I think that the importance of large rivers to the the game would be prudent. This would be a map and rule change and I don’t know exactly how it would work, but I have been thinking about it.

Any ideas if this should be included and how it would work?

[Jennifer]

Yes.  But you need a map three times as big, twice as detailed, with a hexagonal over lay and double the territories.

[Admiral_Thrawn]

I don’t think the map would have to be that much bigger. Perhaps bonuses for defenders if the attacker crosses the rhine(or other large river)

[tekkyy]

so more detailed map or just a small defence bonus on first round of combat or something?

[ajgundam5]

this is true but there are tons of rivers all over the world and in WWII maybe there was no big war fought in N. america but in A & A however rare it is possible and yes the board would have to be huge

[theduke]

I hate to say something can’t be done. You might be able to do it, but it would probably add too much complexity for what it will be bringing to the game. Bridges/rivers were very important in WWII tactics, but it does seem very hard to introduce in the game.

Here’s an idea (forgetting about complexity for a moment), have a list of historical “bottlenecks” during WWII. I use the general term bottlenecks to refer to any key points such as bridges, mountain passes, etc… Each bottleneck connects 2 different territories. Western Europe and Germany are connected by the Rhine, for example. At the start of the game, all bottlenecks are “open”, that is that there is no penalty for moving between the respective connected territories (in this case W. Europe to Germany and vise versa). During a player’s turn who controls at least one of those 2 territories may destroy the bottleneck (i.e. blow the bridge/ mountain pass road, etc…). Until the bottleneck is repaired (cost of 1 IPC and 1 full turn to build maybe? I don’t know, we can discuss that later.), attacking units have some penalty (such as -1 attack strength) when moving from 1 of the territories to the other (i.e. moving from W. Europe to Germany or vise versa).

Maybe other bottlenecks could include the Burma Road, the Alps (connects Southern and Western Europe), Yellow River (connects China and Manchuria), etc…

This idea needs some work but it’s not too bad for coming up with it on the fly like that, right?

[Imperious Leader]

Yea and add the Pripyet Marshes in white russia. It would basically be another space to make it impossible to feed units from north south axis of belorussia and ukraine in one move. You want to also add a river between western europe and germany as a river (rhine), and rivers between balkans/ukraine ( dniper)  and ukraine /caucasus (volga), another river from germany to eastern ( vistula), a mountain pass between southern europe and germany ( Brenner pass-  max 3 units per turn can pass) and another between western europe and southern europe ( max 6 units can pass).

Of course the map will be bastardized with all this and thats why it should not be done in the first place. But thats a starting point at least to begin to do that.

[ajgundam5]

it could probably be done if there was a new computer version made

[Admiral_Thrawn]

I was thinking maybe this would be more viable in the smaller scale A&A Games. Like D-Day and Battle of the Bulge and future games.

[Imperious Leader]

Yes thats possible, but not in the “global” games. In bulge only the Meuse and the Our river formed any major obstacle for movement, other than that Tanks could have made it in the more shallow rivers, or they were frozen over. A Market Garden game or a Stalingrad game would need terrain as a major consideration. That much is correct

[tekkyy]

theduke’s idea of bottleneck between countries is interesting.

But overall it might not be a good idea. You need to take into account of size and time.

[Crapgame]

We captured the effect of major rivers and terrain in our game - which takes some aspects from A&A and several more complext games
www.ww2wargame.com
but, yes the map is about 3 times as large and twice as detailed.  I think you need this kind of scale to have meaningful river and terrain effects for a WW game.

[Imperious Leader]

Yes i own that game. I bought the first $1,000 copy of it. Problem is the southern half of the world is missing.

Rivers work in that game because it has many more territories, Revised is like a very basic map.