Let us know what you’re having trouble with on the triplea install on the triplea thread https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/category/28/triplea-support
I will try and help. If we can’t figure it out, I’m sure Panther can :)
G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions)
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And if Russian NOs is still:
+5 if at War, for each open supply route: Persian Corridor, Pacific Route ALSIB Northern Trace, Arctic Route.
Astrakhan and Baku (both Caucasus) is also considered in the Persian Corridor, isn’t?Does the Persian Corridor is passing through Caucasus or Kazakhstan?
After a few reading, IMO both TTy should be captured to block this route, of course Persia must be friendly or Allies owned.
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Also, we don’t have Azores on the map but we gave both Gibraltar (NO for UK and Italy) and Iceland (VC) to cover somehow about the supply lines of UK.
Here is an interesting extract from a longer text on Azores:
The U-Boat Attack Was Our Worst Evil
A problem for all these schemes was that Portugal, a strict neutral, had no desire to get involved in a conflict between the great powers, firmly believing that when an elephant sneezes a mouse dies of pneumonia. To stay out of the war, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar did not want either side to use his territory as a base for offensive operations.
The Allies agreed on one thing. World War II would not be lost on any land battlefield but might be in the ship graveyard of the North Atlantic. Churchill wrote: “The U-boat attack was our worst evil. It would have been wise for the Germans to stake all upon it.”
U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull said, Our whole democratic civilization twice hung by a thread during the recent war once during the summer of 1940 after Dunkirk and the fall of France, when Britain even with her Navy might have failed to repulse a full-scale German attack across the Channel, and again during 1942, when German submarines were sinking three Allied merchant vessels for every one constructed.
In 1941, Admiral Karl Donitz’s U-boat wolfpacks sank 2.1 million tons of shipping, while submarine production was increasing from 65 to 230 a month. Ships were destroyed faster than they could be replaced. Over 3.5 percent of the tanker fleet was lost each month. To win the war, the sea lanes had to be protected and that could be accomplished only by long-range bomber patrols flying from air bases on neutral territory around and in the Atlantic. For the northern sea routes, Denmark’s Greenland and Iceland would provide that protection, and for the broad expanse of the central Atlantic, Portugal’s Azores Islands were the only possibilities. The German wolfpacks had to be contained if American convoys were to bring their precious cargoes of men and material into the war.
Combatting the U-Boat Menace With Air PowerThe outlook for the free world in 1941 appeared bleak, but by 1943 the Allies had constructed airfields along the northern perimeter of the Atlantic in Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom so ships following an extreme northerly route had aerial protection.
The bases in Greenland were made possible by an agreement signed on April 10, 1941, between the United States and Henrik de Kauffmann, recognized as the legitimate Danish ambassador by Washington but not by Copenhagen, then under German occupation. Since the United States was not at war yet, Roosevelt called on the Monroe Doctrine to justify the action, loudly protested by Hitler as an outrageous violation of neutrality.
After Iceland declared its independence from Denmark on July 7, Roosevelt sent Naval Task Force 19 made up of the Marine Corps 1st Brigade accompanied by four battleships, 13 destroyers, and eight supply ships, or more than the entire German fleet in the Atlantic, to Iceland to relieve a small British force. Once again Hitler expressed dismay that a professed neutral could take such belligerent actions. German newspapers howled, Invasion of Iceland; Roosevelt provokes war; Arm-in-arm with Bolshevik mass murderers; Roosevelt has irrevocably torn up the Monroe Doctrine.
http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/covering-the-azores-gap-in-world-war-ii/
And we are not that bad since we clearly improved the Subs, DDs and planes dynamics.
Now planes have an opportunity to attack Subs. And a Gibraltar AB will be very convenient to help TcBs chasing U-boats in Mid-Atlantic. Knowing that StBs cannot do the job after A0 C5 bomber has been introduced. -
@Imperious:
…Somebody who knows or reads about the actual war should be influencing this process, or the end result will not look well. …
Idk Baron. According to some, we might not be qualified to comment. :) Lol w/e
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@Imperious:
…Somebody who knows or reads about the actual war should be influencing this process, or the end result will not look well. …
Idk Baron. According to some, we might not be qualified to comment. :) Lol w/e
IL was a kind of wake up call.
Are we sleeping eyes wide open that we missed that much our targets?
IDK but I think it was a special day for him. He’s other comments on other threads have a similar tone. -
The Azores history is interesting, Baron Munchhausen; thanks for sharing. Some day I would like to have a mid-scale map (1942.2 / AA50) that has convoy zones, as in, you put an enemy ship or sub in the convoy zone, and the owner of the convoy zone loses money. I would be very happy to have minor Atlantic territories such as Iceland become somewhat more important because they’re convenient to use as airbases for patrolling convoy zones.
That said, the Azores are not represented on the 1942 Second Edition map by even one pixel, so it’s not obvious to me how we’re supposed to turn them into a Victory City.
Finally, if Imperious Leader wants sympathy because he had a bad day, he can ask for sympathy. If he wants to help design the game, he can offer specific, constructive suggestions. If he just wants to swing by and insult our intelligence, then I plan to ignore him. I’m not intimidated by his dire predictions about “the end result.” We’ve got some smart people working on this project, and I’m sure we can do it justice in the end.
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As you saw a few weeks ago, I posted a revised version of my Convoy Raid rules.
It had an interesting depth to AA50 and 1942.2 while making it similar to SBR for Subs: either attack or either disrupt convoy.I already spoted the main SZs as Convoy Zones and it was on my roster files.
One issue, is that I made it with low cost warships, so it left money for Subwarefare and Convoy disruption.
The other issue is about testing it thoroughly. And this is the same issue for any other kind of Convoy raiding system. It would be easier to test on Triple A, but it is a huge work to just trying to implement the G40 Convoy Zones into 1942.2However, if playing for fun in a non-competitive environnement on table top, it can be played as I did.
One National Control Marker in each given SZ, and put chips to register damage (and maxed out SZ) until players repair and damage phase. U-boats (5 IPCs) have something to do every turn. Archangel Artic SZ was quite interesting to plunder. Once, on AA50, Russia was able to launch a Destroyer (A2 D2 at 6 IPCs) to get ride of 2 u-boats which were relentlessly harrassing his Convoy SZ (losing 4 IPCs each turn): epic.http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=39163.msg1618926#msg1618926
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I didn’t take it as an insult. Just a suggestion (perhaps sardonically framed) that I haven’t been clear enough in articulating what I think the aim of adding more VCs should be.
Every time an A&A game has come out since Revised, I hear people make the same lament. That the game has too few VCs, and that if only a couple more were added then maybe the game would work. Or that of the VCs which are included, that half are largely irrelevant to the gameplay, or only relevant in terms of the capital dynamic etc.
My thought here is that, instead trying to be conservative with numbers, why not try to be more radical for a change? Instead of adding just one or two VC, add 10 or 20. Because the more VTs you have over all, the more flexibility you have to justify the inclusion of one place over another.
If every VC is a Capital, there isn’t much room to opperate. Global added only 1 VC (in Cairo) compared to the 18 in AA50, despite a map which is more than double the size.
I actually liked the VC spread in AA50. It had a real goldilocks feel to it, like just right for the scale of the map. Global by contrast feels like it is a bit shortchanged. So my thought was, if you have twice as many territories, why not twice as many VCs. That way you can add a TT like Truk or Chongqing and people are less likely to balk at the idea, because it’s not so much of an outlier.
That’s why I suggested we just pick a number that seemed to scale appropriately with the size of the map, and just start listing potential candidates. The door isn’t shut on this one yet. If there are arguments to be made or historical digressions that will better inform the choices, I’m all ears.
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@Imperious:
…Somebody who knows or reads about the actual war should be influencing this process, or the end result will not look well. …
Idk Baron. According to some, we might not be qualified to comment. :) Lol w/e
Yeah, lol.
@Baron:
IL was a kind of wake up call.
Are we sleeping eyes wide open that we missed that much our targets?
IDK but I think it was a special day for him. He’s other comments on other threads have a similar tone.IL’s suggestions are all personal pet-peeves for him. His maps include emphasis on Caucasus and DEI Oil areas and for some reason he attaches special significance to small island chains like the Maldives and Azores.
As you guys have already said, both Caucasus (Baku) and DEI regions are heavily incentivized as-is. It would be redundant and probably inappropriate to put even more money on the line in each territory. If you had a VC for Baku, that would be 2 IPCs for the territory, 2 for the VC and 5 more for a NO = 9 IPCs. That’s as much as a capital.
IMO, the Maldives and Azores are unnecessary. I don’t believe the game is impacted in any way by having or not having them. Both are in such proximity to significant landmasses that they are hardly effective. Maldives in particular. The Azores could be occasionally useful in SZ 103 (G40), but the Allies already have two territories (Iceland and Gibraltar) on which to land fighters when ferrying across the Atlantic. Plus, far as I can tell, the Azores were not actually used by the Allies until 1943, so they would need to be pro-Allied Neutral to start the game. Not that that’s a big deal.
Casablanca should be a VC before Dakar and if we list Gibraltar as a VC then I am not sure we need Casablanca. And we have Freetown still, so that makes it more moot.
His aims are fine, but I don’t believe they are necessary additions.
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One thing I learned about Rostov-on-Don and Baku is that Russia would have make sure they become unexploitable for a long time when Whermarcht get hands on it.
They fell up the digging holes with concrete when leaving Rostov oil field.
And if Baku was reached, it have had received the same treatment or put in fire.
So it would have take months to make it useful for Germany.
Meaning the main impact was to shot off oil access to Russia.
Germany would never get richer with it. -
Tier 1: What are the victory conditions at their most fundamental level?
Concession or Sudden Death. While I think that there are definitely other options than these two, such as victory charts with specific goals by nation or hard limits by game round, if going on traditional A&A, those are the two we have seen. Concession or sudden death (whether based on VCs or total IPCs) is basically what we were given with Axis and Allies. Anything substantially different, and I’m not sure the gameplay would really be recognizeable.
Maybe I should have explained more clearly what I meant by “What are the victory conditions at their most fundamental level?” because, when I used the phrase “fundamental level” I wasn’t looking for an answer so broad and generic that it’s essentially meaningless. “Concession or Sudden Death” basically translates as “When one side gives up or when one side loses,” which doesn’t answer the question because the same answer could apply to thousands of other games. What I should perhaps have said was “What are the victory conditions at their most fundamental level, explained in such a way that it’s clear from the answer that what is being described is a specific version (OOB or house-ruled) of a specific edition (1940, 1942, etc.) of an Axis and Allies board game (as opposed some other game, like Monopoly), and which makes it clear exactly what goals the players should be pursuing during the course of play.” That phrasing is ridiculously long, but I’m simply trying to explain that “Concession or Sudden Death” in and of itself provides no guidance to an A&A player about what he should be doing during play, and says nothing about what the game’s victory conditions are in terms that are both concise and concrete.
Let’s take Monopoly as an example. The fundamental goal of the game is to land on and purchase enough of the board’s real estate properties to bankrupt all the other players.
Now let’s look at Global 1940. What is each team trying to achieve? A military victory in which the enemy forces are destroyed? An economic victory in which one side controls vastly more IPCs than the other? A territorial victory in which one side controls a vastly greater number of territories than the other? A numerical political victory in which one side controls a large number of Victory Cities? A symbolic political victory in which one side controls a few very specific but highly important Victory Cities? A combination of some (or all) of these achievements? A total victory in which, at its most extreme, all of these conditions are met to a 100% degree, with one of the two enemy coalitons completely wiped off the game map in every respect? A less-than-total victory in which some or all of these goals are partially achieved? If so, to what degree do they have to be achieved in order for one side to proclaim a victory? Can one side proclaim a victory when it has achieved certain benchmarks, even if the enemy coalition insists that it’s still willing to fight? Are the OOB rules completely satisfactory in all of these regards? If yes, then it follows that no house rule adjustments should be contemplated which alter these fundamental goals and victory conditions. If no, then the question becomes: which of these fundamental goals and victory conditions should be altered (and in what way) to produce a more satisfactory game?
That’s what I was trying to get at when I talked about Tier 1 issues. It’s also why I relegated the choice of specific VCs to Tier 3 rather than Tier 1. Take, as specific example, the hypothetical question “Should San Diego – the site of a major US naval base – be added to the Global 1940 map as a VC?” Look at all the questions in the previous paragraph and ask yourself: would a Yes answer or a No answer to the San Diego question provide a solid, relevant answer to any of those other questons? My feeling is that it would not, because it would be putting the proverbial cart before the proverbial horse. On the other hand, if one starts by answering clearly all those preliminary questions (in other words, putting the horse before the cart), then answering the San Diego question becomes easy because one knows exactly on what basis the yes/no design decision about San Diego needs to be made.
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Thanks CWO Marc,
I better understand and your questions are good ones, too?It will make us philosophizing at one stage or an other about goal what is the more interesting or historical or easier to attest.
Actually we remained in a fuzzy area between OOB usual playing goal and something more tangible and less questionable.
From what I observed and experienced, people plays until one main axis capital is conquered or called by a prediction call about the more plausible outcome.
I know that using more VCs can eventually be a way to determine by sheer number which side is winning.
My actual hope and expectations is that it will make easier and clearer the call: is it a draw, is it a win?
But, your right, why not economical? , most income? geographical? , strategic VCs per theater, sets of strategic goals accomplished (a la YG)? Per side? Per Power?One day or an other your tier 1 question need to be adress.
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@CWO:
Now let’s look at Global 1940. What is each team trying to achieve? A military victory in which the enemy forces are destroyed? An economic victory in which one side controls vastly more IPCs than the other? A territorial victory in which one side controls a vastly greater number of territories than the other? A numerical political victory in which one side controls a large number of Victory Cities? A symbolic political victory in which one side controls a few very specific but highly important Victory Cities? A combination of some (or all) of these achievements? A total victory in which, at its most extreme, all of these conditions are met to a 100% degree, with one of the two enemy coalitons completely wiped off the game map in every respect? A less-than-total victory in which some or all of these goals are partially achieved? If so, to what degree do they have to be achieved in order for one side to proclaim a victory? Can one side proclaim a victory when it has achieved certain benchmarks, even if the enemy coalition insists that it’s still willing to fight? Are the OOB rules completely satisfactory in all of these regards? If yes, then it follows that no house rule adjustments should be contemplated which alter these fundamental goals and victory conditions. If no, then the question becomes: which of these fundamental goals and victory conditions should be altered (and in what way) to produce a more satisfactory game?
I was trying to get at this same issue a few pages back and it ended up falling into the rest of the extended VC discussion:
Yet going JCC is both economic and strategic. Ultimately, the game is won by taking out the enemy, not amassing money. Money is critical, but it is a means to an end. You have to balance gaining money with complex strategic considerations such as blocking enemies, attacking targets of opportunity, managing your timetable of objectives, supporting your allies, solidifying positions, increasing range of motion, etc… Japan moving farther into the Pacific allows for few of these considerations because, as you point out below, there are no allies to support and generally no one to oppose you. Unless the United States decides to fight Japan in the Pacific, you aren’t accomplishing anything of worth to move the game towards its final conclusion. Even if the US fights Japan in the Pacific, the best you have done is distract them from Germany rather than move to take physical objectives that can end the war. Japan can control almost half the world and be an economic power, but if Germany can’t crack Moscow, the game is over. Japan’s success is revealed to have been pointless. I have seen it multiple times, as I am sure you all have, albeit with less team-oriented players.
Regarding Victory Conditions, I want to pose a couple questions. There is no right or wrong answer, I just want to see what people think or how they play the game.
Is an Axis victory acceptable or legitimate if they do not take at least one of the 3 major Allied Capitals? (Do you think your Allied opponent would feel cheated in that he was not truly defeated and still had the ability to continue fighting and/or eventually win the game?)
OOB rules state that the Allies win by taking all 3 Axis Capitals. If the Allies took either Berlin or Tokyo (not both) and held the big 3 Allied Capitals, is that enough to declare Allied victory?
Should the Allies have have a victory condition in which they do not have to take either Berlin or Tokyo to win the game?
At this point I am just putting stream-of-consciousness into words. I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are the core of the game. I can tell you what I think and how people I know normally play.
There is no such thing as a minor victory. The only victory cities that really matter are Tokyo, Berlin, Washington, Moscow and London. Maybe that is a holdover from starting out on Revised. If the the Allies take either Berlin or Tokyo, and retain their own capitals, the Allies win. If the Axis take any of the Allied capitals (and hold it more than one turn, while keeping their own), game over; Axis win. Most times victory is projected via the eye test.
This doesn’t go along with the rule book exactly, but it works for person-to-person play. You can examine the board, unit placements, turns, income and at a certain point see who is going to win. We all can do that, in everything but the tightest of games.
I asked the questions above because I think I may need to let go of some habits and defaulting to historical accuracy in order to allow the game to be more dynamic. I think the root cause of sameness among games is that victory is only considered legitimate if one of the enemy capitals are taken. This necessarily focuses efforts toward those goals. Most often this devolves into a Germany (and Japan) vs USSR game decision, principally because they already border each other. If a type of minor victory can be thought of as legitimate by all parties (not taking capitals to win), then I think it will open a lot of strategic possibilities and alternate ‘theaters of operation’ within the game.
It is true that we need to define the objective of the game before we can detail how to achieve the objective. I don’t believe we have layed that out in an explicit fashion as yet. In the above statements, I was trying to drive at and state how I tend to view victory conditions and also how I think many other people see them. Like Baron said, I am of the mind that most people do not use VCs as they are intended in OOB rules. Nobody that I know plays the game with strategy to capture and hold a certain number of Victory Cities to win. Overarching intentions are to take down one of the major 5 capitals. This is a significant and often mortal blow to one side. The rules also call for the taking of at least one of your enemies capitals to win; all focus is directed to that because the shortest path to victory is to eliminate your enemy’s center of income and production rather than wage an endless war over peripheral objectives (VCs). You can argue if that is right or not, but it is the way I believe everyone plays. So we must consider the de facto rules when the de jure rules are simply ignored.
If the Allies take Berlin, is Japan going to fight on? No, because at that point it is 3 against 1 and Japan cannot win. If the Axis take the Moscow, are the Allies going to fight on? Maybe, if the occupation force is weak and the Allies can retake it. But if the USSR has lost virtually all its units in the process and Germany is only going to hold it longer, then probably not. The game effectively becomes 3 (Axis) vs 2 (Allies) with the Axis controlling 65-80% of the earth’s land mass.
Point being capitals are the most important territories in the game as it stands. I don’t think people believe in a Victory condition in which the ‘losing’ side is still able to fight and potentially turn the tide. If the new VCs we propose are going to take root as worthwhile objectives in and of themselves, people’s viewpoint of ‘what is victory’ probably needs to be changed. Including my own.
@CWO:
That’s what I was trying to get at when I talked about Tier 1 issues. It’s also why I relegated the choice of specific VCs to Tier 3 rather than Tier 1. Take, as specific example, the hypothetical question “Should San Diego – the site of a major US naval base – be added to the Global 1940 map as a VC?” Look at all the questions in the previous paragraph and ask yourself: would a Yes answer or a No answer to the San Diego question provide a solid, relevant answer to any of those other questons? My feeling is that it would not, because it would be putting the proverbial cart before the proverbial horse. On the other hand, if one starts by answering clearly all those preliminary questions (in other words, putting the horse before the cart), then answering the San Diego question becomes easy because one knows exactly on what basis the yes/no design decision about San Diego needs to be made.
This is a poor example. If we are operating under the premise that there is only one VC per territory, as we all have been, then it simply doesn’t matter. San Francisco already is a VC. So whether it is SF or SD is just an argument about which should be represented. You have the same situation in many territories. Shouldn’t NYC be a VC? Or Boston? Or Frankfurt or Hamburg? Or Osaka or Kyoto or Sendai or Yokohama…? They are all large and important cities for their respective countries, but they are all in the same territory as one another. You just have to pick one, doesn’t really matter which.
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Nobody that I know plays the game with strategy to capture and hold a certain number of Victory Cities to win. Overarching intentions are to take down one of the major 5 capitals. This is a significant and often mortal blow to one side. The rules also call for the taking of at least one of your enemies capitals to win; all focus is directed to that because the shortest path to victory is to eliminate your enemy’s center of income and production rather than wage an endless war over peripheral objectives (VCs). You can argue if that is right or not, but it is the way I believe everyone plays. So we must consider the de facto rules when the de jure rules are simply ignored.
You nailed it right Hoffman.
I don’t think Redesign intent is to duplicate that good old Classic time goal: “Capture one enemy Capital while keeping yours” which influenced many other A&A versions.IMO, I believe adding a lot of VCs with an economical values will somehow break this de facto rule. I hope that at some point, a critical number of VCs will, by itself and NOs helping, provide such an influx of production that more your side get the more you can influence the outcome.
Of course, russian front will not disappear. Both Berlin and Moscow will be face-to-face. But Moscow will be a goal (attacking center) amongst two others: taking northern VCs or Southern VCs? And taking them would still seriously hampered russian war effort.However, if a Warchest is activated with VCs, a kind of 1 IPC per VC, other Allies (going well elsewhere) may use all their warchest (lend-lease) money to give an additional help to Moscow.
So, if VCs owned give for each country 1 IPC and at the end of round phase another 1 IPC in warchest, VCs become very interesting lever to change the course of events in a given theater.
Even if we can count them, my wish would be that at a certain point this number translate in real combat units on board, in such a way that both, actually, make easy the assesment about which side is the winner.
Not just an abstract number such as x VCs in ETO or y VCs in PTO which may seems weird if a lot of units on both side are still unengaged to make the decisive conclusion.
A kind of: after x VCs in ETO for a second end of round warchest balance sheet, the opposing side see on the board that their situation is virtually hopeless.Probably Warchest will contribute to Capital conquest, and why not if it makes clear that a Capital will be sooner or later overwhelmed because one side lose too much VCs (secondary targets) to the other side.
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This is a poor example. If we are operating under the premise that there is only one VC per territory, as we all have been, then it simply doesn’t matter. San Francisco already is a VC. So whether it is SF or SD is just an argument about which should be represented. You have the same situation in many territories. Shouldn’t NYC be a VC? Or Boston? Or Frankfurt or Hamburg? Or Osaka or Kyoto or Sendai or Yokohama…? They are all large and important cities for their respective countries, but they are all in the same territory as one another. You just have to pick one, doesn’t really matter which.
Point taken. I wasn’t looking at the game map when I was typing, so it didn’t occur to me that my made-up example of San Diego was in the same territory as an existing VC. My intention wasn’t to discuss a case in which an extra VC was being contemplated for addition to a territory which already had one. The point I was trying to make was that game design decisions that go from general principles to specific example are sometimes easier than going in the other direction.
Good points also about players focussing on what constitutes a mortal blow, and what constitutes a means to an end, which ties in nicely with what I was saying about fundamental victory conditions. A rough parallel would be Mahan’s theories of naval warfare, which included the precept that destroying the enemy’s capital ships amount to winning the war, and that you should therefore focus everything on that primary objective and ignore pretty much everything else. Similarly, there was a famous chess game (I forget who it involved) in which one player made a number of sacrifices, including at one point the spectacular sacrifice of his Queen, yet won the game because all of his actions were directed at seeking positional advantages and achieving a checkmate, not at capturing his opponents’ men or preserving his own men.
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@CWO:
This is a poor example. If we are operating under the premise that there is only one VC per territory, as we all have been, then it simply doesn’t matter. San Francisco already is a VC. So whether it is SF or SD is just an argument about which should be represented. You have the same situation in many territories. Shouldn’t NYC be a VC? Or Boston? Or Frankfurt or Hamburg? Or Osaka or Kyoto or Sendai or Yokohama…? They are all large and important cities for their respective countries, but they are all in the same territory as one another. You just have to pick one, doesn’t really matter which.
Point taken. I wasn’t looking at the game map when I was typing, so it didn’t occur to me that my made-up example of San Diego was in the same territory as an existing VC. My intention wasn’t to discuss a case in which an extra VC was being contemplated for addition to a territory which already had one. The point I was trying to make was that game design decisions that go from general principles to specific example are sometimes easier than going in the other direction.
Good points also about players focussing on what constitutes a mortal blow, and what constitutes a means to an end, which ties in nicely with what I was saying about fundamental victory conditions. A rough parallel would be Mahan’s theories of naval warfare, which included the precept that destroying the enemy’s capital ships amount to winning the war, and that you should therefore focus everything on that primary objective and ignore pretty much everything else. Similarly, there was a famous chess game (I forget who it involved) in which one player made a number of sacrifices, including at one point the spectacular sacrifice of his Queen, yet won the game because all of his actions were directed at seeking positional advantages and achieving a checkmate, not at capturing his opponents’ men or preserving his own men.
My apologies for coming off a little strong there. Wasn’t my intention. I figured you actually meant to use a more appropriate example.
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My apologies for coming off a little strong there. Wasn’t my intention. I figured you actually meant to use a more appropriate example.
No offense taken. If I’d realized that my example put 2 VCs in the same territory, I’d have picked a different city. San Diego came to mind because of my interest in naval history, and because I’ve been there; my visit was coincidentally when the USS Midway was brought over to the pier when she now resides as a museum ship, an event which I got to watch and which was a great treat. I still have a souvenir baseball cap somewhere in my closet.
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I did not intend to provide a meaningless answer there, appologies if it seemed that way haha. But many ideas have been put forth at various points suggesting potential alternative systems, such as specific charts or token systems, where the game is called based on specific objectives being met by either team or by a particular nation on the team, or within a given time/round limit. Implicit here was the suggestion that these recent proposals to add more VCs, are just assuming a more general approach to Winning/Losing that we see OOB. Not trying to articulate anything radically new or unfamiliar. Basically trying to be more descriptive than prescriptive, and figuring that we are all familiar by now with how the OOB games tend to resolve. So concession or sudden death was just a shorthand.
In the OOB games, by “concession” I meant when one side is overwhelmed, economically or in total unit value or production capacity, to the point where they feel they can no longer reasonably recover or put the opponent in a similar position by continuing.
By sudden death I meant the sort of running tally of total VCs where the game ends automatically once a certain number is reached. In this case many of the considerations above for games played till concession may not be relevant, as the only thing that matters is who controls X number of VCs at the end of the game round.
Traditionally VCs have only been involved with the later sort of game. What I was trying to make clear above is that I want them to be able to play a part in the former sort of game as well. That’s why attaching an economic value to them is important, because without this I think they only support the sudden death concept and not the concession concept.
Since the introduction of VCs, the waters have become somewhat muddied relative to previous editions. Technically right now there is only one way to officially “win”, and that is the political victory you described above. In both Global and 1942.2 the situation is much the same.
“A numerical political victory in which one side controls a large number of Victory Cities”
In G40 terms, that one side is Axis, and the game comes down to whether Axis can achieve it in a reasonable amount of play time, or whether Allies can prevent this and force an effective stalemate. This creates a kind of weird hybrid situation, where only one side can make a technical sudden death win, or else the game reverts to concession.
In 1942.2 terms the situation is somewhat better, because at least here both sides have a number which can be reached for sudden death. But again with the spread being very narrow, it often amounts to the same thing, where the game reverts to a win by concession.
To me the victory by concession system, and the foundational goals involved there, are not all that complicated really. It looks pretty similar going back to Classic, and involves all those things mentioned above.
“A military victory in which the enemy forces are destroyed”
“An economic victory in which one side controls vastly more IPCs than the other”
“A territorial victory in which one side controls a vastly greater number of territories than the other”And of course with capital capture…
“A symbolic political victory in which one side controls a few very specific but highly important Victory Cities.”Though this last is not really symbolic, because it is so consequential for the military and economic factors just mentioned. And because controlling a capital dramatically increases your ability to expand your territory and deny it to the opponent.
What I have been trying to drive at I suppose, is just a simple way to make the “numerical political” victory, fall more in line with these others. If that makes sense?
I kind of liked the hypothetical involving San Diego, maybe because I used to live there for many years back when I was an Aztec haha.
:-DBut yeah highlights what I was trying to say about the Territory being more significant than the city, if there is only on VC per territory.
Functionally all a VC does, in gameplay terms, is to indicate the territory involved. So if, instead of Western US, you had two tiles like Northern California and Southern California, then maybe it makes sense to choose San Diego or LA for the southern one. But right now there is only one tile Western US. And there it doesn’t really matter (other than for educational purposes) whether we make the VC San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Sacramento, the San Joaquin Oil fields etc. because those all fall within the scope of the same tile.
That’s why I wanted a list focusing on Territories first rather than cities. And also why I think VT (victory territory) is a more useful shorthand.
It allows you to include for example Baku or Astrakhan, within the same VT of Caucasus, or same deal with places like Romania between the political capital and areas with natural resource concentrations, so we don’t have to split hairs. Just figure out which tiles are the most relevant to the history, without losing sight of the main purpose of including them in this first place, which is to enhance the gameplay.
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RUSSIA:
+5 if not at war with Japan.
+2 for Axis territories under Soviet control.
+5 if at War, for each open supply route: Persian Corridor, Pacific Route ALSIB Northern Trace, Arctic Route.What does include Artic Route?
Archangel, for sure, does Murmansk port is covered by Novgorod and Karelia, or only Karelia?
Or to shut off Artic Route, Germany must hold both Archangel and Karelia?About NOs, I think we might at least consider that point of Simon33 and oysteilo, to improve player’s experience while playing Russia.
RegularKid provides an argument which work inside Balancing mode focus but for Redesign it is not related:1) I want to reverse the Novgorod bonus to be a bonus for the USSR holding it rather than a bonus for Germany. Ties in with the KV-1 Tank factory there the way I see it.
2) USSR lend lease routes - do the Persian and Siberian routes have historic precedent? Particularly the former one through those mountainous regions. The latter one I guess had the Trans Siberian railway. Perhaps some stuff went that way.
3) West Indian ocean free of Axis subs - this is a bit too much of a gift for the Calcutta economy IMHO.
4) East Pacific Islands ANZAC NO: I think it is too easy to holdYou’re aware of my leaning that Marines are overpowered - although they are arguably expensive. At least disallowing bombardment support from a marine. Only inf/art/mec/tanks should count IMO.
Those are probably my main thoughts. I might have a bit more if I think of it.
Hey Simon,
Addressing points in turn:
1. Interesting historical point, but the changes under consideration now for BM are to bolster Axis (ever so slightly) rather than to bolster Allies (who already have a slight win advantage in league stats). This proposed change would help Allies, so its probably off the table, despite its historical justification.
2. USSR Lend Lease Routes - YES! there were three major lend-lease routes into Russia (its a little annoying that classic G40 only represents one). You can read about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the_USSR. Delivery was via the Arctic Convoys (i.e., Karelia), the Persian Corridor, and the Pacific Route.Regarding the Persian Corridor specifically, because the other two routes were in the north, “[t]his latter route became the only viable, all-weather route to be developed to supply the nearly insatiable Russian needs.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Route
And the Pacific Route remained an important channel for US aid to China, even though it ran straight through the Sea of Japan. As wiki explains, “Even though Japan had been at war with the USA since December 1941, it was anxious to preserve good relations with the USSR, and, despite German complaints, usually allowed Soviet ships to sail between the USA and Russia’s Pacific ports unmolested. . . . As a result, during most of the war the Pacific Route became the safest path between the USA and the USSR.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Route).
3. While the “no subs in Western Indian Ocean” NO is difficult or inconvenient to contest early game, it isn’t insurmountable for Axis. Certainly by mid and late game, when the Axis moves in on Persia, the objective is readily negated. The point of the objective (in addition to bolstering India’s ability to delay India crush) is to represent the substantial submarine activity that occurred in the Indian ocean, including by the Kriegsmarine Monsun Gruppe (Naval Monsoon Group). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_in_World_War_II
4. Definitely hard to hold. Wish it could be a little easier.
I don’t know how to change game phase order. And yes it is possible to make it so you collect income only on the territories held at the start of a turn.
The way I read simon’s idea about Leningrad/Novgorod is that he would like to see a war objective for Russia that they can fight over. I totally agree with this, but I am not sure what it should be. Russia should also have war objective(s) they realistically can meet. I have mentioned this in the past and I still think this is the poorest change in BM
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Just thinking more on Adam’s point, is there any kind of NAP that actually works in A&A, without totally hamstring’ng the gameplay in the process, or which isn’t so weak that it’s inevitably broken as a matter of course? I mean I’ve looked at many of the BM saves in the league thread since it launched, and the Russia/Japan situation seems to still deteriorate pretty regularly. It’s obviously not as bad as OOB, because of other things going on, but still see similar breakdown develop in the midgame. Certainly the OOB NAP is nowhere near strong enough to deter Russia from saying “screw it” right out the gate.
What if the DoW phase occurred before unit purchase?
Then the violator of the NAP could get hit with a penalty at purchase rather than collect income. Would that solve the issue of having the penalty gamed before capital collapse?
Seems like a lot, just to get one thing working correctly, but if it doesn’t impact the game substantially in any other way, maybe it works? Similar to switching the combat movement phase to be before purchase/combat proper with no real effect.
I found the explanation about how BM is doing the incentive to not attack Japan or Russia:
Amur is a contestable objective sort of - Japan has to compromise to contest it. If the Persian and Northern routes are open, they have to allow 4IPC of objective to stop 2IPC and also activate Mongolia. This is part of what I dislike about the 2IPC bonus per route for USSR if Japan DOWs on USSR.
What you dislike about the 2PU-per-route bonus is precisely the reason it was added–it creates a logical in-game disincentive for an ahistorical outcome (i.e., Japan declaring war on Russia). Of course, it doesn’t force the historical outcome, but it creates an in-game justification for it.
I also tend to think that BM has enough NOs, and am reluctant to add more.
Why is the historical outcome the correct outcome? Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying?
I still can’t see the logic of varying the bonus based on who DOW’s.
No, I don’t mean that the historical outcomes are the “correct” ones. What i mean is that the game conditions should be such that there is a logical reason for events to unfold in the historical way (even if there are plenty of opportunities and reasons from the game to divert from history). In vanilla G40, what reason is there for Russia to follow the historical path of delaying the DOW against Japan until the end of the war? None. The DOW almost always happens in the first round, cuz “why not?” The historical choice is not motivated at all.
The logic of varying the Lend-Lease NO based on who DOWs: If Russia could double its Lend Lease aid simply by declaring war on Japan, Russia would always declare war on Japan at the earliest opportunity. I think an argument could be made that the urgency of Lend Lease would be greater if Russia were dragged into a two-front war by Japanese aggression, than if Russia elected to open a second front on its own initiative
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So what does BM give USSR as lend lease each turn? 6 IPCs?
But if USSR declares war on Japan, they lose 2 IPCs per turn such that they only get 4?
I am not sure I understand the whole NAP/Lend Lease rule for BM.
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