Re: Field Marshal Games Pieces Project Discussion thread

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@The-Janus said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:

an East & West mod, for RISK. […] the “Reinvention” version of RISK is the one I ended up purchasing.

Part One:

RISK-isms

Probably the first thing to address in any “team game” modification to RISK is how to determine who gets credit for controlling the continents. As RISK-isms go, if you aren’t going to include continents as a mechanic, why even bother? The iteration of the rules that I settled on is pretty simple:

if NATO controls North America or South America, those bonuses go to the US if NATO controls Europe or Africa, those bonuses go to WE if NATO controls Asia or Australia, those bonuses go to the UK

The other thing to address in a 3v1 is some measures to prevent the USSR from just getting dogpiled. The solution I came up with is that NATO can only attack from territories they have controlled from the start of their turn. So, the US could attack from Alaska to Kamchatka, but could not continue attacking from Kamchatka on that turn.

With the ‘Reinvention’ version of the rules, cities and capitols increase the overall production capability on the board, but I felt a few more changes were necessary. When totaling up territories, the USSR does not divide their value by 3 (loosely meant to simulate 2-IPC infantry). Also, the “minimum 3 armies” rule is ignored. So for example, if your territory total as NATO is 6, 7, or 8 you would only get 2 armies.

NATO can reinforce (i.e. non-combat move) through each others’ territories, but cannot share territories. So, for example, US troops in Alaska could reinforce through the Northwest Territories to Greenland or Iceland; they cannot end in the UK or Western Europe.

Reinvention-isms

So the real big additions in this version of RISK are cities and capitols.
Cities effectively increase the “IPC value” of a territory; when drafting troops, a city counts the same as 1 additional territory (i.e. 1/3rd of an army, for NATO.)
A capitol grants you an additional 1 army; this means that controlling your own capitol immediately raises the floor on troop generation (in the base game) from 3 armies to 4.

For all intents and purposes, the capitols are placed roughly where they would be in E&W, and cities are placed where Industrial Complexes would be – notably, this includes some being in neutral territories.

Reinvention also does the more “modern” rule for card trades, whereby the symbols cashed in prescribe the number of armies you get. In this mod, the wild cards are used as nuclear weapons. A recurring theme is that I didn’t want to have to create any separate play-aids for this game to work, so this is one example of that.

Also, I’ll mention here that because Reinvention doesn’t use infinitely-escalating unit production (via cards) the armies are in denominations of 1 and 3, instead of the 1/5/10 of older versions. This will come up in a few small places, for this mod.

Capitols:
Red (USSR) - Urals
Blue (WE) - Western Europe
Yellow (UK) - Great Britain
Green (US) - Eastern United States

Cities:

Russia Urals Kamchatka Western Europe Ontario Great Britain Eastern United States Western United States

Now, in E&W there is an IC in Italy, so you would expect there to be a City in Southern Europe. The thing I found was that it over-incentivizes the USSR to attack through this route – and they’re already incentivized to not “open” Britain or Iceland. The rationalization I used is that since Middle East is controlled by the Arab League, Southern Europe is more meant to represent Greece and Turkey in this scenario, with Western Europe representing France and Italy. I realize the adjacency doesn’t make as much sense that way, but… I also didn’t want to reinvent the map.

E&W-isms

I mentioned the continents right off the top, but clearly there are going to be a bunch of neutral territories – so how do those figure in?

Clearly, we don’t want a game that incentivizes NATO just bowling over neutrals, as that’s not really in the spirit of E&W. So here’s what I came up with:
Each neutral alliance can support either one NATO power, or the USSR. Originally, I had figured there would be a +0/+1/+2 support level to either side, but to make things easier to track (again, without adding any play aids to the game) the support scale is instead a 5-point slider (i.e. -2/-1/0/+1/+2)

If a neutral alliance is giving +1 support to a power, that power places a 1-army marker of their colour on that neutral’s city. If a neutral alliance is giving +2 support to a power, that power places a 3-army marker of their colour on that neutral’s city.

This is simply our way of tracking support, using the materials the game comes with. At the start of the game, the OAS should be set to +1 towards the US, and China should be set to +1 towards the USSR.

Now, what does this actually mean, mechanically?
+1 support means that when counting up your territories and cities, you can add the territories and cities of that neutral to your total; you can also count their territorial ownership towards your control of one continent.
So, since the OAS straddles North and South America, on the US turn if the OAS is at +1, then the US can choose to count the OAS territories towards their control of either North America or South America. Likewise, with the Arab League straddling Africa and Asia, having a +1 support level allows them to contribute towards control of either one of those continents.

At the +2 support level, the number of cities and territories for the neutral is doubled before being added to the total; you can also use their territories as your own, for the purposes of pathing your reinforcement (i.e. non-combat move). You can also count the neutral’s territories towards your control of 2 continents; obviously for China, this last stipulation would have no actual consequences.

For the purposes of support/influence, Indonesia is treated as part of the Arab League, as long as it remains neutral. If attacked, however, Indonesia and the Arab League are treated as separate neutrals. If the Arab League is at +1 to NATO, they can choose to count Indonesia (if neutral) towards their control of Australia.

Now, that all being said, most of the testing I did in the past didn’t have the support levels change all that much – so a lot of the assumptions around the economics of the game work around the OAS and China always being a +1. If you add in influence rolls to the game, there is going to be more randomness… but that might also allow for more replayability.

The general idea was that the USSR would get one influence roll at each of the 3 neutrals, to start their turn; each NATO power would get one roll towards their affiliated neutral, at the start of their turns. Since this is RISK (where you want to roll high) success would be on a 6.

Since the support level for the Arab League/Indonesia could conceivably increase from +1 on the WE turn to +2 on the UK turn (and more generally, just because the Arab League crosses 2 different NATO powers’ zones of influence) just make a note to only let them be used to a maximum of +2 per round. The chances of being able to count them towards 3 continents in a round without the USSR being dumpstered is pretty low… but for the sake of posterity, I should mention that it is not intended for NATO to be able to cash in on all 3 continents in a round.

Neutral Armies

Now, to determine how many armies to put in the neutral territories, I basically took the total number of units for each neutral power in E&W, and then divided them evenly among their territories. For the Arab League, I believe the numbers for Iran, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia were also included; likewise, Indonesia basically includes Thailand and Tibet.

As said before, since Reinvention uses 1-army and 3-army markers, I decided to round off the neutral armies to increments of 3.

OAS: 3 armies per territory Arab League: 12 armies per territory China: 15 armies per territory Indonesia: 6 armies

With ICs being in Brazil, Egypt, and Manchuria in E&W, cities are placed in Brazil, Egypt, and Mongolia.
As in E&W, the USSR can attack neutrals at any time, but NATO can only attack them if they are giving full support (+2) to the USSR.

@ army man

you could try some of the altrenate set ups. Also triplea has a game called napoleonic empires that is a FFA. It seems pretty popular

Hey All,
I’ve had time to play a couple of games of the new Fortress America. Aside from the new pieces, the game is pretty much the same as the older version. Here are the most noteable differences:

The USA’s Partisan cards are spelled out quite a bit clearer than the old ones. These tell you EXACTLY what territories, units and actions are involved. Most of the cards are really the same as in the old deck, except of course one that deals with Colorado Springs, which wasn’t in the old game, but the new cards seem to spell out what you are supposed to do in more detail. They even tell you to discard the card after you are done.
After I compared the new and old cards, I can see that some of the old cards could have been misread. Specifically, the MAJOR AIRLIFT card. With the old game, I always played it by taking ALL US units anywhere on the board and moving them as I wished. The new MAJOR AIRLIFT card specifically says that you pick ONE territory and can move the units from that territory to anywhere on the board that doesn’t have enemy units (even enemy controlled, unoccupied city territories). So, the USA player is basically limited to a maximum of 5 military units that he/she can move around like this. While this can still be a big plus for the US, especially if the invaders have left a lot of cities unoccupied, it isn’t so devastating to the invaders that it might be a game ender. Since then, I have gone back and re-read the MAJOR AIRLIFT card in the old deck and realized that I think I have mis-played it all this time. I think it might have ALWAYS been just one territory of units, not ALL US units. The way it is worded could go either way.

Another big difference is that the Mobile Units are much more useful now. If you have a Mobile Unit and an Infantry (or Partisan for the US) in the same territory, that Mobile Unit can transport that Infantry/Partisan with it in the Maneuvers phase (normally Infantry/Partisans have no movement in the Maneuvers phase). This happens on a 1:1 ratio. So if you have 2 Infantry and 1 Mobile Unit, then only 1 Infantry may travel with the Mobile Unit. That makes Mobile Units much more valuable now. In the old game, they were more or less mobile cannon fodder to me.

Finally, the biggest difference is that now there are cards for the Invaders. Each Invader has a deck of 8 cards that can give them certain advantages if certain conditions are met. During the reinforcement phase, each Invader must decide to get 8 new units or get only 5 new units and draw a card. Each card has certain advantages which could boost their forces’ movement or attacking power or cause a detriment to the US’s abilities (like depriving them of the laser attacks for a round). To gain these advantages, certain conditions must be met, like holding certain cities, or simply a certain number of cities and/or holding certain resource territories (agriculture, mineral, oil). Some cards are one time use and others are “Remain In Play” which the invader that holds that card can use even if the original conditions are no longer met. For example: Say the Western Invader draws a “Remain In Play” card and the conditions are that he has to own Los Angeles, 2 Agricultures and 1 Mineral. Then later on he loses one of the Agricultures, or the Mineral, or even Los Angeles, he can STILL PLAY THAT CARD. Also, even once the Invader’s reserves are depleted, they can still draw cards during the reinforcements phase. If you get a card for which you haven’t met the conditions yet, you simply keep it face down in front of you until you can use it. So, theoretically, Invaders could possibly use several cards in the same turn, provided all the conditions are met for each card.
Frankly, while some of the advantages in the cards are pretty good, I think overall they are more of a detriment to the invaders as well as the overall game experience. As an invader, you might end up becoming too fixated on trying to accomplish the conditions on a card so that you can gain that advantage that you end up not doing other things that would better defeat the USA forces. As for the game, it really takes more time for the invaders to keep checking their cards to see if they meed the requirements. Also, losing that 3 extra pieces each turn so you can draw a card may not seem like a lot, but I think it could be just enough for the USA player to get just enough of an edge that they don’t lose all 18 cities. The longer this game goes, the more forces the US will have and the less the Invaders will have, thus it will be that much harder to gain the 18 cities and defeat the US. Plus if you keep getting cards that you can’t use, then is it really worth losing those extra 3 units each turn. It seems to me like a lot of the conditions, while not impossible, are pretty hard for the Invaders to accomplish. For Example: there are two or three cards for the Eastern Invader where one of the conditions is an Oil Resource. The nearest one for them is clear over by Memphis. That’s a lot of territory to conquer.

Well, there is my report. It’s a pretty cool game, but VERY similar to the old game. If you have the original, unless you just really want the new pieces and map or really want to try out the new Invader cards, I would say save your money and play the original some more becasue except for the few points above, they are basically the same game.

The picture is primarily about the chips, but I notice it includes a bonus piece of new information about the FMG Italian infantry units: they have the FMG star under the base.  Nice touch!

@cminke:

why not?

I’m gonna buy more painted army factions and maybe the italian set of FMG

Use them for large armies on the board if you like. You really don’t need the FMG pieces coming out you just want them as I do because they are better than WOTC. It was a just a thought I think they would look awesome. It is purely eye candy on the board. Maybe use them as Victory city markers if you don’t want to have that many of them on the board. After about 3 hours and 4 or 5 coctails I need an easy way to count them.

I would be more than happy to see FMG  produce either the FW 200 Condor or the Heinkel He 277 as the German Strat Bomber.