Sub-division of House Rules Forum

Here is an interesting bit of historical trivia. The US 8th Air Force actually had bases in the Ukraine for a short time. From June to September 1944, the 8th Air Force started a shuttle run of bombers that would take off from England and Italy, bomb targets in Germany then fly on to 3 bases in the Ukraine, Piryatin, Mirgorod and Poltava. The reasoning was mainly to show solidarity with the Russians and to hit Germany from an unexpected quarter.
The mission was called “Operation Frantic”. I don’t think it was much of a success. One reason is that the Luftwaffe bomber arm was still fairly strong in the East. Some Luftwaffe planes saw the American bombers heading into Russia. Then when a shot up P-51 crashed in Poland, it had documents on the Russian bases. Luftwaffe command was notified and they send Fliegerkorps IV, nearly 350 He 111s, to pound those bases while the B-17s were lined up in neat rows due to lack of space. It was the 8th Air Force’s costliest single operation of the war.
I didn’t even know about this until I read it in World War II magazine.

@der-kuenstler For some reason I’m just finding this thread now. I mostly agree with what others have said. The only thing I want to add is that if you want to play with more than the simplest of house rules, you should feel good about creating play aids to support those rules. Seriously, go out and print your new rules, in full color. Put some thought into how to design and lay out a chart or a cheat sheet that will help players remember and use your rules. Cut them out so they’re the right size, and then laminate them or print them on heavyweight cardstock. If your rules involve any special pieces, buy sculpts for those pieces or use some paint or something to convincingly alter the closest available piece; don’t just slap a chip underneath artillery and say “OK, now it’s a self-propelled artillery.”

If you’re not willing to put in that work to make things easier on your players, then why should they put in the work to test out your house rules? It can take 8+ hours for a single playtest; if you invite 3 friends over, that’s 24 hours of other people’s time. You should be willing to put in at least 10% of that (2 hours) on creating play aids to improve that experience. If you’re not, maybe that’s a sign that you’re having so much fun imagining new rules that tickle your fancy that you’re not really thinking hard about whether those rules will be fun to play with for others.

@Gargantua:

I like 1B, that’s not bad.

But it’ll make things like 8 transports 1 destroyer a HELL of a force to deal with. I’m not convinced…

Maybe they could operate like AA for eac 2 you have paired or something…

Well with 1B, then only the destroyer and 1 transport would get to defend, and the transport could only hit air units.

I see your point if your talking about 1A though.  So maybe 1B?  I just don’t think having transports have absolutely zero defensive capabilities whatsoever is neither historically accurate or fair.

For 2, i think I’ll leave them at 6.  It seems allies are a little bit behind in this version, and the 6ipc tank rule hurts germany more than anyone else.

i know it was suppose to be funny

Larrys new NOs for US look exellent and look like they will balance game better becouse they will scale down US income if conditions are not met

@lnmajor:

how about this?
place a roundel under a sub on the board to signify its submerged. it can only move 1 space per turn submerged. you must use ASW search roll of 1-2 to detect sub from destroyer or cruiser. surfaced sub can move 2 spaces per turn. ASW roll is 1-4 when sub is surfaced. now, on second turn, if sub remains submerged put second roundel under sub. beggining of 3rd turn submerged sub must surface for 1 turn no matter where it is. even if it has to surface strait into hostile ships and be attacked.

not a bad idea. The one benefit to having them off the board is the surprise factor.

Great ideas though…

…interesting…

Well in his defense i actually have 2 games (using d12 system) that have both a primary and secondary attack ( the primary is pre-emtive)

but the economy of scale is quite different from regular AA