@Cpl-Hicks said in How long is a turn in real life?:
It keeps me bothering and busy, questioning the real versus game time.
The first 3 Turns seems tot take about 7 months per turn. From turn 4 and following up turns, these turns can be about 4 months per turn. The so called ‘rubber band’ (effect) from Larry.
An analogy to this rubber band concept would be the method for converting a dog’s age into “people years”, the situation being (or so I’ve heard) that you can’t use a single conversion factor; instead, you not only have to make different computations for different dog breeds, you also apparently need to use different conversion factors at different growth stages.
A&A similarly has “springs and rubber bands geography”, with various parts of the world compressed and other parts of the world stretched to allocate more elbow room to the areas where there was the most action during WWII, and to reduce the large-area but low-action parts of the world (such as the south-east corner of the Pacific Ocean). A god example is China on the Pacific 1940 map, where compared to its real-world geography it’s highly compressed in the east-to-west direction compared to its north-to-south dimensions.
Ya. I’ve also seen it where one side is playing later than the other side.
usually takes me about an hour to play a round.
oops misread the question :)
It’s another and interesting way to approach this issue indeed.
Something else I sometimes seem to forget, although I’d like to think about it otherwise. Axis & Allies is a great game. I enjoy playing it since the very first edition in the eighties. And although I really would like to see Axis & Allies as to be a WW2 simulation like board game and sometimes even feels like one. In my opinion the truth however is, it is not and never wasn’t meant to be one either.
In the time scheme I’ve shared I have only taken into account, the ww2 events in relation to the months and seasons in a year.
Things are getting a bit awkward when you try to involve the movement of units as well. A Liberty transport ship wasn’t a very fast ship. But even a slow vessel like a Liberty class ship under ‘normal’ conditions, didn’t need a couple of months to cross the Atlantic.
And this is where I would like to think about the rubber band approach. Where I can enlarge the feeling of a ww2 simulation game, I’d like to tighten the rubber band a bit and give it all a more simulation like feeling. On issues like ‘travel time versus distance’ maybe it’s possible to loosen up the rubber band a bit.
@Cpl-Hicks
The simulation/realism issue you raise is an interesting one, and in my opinion there are two aspects to the problem. In a narrow sense, there’s the purely mechanical stuff: A&A is very abstracted, and it leaves out (or barely deals with) some crucial elements of WWII, notably logistics. The Battle of the Atlantic, for example, was essentially a multi-year supply battle whose first objective was to keep Britain alive and whose later objective was to build it up as a springboard for the cross-Channel invasion of western Europe. An even better example is the war in the Pacific: the whole point of the war was for Japan to obtain the natural resources it lacked at home (most crucially oil), which meant conquering the Dutch East Indies and nearby areas like Malaysia (where the resources were located) as well as the Philippines (to secure the shipping lanes between the DEI and Japan. Unfortunately for Japan, the Americans understood the importance of logistics better than the Japanese did: they focussed their submarine operations on those shipping lanes with the aim of gradually strangling Japan, and by 1945 they had succeeded in doing so. Japan, for its part, had too few transport ships, used inefficiently the ones it did have, and gave too little attention to convoy protection – all of which is astonishing, given the underlying purpose of the war. Realistically simulating all this in A&A would require a substantial overhaul of the game and would greatly change its nature.
More broadly, though, there’s the problem that simulating WWII as a whole (not just a specific part of it) creates an inherent problem. WWII was a long and complex struggle with all sorts of points at which factors such as strategic decisions could have changed radically all the subsequent events. Hence the following quandry: in order for a game to faithfully reproduce all or most of WWII’s major events, in the correct sequence, would have to be highly scripted, perhaps even to the point where its outcome is predetermined, which potentially isn’t much fun. Conversely, an unscripted game would almost inevitably deviate from history at some point or another…and the earlier the start date (say, 1940 as opposed to 1942), the bigger the deviations tend to be, which runs counter to the aim of having a realistic simulation in the first place. So in general, I tend to see A&A as a board game which is set in WWII rather than a board game which simulates it. An analogy I’ve heard is that there’s a similar difference between Monopoly, which is board game that has real estate transactions as its theme but which is highly abstracted, and the sophisticated financial simulation games or exercises which are sometimes played in business schools for instructional purposes.
Yes Marc you are right on. In my game you can represent the battle of thee Atlantic which can last up to 6 turns and on the Pacific side Japan can get the Dutch Island oil for the win. It can be done and it is happening on both sides in game. As you mentioned yes you would need to make setup changes. What’s also nice is you can add event cards to represent certain things that happened in war and or you just give certain things to each country on a turn as far as advanced weapons.
There is so much you can do. How much you want and major play testing
One issue is the convoy boxes in g40 are not out in the Atlantic away from shores.
I’ll post pick of my Atlantic setup
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/assets/uploads/files/1569285166963-img_7321.png
Each sub inside convoy box does the damage of the number and any sub touching outside of convoy box is doing 1 icp damage too.
Don’t mean to get off topic here.
@CWO-Marc
Thank you for this well substantiated reply. It gives me a lot to consider.
The whole idea of a ‘time’ came from the situation how I play AA 1940 Global these days with friends. Once in say two weeks, mostly on Sundays we meet and play. The game is placed on a large table at the attic. In this way it’s possible to play a longer period of time.
Preparing the next moves at home, before the continuing battle continues after a week or two. Therefore I came up with the idea to create a Journal or Log. I wanted to keep track on the game progress. And therefore it felt necessary to find a way to relate game events to a ‘real’ date…
@CWO-Marc said in How long is a turn in real life?:
@Cpl-Hicks said in How long is a turn in real life?:
It keeps me bothering and busy, questioning the real versus game time.
The first 3 Turns seems tot take about 7 months per turn. From turn 4 and following up turns, these turns can be about 4 months per turn. The so called ‘rubber band’ (effect) from Larry.
An analogy to this rubber band concept would be the method for converting a dog’s age into “people years”, the situation being (or so I’ve heard) that you can’t use a single conversion factor; instead, you not only have to make different computations for different dog breeds, you also apparently need to use different conversion factors at different growth stages.
Strange coincidence: just one month after I used the dog-age concept as an analogy to the A&A time-elasticity concept, I’ve just come across a BBC article which discusses that topic:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200106-how-to-calculate-your-dogs-real-age
Looks like you got shot down CWO ! LOL So WW 2 started 1939 and when its 1940 its 1971. Fasted game I’ve ever seen.
@SS-GEN said in How long is a turn in real life?:
Looks like you got shot down CWO ! LOL So WW 2 started 1939 and when its 1940 its 1971. Fasted game I’ve ever seen.
A fair point. By some benchmarks, however, WWII was shorter than is commonly thought: apparently, there are some Vichy-era commemorative monuments in France which honour the fallen soldiers of the war of “1939-1940.”
Guest said in How long is a turn in real life?:
I think each round is supposed to be 3 months.
That is exactly how we play it :)
