Playable Nations in 1914

@ghr2:

Granted China did not do a whole lot so I guess not them.

Yes, that’s right.  I think the only Chinese territorial connection to WWI was Japan’s conquest of Germany’s colonial port in Tsingtao, where the Germany’s Asiatic squadron was based.

@Flashman:

It should be noted that Turkey was a major power in a limited sense, as it had no modern industry. All mechanical weapons were imported from Europe.

One factor to keep in mind is that, when Austria-Hungary occupied Serbia and when Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, these two events created an overland connection between Austria-Hungary and Turkey.  So in one sense, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey had the advantage of being directly connected to each other by land from that point onward – unlike the Allies, who were geographically isolated from each other and whose Mediterranean/Black Sea connection route (which was far from ideal to begin with) was severed by Turkey.

Yes, this is why the Dardanelles was seen as so important - controlling this area allows the Allies to supply Russia by sea (about 90% of Russian imports came through here); while for the CP it allows a continuous rail link from Berlin to Medina.

I’m not suggesting Turkey should be “weak”.  It will start off with fully equipped armies from supplies purchased pre-war.  As long as A & G can keep a supply route open they can continue to supply Turkey with mechanized units, especially since the Bosporus is considered to have an unbroken rail link from Europe to Asia. They just can’t be BUILT in Turkey.

This also raises the question of turn order: presumably the official game will still have every power playing individual turns one after the other.  However if we go to the other extreme and have “All Axis plays; then all Allies play” converting units isn’t even an issue.

Personally I’m in favour of something in the middle for both eras: in WWII I have Japan and USSR as separate factions; Germany and Italy are one; UK, F & USA are one faction as the Western Allies; making 4 blocks, each of which plays all of its members simultaneously.

For WWI I’d suggest Russia and Turkey as separate, but ALL then ALL turn order makes more sense for this game.

Regarding Russia & the Bolsheviks: A reminder that Germany surrendered while occupying about 3 times the tt it had when the war began. Just defaulting to the old “capture 2 capitals” idea will not work if the game is reasonably balanced; the game will likely go on forever. Therefore, there needs to be a mechanism for nations collapsing into disorder and revolution. This can happen to any power, but Russia is the familiar example.
Otherwise, how do you represent a power suddenly just dropping out of the game?  The Allies tried to keep Russia going as an anti-German power, Germany supported the Bolsheviks.  As the great powers descended into anarchy, civil wars and revolutions were going on all over Europe; if the game just ignores all this its a poor representation of history.

@CWO:

@Flashman:

It should be noted that Turkey was a major power in a limited sense, as it had no
modern industry. All mechanical weapons were imported from Europe.

One factor to keep in mind is that, when Austria-Hungary occupied Serbia and when Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, these two events created an overland connection between Austria-Hungary and Turkey.  So in one sense, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey had the advantage of being directly connected to each other by land from that point onward – unlike the Allies, who were geographically isolated from each other and whose Mediterranean/Black Sea connection route (which was far from ideal to begin with) was severed by Turkey.

Japan, China and these “Bolsheviks” should not be any part of this game.  Germany had just a few ships and very meager forces in China and some island groups. It is so marginal to combat on a strategic scale that it does not warrant any consideration. The Great War was mostly a European affair with some action in the middle east. To try to represent and model all these trifle little and meaningless struggles would be to the detriment of any decent Axis and Allies system. Honestly, if two guys fought with knifes in Brazil, somebody would want yet another set of freaking pieces to represent some game changing warfare…all they need is that Wikipedia entry to prove it.

Turns:
Each game turn constitutes four months (except the first) of real time outlined as follows:

1. August 1st - December 1914      9. May - August 1917
2. January - April 1915    10. September - December 1917
3. May - August 1915    11. January - April 1918
4. September - December 1915            12. May - August 1918
5. January - April 1916            13. September - December 1918
6. May - August 1916    14. January - April 1919 (extended game)
7. September - December 1916            15. May - August 1919
8. January - April 1917

Turn order:
Turn 1 only: Austro-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, England and Ottomans.
Turn 2 - till end of game: Russia, Central powers, Allied Powers.

Note: Each nation must perform their turn individually on turn one.  On later turns, Russia always moves first and separate from the other Allies.  The Central Powers and Allies may move simultaneously when it is their sides turn.

If I had to have 8 separate turns, my order would be:

Germany
Russia
Austria
France
Ottoman Empire
United Kingdom
Italy
USA

Austria shelled Belgrade, but this was hardly a major action. The first big attack came from Germany, then Russia attacked in the East while Austria was dawdling between 2 fronts.

So for a 4 block game, I would have:

1. Germany (& Italy?)
2. Russia (& Italy?)
3. Austria (& Turkey)
4. France (& Britain, & USA)

Turkey joins in round two (or perhaps when a battleship is delivered to the Sublime Porte…)

Britain joins after an attack on any neutral (only the CPs can ever attack neutrals!)

USA really needs a chart to track its attitude to war; its entry certainly shouldn’t be automatic after X turns.

Italy decides who to join in May 1915 (see my timetables attached)

http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/world_war_i_1914.htm

The Russian Civil War cost as least 3 million casualties. Hardly a bar-room brawl.

How do you represent the Russian Revolution? When and how does it happen? What do the Germans do - just stop at the borders? Is Russia declared off-limits (lets leave them alone while they fight among themselves?)

GreatWarC.xls

Britain joins after an attack on any neutral (only the CPs can ever attack neutrals!)

USA really needs a chart to track its attitude to war; its entry certainly shouldn’t be automatic after X turns.

The game would be ruined since the Central powers would avoid UK the entire game, A variable entry USA is also a game breaker. It must be fixed because the games balancing would prove impossible. The game must be Historical, not full of nitpicking rules that destroy play balance.

Would Britain have gone to war if Germany had avoided Belgium? Not certain.

What if Germany had not even attacked France?

At the very least, offer a number of scenarios leaving the possibility of unhistorical results.

American entry was based on so many factors that it is ridiculous to make it mandatory on turn X.  Instead, each side should be able to influence it in various ways. It will always be likely, but if you make it and its date certain where’s the game?

Would Britain have gone to war if Germany had avoided Belgium? Not certain.

What if Germany had not even attacked France?

At the very least, offer a number of scenarios leaving the possibility of unhistorical results.

American entry was based on so many factors that it is ridiculous to make it mandatory on turn X.  Instead, each side should be able to influence it in various ways. It will always be likely, but if you make it and its date certain where’s the game?

The only way to make a balanced game is to allow Historical developments at specific times, not variable. American entry was assured after the Zimmerman note no need to figit with what happened. If it does not add to the game it does not need a place in the game. Axis and Allies is a broadstroke of History put in a game. It’s not supposed to account for every single incidental because these types of rules bog down an otherwise good game.

I’m most curious about the color for each nation

@Flashman:

Otherwise, how do you represent a power suddenly just dropping out of the game?  The Allies tried to keep Russia going as an anti-German power, Germany supported the Bolsheviks.  As the great powers descended into anarchy, civil wars and revolutions were going on all over Europe; if the game just ignores all this its a poor representation of history.

The British television series “The First World War” (based on Hew Strachan’s book of the same name) has an episode on strikes, revolts, mutinies and revolutions.  It discusses the concept of revolution as a weapon of war: trying to prevent it on your own side (both in the army and on the home front) while simultaneously trying to encourage it in enemy countries.  Germany succeeded in Russia (it helped Lenin get from Switzerland to Russia, ultimately resulting in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian surrender to Germany at Brest-Litovsk), and it had a partial success in Ireland (in the form of the Easter Rising).  Britain lost a large number of man-hours to strikes, to which the government responded by ordering its negotiators to give the strikers what they wanted.  The French Army mutinied in 1917, and was brought back into line through a mixture of reforms, concessions and executions.  The Italian Army responded to excessively harsh policies from its highest officers by surrendering to the Autro-Hungarians in the tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands.  The German Navy mutinied in 1918 when its leaders planned a suicidal final sortie against the Royal Navy for the sole purpose of salvaging its honour.  Austria-Hungary and Germany both underwent social collapse in the final months of the war.  Ultimately, none of the regimes on the losing side survived the war: the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were all destroyed, and the latter two were dismantled into a patchwork of successor states.

Yeah, I know about all that, but I think the only way to represent it is a disorder and revolution chart similar to the IPC income chart. When a nation drops so far it falls into disorder; after another target is falls into revolution.

When all powers of one side are either defeated (occupied) or in revolution, the game ends. Indeed if the game is correctly balanced this is the ONLY way it can end, otherwise the stalemate continues forever. But a nation should always be recoverable, even after revolution; hence I prefer to put revolutionary forces in the game, rather than just placing a country off-limits.

@CWO:

@Flashman:

Otherwise, how do you represent a power suddenly just dropping out of the game?�  The Allies tried to keep Russia going as an anti-German power, Germany supported the Bolsheviks.�  As the great powers descended into anarchy, civil wars and revolutions were going on all over Europe; if the game just ignores all this its a poor representation of history.

The British television series “The First World War” (based on Hew Strachan’s book of the same name) has an episode on strikes, revolts, mutinies and revolutions.  It discusses the concept of revolution as a weapon of war: trying to prevent it on your own side (both in the army and on the home front) while simultaneously trying to encourage it in enemy countries.  Germany succeeded in Russia (it helped Lenin get from Switzerland to Russia, ultimately resulting in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian surrender to Germany at Brest-Litovsk), and it had a partial success in Ireland (in the form of the Easter Rising).  Britain lost a large number of man-hours to strikes, to which the government responded by ordering its negotiators to give the strikers what they wanted.  The French Army mutinied in 1917, and was brought back into line through a mixture of reforms, concessions and executions.  The Italian Army responded to excessively harsh policies from its highest officers by surrendering to the Autro-Hungarians in the tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands.  The German Navy mutinied in 1918 when its leaders planned a suicidal final sortie against the Royal Navy for the sole purpose of salvaging its honour.  Austria-Hungary and Germany both underwent social collapse in the final months of the war.  Ultimately, none of the regimes on the losing side survived the war: the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were all destroyed, and the latter two were dismantled into a patchwork of successor states.

My preferred scheme:

France - Blue
Britain - Brown(khaki)
USA - Green
Russia - Light Grey
Italy - Light Green
Turkey - Light Tan
Austria - White
Germany - Field Grey

Communists - Red
Nationalists - Black
Japan - Dark Blue
China - Yellow
Neutrals - Orange

Probable Avalon Hill colours:

France - Blue Grey
Britain - Medium Brown
USA - Green Brown
Russia - Dark Brown
Italy - Medium Brown
Turkey - Light Brown
Austria - Light Grey
Germany - Field Grey

Some other schemes:

Great War:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/547029/the-great-war?size=original

Conflict
http://www.legiongaming.com/

Diplomacy(Gibsons)
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/1050314/diplomacy?size=original

War To End All Wars
http://www.guildofblades.com/WWI_Map.php

TripleA
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&sa=N&tbo=d&biw=1024&bih=653&tbm=isch&tbnid=1XIFv3SfTx_qTM:&imgrefurl=http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/709496/world-war-1-game&docid=fvA1oySX_SST4M&imgurl=http://triplea.sourceforge.net/newScreens/TripleA_great_war_quartersize.png&w=900&h=645&ei=8_DIUOOGJ8fBhAf8nYDwDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=340&vpy=352&dur=17939&hovh=190&hovw=265&tx=126&ty=75&sig=111675237919074572421&page=1&tbnh=150&tbnw=194&start=0&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:16,s:0,i:131

@Yavid:

I’m most curious about the color for each nation

I love the idea of countries falling into revolution, but how would we perform this? What factors would we use to tell if a country is falling into revolution? Certainly not a dice roll! The only thing I can think of is national objectives with turn limits:

(example: Germany must capture Paris by turn 10 or this will lead to rolling of two dice, the number is the number of revolutionaries that spawn in the capitol territory on the place new units phase and must be dealt with on the countries next combat movement phase, this only happens once in a game).

So instead of making the national objectives purely economy based, we can have a mix of some economy/citizen unrest. And I agree with Imperious that it would be silly to have China and Japan represented, focus on the meat of the conflict.

What say the rest of you about how can we implement the revolution system into the game? Oh, and I actually like making the USA a token power/neutral in the game. Face it, the French and Brits won that war, we were the straw that broke the camels back.

@maverick_76:

I love the idea of countries falling into revolution, but how would we perform this? What factors would we use to tell if a country is falling into revolution?

Presumably through some kind of chart similar to the income tracking chart.  Call it, say, a social stability chart.  The marker for each country would move up and down (mostly down) based on various game-event inputs such as the length of the war, the accumulation of casualties, major victories or defeats, etc.  The chart’s outputs could take the form of increases or decreases in industrial productivity, army combat morale bonuses or penalties, and so forth.  The closer a country gets to the bottom of the social stability chart, the closer it comes to having its war effort collapse through civilian revolution and/or military mutiny.

@Imperious:

Britain joins after an attack on any neutral (only the CPs can ever attack neutrals!)

USA really needs a chart to track its attitude to war; its entry certainly shouldn’t be automatic after X turns.

The game would be ruined since the Central powers would avoid UK the entire game, A variable entry USA is also a game breaker. It must be fixed because the games balancing would prove impossible. The game must be Historical, not full of nitpicking rules that destroy play balance.

How is a fixed entry in any way historical, unless you think that everything that happened HAD to happen as it did? There can be balance without scripting the game (Russian Revolution happens turn Y, Italy enters turn X, USA enters turn K, etc etc etc)

One cool way for USA to enter that my friends and I did for 1939 Europe and for WWI was a provocation system.

For example, it’s 1 pt for every allied DD/TRN that is sunk on a axis/cp turn, 2 pts for battleship/carrier.
2 pts for every IPC germany collects from a neutral territory, 1 for every IPC a Central/axis power collects from an originally french/british territory, plus some for convoys (which changed based on game for us, you get the idea), and MINUS points for every IPC that is SBR’ed out of Germany.

If the points are at a certain total on USA’s turn, they declare war.

This adds a dynamic to the game that is new and interesting for A&A, where wholesale beatdown of the enemy must be balanced with the threat of a sleeping giant. Adds a lot of variety to the game.

There may be some whining about how that makes the game too political, but WWI was a very different war from WWII and to think that the US entry had to happen because it did happen is a disservice to any attempt at studying history and making a game historical.

Will it be harder to make the game balanced for both sides if the US entry is based on actions rather than a preset schedule that ignores the conditions in the game? Probably. But, unless what you like in A&A is the ability to replay the exact same scheduled events over and over again with a little variability in dice to spice it up, it will be a better game if the political situation is decided by factors that would decide it in reality rather than scheduling it based on what already happened in reality, ignoring that differences in events leading up to those key events that you would script would in fact change the script.

@Imperious:

The only way to make a balanced game is to allow Historical developments at specific times, not variable. American entry was assured after the Zimmerman note no need to figit with what happened. If it does not add to the game it does not need a place in the game. Axis and Allies is a broadstroke of History put in a game. It’s not supposed to account for every single incidental because these types of rules bog down an otherwise good game.

So Global is not balanced and has no chance of being so? That game has plenty of variable entries, left up to factors determined by player choice.

If Russia is trouncing Germany and is twice as rich as when it started, would it make sense that it’s people be disillusioned with the war and that they revolt?
By the logic quoted above, who cares? Revolution turn X, even though Russian morale is at its highest in decades! Huzzah!

If Germany has pulled back all of its subs and surface fleet to defend its home waters and elects not to violate belgian neutrality, would the UK (not to mention the USA) have been as gung-ho about entering, or even entered?
By the logic quoted above, who cares? USA hasn’t been provoked at all, but, TO WAR!

Scripting the events of the game while completely ignoring the developments in the game is what is truly ahistorical.

Thinking of history as a set sequence of events that couldn’t have happened any other way is dangerous when it comes to analyzing how and why events occurred. A historical game would be one that takes the miliary success into account when determining if a nation will have a revolution, not ignoring all of that to keep a schedule that is based on a succession of events that could very well look nothing like what is happening in the game.

A historical game takes the causes and effects in historical patterns into account, not insisting that events be maintained on a schedule no matter what, no matter how much the previous events deviate from the real-world script.

The central powers being caught between destroying the enemy and avoiding angering the US only adds to the potential for the game to avoid being played the same way over and over again, getting boring in a couple months.

Unless you believe that because of the variable entries in global (not the sheer size of the game), it is impossible to balance, there is no reason to believe that  in WWI variable entry/revolution is an automatic balance killer.

–-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imagine this scenario:

The CP are focusing all of their effort on knocking out France, keeping only enough in the East to ensure the safety of their most important territories.

Russia is booming, entirely safe for as long as France can hold out, and Russia is in fact doing well enough that the Central powers may have to divert attention from France to ensure their defenses hold. Conceptually, we would imagine that morale in this scenario would be higher in Russia than it was in the war, as the CP made huge advances into Russia and the situation was looking grim.

But whoops! Turn X came along! Russian Revolution, against all odds! Russia is out of the war or whatever. France stands alone. CP wins.

It’s quite plausible that if Germany knows that the revolution will happen according to a timed script, rather than factors that would logically lead to the revolution, they can ignore russia only enough to keep from taking Vienna or Berlin or whatever, and then once the revolution happens, they are home free.

Is it possible to balance the game with this possibility? Probably. But how bizzare would the game be? France has to be strong enough if Germany decides to ignore russia. But if France is that strong, will Germany have any real coice or motivation to go after Russia?

Similarly, UK and France KNOWING when USA would enter would allow them to do some historically (from a pattern/plausibility point of view) asinine things.

How can the game be historical when both sides know when these huge events will happen when in reality they were much muddier?

Obviously we don’t know all the details of the game, but scripting the game has a very good chance of making balance MORE difficult, especially with the case of Russia. Unless you want to throw out the revolution altogether.

Having a simple system that tracks the US involvement and Russian Revolution presents its own challenges, but if far from impossible to balance, and may be easier to balance than a game where those two are scripted.