Delta Deck: cards for playing G40 Delta house rules

@ando101

I wasn’t saying that your idea was bad.

But yes, that makes sense.

@Imperious:

Unit on both sites are drawing board, partially developed, or fully developed naval and air units. The LZ-135 was never built, only drafted on paper and in this sense it was real.

A fair point, though it should be remembered that some on-the-drawing-board concepts are less real than others.  Germany’s proposed H-Class battleships began as realistic designs in 1938 or 1939, and one or two of them were actually laid down.  When the construction work was suspended, however, drawing-board work continued on-and-off until 1944.  The design kept getting upgraded, and kept getting more and more unrealistic; from about 1941 onward, these designs can be regarded as purely paper studies, with zero chance of being built and thus little need to keep practicalities into account.  But at least they were being designed by competent naval architects, in contrast with Hitler’s propensity for sketching battleship designs on the back of envelopes.  (This fondness was an odd one, in view of his land-warfare orientation, but wasn’t entirely out of character: he believed that he knew more about warfare than his professionally-trained generals, and he similarly felt that he could come up with better battleship designs than professional naval architects.)  Hitler once proposed building a battleship armed with 800mm guns of the Gustav / Dora railway artillery type; in a rare example of common sense winning over Hitler’s fondness for gigantism (as illustrated by the 188-tonne Maus tank), an admiral managed to talk him out of the idea by pointing out that no existing German harbour was large enough to accommodate a ship big enough to carry guns of that size.

I’ve settled on my house rules (for now) and so I’m going to release my files for a free download for anyone that’s interested in using them or even just checking them out to get some ideas for your own set. The link to download them is at;
http://www.mediafire.com/file/mucfl9jol75ujl9/GHG_House_Rules.zip

I also made a video with my house rule set that I use and the copy that I have sent to Young Grasshopper to put on the prize table at the Grasshopper Invitational coming up. It gives a summary of all of my house rules with a quick explanation of each as well as a close look at the units and markers. You can see the video here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCWswdQL-rw

Thanks YG.  Please keep the ideas coming.  I’m grabbing bits and pieces and mashing it together with some of my own ideas to make a nice set of rules that works out for my group too.

@CWO:

@Young:

The problem as it is right now (if it actually is a problem) is that the Axis powers (Japan in particular) will absolutely profit the most for capturing enemy cities (Japan will essentially claim up to $9 for cities that are easy to take and hold), so to add a Chinese capital city for no reason but to give Japan yet another target to profit from may unbalance the game.

Fair enough.  As I said, it was just an idea that I tossed in for fun in case it it turned out to be worth considering.  It arose from the discussion of the player capitals versus the cities, and I didn’t scrutinize it in any detail because I wanted to leave it up to you to decide if it worked or not in the context of your house rules.  So I have no problem with the idea turning out to be problematic.

No problem, I greatly appreciate all your suggestions and there have been some great modifications because of them, I guess my problem is that I have played over in my head a lot of angles to these objectives, and it’s very easy to tip the scales of balance when restructuring an entire game mechanic like this.

For any game with tech research in it, I like the tech being more likely to be discovered the more money you put into it. Instead of needing to roll a 6 on one die to discover the tech, you roll two dice and need to roll a 12, but for each previous roll, you get +1 to your current roll. So on the second roll you would succeed on an 11, on the third roll on a 10, etc. The average number of rolls needed to get the tech is about the same, but the variation is much lower. You’re much less likely to get it on your first attempt, but also much less likely to need 10+ attempts. To keep track of how many rolls you’ve made, place a die (or an airplane movement marker from Revised) on the tech chart where the control marker would go.

@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…