Just how balanced is the Balanced Mod?

Well I am hardly “experienced”, but have completed one balanced mod game with 4 more currently being fought.

In the completed one, my much more experienced opponent adjusted the NOs by removing 4 allied ones, being of the view that the Allies are overly advantaged. I played allies and lost, but it took over 30 turns for axis to win. All of which strongly suggests that axis do not have the advantage, certainly if those deleted NOs remain.

I am playing allies in all the 4 current games. In one allies is winning. In the other 3 it is too early to say.

One of the authors of balanced mod shared a while back that at that time honours were even between axis and allies in the last 18 games on either the tournament or league board (I cannot remember which).

Sealion is much easier now with the NO +5 for capture of London.  It makes it easier for Germany to sustain an early economy. With an more powered Italy now it is easier to assist Germany in Sealion.  Germany doesn’t have to waste planes on taking down ships in the Med anymore.

Make sure you guard London round 1.

@Young:

I don’t play online, and I’ve never played Balance Mod, but I understand there are quite a few changes from oob, and I’m curious as to how this BalMod became so widely accepted among experienced players… is it really that good?

Yes, it is.
2nd edition is very unbalanced according to league statistics.  This year the Axis are 140-91, and that’s with the smallest bids being around 15 (I think almost everyone limits the bid to one unit per zone/territory)

Balanced mod at this point is 25-24, which is a fairly small sample size
If anything, I think the Allies might have been given too much (I have played 2 games as the Allies where I give up 3-4 of the new NO’s)
But this game, YG, is a huge improvement.  The China rules make it much harder to steamroll the Chinese.  India is given a much needed boost of 3 IPC’s a turn.  Russia’s NO’s and UK’s NO’s are supplemented and broken up so it’s not all or nothing (you can’t stop all of Russia’s bonus income merely by sticking a sub in 125), and the cheesy non European +3’s are taken away from Russia, which will make players just focus on the German front like they should.  And then there’s the marines.
I am playing balanced mod exclusively now and only playing 2nd edition when I have to, like in league playoff games.

@The:

Therefore, I don’t want to render judgment myself on BalMod. But I feel as though the Axis still have a strong advantage. How do more experienced veterans of the league feel about it?

The Axis do not have a strong advantage in the balanced mod game.  The Allies were given many, many advantages that in my opinion offset or more than offset the standard need of an Allied bid.  You will get more Italy action again (taking the bid away) but the Allies are given a lot.  A LOT

So where can I read the complete rules with all the changes?

It’s stickied in the league forum - says “rules and download”

The USA NOs are very powerful.  Balanced Mod is great because it forces the axis to do their thing FAST before the allies get the economic advantage.  Just as it should be.

Giving the Axis split victory conditions over-compensated for the earlier Allied advantage.  The breaking up of the previously automatic USA Homeland NO (and maybe was reduced too?) was good for gameplay but was also a big blow to the Allies.  As variance noted, the Balanced mod gives a lot more money back to the USA.

The Berlin complex was made major (as it should be) and the Ukraine complex added (which of course helps Germany a lot).  Good changes, but all helped the Axis a lot.  It is rather staggering that in the league the Axis, with 15-30 or so in Allied bids, is winning over 60% of the games this year in the league

Never tried it myself, but if it’s popular enough that probably won’t matter. The nice thing about a mod is that you can always mod the mod. The kind of players who are willing to try a modification  are the sort who are probably willing to accept minor tweaks to that mod later on, if it still ends up tilting to one side over the other.

I think the hardest thing to do, is simply to persuade enough people that its worth their time to try something new, or something that departs from OOB with the aim of making the game more fun. Usually the problem is an overabundance of mods or HRs, such that its hard to popularize any one mod or rules change over another. Thankfully the people in my playgroup have been pretty open to house rules or set up changes, but even then they sometimes suffer from an HR overload. The desire for consistency sometimes trumps other considerations.

I still wish that alternate scenarios would receive some official support. It wouldn’t be very hard to do. All it’d require is a new pdf set up chart that players could download, or an addendum to the manual/faq providing some different official alternatives.

Unfortunately in the cases where this is done, it’s usually meant as a fix to some oversight or some misprint for the boxed game, rather than as an optional alternate game.

Even the most popular kind of alternate scenerio, the bid game, has never been addressed officially. It’s kind of a bummer, because absent some official guidence/sanction from the designers, the player base tends to splinter over these things, with lots of different ideas, none of which ever seem to gain enough traction to provide a long term solution to perceived imbalances with the OOB game.

I found a few things called balanced mod just by doing a Google search, but could someone help me out and post a pink to the most recent interaction for me?

@nicbizz:

I found a few things called balanced mod just by doing a Google search, but could someone help me out and post a pink to the most recent interaction for me?

Here you go nicbizz:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=37341.0

@Gamerman01:

@The:

Therefore, I don’t want to render judgment myself on BalMod. But I feel as though the Axis still have a strong advantage. How do more experienced veterans of the league feel about it?

The Axis do not have a strong advantage in the balanced mod game.  The Allies were given many, many advantages that in my opinion offset or more than offset the standard need of an Allied bid.  You will get more Italy action again (taking the bid away) but the Allies are given a lot.  A LOT

I need to play more Balanced Mod games at least with the Allies.  It is an interesting Mod.

Thank you, sir. I find the marine idea interesting, but I’m not a fan of loading troops onto warships….why not just give transports the ability to carry a marine in addition to their normal compliment (infantry, tank, marine)?

@nicbizz:

Thank you, sir. I find the marine idea interesting, but I’m not a fan of loading troops onto warships….why not just give transports the ability to carry a marine in addition to their normal compliment (infantry, tank, marine)?

That sounds reasonable, I guess they wanted to give extra value to warships.

@variance:

The USA NOs are very powerful.  Balanced Mod is great because it forces the axis to do their thing FAST before the allies get the economic advantage.  Just as it should be.

Exactly!

Also, cyan, the +5 for german control of London has not been implemented yet. Just an idea were tossing around

@nicbizz:

Thank you, sir. I find the marine idea interesting, but I’m not a fan of loading troops onto warships….why not just give transports the ability to carry a marine in addition to their normal compliment (infantry, tank, marine)?

Why aren’t you a fan of loading marines onto warships? Have you tried it?

Also, we did toy with the idea of increasing transport capacity to allow carrying a marine as a third unit (or to allow 3 marines to a transport). The result was that marines were invariably purchased for every transport, as a consequence of which they were vastly overrepresented on the board.  You really should try playing with marines on warships, if you haven’t. Its a lot of fun and has a firm historical justification.

Marines make kamikazes more valuable

I don’t think marines were transported by destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, or made beach assaults from the same. I see your point with the extra capacity for a transport though, it would be annoying having everyone just buying marines lol.

Had a chance to look over some of the specs. I’m not familiar with the mod as a whole, but a lot of the individual rules and some of the objectives it uses. Looks pretty solid. Sounds to me like the most complex part of it is probably the rules surrounding Vichy, and Guerrilla Chinese since those introduce concepts that don’t really have analogs in the OOB situation.

One thing I’d suggest, make Sierra Leone a starting British territory!

Having Sierra Leone neutral, as it is OOB, is an oversight/error of the boxed game.

True neutral makes no sense for this territory, both from an historical and a gameplay perspective.

Sierra Leone was a British Colony “At War” with the Axis from 1939, and played a major role as a convoy staging area. The capital Freetown was heavily militarized after the fall of France. There was also a large RAF presence in this broader area of West Africa, that involved the colonies of Gambia, Nigeria and Gold Coast as well, it was called the West African Reinforcement Route (WARR).

Getting Aircraft to Egypt and the middle east was a major logistical challenge of the British war effort, and a major part of the way they solved it was to use the West African Reinforcement Route. Aircraft were actually shipped in pieces to West Africa, assembled there and then flown in stages all the way to Cairo and beyond.

It makes complete sense for the British to be able to build bases in Sierra Leone! I can’t think of a single reason why Sierra Leone should not be made a normal British Territory from the outset, so they could build bases there from the very first turn. This would improve the Allies situation considerably. The historical and gameplay justifications are compelling, and it only requires a single roundel change, and moreover it allows you to sidestep the French West Africa exception under your Vichy Rules for territory control.

An Airbase in Sierra Leone would allow fighters to move between that territory and Egypt in one move.

A Naval Base in Sierra Leone, would allow transports to cycle between sz 101 and sz 87 in one rotation.

I think I have to post a Sierra Leone Question, to see if we can get to the bottom of this…

Ps. Ok posted the Q in couple places, it’d be nice if they included the change as official, but if not I’d still suggest you do so in the mod. It gives the Allies a decent alternative to Gibraltar for staging their expeditionary forces.