New Production Facilities

These new bases sound great, but would it be a good idea to let tactical bombers STB a minor factory?  It just seems like their bombing capabilities are near to useless so far.

@Baron:

@Young:

@Baron:

Outpost and minor should be upgrade for 10 IPCs.
Major Factory should be upgrade for 15 IPCs.

At 12 to upgrade Outpost noone will buy it.
Buying Minor for 15 gonna be the shortcut.

Hey BM, Thanks for the comments,

The value in these units have nothing to do with upgrade cost, I’ve been playing this game for years and have never witnessed a factory upgrade. If a territory meets the required placement criteria for 3 different types of production facilities, you’ll obviously purchase and place the highest that is eligible for the territory or risk spending more in the long run. The ideas in Halifax rules prevented them from getting upgraded at all unless you were the original owner of the territory, this way I’ve made it possible to upgrade, but good luck affording it. I believe many players will purchase a military outpost not because of it’s upgrading potential, but rather their placement abilities. An outpost cost 10 IPCs and can be placed on the Caroline Islands, so it doesn’t mater how much it would cost to upgrade it later to a minor factory because minor factories can’t be placed on islands.

Probably, upgrade for outpost and minor factory should be cheaper, something around 6 IPCs.
While major to IC should cost 12 IPCs.
That way, it can be affordable to upgrade.

@Young:

Well, a military outpost in my mind consists of barracks, supply depots, and some training obsticals, so going from that to producing precision weapons made of iron like artillery, or engines and armour for tanks is quite a shift. I think in my head these outposts can be placed on territories with zero IPC value, and even islands… so supplying a project to turn it into a minor factory would not be cheap, even if the territory is eligible… I wouldn’t go lower than 10 IPCs to upgrade outposts to minors and minors to majors. Any other things about it that need discussion? would you play with these new unit profiles?

My assumption was to keep proportion with OOB upgrade:
Minor cost 12
Upgrade cost 20
IC cost 30
So upgrading cost 2 additional IPCs.

From major Factory at 20
Upgrade 12, sum 32 IPCs (same  as OOB)

From minor factory at 15
Upgrade 6, sum 21 (1 additional IPC compared to major factory )
From outpost at 10
upgrade 6, sum 16 (1 additional IPC compared to directly buying minor factory.

Of course, upgrade cannot be done if territory is not able to receive it.

The capabilities of a combat aircraft are determined by its own design characteristics, not by the size or nature of its target.  I’m not saying that a WWII ground-attack aircraft (a tactical bomber in A&A terms) could not attack a specific factory building, whether it be a major or a minor factory.  What I’m saying is that a strike by a ground-attack aircraft is a ground-attack mission, not a strategic bombing mission.  Strategic bombing missions in WWII were medium-to-high-altitude attacks by (typically) large groups of bombers flying horizontally and dropping large payloads of bombs with relatively low precision against (usually) large targets like cities.  Ground-attack missions were low-altitude attacks by individual planes against individual relatively small targets (like tanks or ships or buildings), often conducted in a shallow or steep dive, and involving small ordnance payloads like a single bomb or a cluster of rockets.  There was nothing “strategic” about strikes by ground-attack aircraft.

@CWO:

YG’s Military Outposts proposal sounds a bit like the base / training camp idea that was discussed on the first page of this thread:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=36518.0

There might be some useful ideas there on terminology because “outpost” to me conveys the idea of a small, lonely distant military installation (the kind that soldiers hate being posted to, and hated even more in the days before Skype and email), not the idea of a mobilization area for infantry.

As a 20 year military veteran and big student of WWII history, I concur the “Military Outpost” is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps call it what it is… “Military Base” or “Military Depot”.

@Young:

Would it be accurate to give UK a military base in Egypt as part of the setup?

Yes.  In my G1940 map analysis, I noted: “Egypt is shown on the G40/2 map as being a British possession, though technically it had been independent since 1936.  British troops occupied the Suez Canal zone only, but by treaty they could re-occupy the rest of the country in time of war.”

@Young:

What about this Soviet setup?… I wanted it to help convey the movement of their production further east as the Germans advanced.

Russia - Industrial Complex
Novgorod - Minor Factory
Volgograd - Minor Factory (immediately upgraded to a major factory if Ukraine or Leningrad has been captured)
Ukraine - Minor Factory

…and do you think Leningrad should start with a major factory instead of a minor?

I can’t offer detailed comments because I’m crummy at translating historical information into specific A&A game set-ups, given that A&A is so abstracted. But Leningrad certainly was a major industrial city at the time.

@Major Industrial Complex in Leningrad

I agree that Leningrad pumped out a lot of troops, equipment and was the closest to the Murmansk port for Lend-Lease.  Therefore, definitely a Major IC.

But has anyone play-tested this?  Won’t that greatly alter the balance and prevent Germany from pushing in on their northern front?  Would really like to hear some AAR’s on this.

Not convinced.

Rather Tankograd in URALS should be represented  ( large IC). Possibly as second choice a small IC in Archangel (wherever Murmansk is on the map)