AARHE: Phase 3: Revised NA's

Mind you, you could pair your reduction of IPC values with a reduction in the number of units on the board at the start of the game. How much you would have to remove is something you would have to play out several times in order to get the balance right. I suspect this would start moving away from “easy fix” and moving towards “might as well be a different game”.

Such is gaming.

-Midnight_Reaper

This is essential for balance; it hardly effects the Allies but enables the CPs to counter Allied sea transport.

If a turn is a year that Berlin-Munich service needs a rocket up the boiler. More than anything, this issue demonstrates the lack of play testing for this game.

@Black_Elk:

I think we’d probably only need to go down to 12 ipcs for the cost of the factory to make it a viable purchase option in a place like Africa. Or if there was a 2 ipc space in Australia, a factory there might be feasible if they only cost 12. At 15 the only players that have much use for them are Japan and the USA.

For a while now, I have definitely been in favor treating IPC values more like “abstract game points” than actual industrial production, so I really don’t have an issue with concepts like increasing or decreasing the value of specific territories, if this serves the gameplay.

In the post above I tried to confine my suggestion to the one area of the gamemap that has been a consistent disappointment for me and that is the valueless Pacific. I know there are people who believe that these territories can be made “valuable” in other ways, but I just don’t see it. Until they have a value of 1 ipc, I think they will be ignored. USA has no strong incentive to take them, and Japan has no strong incentive to hold onto them. Just making them worth 1 would make all the difference.
That would put 6 ipcs into contention, in areas that the USA can reach early on, so the first 4 rounds of the game aren’t so boring to play as USA.

I picked the 5 Japanese territories that I feel should have a value of 1, due to their historical significance in the war. And Midway too, because it’s Midway! That’s 6 territories that are currently worthless, which would be brought into play. The island of Formosa is less important to me.

If I had my way, every territory on the map would have a minimum value of 1, but I would be happy enough if the main Pacific islands that were contested during the war had a value of 1. Basically I was trying to find a simple way to keep the game at a similar economic scale, but with a more compelling Pacific distribution.

I tend to agree with wittmann, USA feels pretty cash strapped compared with Japan. I think there are two ways you could approach it, either more total IPCs or more starting ground units in North America (so you don’t have to buy them.) I think either approach to balance might work.

I would like to see Hawaii at 2 as well, just to give the territory more potential significance as a factory location, or as a target/springboard for Japan against North America. I’m not looking for huge changes to the map, I think we could accomplish a lot just in the range of +1 or -1 ipc in a few specific places :)

If you add 3 IPCs to USA, rising the starting money to 45 IPCs, maybe you can give 31 IPCs to Japan. How?

+1 IPC to Hawaii, Midway and Alaska while keeping Central US at 6 IPCs.
(less change on the original board, simpler to make the calculations).
Now, Formosa can rise to 1 IPC. (All “No IPC” Islands have a worth of 1 IPC.) Simpler to calculate.

If you think USA need another 1 IPC (46 IPCs) gives 1 to Greenland. And all 0 IPC islands will have their value.

@Der:

Hi Marc -

I put in the possibility of removal of the chips in case the player was faced with a huge attacking force and wanted to withdraw everything but did not want the enemy to capture and use all of his entrenchment. (kind of a scorched earth thing)

I put some entrenchment in the Causasus because on my map Stalingrad is located there. I didn’t put any in Hitler’s Atlantic wall because my map starts in 1942 and the player can always add some later. Plus the German player gets an automatic 3 entrenchment anyway when the Allies try to land from the sea.    Â

Okay, thanks for the clarifications.  About the scorched earth thing, the ideal technique (and I’m just kidding here) would be to wait until the attacking enemy infantry falls into the abandoned entrenchments, then to fill in the trenches by blasting their walls with pre-set charges of TNT.  Sort of killing two birds with one stone.  :-D  In fairness, U.S. troops sometimes used a variation of this technique in the Pacific.  When confronted with a particularly tough dug-in Japanese position that would cost a lot of American casulties to clear by conventional assault methods, the troops would simply use a bulldozer to fill it in or collapse it.

And how is game balance threatened when both sides can do the same thing? It may upset game tradition, but I don’t see how it hurts game balance. The Brits put a large capacity IC in South africa. Hmmm…the Germans put a large capacity IC in North Africa. Now you’re both fighting somewhere else. Where’s the imbalance?

I guess ill get to work on a 1941 and 1940 setup for the 1942 2nd edition……

Japanese destroyers can carry one infantry.

typo.

use the “mechanized units” for trucks

you can use choppers, hover tanks and delta wing bombers too :mrgreen: