Condensed 'Bring-me-up-to-speed' information?

YG wanted to solve some balance issues, not just toying with 8 dices.
At least, he might get credits with tweaking subtly with balance without radical change.

There’s no official answer that I know of.  A&A is such an abstracted game that, in one sense, it would be meaningless to say that game unit X corresponds to real-world military (or naval) formation Y.  Given the scope of A&A Global 1940, however, the various unit types on the map would roughly correspond to large formations if we were to assume that the allocation of units in the rules corresponds to real WWII numbers.  As an example, Germany’s invasion of the USSR was carried out with over 150 divisions – so from that perspective, the small number of sculpts on the actual board could at best only correspond to army groups.  At that level, it shouldn’t even be possible to differentiate between the components of the army groups, nor even of their consitutent armies or corps; the highest-level tank formations in WWII were, I think, armoured divisions and (one level further down) tank brigades.  So one way to look at the game would be to imagine that we’re not actually seeing the military formations themselves, but rather a patchwork picture showing some of the elements of those formations, with some of these elements being high-level ones and others being lower-level ones (like tank brigades).

I have labored in the past thinking of ways to fix the Research & Development phase. My ideas have ranged from ridiculously complex and elaborate to outright stupid, however, my final draft is both simple and balanced. The following house rule has been rigorously play tested, and none of the original technologies have been modified. This rule is balanced enough to bring the R&D phase into your games more often, while simple enough to get your fellow players to approve it.

Grasshopper’s Tech Rule

When an eligible nation chooses to enter the Research phase by purchasing 1 or more research dice, they will receive 1 bonus roll for free. Therefore…

_- if you buy 1 dice for $5, you will get 2 dice for a chance to roll a 6

If a 6 was rolled during the research phase, you must then choose a technology chart to roll on during the development phase. However, after you have chosen a technology chart, and before you make a development roll, you may choose one technology that you will be immune from. For example…

- America chooses to make their development roll using technology chart #2, and decides to be immune from Radar (technology #4). Therefore, if a 4 is rolled, the player for America must try again until they get a result other than 4.

This process is reset after each game round allowing players to choose different charts and immune technologies with each R&D phase.

sounds very promising!

that’s true didn’t think of that  :lol:

ATTENTION:
After consultation with interested people, new drafts have been presented and will be voted on after further inspection.  These are posted so they can be read and commented on.  Please see reply #126 and #130 of the Government in Exile Discussion thread:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=25549.120

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=25549.120

I have locked voting on the early drafts.  A binding vote will be coming soon.

@Red:

The last boats that I would think of making a ramming attack in the WWII era would be capital ships, particularly undamaged capital ships.  Big ships were stand off weapons (aircraft carriers and battleships.)  Unless there is a long/mid range combat phase followed by a short range naval combat phase I don’t see how the attack roll would work conceptually.

An excellent point.  Using big ships as rams rather than as long-range weapon platforms would be roughly in the same league (though slightly more credible) than bringing them alongside an enemy ship so that the crew – armed with pistols and cutlasses, if their captain is a traditionalist – could board it.  The British captain who came closest to carrying on this tradition during WWII was (as I recall) Captain Vian of HMS Cossack (a destroyer), who led a boarding party over to the German supply ship Altmark and freed its POWs with the dashing remark (addressed towards the ship’s holds), “Any British down there?  Well, come on up – the Navy’s here!”

Here is a link to some good German WWII Wav files… maybe you can contact this guy and get some of them in MP3 format.

http://www.tigertank-h-e-181.com/songs_and_lyrics.htm