Best posts made by Argothair

@simon33 The fighter+sub bid in the Med is interesting; maybe I’ve been putting too much of my bid into the Atlantic. Honestly, it’s been a long time since I’ve played OOB Global; I tend to play either Balanced Mod or Bloodbath Rules when I play at all. If you crush Italy hard enough in the opening then I could see a follow-up neutral crush being effective around turn 7, as you suggest. I think this would be easiest using OOB rules, which give you more flexibility to concentrate Allied assets in the Med.

@vodot Well, it may be easier than you’d think to set up a naval blockade. If you’re on an island like Borneo, and your enemies put a sub or a destroyer in that island’s sea zone, then your land forces and planes on that island are now out of supply. If you’re the Italians and you’re fighting in Italian East Africa and the British control even half of the Suez, you are likely out of supply.

But, yes, the primary goal is to reduce players’ ability to move huge tank stacks through the jungle mountains of western China and the arctic swamps of Siberia.

@vodot Good questions. It’s possible this system needs one more rule – something like, “You can trace supply through up to 5 sea zones at no charge.” That way if you have to take the long way around South Africa (as either the British or the Italians) you will likely be out of supply.

As far as when to check supply, I would say for simplicity’s sake, you only check it at the start of your own combat phase. You put an out of supply marker in any territories you control that are out of supply, and then your units on those territories remain out of supply until your next combat phase begins. If you conquer an enemy territory that was out of supply for them, then of course you remove their out of supply marker when you remove their control marker.

That way for invasions of, e.g., Borneo you are not automatically out of supply just because your enemy brought a destroyer along with their transport; they would have to send the destroyer or sub or whatever a turn before they plan to invade in order to put you out of supply.

@general-spengler Very interesting. I think having conscripts cost only $1 and be totally unable to attack is both a little sleepy and tends to give too much of an advantage to the defenders.

What about conscripts that cost $2, move 1, defend at 1 each, and attack at 1 as a stack? In other words, no matter how many conscripts you have in an attack, they all collectively only roll one die per round of battle, which only hits if the die is a 1.

This should naturally discourage players from building too many conscripts, since a stack of 5 conscripts is less cost-efficient than a single conscript.

You could also limit production of conscripts to 1 per factory and/or recruiting center per round. So if you have both a factory and a recruiting center in the same territory, you could buy up to 2 conscripts there per turn. If you have only a factory or only a recruitment center, then you could only buy 1 conscript per turn in that territory.

@vodot Thanks! I made some edits to the original post based on our discussion. I hear you that it is important to avoid unreasonable “side-stepping” of blockades, but trying to count up fractional territories is way more bookkeeping work than I want to assign. Instead, I give players the choice of using either a land supply line or a sea supply line, but not both.

I designed an alternate combat system that could be used on any A&A map. The primary goal is to provide an intermediate amount of luck – more luck than low luck (where you are guaranteed a hit for every 6 pips of strength), but less luck than full dice (where you can roll a large fistful of dice and hit absolutely nothing). I also wanted to properly reward combined arms; players who attack with a well-balanced mix of infantry, artillery, tanks, and planes should get better results than players who attack with a similarly-priced stack of nothing but tanks.

At the start of combat, players assign each of their units to a particular color. Players then roll dice based on how many units they have in each color. You typically need 3 units to receive 1 die, but you always round up. This means that if you have 1, 2, or 3 tanks in the red column, you’ll roll 1 red die. If you have 4, 5, or 6 tanks in the red column, you’ll roll 2 red dice. If you have 7, 8, or 9 tanks in the red column, you’ll roll 3 red dice, and so on up to a maximum of 6 dice per color per player per round of combat.

Players then compare the dice they rolled in each color, matching up high dice to high dice as in RISK. For example, if I rolled [5, 4, 3] and you rolled [6, 3, 2], then we would match up your 6 against my 5, your 3 against my 4, and your 2 against my 3. Each pairing that you win causes your opponent to take one casualty. In this example, I would take one hit (because your 6 beats my 5), and you would take two hits (because my 4 beats your 3, and my 3 beats your 2).

If two dice are tied, then both sides take a casualty. If I have extra dice, then they automatically beat your missing dice. For example, suppose I roll [6, 3, 2] and you roll [6]. Our 6’s tie each other, so we each take one hit. Then, my 3 and my 2 are unopposed, so they both hit you. I take a total of 1 casualty, and you take a total of 3 casualties.

Your opponent can generally choose which unit to take as the casualty within the guidelines set by the current color. This is referred to as “victim’s choice” because the player who is losing the unit (the victim) gets to choose which unit is lost. The only exception is that the player who scores a hit with a red die is entitled to choose which unit will be killed by that die. This is referred to as “winner’s choice” because the player who won the red die roll gets to choose which unit is lost.

Some colors allow a unit to be assigned to boost a particular type of die. This means that the die’s value is increased by 1. Each die can only receive each kind of boost once per round. Most dice can only receive one type of boost, so the maximum possible value on those dice is a 7. White dice can receive a boost from artillery and another boost from airplanes, so the maximum possible value on a white die is an 8. If you have enough dice and enough boosting units, you can boost multiple dice once each. For example, a stack with 9 tanks and 3 mech. infantry would roll 3 red dice, each of which would be boosted by +1. If you roll [6, 5, 4] on your red dice, then you would treat them as showing [7, 6, 5] instead. You assign boosts to your dice after seeing everyone’s dice rolls in that color. If both sides have a boost in a color, the attacker must assign boosts first.

The same unit cannot be used to both boost a die and roll a die – you must assign each unit to exactly one function at the start of a battle, and then those units stay put and keep performing that function all throughout the entire battle. You may never move units between colors in the middle of a battle, not even between rounds of that battle. If you have extra boosts that you cannot use, those boosts are simply wasted. For example, with 3 artillery and 1 infantry, you would roll 1 white die and then boost it by +1. The extra 2 artillery don’t accomplish anything, although they may still be taken as casualties.

Each color is resolved in order, from the top of the chart to the bottom of the chart. Attackers and defenders roll simultaneously within each color, but a unit that is killed by an earlier color is not available to contribute its strength to a later color. For example, a bomber killed during the yellow dice roll does not count toward your “1 die per 3 bombers” in the black dice roll.

All rounding takes place within the same type of unit, not across multiple units types. For example, if you have 1 battleship and 2 bombers in the black die row, you would roll 2 black dice: one for your battleships (rounded up), and one for your bombers (rounded up). You would not combine 1 battleship + 2 bombers to get 3 units.

Chessex and many local gaming stores will sell you a block of 12 dice of the same color for about $4, so you can buy a custom set of all 6 colors at a reasonable price, but you could also play without any particular color; just roll whatever dice you have for the “yellow” category, then re-roll those same dice for the “black” category, and so on. The colors are just to enhance the theme and make it easier to remember what part of the combat round you’re in.

I would love to get your feedback! Let me know what you think. :)

Thanks for writing in! I hope you get a chance to try the game and see what you think of it.

You can turn off tech development fairly easily in the Map Options dialog box, just like for any other map. I also like to play without tech.

Before you declare that a two-ocean USA is impossible, why not give it a try? I’ve playtested this a fair bit, and my experience is that the USA absolutely can build two navies as their income gets up into the 60s and 70s, and that Japan is vulnerable because the navy can pick up 3 IPCs from the central Pacific islands, or 3.5 IPCs from the Philippines, or 5.5 IPCs from Borneo, or 5.5 IPCs from East Indies, all of which are threatened from zones like the Solomon Islands or Wake Island. If you’d like to play the Axis sometime, I can show you what I mean.

There’s also a tricky problem with trying to make A&A maps match up with history. Historically, if the Axis had won the battles of El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Midway, would they have had an economic advantage against the Allies, or would they have knocked any major Ally out of the war? I’d say no to both counts, by a very wide margin. The USA + Britain + USSR + China outnumbered and outgunned and outproduced Germany + Italy + Japan by roughly 3:1, even after the loss of France and Poland and Shanghai and Ukraine. As you say, total Japanese income could never have approached total US income during the war, no matter how well the battles went for Japan. But the same thing is true of Germany! So if you want to be faithful to that historical reality, you have to write a map where the Axis are guaranteed to lose. That’s the route chosen by some hex-and-counter games like Unconditional Surrender, and some innovative semi-wargames like Churchill, but it’s not the way TripleA works, and it’s not part of the philosophy for this map. I have to give both sides a fair chance to win, and that means that sometimes the Axis will have an unrealistically high income.

All that said, it is possible that Germany is still a little too weak and Japan is still a little too strong. If we were going to add a fourth new national objective for Germany, what should it be? Any suggestions? If we were going to weaken or remove one of Japan’s national objectives or make one of them harder to achieve, what should that be?

As far as map changes, I am in broad agreement with your ideas, and I am working on implementing them in my other map, Argo’s Middleweight. Thanks for your comments on that map as well, which I’ll reply to in that thread!

I think Persia might be the optimal play for the Allies under these rules – you can easily reinforce it from Stalingrad, and you can push either east to India or west to Egypt as needed. Persia’s usually not worth a factory in OOB play because it would only have 1 production slot, but with 2 production slots in Persia at the start of the game, you could really swing the center of the board toward the Allies.

Anybody want to test this out by e-mail? I’ll take the Allies with a factory and AAA in a modified Persia that’s worth 2 IPCs and has 2 production slots for as long as I can hold it. I wouldn’t ask for any further bid; that sounds like plenty to me.

I like this idea, but the board is not really made for it.

General De Gaulle nailed it here – having a third tier of factories would be really interesting, but most of the map isn’t designed with a third tier of countries in mind. In Soviet Russia, there are some obviously plausible “tertiary” factory sites like Vladivostok, Vologda, Archangel, Chelyabinsk, Perm, and Kazakh, all of which had notable concentrations of heavy industry in the 1940s…but these are all worth the same 1 IPC as completely ridiculous locations like Sakha or Nenetsia that couldn’t manufacture even one squadron of airplanes if they broke the local economy trying to do it.

Same thing in Africa – the idea of having the Gold Coast or French Central Africa pump out combat-worthy tanks is just laughable; these places couldn’t even manufacture sliced bread in the 1940s. On the other hand, Rhodesia or Ethiopia probably could have managed it. They’re all worth the same 1 IPC.

Same thing in the Pacific – there’s no industry or even enough locals to recruit on Iwo Jima, which is worth 1 IPC, but you could have easily recruited a few infantry regiments and equipped them with locally sourced rifles in, e.g., New Guinea, which is worth 0 IPCs.

So I think you either need a totally custom map, or you need some other way of extending the unit roster for production centers. I favor the “training camp,” which might also cost about 7 IPCs, but where you can recruit up to 2 infantry (only) per turn, and no other units. This helps get at the idea that you can set up a recruiting station just about anywhere, even if there’s no industry to speak of, because rifles are lightweight and easy to ship or haul across a continent – but you can only manufacture tanks and planes in genuine industrial centers that were built up at least a little bit before the war started.

Hi everyone,

I designed a map for the 1942 Second Edition game board, with some changes to improve strategic variety and historical realism. The Pacific fleets have been moved to encourage historical battles at Midway and/or Guadalcanal, instead of an odd, six-month-late repeat of Pearl Harbor. The IPC values of several territories have been increased to encourage play around the periphery of the board, including Scandinavia, South Africa, Australia, China, and Siberia. The Germans have enough subs in the Atlantic to pose problems for several turns, but not so many that they can wipe out the combined Anglo-Atlantic fleets before the Allies even get to move. There are additional victory cities, and the number of victory cities needed to win has been increased to 15 out of 24 for a Projection of Power, or 18 out of 24 for an Honorable Victory. In general, the game is loosely built on the historical situation as of August 1, 1942, but I’ve taken some liberties with history as needed to ensure a fair and strategically interesting game.

Files are available below for both TripleA and home play, so give it a try and let me know what you think! If you’re playing at home, you can probably get away without changing the territory values, and still have an interesting game.

Moderator’s edit: Added tag [1942 2nd Ed.] to title.

World War II v5 Argo’s Summer 1942.xml

Fair enough! And thanks very much for the writeup. If anyone tries this again, consider adding:

2 German subs in SZ 10 (Greenland)
2 German subs in SZ 12 (west of Morocco)
1 Japanese carrier with 1 Japanese fighter in SZ 62 (east of Tokyo)

Has anyone seen any interesting house rules to simulate manpower limitations? Like, I’ve heard that Germany was almost completely out of able-bodied men by the end of the war, and that the Soviet Union was down to its last 2 million or so replacements, so that some of its final units in 1945 were lower-quality. Whether or not those specific facts are true, it does seem like there’s more than just an industrial limitation on how many infantry you can produce – at some level, the number of infantry divisions you can put into the field is limited by the number of people who live in your territory. A million men carrying thin rifles in wooden wagons might use only as much industrial capacity as 10,000 men driving steel tanks and burning gasoline – so the infantry-heavy strategy is going to chew through your manpower reserves much more quickly.

Has anyone experimented with rules about manpower restrictions? Like, the cost of infantry goes up after your first 100 units, or after your first 10 units each turn? Or infantry become weaker if you have too many infantry on the map at once, or if you lose too many infantry as casualties? It’s a tricky problem to simulate, and maybe it’s not worth it, but I thought I’d reach out and see how far other people have gotten.

I mainly have Global 1940 in mind for this house rule, but I suppose it could work in other systems, too.

It’s always hard to guess what people mean by “simple,” but here’s an idea for incorporating iron, oil, and grain.

BASIC RULES
() Natural Resources are not accumulated or saved – instead, they are available on each player’s turn (or not). You may use resources that belong to one of your teammates or that belong to an unoccupied neutral country that favors your faction. For example, the United States can use Brazilian iron unless Brazil is occupied by the Axis, because Brazil is pro-Allied.
() Generally, supply must be traced to a unique source. This means that there must be a continuous chain of unconquered territories and/or non-hostile sea zones that connect the factory where you want to build a unit to the resource that is assisting with the unit’s construction. For example, to bring Brazilian iron to the Eastern US factory, you would need either a continuous land route (running up through Panama and Mexico), or a continuous sea route (running through the Gulf of Mexico), or a mixture of the two. You may trace supply through true neutral territories or even through neutral territories that are hostile to your cause (e.g. Britain may trace supply through Iraq even though it is pro-Axis), but you cannot trace supply through a territory that has been activated, conquered, or occupied by your enemies. You cannot use the same resource twice on the same nation’s turn, but you may use the same resource again on each nation’s turn. For example, Brazilian iron could be used to build one battleship on the US turn, and then again to build one battleship on the UK turn.

IRON
() available in Norway, Finland, Siberia, Urals, Brazil, Quebec, French West Africa, Western Australia, and Manchuria
() for each BB or CV you want to build, you must either trace supply to a unique source of iron, or spend an extra 5 IPCs.

OIL
() available in Iraq, Persia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Egypt, Mexico, Central US, Romania, Caucasus, Borneo, Java, Kazakh
() for each tank or aircraft you want to build, you must either trace supply to a unique source of oil, or spend an extra 3 IPCs.

GRAIN
() available in Ukraine, India, West India, Turkey, Eastern US, Central US, Ontario, Belgium/Holland, Normandy, Sicily, Kiangsi, Kiangsu, Hunan, French Indochina, Ethiopia, Celebes, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Queensland.
() for each pair of infantry or mechanized infantry you want to build, you must either trace supply to a unique source of grain, or spend an extra 1 IPC. You may build a single infantry without paying the penalty.

Background

So, for those of you just tuning in, there’s a reasonably broad consensus about A&A 1942: 2nd Edition that it’s a fabulous game but that (a) it’s slightly unbalanced in favor of the Axis, and (b) it fails to break out of the increasingly tired rut where Russia immediately evacuates all of its Asian troops, China is a speed bump at best, and the optimal strategy is for the Axis to race for Moscow while the Allies race for Berlin.

We’ve talked about many potential solutions for these issues, most of which have involved adding additional units and/or changing the price of units. We’ve steered clear of changing the map, though, mostly because map changes disrupt game balance in ways that are hard to predict, and tend to damage the graphics – you don’t want to go around leaving permanent marks on your snazzy $60 game boards with a $2 sharpie.

A Modest Proposal

Keeping those risks in mind, I have a proposal for a very small set of changes to the 1942.2 map that could yield big payoffs in terms of creating additional game balance and strategic variety without ruining the aesthetic appeal of the game. It’s just a proposal, though, so I strongly recommend using a pencil…

1. Draw a vertical line from the northeast corner of Afghanistan to the center of the southern border of Sianking, dividing Szechuan into two territories: Qinghai (west) and Henan (east). Qinghai is worth 1 IPC and contains a new Victory City named Chongqing. Qinghai starts the game with 1 American infantry. Qinghai borders Kazakh, Sinkiang, and Henan. Henan is worth 2 IPC and starts the game with 2 American infantry, 1 American anti-aircraft gun, 1 American fighter, and 1 factory. Henan borders Sinkiang, Henan, Anhwei, Kwangtung, and Yunnan.

2. Draw a vertical line from the northwest corner of the Caspian Sea to the center of the southern border of West Russia, dividing the Caucasus into two territories: Armenia (west) and Volgograd (east). Armenia is worth 4 IPCs and starts the game with 3 infantry and 1 artillery. Armenia borders Ukraine, West Russia, Volgograd, Persia, and the Black Sea. Volgograd is worth 2 IPCs and starts the game with 1 tank, 1 anti-aircraft gun, and 1 factory. Volgograd contains a new Victory City named Stalingrad, and borders Armenia, West Russia, Russia, and Kazakh.

3. Draw a diagonal line that runs across the narrowest portion of Vologda, starting from the southeastern border of Archangel and finishing at the northwestern border of Novosibirsk. The line will split Vologda into two territories: Omsk (west) and Chelayabinsk (east). Omsk is worth 1 IPC and starts the game with 1 infantry. Omsk borders Russia, Archangel, Chelayabinsk, and Novosibirsk. Chelayabinsk is worth 2 IPCs and starts the game with 1 factory. Chelayabinsk borders Omsk, Archangel, Evenki, and Novosibirsk.

4. Draw a vertical line splitting Libya into two territories: Tunisia (west) and Cyrenaica (east). Tunisia is worth 2 IPCs and borders Algeria, Cyrenaica, and the Italian sea zone. Tunisia contains a new victory city named Tunis. Tunisia starts with 2 German infantry at setup. Cyrenaica is worth 1 IPC and borders Tunisia, Egypt, and the Italian sea zone. Cyrenaica starts with 1 German tank at setup.

5. Eastern Australia is now worth 2 IPCs instead of 1 IPC, and contains a victory city (Sydney).

New Starting IPCs:
USSR: 24 -> 27 IPCs (+3)
Germany: 40 -> 42 IPCs (+2)
Britain: 31 -> 32 IPCs (+1)
Japan: 30 -> 30 IPCs (no change)
USA: 42 -> 44 IPCs (+2)

New Victory City List:
Allies (10): Washington, London, Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Calcutta, Chongqing, Honolulu, Sydney, San Francisco
Axis (7): Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tunis, Shanghai, Tokyo, Manila

There are 17 total victory cities. If either the Allies or the Axis control 11 or more Victory Cities at the end of the USA’s turn, then that team immediately wins.

New Russian Starting Factory List:
Karelia (2 units/turn), Volgograd (2 units/turn), Russia (8 units/turn), Chelayabinsk (2 units/turn).

Strategy Discussion

The point of these changes is to encourage the Russians to vigorously defend their Asian territories, to encourage Germany to vigorously defend north Africa, to allow the Americans to pump major resources into China if they so choose, to force the Allies to defend at least part of the Pacific, and to give both sides even chances at victory even without a bid.

The Russians now have a starting factory in the Ural mountains (Chelayabinsk). Holding that factory and the immediately adjacent territories is worth 6 IPCs, meaning that you can drop two infantry a turn into the Ural factory and have them pay for themselves. Russia may not have a good reason to defend Buryatia, Yakutsk, and the Soviet Far East, but now at least there is a Russian rallying point somewhere along the 3,000 miles between Vladivostok and Moscow. If the Japanese conquer Chelayabinsk, it will seriously improve the Japanese income and logistical situation, but it is not necessarily an immediate game over for Moscow, which is still two spaces away.

The Russians now have some room to trade in the south – Germany wants to capture Armenia because of the valuable oil worth 4 IPCs, and can do so relatively easily by swinging the Italian navy over to the northeast, but because Armenia does not come with a free factory, and because the USSR can still produce units in Volgograd, it is not necessarily worthwhile for the Axis to pull extreme stunts like flying the Japanese air force over to defend a captured Armenia.

The Americans now have a starting factory in China (Qinghai) that is guaranteed a chance to produce 2 units before the Japanese can even attack it. Because the Americans start with an extra infantry and extra AAA gun in the region, if the Americans use both builds and also consolidate all forces in Qinghai, they have some hope of holding it against the Japanese on turn 2 even if Japan sends all available forces and the Russians/British do not help reinforce it. With a coordinated Allied effort, China can now hold against a mid-strength Japanese attack until turn 5 or 6 without the need to strip Russia or India bare.

In north Africa, the Germans no longer have an attractive option to blow open Egypt on turn 1, because the ex-Libyan infantry is now out of position in Tunis. On the other hand, the Americans no longer have the option of defending all of Africa by ferrying troops to Morocco – once the Germans do crack Egypt on turn 2 or turn 3, the Allies will have to reinforce sub-Saharan Africa via West Africa and/or India, because Morocco is just too damn far away. On the third hand, if the Americans do choose to land in Morocco, the Germans will be less likely to just abandon north Africa in response, because now they have a 2 IPC territory with a victory city in it to defend. If the Germans let the Americans walk into Tunis, the Americans can build a factory there, and use it to seize Paris and Rome, setting up a European Allied victory even if the Allies never capture Berlin.

Meanwhile, most of the old strategies can still be used if desired – the sea zones are all the same, the navies and air forces are all the same, the capitals are all in the same places, the starting forces distribution is virtually unchanged, and most of the map is encouragingly free of pencil marks.

Let me know what you think!

PS Many thanks to Black_Elk for his thread on moving Russia’s factories to the east, which is what got me thinking about these map changes in the first place, and to everyone for your feedback on earlier articles I’ve posted, which have helped me push the ideas in this piece forward to (what I hope) is their logical conclusion.

In the historical World War II, both factions fought over Central Pacific islands, for two reasons:

1. It was much easier/cheaper to base fighters on islands than on carriers, because carriers are much more expensive than landing strips, and pilots need an extraordinary level of skill to take off and land on a carrier’s tiny runways. Even a tiny, rocky island served as a huge force multiplier for a nation’s air forces – you could store a couple hundred fighters on a small island, which is as many fighters as might fit on three or four carriers, i.e. nearly doubling the size of your available air force for the theater.

2. It was much easier/cheaper to stash (and use!) depots of spare parts, ammunition, food, and diesel on islands than on dedicated supply boats, because an island depot is much easier to build, maintain, and access than a floating supply boat. Very few ships were capable of cruising around the Pacific for more than a couple of months at a time without at least a minor resupply stop to take on more fuel and other consumables.

In the OOB versions of Axis & Allies games, very few players fight over the Pacific, because it’s full of a bunch of 0-IPC territories that aren’t connected to anything interesting or useful. Sea-based fighters function exactly the same as land-based fighters, and ships have unlimited range; you can sail a ship from San Francisco and Tokyo to back, fighting in five combats along the way, without ever bothering to stop near a friendly island chain.

The “national objectives” that give players extra IPCs for holding certain combinations of islands can help restore some interest to that region of the board, but it winds up feeling somewhat artificial and disconnected from the interesting historical aspects of carrier-based warfare. You’re not taking Wake Island because you need it as a base or even to deny your enemy the ability to use it as a base; you’re taking Wake Island because a little card says it’s worth extra cash.

So here are a couple of house rules that might get players thinking along more historical lines in the Pacific, without too much added complexity.

(*) Fighters are reset to C8 A2 D3 M4. A fighter that takes off from a land territory and fights in a sea territory (whether via a combat move, scramble, or otherwise) gets +1 to its combat rolls (so, the fighter returns to the familiar A3 / D4 level). This helps encourage players to store their fighters on islands, instead of just putting every available fighter on a carrier. Incidentally, this tweak also makes it slightly harder for players to advance a stack consisting of nothing but infantry and fighters – without some artillery, tanks, or tactical bombers, it will be harder to wage an offensive war.

(*) To remain in supply, a naval unit must be in or adjacent to a sea zone that touches a friendly land territory. A naval unit that is out of supply gets -1 to its combat rolls and convoy damage (to a minimum of 0). For example, a submarine that was out of supply would attack at 1 and defend at 0. A combat unit that is reduced to a roll of 0 still functions as a normal combat unit, i.e., it can still be taken as a casualty when appropriate. Supply is checked at the moment that combat occurs. Only ships are affected by supply rules; infantry, marines, and planes still have their full combat value. This should help encourage players to seize at least a few islands in any region where they plan to fight naval battles, instead of sending a fleet deep into enemy territory and leaving it there.

(*) Intact naval bases provide supply for two sea zones in every direction. If you are two moves away from a sea zone with an operational friendly naval base, you are in supply.

Thoughts?

@baron-münchhausen I think part of what’s needed to make subs both simpler and more realistic is to have a strict “up or down” rule that always applies. In other words, in any given battle, for the entire battle, the sub is either above the waterline or below the waterline. The sub’s owner might get to choose, or the attacker might get to choose, depending on how many destroyers and planes and things are in the battle zone, but we can’t have five different “states” for a sub to exist in, because that’s part of what causes the confusion. Right, like I don’t want to learn about what happens to a sub whose surprise strike is cancelled but that can still submerge but only after the first round of combat. That’s just too much. Either the sub is up, in which case it participates fully in combat, or down, in which case it ignores all combat.

Just my two cents.

I like the problem you’re trying to solve (China gets crushed too easily), but I think your solution is complicated and confusing. China is supposed to simultaneously have both a normal economy and a partisan economy? So would you add a factory? A capital that can be looted? Are you saying that if China owns 6 territories, then they can deploy 3 infantry as partisans, plus 2 more infantry at the factory? Or would the factory be capped at one unit per turn? How do you distinguish Chinese artillery from American artillery if the Americans invade via the Pacific?

I think if we adopted all of your suggestions at once (more starting infantry for China, China can build artillery, China gets to use both a partisan economy and a normal economy in the same territories) then China would be over powered. Right now China + Hong Kong + Burma have 6 Allied infantry, and Manchuria + Kiangsu + Thailand have 9 Axis infantry. If you even that up so that both sides start with 9 infantry, and if you let China produce 5 infantry per turn, then, as a rough rule of thumb, Japan will have to produce or transport an average of 6 infantry per turn into China in order to make progress and start rolling China back toward Kazakhstan…but that’s a lot to ask. 6 infantry per turn is Japan’s entire starting income on turn 1, and about half of Japan’s income on turn 2. It really doesn’t leave Japan any margin to expand its navy to defend against a US Pacific campaign, or to try out aggressive strategies against India or Siberia or Australia. You’re kind of forcing Japan to go all-in on China every game, which is not that much more interesting than turning China into a doormat. The ideal would be for China to be tough enough that you need to put some Japanese reinforcements there if you want to win, but weak enough that you can usually afford to mostly neglect China if you’re comfortable with a stalemate.

So, here’s one way to do that:

• Add 2 more starting Chinese infantry to Yunnan – this means that the Flying Tigers will almost always survive unless Japan wants to abandon other turn-1 objectives and risk serious fighter losses, or unless Japan wants to empty out Thailand and let the British walk into Thailand and collect the British national objective there.

• Add 1 starting Chinese infantry to Ningxia – this gives the Chinese army a bit of depth, so that if the Japanese attack Suiyuan, Hupeh, and Fukien on turn 1, the Chinese still have something relevant to fight back with in the north.

• Allow Chinese forces to move freely into Burma, Hong Kong, and/or Thailand – this makes it a little more dangerous for Japan to completely ignore China.

• Allow the USA to spend $12 to replace the Flying Tigers ($10 + shipping) if they are destroyed – this makes it a little harder to permanently knock China out of the game.

Otherwise leave everything the same as OOB rules. This should be more than enough to keep China interesting, without making China so powerful that Japan gets sucked into a mandatory total war in China in every single game.