Hello AA players.
Since I decided to play AA1914 I’ve been doing some custom units for some of my own needs and tweaks and I have placed them on Shapeways here : https://www.shapeways.com/shops/tablegamewiz?li=pb
I have 2 units so far, and I am looking at maybe building a bomber unit.
If any of you would like something added to their game, send me a private message about what you need and we’ll start a discussion. I’d be happy to give it a shot !
Enjoy your battles !
Hello there.
We ran into some of these problems early on when we started AA1914. It took over 20 minutes of talk every time a country played because we analyzed everything.
Eventually, we settled with a 5 minute check for each side at the beginning of a turn and 1-2 minutes when a country was playing and the other side needed to discuss an important thing. It ended up being reasonable enough while also not always revealing the other side’s strategy.
I also suggest you limit the amount of players in a game. Four makes for 2v2, which makes decision making that much faster. Any team with three players slows the game exponentially just because you now have three-way communication and negotiation. We play 2v2 and it goes by fairly well.
Hope this helps !
Hello everyone.
I have been making a few special pieces of my own for AA1914 to make the game more interesting. I designed two pieces so far; a truck and an FT-17 Renault tank model for the WWI game. You can find them here : http://www.shapeways.com/search?q=jsebt
I try to make them in their most affordable material since they are playing pieces, so they have a balance between detail and structural integrity.
If you are interested in trying something out, please let me know. I welcome some challenges !
I personally am not in favor of adding randomization to AA. I feel this game needs a good balance between luck and strategy, and the fact that luck decides most of the battles means you need to compensate otherwise.
Add too much random and you may find the entire game is tilted one way or the other, which can be frustrating.
What I do like to do with my friends (we play the 1914 version a lot) is to tweak the rules every now and then to keep us off balance. I would also like to play around with allowing a limited amount of initial troop placement changes to modify the beginning of the game - which does have good impact on the outcome. It just feels more fun to have a certain choice about it or to have a mechanic itself modified rather than leaving too much of my fate in the hands of the dice.
Hello everyone.
Will be trying to downcost the cruisers and subs in AA WWI to see if this makes for more interesting naval conflicts. So far everyone only buys BBs and transports and I was loathe to increase BB cost as it would only make them too expensive and therefore removed from the game.
I figure that Cruiser cost of 7 and Sub cost of 5 will allow smaller fleets and therefore more choice in resource affectation.
Based on that cost, 5 Cruisers vs 3 BBs (35 IPCs vs 36) or 7 Subs vs 3 BBs (35 vs 36) yield the same theoretical outcome of BBs winning with 1 or 2 left and all remaining damaged. To me this makes sense because it still gives you the advantage of benefiting from your higher one-time costs of BBs yet still give you the chance to look into more slowly building up a force while not comprimising too much ground, which smaller powers could benefit from.
At current costs of 9 and 6, Cruisers and Subs are just pointless; with this kind of odds, I hope they will be better.
Any thoughts?
Hi !
Thanks for the link.
What do you mean the map is not editable ? Copyright issues ?
Hi there.
I agree with drsnidely. Usually you should play the game until it becomes evident that one side is going to lose.
I play regularly with a group of equally-matched friends strategically and the game can still be undecided by turn 10 at times. Usually though, by that time one side will have a clear advantage and it would just be pointless to continue for a couple of hours for the unavoidable to happen.
I expect you should start to see how the game will go by turn 5, so plan for at least 7 turns and be prepared to fight it out for longer if strategy and chance dictate a close game.
Enjoy !
Thank you ! It is modified from the original, so I assume there are different rules associated with it for initial unit placement ?
Here are my doubts about railroads from a game perspective (I am aware they are historically more accurate) :
Do unlimited railroads essentially make the game about holding a massive front like other A&A games with reinforcements dropping in the war zone almost instantly ? If so, this is certainly a historically accurate perspective but a very boring one game wise.
Do limited railroads make for a stiff line of mobility and become obvious targets, again creating a stockpile of units ?
What I do like about this game is that reinforcement logistics has to be accounted for. It has made for more fluid games.
I know I do not want to recreate mechanized infantry and the no-combat value is in place specifically for that, so it makes little sense to build so much it hampers your striking force. The only advantage this method has over limited railroad capacity is some fluidity - again, only some.
EDIT : I did forget to mention that trucks are not allowed to Blitz, obviously. That would make it beyond ridiculous.
So how does one modify the cruisers in this game to make them interesting, short of reworking the entire IPC costs of navies ?
Hi guys.
Historical Board Gaming has a ton of extra units you can buy, but what if I want to get just the board itself ?
After playing this game many times it is getting scratched up a bit so I’d like to see if replacements are available.
Thank you !
Hey guys.
So my friends and I play this game about 4-6 times a year and we like it, though we did think mobility could be some issue. We did try the Tournament Rules movement of 2 squares and found it to be frankly underwhelming and not as balanced as we would like.
So we tried introducing a new unit into the game : trucks. It does make some sense historically and I was trying to think up a way to give players a way to choose to commit to mobility.
So here’s how we played our first game with it :
The purpose is that the units can move onto a territory, load into a truck and move another territory so the truck does a one-back one-forward motion. Under no circumstances can any unit travel more than 2 areas in one move.
The end result was interesting : it saw action with about 8 units on the map. My friend played AH and by the end had 3 that could move armies effectively enough to counter Italian attacks from two fronts. I had some success with Germany and France made use of a couple later in the game to rush reinforcements in.
Overall it seems to offer players a choice of flexibility in that you either choose to buy pure military power and have it walk slowly or you invest in speed and get more maneuvrability as well.
We’ll be playing it again that way and it is fun. If you guys want to try it out, I suggest you do or post any questions and suggestions.
Thank you !