Posts made by CWO Marc

I’ve just placed an order for five sets of the Italian pieces.  I didn’t run into the problem with the ROMMEL code that knp7765 reported (the deduction made was $5 on the whole order), but I did get puzzled over the phrase “Shipping & Handling (Mail COMBAT DICE to Europe (2-4 weeks) OR - UPS - United States / Canada (2-6 days) )” which I ran into.  I think that the “COMBAT DICE” part isn’t actually supposed to be there because I’m ordering pieces, not dice.  Perhaps this accidentally got copied to the Italian piece preorder menu from the menu which FMG uses to take orders for the combat dice.

Some kind of concealment mechanism might be interesting to introduce.  One of the basic differences between A&A (which is a boardgame rather than a military simulator) and true warfare is that, in A&A, you always know where the other side’s forces are, what types of units they consist of and how many units they include.  As a result, players can’t really practice one of the key skills of generalship, which is to concentrate strength against weakness by deceiving the enemy about where and when you’ll attack and what forces you’ll do it with.  This principle was expressed as far back as Sun Tze’s treatise The Art of War, which stated that all war is based on deception.  Two of its famous applications in World War II were the German main attack through the Ardennes in June 1940 (while the French and British were charging towards a diversionary force in Belgium and Holland) and the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy (while the Germans were fixated on the idea that the real attack would occur at the Pas-de-Calais).

@aethervox:

Instead of going to all the expense of including so many different naval pieces (not too mention the air units & the land vehicles) why not give the buyer the factories & AA Guns? […] There is still, I believe, a few missing units for the stable of A & A games, namely, Paratroops & Corvettes.

Could you clarify what you mean by this?  On the one hand you seem to be saying that the games should provide plastic factories and AA guns rather than such a large variety of naval pieces, while on the other hand you seem to be saying that the games should include corvettes, an entirely new type of naval unit.

I think that the variations arise mainly from the fact that the A&A boards have always used multiple scales within the same world map.  A completely realistic map of the world wouldn’t work well for A&A because its proportions wouldn’t be convenient for placing pieces on the board: Europe, for example, would be much too small, and the Pacific would be much too big and would contain too much wasted empty space.  So the A&A maps compensate for this by artificially inflating the size of the areas that saw the most fighting in World War II (like Europe and North Africa), shinking the ones that didn’t see much action (like South Africa) and completely eliminating parts of the Pacific Ocean (especially to the west of South America).  It’s not accurate cartography, but it’s practical game design.  I do wish, however, that the Pacific and Europe halves of the global map would wrap around properly in both directions.  The difference in scale between the two halves of North America is quite large, and there’s no way to make the whole continent fit together properly along its whole height.

According to the notes I’ve kept over the years, the evolution of the sculpt colours in the A&A games (I have all of them from the Milton Bradley edition onward) went more or less as follows:

United States: In the Milton Bradley edition, the U.S. troops were dark olive green and the equipment sculpts were dark brownish green.  The current basic U.S. colour of medium green was first used for both troops and equipment in AAEurope.  The medium green colour has seen a few shading differences over the years, especially in the troops sculpts, but the biggest variation in this practice was the use of two U.S. troop colours in AAPacific: medium green for standard troops and dark green for Marines.

Great Britain: The A&A rules have generally described the British pieces as being “tan,” but the actual sculpts that have come with the games have used different interpretations of this colour over the years – and have deviated wildly from it in some cases.  In the Milton Bradley edition, the British troop sculpts were medium tan and the equipment pieces were what could be called pale beige.  In the AAEurope and AAPacific, the British troop pieces stayed medium tan and the equipment pieces now matched them in colour.  The British troop and equipment sculpts then went all over the place for a while: they were pale cream in D-Day, pale lime green in Revised and salmon pink in Bulge.  Things finally settled down with Anniversary because from that point onward British troop and equipment pieces have been issued in a light tan colour almost identical to the pale beige of the Milton Bradley equipment pieces.  (They’ve also been issued in a so-called “dark tan” version to depict ANZAC forces in Pacific 1940, but that’s another story.)

Soviet Union: Russia’s troop pieces in the Milton Bradley edition were dark chocolate brown and its equipment pieces were a slightly lighter shade of the same colour.  In AAEurope, all the Russian sculpts were a medium shade of burgundy purple; since Revised, they’ve been a darker shade of the same colour.

Germany: In the Milton Bradley edition, Germany’s troop sculpts were medium grey and its equipment sculpts were a slightly lighter shade of the same colour.  Beginning with AAEurope and ending approximately with Revised (my notes are a bit unclear about this point), German troop pieces were a kind of gunmetal bluish-black and most German equipment sculpts were similarly toned (though a few were also issued in dark grey).  The use of outright black for all the German pieces seems to have started with Bulge and continued thereafter.

Japan: The colours used for Japan in the Milton Bradley edition can be described as amber (or medium butterscotch) for the troops and pale butterscotch for the equipment.  All of Japan’s sculpts were cherry red in AAPacific; they’ve been dark burnt orange from Revised onward.

Italy, China, ANZAC and France: All of these are recent additions to the A&A sculpt range.  Their respective colours are medium brown for Italy, lime green for China, “dark tan” – actually more of a grey colour – for ANZAC and dark blue for France.  There has been no colour variation either between games in the case of Italy and China (which appear in both Anniversary and Global 1940) or between the troop and equipment sculpts of a given country (which is a non-issue in the case of China because it only has troop pieces).

There are a couple of things about this concept that I’m wondering about.  The first thing that puzzles me is the idea that it would be possible for an international coalition to win a global war by simply having one-half of the coalition win in just one-half of the globe.  What would the rationale for this be?  For example, let’s say the Allies are on their way to winning in Europe, but haven’t quite achieved victory, and that the Axis wins in the Pacific at this point.  Why would the Allies fighting Germany in Europe consider a Japanese victory in the Pacific to be a global Axis victory, and why would they stop fighting the Germans at that point (especially if they’re getting the upper hand in Europe)?  I’m also wondering about the fact that this proposal is supposed to “keep the Allies from focusing on the European Axis and crushing it before Japan can do anything.”  Since the proposal would make it possible for one side to achieve a global victory by winning in just one theatre, then the Allies should be able be able to win the game by focussing on defeating Germany and ignoring Japan…which is exactly the kind of scenario that this concept is supposed to prevent in the first place.

New links added:

Katfishkris’s Global 1940 Table
      (Pictures located on page 2 of the thread for 94Canuck’s Global Gaming Table)
      http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=20291.15

Streifenkarl’s AARHE 118" x 60" Map Table
      (Pictures located on page 14 of the AARHE Map Files thread)
      http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=8670.msg688948#msg688948

I once read an amusing anecdote told by a military history professor at an American university.  His father had fought in the Second World War, and in his classroom lectures he would sometimes mention his dad.  Several years ago, however, he realized with a shock just how much of a generation gap there was between him and his students when he phrased his reference to his father a bit too vaguely (saying that he had served “in the war”) and one of his twenty-or-so-year-old students raised his hand and commented that “my Daddy was in Vietnam too.”

SZ 11 adjacent to SZ 64
SZ 28 adjacent to SZ 64
SZ 51 adjacent to SZ 64. 65. and 66
SZ 52 adjacent to SZ 66
SZ 64 adjacent to SZ 11, 28, and 51
SZ 65 adjacent to SZ 51
SZ 66 adjacent to SZ 51 and 52

@tytyboogie:

this is my custom table…the only thing left is the custom peice of glass…didnt realize the best price i was going to get down here in florida was going to still be over 100$…lol. decided to use hinges for a bit of a storage area for the decorative wood side with the decals i made.

Very nice! It was a good idea to build dice-rolling areas into the table frame.

As far as the glass goes, it might be cheaper to use plastic (like acrylic) depending on what thickness you buy, and it would almost certainly be lighter.  Thin plastic also has the advantage that it can be rolled up for shipping, storage and moving.

@molinar13:

You bring up very good points CWO Marc, I am now considering a name change for the variant. Would Allies v.s. USSR make more sense? As for the time frame, I am now leaning towards a 1946 scenario. I would prefer this because the units being used in the game are that of AAG and now that I think about it a 1949 would make some of those units obsolete…Okay another question I have is should Germany, Italy, Japan have any part in this? or should their original territories be occupied by allied markers? One other obstacle I am facing is what to do with nuetrals and other territories the allies did not officially occupy militarily ex. Norway, Dutch East Indies, and a couple other I can not name off the back. I appreciate your post CWO Marc, I see now this variant will require much more reasearch than I anticipated. If anyone has a link to post World War II army strengths, and where they were stationed I would appreciate it.

The immediate post-war period would indeed be an interesting time in which to set a wargame.  As you say, it would allow the use of A&A sculpts, perhaps with a sprinkling of a few more advanced units supplemented by other games.  And as I mentioned, it would put pretty tight limits on the nukes.  (You might want to do some background reading on Operation Crossroads, the first post-war atomic bomb tests – you may find the information useful.)

Politically, 1946 was an interesting time.  Russia and the Western powers we still technically allies, but Cold War strains were already appearing.  The points you raise about whether Japan and Germany should be used, and if so how, fits right into this issue.  The U.S. position, from August 1945 onward, was that Japan was in the U.S. sphere of interest and that Russia should stay clear of it.  As for Germany (which is conveniently divided into eastern and western portions on the Global 1940 map), its postwar division into Soviet, American, British and French occupation zones made it (and particularly Berlin) into an obvious possible flashpoint in East/West relations – the Berlin Blockage crisis of 1948-1949 being an early eample.  There was also a lot of instability in places like Greece, which looked for a while as if it might tip into the Communist camp.  One element potentially affecting Italy is that the situation in Trieste took a while to sort out; Churchill even mentioned it in the famous 1946 speech in which he said that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the Continent.”

One place where you could get some good inspiration for your scenario would be the book “What If? : The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been”, edited by Robert Cowley.  It includes, as I recall, speculation on how the Chinese Civil War might have turned out very differently, and on how the Cold War might have turned hot in Berlin.

Depending on the time frame in which you set your game, the answers to your four points might vary.  For instance:

• NATO was founded in April 1949.  The People’s Republic of China was established in October 1949.  So the two requirements of “NATO v.s. USSR” and “Communist Party of China will be a playable side and if successful in conquering China” would restrict your time frame to a fairly narrow window if you want both at the same time.  A large-scale Nationalist-versus-Communist conflict in China would probably have to be mainly set in 1946-to-1948, which is pre-NATO, because by 1949 Mao’s Communists were probably getting the upper hand of Chiang’s Nationalists.

• One way of putting a limiting factor on nukes is by choosing the time period that will give you the degree of limitation that you want.  Initially, the US had a total monopoly on atomic bombs, and had a very limited number of them in stock.  Then the Soviets and the British and the French and the Chinese got into the act (I can’t recall in which order).  And the hydrogen bomb eventually came along too, and raised nuclear capabilities to a whole new level.  Delivery systems also evolved: first bombers, followed later by various missile types, with nuclear artillery also being experimented upon.  In other words, nuclear warfare capabilities become very different over time as you move forward from 1945, so you have several models from which to choose.

• Similarly, the period in which you set your game might let you choose the type of guerrilla activity (or the specific insurgency war) you prefer.  The insurgencies of the post-1945 period blended (to various degrees) elements of proxy warfare between the Western and Eastern power blocks with elements of anti-colonial national-liberation and/or national unification movements – Korea and Vietnam being two examples.  It might depend on whether you want these conflicts to be supplementary elements on the fringes of (let’s say) a full-scale NATO/Warsaw Pact war in central Europe, or whether you want them to be the focus of the game, or whether you want them to serve as the initial trigger of a wider conflict.

@cminke:

the red army would fight w/ stick and stones if they had to

Yes indeed.  An example of this victory-at-all-costs attitude can be found in a book by General (later Marshal) Chuikov in which he describes an incident that occured during the Red Army’s assault on Berlin.  A Soviet tank somehow got isolated during the street fighting for the city and was damaged by a German anti-tank round.  All but one of its crew were killed.  The surviving (though wounded) crewman kept working the main gun, loading and aiming and firing it by himself.  When the main gun ran out of ammunition, or was wrecked by another enemy hit (I can’t remember which; I read the book a long time ago), the Russian proceeded to fire the tank’s machine gun at the nearby Germans.  When that ran out of ammunition, he started lobbing grenades out of the tank to drive off the Germans who were pounding on the hull and demanding that he surrender.  A fresh Soviet unit finally arrived and forced the Germans to retreat.  The Russian soldiers got into the wrecked tank and found the last crewman inside.  He was dying of his wounds, but he was holding a knife in his hand, ready to use it to make a final stand against any German soldier who had tried to enter the tank.  After telling the other soldiers what had happened, his final words were, “Thank you, comrades, for not leaving my body in the hands of the Fascists.”

@rockrobinoff:

barring printing out a series of small sheets and binding them together (unless, that actually works well, though i have my doubts) can someone suggest another printing alternative?

Prior to the publication of Global, there’s a radical idea I once considered when I was wishing I had a huge game map.  I never explored the concept in detail, so I don’t know if it can be done satisfactorily…but since you’re brainstorming, here it is for whatever it’s worth.

The idea was to have a projected map rather than a printed one.  The map would be a computer image, and it would be projected using a data projector (assuming it could be positioned to do so).  One option would be to have the image projected straight downward onto a table covered with a single large sheet of white paper. That’s the most straightforward approach, but it would create shadow problems when you leaned over the table.  Another option would be to have a reversed image projected upward, onto a translucent surface – for example a glass table covered with something like white onion-skin paper.  There would be no shadow problems in that case, and the table would have the rather cool look of a glowing electronic map (kind of like the “big boards” you see in places like NORAD headquarters), but the image would look fuzzier than a direct projection.  There’s also the problem (in both cases) of how to project an image straight up or down, since most people don’t have data projectors bolted to their ceilings; maybe using a mirror at a 45-degree angle would do the trick.

All these practical difficulties explain why I never explored the idea in detail – but who knows, there may be data projection devices or options available that I’m not aware of.  And the costs involved could well exceed those of printing out a big map.  On the flip side, if there was a practical way to do this, you could easily change from one kind of giant game map to another by simply projecting a different picture file.

@ozimek1:

You could have painted at the borders, IPC values, territory names etc. on the glass. That way you could easily use the 3D map for different games by changing the glass overlay :)

I think that having different sheets of painted glass for different games would be an expensive proposition.  I don’t know how much Rorschach’s setup cost him, but the acrylic sheet which covers my own AA50 table set me back over a hundred bucks.

Here are the customized roundels I made for Vichy France and for the Free French forces.

The pictures of the five roundels didn’t all end up the same size when I made them into separate files prior to posting them, so if you copy them into a Word document for printing make sure to adjust their size on the page until they’re all the same diameter and so that they print out correctly sized as A&A roundels.

@shintokamikaze:

how can i get that lovely commonwealth roundel?

Here’s the Commonwealth roundel, accompanied by the other four customized roundels I made.  The ones in this post are for Fascist Italy and for the Chinese Communist forces, and I’ll post the other two in a moment.

Terrific table!  I especially like the padding all around it, complete with nice curves at the corners – it looks very professional.  Are those casino-style chips I see in one part of the picture?

@shintokamikaze:

how can i get that lovely commonwealth roundel?

The file with my customized roundels is on another computer, so I’ll bring it in tomorrow and post a copy of the picture of the generic (and unofficial) Commonwealth roundel I made.

As with my other customized roundels, I pasted multiple copies of the picture into a Word document, had it laser-printed in colour at a commercial photocopy centre on full-sheet sticky-label paper, cut out the roundels one by one and stuck them on white bingo chips.  Because the white sticky paper was the same colour as the white bingo chips, I didn’t have to worry too much about the slightly jagged edges of the cut-out designs, since they’re not very visible at arm’s length.  If you have your own colour laser printer, however, a neater (and less labour-intensive) method would be to use Imperious Leader’s template for printing roundels on round Avery sticky labels.

I haven’t come up with any homebrew rules yet, but this summer when I was making the customized roundels for my Global game I decided to use a single design that would apply to all the Commonwealth dominion forces: a plain blue circle on a white background.  (You can see them being used for Canada, Australia and New Zealand [and for territories under their jurisdictions or mandates] in the “Right side” picture I’ve posted here: http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=20658.0)

The original idea was that this common roundel would be used by the six dominions to which the 1931 Statute of Westminster applied (Canada, Newfoundland, Eire, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) and that the ANZAC sculpts from Pacific 1940 would be the ones used in common by these forces.  I later decided that Eire shouldn’t be included in my list because it technically remained neutral during the war.  The other five locations all contributed substantial forces to the war effort, so I’ve been applying the common roundel to all of them – even though, strictly speaking, Australia didn’t ratify the Statute until 1942, New Zealand didn’t ratify it until 1947, and Newfoundland never ratified it at all and was under direct British rule from 1934 to 1939.