How much does central powers cost and can you give me a link. <<
http://www.tabletactics.com/central_powers.html
(plus additional colors: http://www.tabletactics.com/new_colors.html)
I guess I could use AA stuff for the planes but the air ships and Zeppelins have me stumped. <<
These aren’t Zeppelins, but they might work for you if you can’t find actual airships:
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/691643/wings-of-war-miniatures
Players: 2 - 5
Well, if France was a playable ally, it should have read:
Players: 2 - 6
Perhaps what they mean is that France, although it’s playable, is controlled by one of the Allied players, in the same way that China in Pacific 1940 gets its own game turn but is controlled by an Allied player.
There’s a suitably-sized halftrack in the Central Powers expansion set from Table Tactics.
Table Tactics produces a set of WWI-style pieces, of which the most distinctively WWI-ish unit is the rhomboid tank: http://www.tabletactics.com/central_powers.html
I think Imperious Leader has a template somewhere on the board which you can use to print markers onto round sticky Avery labels.
I don’t have a colour printer at home, so I used the following alternate method to produce the custom markers I wanted for my game:
I started by collecting (from the web) and/or making the various roundel designs I needed. In some cases this involved fairly simple editing using the Paint program that comes with Windows. (I’m not much of an artist, so a more sophisticated drawing program would be wasted on me.)
Once I was happy with each design, I used PrintKey to grab a colour image of it and paste it into a Word document. After doing this with each roundel design, I slightly adjusted each image size in Word as needed to make the roundels (in the final printed form) about 3/4" in diameter.
I copied and pasted the properly-sized roundels into a fresh Word document, cramming as many as I could into a page as space would allow (leaving a bit of white space around each one for cutting purposes). Major nations would have multiple copies of their roundel on the page, while smaller nations would have fewer.
I saved the Word document to disc, took it to a local photocopy / printing shop and had them print the document (in as many copies as I needed) in colour on full-size sticky-label paper (8 1/2 x 11 in size).
I cut the individual roundels from the printed sheets (using old-fashioned scissors and lots of patience), removed the sticky label backing, then attached the roundels to 7/8" diameter bingo chips (which can be purchased in large bulk qualities for very reasonable prices, in the range of a thousand chips for 25 bucks). Some of the chips required a tiny bit of sanding with an emery board to remove a rough edge at one point on their circumference before the roundel was attached. You can buy chips in a variety of colours (I used plain white for all of mine), and they come in either transparent or opaque versions (I opted for the opaque kind).
I could use some feedback as I am planning on making a second edition of it and can improve on the already very fun variant.
Will the second edition include the two national piece colours which weren’t in the first one, and which were later supposed to come out as an expansion set?
@C_Strabala:
I am considering buying the pieces only to add to my exspansive collection of plastic miniatures. How well do the ships sit on the gameboard?
The submarines have bodies that are a bit narrow, so they can sometimes tip over, but the other pieces are stable.
Does anyone know what the official design is meant to represent, or is a it a complete invention of Wizards?
My guess is that it’s an invention used to cover both Australia and New Zealand in a single design. A roundel with a kiwi bird would work for New Zealand but not Australia, and a roundel with a kangaroo would have the reverse problem, so WotC may have been trying to split the difference.
@Brain:
Well I am not exactly sure yet, but I know I want something with a swastika for Germany and I am looking for a different Italian roundel.
There’s a nice picture of the Italian Regia Aeronautica wing roundel here:
Major General John S. (Shirley) Wood, of the U.S. 4th Armored Division. He’s not well-known, but he was instrumental in the 4th Armored Division’s successful operations in France. He supposedly had a better grasp than Patton of the technical aspects of tank warfare (notably the critical importance of trucks), and he innovated in various ways to make his forces operated more effectively. For example, he had Air Force liaison officers ride with his front-line troops, so that they could call in air strikes on the spot without going through the usual channels. He maintained good relations with the Air Force by having his empty supply trucks return from the front loaded with cases of liberated cognac, which they delivered to air bases, and he always made a point of giving the flyboys their due credit in his reports and public statements.
Once you’ve printed your roundels on round adhesive labels, an inexpensive way to mount them is to stick them on bingo chips. You can buy bulk bags of bingo chips at very reasonable prices (along the lines of 1,000 chips for $25), and they come in a variety of colors and sizes (3/4" and 7/8"). Some places even sell both transparent and solid-color models. I ordered mine from a place in Illinois called Mr. Chips. The only modification some of them needed was a little bit of sanding at one point of their circumference where a rough spot (I assume from the production mold) could sometimes be felt.
the map is my edit of a previous map i found on A&A.org
I think the previous map was by Der Panzinator. There used to be a full-sized (global) version of it on his website, plus an earlier prototype and one or two related maps, but his website no longer seems to exist.
I wanted each turn to represent about 1 week of fighting however, this is one of those fudge factors that comes up in gaming. In reality there would little to no time for construction of major combat units in the modern war I’m trying to simulate. When you consider the entire war could be over in a matter of weeks, how can a nation possibly build entire infantry or tank divisions, squadrons of aircraft and/or fleets of warships? If you really want to do it realistically each nation should start with an order of battle and then each turn would receive set reinforcements as reserve formations are prepared (something like Axis & Allies D-day). After the first few turns all the forces would be in play with little or nothing following. The problem is the collecting and spending of IPC’s is such an elegant and interesting mechanic, I don’t want to lose it. So I’ll just call it a flexible reserve activation method.
I guess another way to help explain it (at least as far as equipment is concerned) might be to assume that some of it is being purchased from foreign sources (outside the Middle East theatre in which the game is set) and that it’s being shipped to the buyers out of existing inventories (rather than being built on demand, which in a short regional war would take too long for complex modern weapons). The existing inventories could consist either of weapons built specifically for export by countries (like North Korea) which sell a lot of military equipment to foreign nations, or they could be surplus older material no longer needed by the country of origin (like those surplus World War I destroyers which the U.S. transferred to Great Britain early in World War II).
Nice map.
The spelling of Israel and Saudi Arabia on the map need to be corrected.
The Crimean Peninsula is labeled as Ukraine (spelled Ukrane on the map). It think that Crimea and the Ukraine are distinct territories.
One idea you might consider is to use white lettering on the darker map territories to make the names easier to read. Black lettering shows up crisply against white and yellow backgrounds, but it can be tricky with other colours.
Good luck with this project – it looks interesting.
I measured my Stratagame pieces and here are the results. The ship is 4.5 cm long, which is about the same size as an A&A American destroyer (the Stratagame ship being about 2 mm shorter and 2 mm wider). The infantry piece is 2.4 cm high. The artillery piece is 1.5 cm high. The mechanized infantry piece (a somewhat fanciful-looking APC) is 2.7 cm long. The light tank is 2.2 cm long and the heavy tank is 2.5 cm long, not counting the gun in either case.
The pieces are made of hard plastic, which I generally prefer over soft plastic, but I find their overall design to be disappointing. The pieces are more stylized than the A&A ones, with much less detail. The head of the infantry piece for example is basically just a cylinder with a helmet on top, with only the faintest possible suggestion of a nose and eyes. The ship looks reasonably okay from a distance, but from close up it’s a bit simplistic. In terms of detail and realism the best sculpt is probably the artillery piece.
At the time when Stratagame came out, the company which produced it had plans to publish a similar game set in ancient China, using Chinese junks and so forth as pieces. Nothing seems to have come of those plans, and Stratagame itself doesn’t seem to be published anymore.
I also checked out my Supremacy tanks, which are 2.8 cm long (3.2 cm with the gun), 1.5 cm wide and 1 cm high. As Holden said, they’re a bit on the large size compared to A&A tanks but they look great.
How big are the ships in Supremancy, and in Stratagames? Are they in scale with Axis & Allies?
The only Supremacy pieces I have are the tanks, so I don’t know what size the submarines are.
I’ll measure the Stratagame pieces this weekend and post the information, but as I recall the only pieces which are roughly on the same scale as the A&A sculpts are the ships. The scale is a bit bigger, I think, but close enough to be fairly compatible. The other pieces are much larger than the A&A ones.
@Brain:
I am not sure but maybe Supremacy or Nuclear Armageddon which is very expensive.
Supremacy had some nicely detailed M-1 Abrams tanks, and also some ballistic missile submarines (“boomers”), but the remaining pieces were completely abstract shapes (except for the semi-abstract nuclear mushroom clouds, which were recognizable for what they were but otherwise looked a bit like tiny futuristic table lamps). The colours of the plastic pieces are a bit too loud for my taste, except for the black tanks that were sold as one of the expansion packs. I have a set of those tanks and they’re about two or three times the size of an A&A Sherman tank.
Another game with modern pieces is Stratagame (http://boardgamegeek.com/image/491822), of which I have a copy. I like some of the pieces but not others (notably the tanks and APCs, which have a round base under them), and here too I don’t much care for some of the colours.
A game similar to and/or inspired by Fortress America is The Sushi-Jalapeño War, by Xeno Games. The sculpt are a mix of modern and futuristic, and are about at the same quality level as the ones Xeno uses for its World War II games. The nuclear mushroom clouds are the sculpts I like best.
Some of the Table Tactics expansion sets use modern sculpts.
Three war movies you might enjoy watching back-to-back are:
Tora, Tora, Tora
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
Midway
The first movie is a big-budget reconstruction of the events (from about mid-1940) leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbour, which is depicted in detail in the second half of the film. It sticks fairly closely to the historical elements – the kind of film that might not necessarily appeal to general audiences, but which historians ought to like.
The second movie is a retelling of the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942. It’s based on an account written by one of the pilots, Major Ted Lawson. There are some propagandist elements to the film (it was released in 1944), but on the whole it limits itself to a factual account of the mission.
The third film (which includes stock footage from the first two, plus lots of WWII combat footage) uses the aftermath of the Doolittle Raid as a springboard to tell the story of the events leading up to the Battle of Midway. About a third of the movie revolves around a fictitious character (played by Charlton Heston), but the other two-thirds of the film gives a pretty good account of the Midway operation. A&A players will probably get much enjoyment from the various scenes in which Yamamoto on his flagship and Nimitz at his headquarters move little ship models around on large maps of the Pacific.
@Brain:
I own the game, but have never played it. I think it would be better than Axis and Allies. Maybe CWO Marc could enlighten us.
I own two copies of TWG (the game board and the sculpts are both of good quality, which is why I bought an extra copy), but I’ve never actually played it. As maverick_76 writes, however, the two games are indeed similar, and an A&A player should have no difficulty making the jump to TWG. Both games are powered by the same basic four-stroke engine that can be traced all the way back to the original Risk game: income buys units, units fight battles, battles win territory and territory generates income. In terms of equipment, TWG and A&A both use a variety of plastic military sculpts, and are played on a map which uses an area-movement system, which gives a printed value number to each territory and which show the location of certain major cities.
One notable thing about TWG is that, in addition to the basic rules (the second edition of which was issued just a few days ago), there are lots of supplementary modules available to cover extra elements like diplomatic relations and air supremacy. This aspect should particularly appeal to A&A players who like to include lots of detail in their gaming. You can find the rules and the extra modules here:
http://www.thewargame.com/fieldmanual.htm
Another thing which I like about TWG is that the board shows something close to a 1939 configuration rather than the more traditional circa-1942 territorial layout of A&A. One way this shows up is in the fact that, as idk_iam_swiss noted, France appears as France rather than as some sort of Occupied France / Vichy France combination. The board isn’t a pure 1939 configuration – for example, it shows in light green the territories (like Mexico) which will side with the U.S. once it enters the war in 1941 – but it’s fairly close to a start-of-the-war set-up for players who are looking for that sort of map. And the large size of the game board (it comes in three sections, each of which folds into three parts) is another nice element.
By the way, I’d just like to note that the pieces you see on the board in the picture I posted don’t show a real game of TWG in progress. The pieces in the photo are for the most part A&A sculpts, supplemented with customized roundels and with other kinds of markers (wooden blocks and plastic Othello/Reversi playing pieces). At the time the picture was taken, I was just experimenting with ways of using different kinds of pieces to represent certain types of information on a game board. An actual game of TWG would look different.