Posts made by CWO Marc

@Midnight_Reaper said in 20 Years of Axis & Allies .org:

@CWO-Marc As for what we did and did not have back in 2000, I made a small chart

Great chart, Midnight Reaper; it brings back lots of memories. A further point to note is that, in Classic, only the infantry sculpt was nation-specific and was based on authentic WWII designs; the equipment sculpts started following the same design principle with Europe / Pacific / Revised, though it took a long while to achieve (by combining E1940.2, P1940.2 and 1941) a full array for everyone except France. We were also treated to some neat special-category sculpts: the German blockhouses in D-Day, the American and German trucks in Bulge, and the entirely-other-war sculpt set of 1914. Another nice development in the official games has been the addition of China, Italy, ANZAC and France to the original five powers (US, UK, USSR, Germany and Japan). And in the early days, people who wanted extra types of units (or extra colours to represent other countries) had to make do with third-party products like the Xeno and Table Tactics ones or the Enemy on the Horizon expansion set, the quality of which was uneven and the availability of which wasn’t always great. Things certainly have changed.

@SS-GEN said in How long is a turn in real life?:

Looks like you got shot down CWO ! LOL So WW 2 started 1939 and when its 1940 its 1971. Fasted game I’ve ever seen.

A fair point. By some benchmarks, however, WWII was shorter than is commonly thought: apparently, there are some Vichy-era commemorative monuments in France which honour the fallen soldiers of the war of “1939-1940.”

I’d make the following two arguments, which don’t rely on any complex technicalities.

1. In order for your friend to buy units to implement his pure-defense strategy, Germany will need income. Income is generated from territories which are controlled and from the bonuses which are granted by attaining certain national national objectives. If your friend never goes on the offensive, it means he won’t be able to conquer new territories beyond the ones he already controls or attain any objectives beyond the ones he’s already fulfilled; therefore, his income will either remain static (if he successfully beats off all enemy attacks) or it will decrease (if he doesn’t successfully beat off all enemy attacks). It will never increase. Theoretically, no matter how powerful his defenses are in the territories he controls, the Allies could counter his unorthodox strategy by taking the equally unorthodox approach of concentrating everything thay have against a single German-held territory, overwhelming it, depriving Germany of the income from that territory, then repeating the process until the Allies win by sheer attrition.

2. Avoiding defeat isn’t the same thing as winning. The best your friend could achieve under his strategy would be a perpetual stalemate, not the fulfilment of the game’s winning conditions.

@CWO-Marc said in How long is a turn in real life?:

@Cpl-Hicks said in How long is a turn in real life?:

It keeps me bothering and busy, questioning the real versus game time.

The first 3 Turns seems tot take about 7 months per turn. From turn 4 and following up turns, these turns can be about 4 months per turn. The so called ‘rubber band’ (effect) from Larry.

An analogy to this rubber band concept would be the method for converting a dog’s age into “people years”, the situation being (or so I’ve heard) that you can’t use a single conversion factor; instead, you not only have to make different computations for different dog breeds, you also apparently need to use different conversion factors at different growth stages.

Strange coincidence: just one month after I used the dog-age concept as an analogy to the A&A time-elasticity concept, I’ve just come across a BBC article which discusses that topic:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200106-how-to-calculate-your-dogs-real-age

The site has been such a well-established part of my life for such a long time that it was a bit of a shock, upon seeing that this is its 20th anniversary, to take a step back and realize just how long a time it’s been and how much the A&A game has evolved during that interval. Many of the unit types and player nations available today in Global didn’t even exist at the time, which makes those days look like ancient history (which isn’t a bad thing, given that many A&A players are history buffs). As the previous post said, here’s to another 20 great years!

I’ve renewed my badge too. Many thanks to djensen for all his great work!

@Cpl-Hicks
The simulation/realism issue you raise is an interesting one, and in my opinion there are two aspects to the problem. In a narrow sense, there’s the purely mechanical stuff: A&A is very abstracted, and it leaves out (or barely deals with) some crucial elements of WWII, notably logistics. The Battle of the Atlantic, for example, was essentially a multi-year supply battle whose first objective was to keep Britain alive and whose later objective was to build it up as a springboard for the cross-Channel invasion of western Europe. An even better example is the war in the Pacific: the whole point of the war was for Japan to obtain the natural resources it lacked at home (most crucially oil), which meant conquering the Dutch East Indies and nearby areas like Malaysia (where the resources were located) as well as the Philippines (to secure the shipping lanes between the DEI and Japan. Unfortunately for Japan, the Americans understood the importance of logistics better than the Japanese did: they focussed their submarine operations on those shipping lanes with the aim of gradually strangling Japan, and by 1945 they had succeeded in doing so. Japan, for its part, had too few transport ships, used inefficiently the ones it did have, and gave too little attention to convoy protection – all of which is astonishing, given the underlying purpose of the war. Realistically simulating all this in A&A would require a substantial overhaul of the game and would greatly change its nature.

More broadly, though, there’s the problem that simulating WWII as a whole (not just a specific part of it) creates an inherent problem. WWII was a long and complex struggle with all sorts of points at which factors such as strategic decisions could have changed radically all the subsequent events. Hence the following quandry: in order for a game to faithfully reproduce all or most of WWII’s major events, in the correct sequence, would have to be highly scripted, perhaps even to the point where its outcome is predetermined, which potentially isn’t much fun. Conversely, an unscripted game would almost inevitably deviate from history at some point or another…and the earlier the start date (say, 1940 as opposed to 1942), the bigger the deviations tend to be, which runs counter to the aim of having a realistic simulation in the first place. So in general, I tend to see A&A as a board game which is set in WWII rather than a board game which simulates it. An analogy I’ve heard is that there’s a similar difference between Monopoly, which is board game that has real estate transactions as its theme but which is highly abstracted, and the sophisticated financial simulation games or exercises which are sometimes played in business schools for instructional purposes.

@Cpl-Hicks said in How long is a turn in real life?:

It keeps me bothering and busy, questioning the real versus game time.

The first 3 Turns seems tot take about 7 months per turn. From turn 4 and following up turns, these turns can be about 4 months per turn. The so called ‘rubber band’ (effect) from Larry.

An analogy to this rubber band concept would be the method for converting a dog’s age into “people years”, the situation being (or so I’ve heard) that you can’t use a single conversion factor; instead, you not only have to make different computations for different dog breeds, you also apparently need to use different conversion factors at different growth stages.

A&A similarly has “springs and rubber bands geography”, with various parts of the world compressed and other parts of the world stretched to allocate more elbow room to the areas where there was the most action during WWII, and to reduce the large-area but low-action parts of the world (such as the south-east corner of the Pacific Ocean). A god example is China on the Pacific 1940 map, where compared to its real-world geography it’s highly compressed in the east-to-west direction compared to its north-to-south dimensions.

@taamvan said in On this day during W.W. 2:

@CWO-Marc @SS-GEN @captainwalker Hose down the deck and clear the barrel for the next encounter, sailor!

Reminds me of a traditional three-part rule of thumb on shipboard conduct for enlisted sailors: if you see something, salute it; if it doesn’t salute back, pick it up; if you can’t pick it up, paint it.

Great picture! The part about “skimming the flight deck so close that the flames singed the beard of one of the Yorktown gunners” brings to mind another kamikaze-related incident (this one from April 1945) in which a Japanese Zero crashed into the USS Missouri, an event involving two dramatic photos (shown in the links below):

A picture of the plane just as it’s about to hit the ship:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/465278205223784252/

A picture of the one-in-a-million-chance aftermath, in which one of the plane’s machine guns ended up jammed down the barrel of one of Missiouri’s 40mm guns:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/7iv32k/uss_missouri_bb63_a_40mm_barrel_is_seen_impaled/

Depending on the level of historical accuracy which individual players might want, one thing to keep in mind about the CV numbers of the earliest American carriers is that a couple of them identify vessels which were not true fleet carriers. CV-1, Langley, America’s first flattop, was originally a collier; she was converted into an experimental carrier, was small and slow (she could barely exceed 15 knots), and by 1937 had been converted to a seaplane carrier. CV-4, Ranger, was America’s first purpose-built carrier, and was twice as fast as Langley, but was about 10,000 tons smaller than the Yorktown class, and as I recall most or all of her WWII service was in the Atlantic/Mediterranean theatre, against two countries (Germany and Italy) with no operational fleet carriers in their navies.

@Playing-Kid said in Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia:

@CWO-Marc Found the video you were talking about. Here’s the link, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmBo8q0akGo

Great, thanks for the link! That video is a classic.

Here’s a cute news story involving: a) one of the only two Avro Lancasters still flying in the world, and b) a stuffed toy bunny. I love the navigator’s map annotated “X 1319 last known position.”

“Stuffed bunny found on Burlington, Ontario, rooftop after sky-high fall from WWII bomber.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/bunny-burlington-1.5372682

@djensen said in Alternate dice rules:

Regular dice battles have too many wild swings of hot and cold. Low luck doesn’t have enough randomness and it’s mentally tiring.

What would be a good in-between?

• A certain number of guaranteed hits and then randomness? (low luck light)
• Mulligans (3, 5, 10 re-rolls per game)
• A deck of card to balance out the bad luck

One thing I like about Zombies are those cards. I’ve only played a few games but the cards never seemed to pile on to one faction. In many circumstances it could actually help the player who just had a series of terrible rolls.

Your thoughts please. If we’re open to changes, maybe the next game will include something that removes the crazy stupid bad luck that I, I mean some people, keep getting. :wink: (Yeah, this subject is completely selfless, sure).

If I remember correctly, I pitched an idea a few years ago about an alternate dicing method which would work as follows. I never worked out the full details, but here’s the general idea.

Googling “dice odds” will pull up lots of tables and images showing the probability curve of the results of throwing two standard six-sided dice. Basically, the distribution is a bell curve ranging from 2 to 12, with the lowest probabilities at the two extremities and the highest probability (for 7) in the middle.

The concept for the alternate dicing method would be that a player, prior to dicing something, would choose one of three tables against which to plot his results: narrow-range result, medium-range result and wide-range result. By using the first table, the player would know that his dice rolls would fall within a narrow range of outcomes centered on the middle of the distribution curve; the results would never be spectacularly good nor spectacularly bad, but instead would consistently be average. This would probably appeal to a player who is getting close to winning, and who wants to protect his advantage by playing conservatively. At the opposite extreme, the wide-range table would cover the full probability curve; the distribution would still favour getting results towards the middle of the bell curve, but it would allow for more variation – including the possibility of getting results that are either spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. This would probably appeal to a player who’s losing, and who therefore: a) has little to lose from a spectacularly bad dicing result, and b) has a lot to gain from a spectacularly good dicing result. The medium-range result table would offer a medium-risk option in between the two extremes of the narrow-range table and the wide-range table.

Thanks for this excellent picture of a great ship’s demise. Earlier in 1941, Ark Royal famously launched the torpedo-bomber attack which jammed the Bismarck’s rudder, delivering the German battleship to the pursuing British naval units who otherwise would have failed to catch her.

The concept of wanting to add extra IPCs to a territory is certainly clear enough (there have been all sorts of house rule proposals over the years to add IPCs to various territories in various A&A games), but what puzzles me is the idea of having IPCs be generated by factories because in the real world – and indeed in A&A – factories / industrial complexes consume money and resources rather than generate them. In other words, they take the economic resources provided by the state (labour and raw materials) and convert them into manufactured goods (such a weapons). I suppose that a mine could be considered a type of industrial facility which produces raw materials, and thus generates IPCs, but the point is that mines are not factories; they don’t manufacture tanks and guns and aircraft. Similarly, factories in real life don’t produce infantry; they do manufacture infantry equipment, but such personal equipment isn’t modeled in the game. A facility which “produces” infantry, i.e. which trains raw recruits and turns them into soldiers, would be better described as a boot camp or a training facility, which could be added to the game as a specialized fixed installation – but again, it would consume IPCs rather than generating them.

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

@CWO-Marc
yea Spruance steaming away at night was a smart move. I wonder if Halsey was in the same situation if he would have. I kinda doubt it

Agreed. Ray Spruance was an excellent combat officer – he and Halsey spent the last few years of WWII alternating command of the 5th Fleet / 3rd Fleet, which was actually the same force whose name got switched every time the two admirals rotated, much to the confusion of Japanese naval intelligence – but he was very different from Bill Halsey in terms of style and personality. Spruance was precise and analytical; he certainly didn’t lack aggressiveness (when he made a decision to attack, he sent in “everything that wasn’t bolted to the flight deck”), but before making his decision to attack he would carefully weigh all the factors of the situation, which sometimes translated into over-cautiousness. Halsey was a hell-for-leather type – sort of the naval counterpart of George Patton – whose fighting spirit greatly inspired his men (the enlisted sailors loved him, not least for the fact that he could drink and swear as well as any of them), but this sometimes translated into recklessness. After the war, someone – I think it was Spruance himself – said that it would have been better if Halsey has been in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (where the IJN lost hundred of planes and pilots, but managed to save the bulk of its fleet) and if Spruance had been in command at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (where Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy operation, and compounded his error by leaving no covering force to guard the San Bernardino Straight).

@Wittmann said in How many G40 games have you played?:

@oysteilo how very medieval!

To go even earlier than the medieval era, I’ve just gotten a mental image of a player using a creative interpretational workaround of the “no calculators and no pen and paper” rule by showing up at the next game with an abacus. Or maybe a slide rule, for a 1940s-style solution.

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

When i read the article I had forgotten that the carriers and a light cruiser on the last day of the battle were the only Japanese ships sunk. Seems odd, even with only planes vs ships

Actually, the outcome reflects good tactical judgement by Admirals Spruance and Fletcher, who were the commanders on the spot. (Fletcher was technically in overall command, since he was senior, but in practice the two American groups – the Hornet/Enterprise group commanded by Raymond Spruance and the Yorktown group commanded by Jack Fletcher – operated fairly independently. Once Yorktown was sunk, and Fletcher had transferred his flag to a cruiser, Spruance was the only carrier commander left in the game.) The Americans were vastly outnumbered at Midway, and not just in carriers; Yamamoto committed about half the Imperial fleet to the operation, if you count all the groups of forces he deployed. The Americans, following Mahan’s principle of going all-out for the enemy’s capital ships (defined in Mahan’s time as his battleships, but by 1942 being redefined as his carriers), concentrated all their attention (and their limited bomber resources) on Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu and sent them to the bottom. Also important, but less well-known, is the fact that Spruance, once evening came, steamed eastward (meaning away from the Japanese forces) in order to avoid risking his precious two remaining carriers in potential night-time surface combat (at which the IJN excelled) against the still impressively large Japanese armada. He and Fletcher had eliminated Yamamoto’s key pieces, the carriers, for the loss of just one US carrier (the patched-together Yorktown, which had taken a beating at the Coral Sea shortly beforehand), and that in itself was enough to make Midway a US victory of enormous strategic importance. Even the Japanese recognized this; they briefly considered taking another crack at capturing Midway by sending in their battleships (including Yamamoto’s flagship, the 18-inch gunned Yamato) to bombard the island prior to staging an amphibious landing, but soon gave up on the idea and turned west to head for home.

The discovery is well-timed: Roland Emmerich’s new Midway movie is set to be released on November 8, 2019. The trailer can be accessed here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6924650/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1