Posts made by CWO Marc

Just as a technical point, by the way, the straight-armed German symbol in question is called a Balkenkreuz (roughly “beamed cross”), as opposed to the curved-arm Iron Cross (a type of cross pattee).

Here’s a great project that a filmmaker has been working on. And I think it’s especially nice that he’s a young man, not someone from a generation closer to WWII.

Thursday, February 28, 2019 6:38AM EST

A young American filmmaker is on a mission to interview every last Second World War veteran to share the stories of as many combat veterans as possible – before it is too late.

Rishi Sharma has spent the past three years documenting the lives of living Second World War veterans in the U.S., U.K. and Canada for his non-profit organization Heroes of the Second World War.

The average age of Second World War vet is now 93 years old, and the number of survivors is slowly diminishing with the passing of time.

After three years of visiting seniors’ homes to record veterans’ stories, Sharma says has filmed more than a thousand interviews.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/american-filmmaker-on-a-mission-to-interview-every-last-second-world-war-veteran-1.4316271

@Argothair said in Argothair (Axis +0) v. Simon33 (Allies) bm3:

Relax, have fun, and ruthlessly execute your opponents. :)

Reminds me a bit of the slogan of the arms manufacturers in the Star Trek TNG episode The Arsenal of Freedom: “Peace through superior firepower.” :)

@Phelan-Kell said in On this day during W.W. 2:

26 February 1942

Indian ocean: American seaplane tender Langley, on the way to Java, is sunk by Japanese air action.

I once saw a two-part, 1960s-ish US Navy documentary about the evolution of aircraft carriers and it mentions the USS Langley, a.k.a. CV-1, the USN’s first carrier (and, as a footnote, also the USN’s first ship with turbo-electric propulsion). Its capacities were limited, but it was only meant to serve as an experimental platform for the development of carrier technology, operational techniques and doctrine, and much was learned from those early pioneering days. The documentary’s narrator has a memorable line in which he says that, decades later, it was a source of great pride for a dwindling number of grey-haired naval aviators to say to their younger buddies, “I flew from the Langley.”

Thanks for posting a picture of the northern polar version of the map and providing the additional background information. I think the northern version has good potential to be developed into something that could work quite well. I’ll get to the specifics in a moment, but first I’ll run through the decision hierarchy which I think is involved here. The highest-level choice is of course the decision to go with a circular map rather than the conventional rectangular shape (or possibly some of the other broad types of map projections which exist, such as the ones which are oval or losenge-shaped). A circular A&A map isn’t personally something I’d use for gaming, but that’s just a personal preference – and as a Global 1940 map customizer myself, I totally see the point of wanting to do something imaginative to improve the OOB game board. With a circular projection having been chosen in a general sense, the next decision becomes which specific circular projection to use, since there are several types, azimuthal equidistant being just one of them. Choosing azimuthal equidistant then leads to the decision of which particular view to use: north polar, south polar, equatorial or oblique. The equatorial or oblique views strike me as the least suitable options for A&A gaming purposes, by a wide margin, which leave a choice between the two polar views – which is actually where we are in this discussion.

As your new picture shows, the northern polar view gives the following cost/benefit trade-off. The cost that it more or less throws Antarctica under the bus; this is actually a pretty trivial cost because Antarctica isn’t a usable territory in A&A, so you’re not losing anything (other than perhaps the potential for some house-ruled secret Nazi bases) by turning it into some white squiggles around the perimeter of the map. The benefit is that it gives (compared with the southern polar view) the most square footage and the least shape distortion to the northern hemisphere, where most of the world’s land mass is located and where most of the land-based action of WWII was fought. As a basic choice, this strikes me as being optimal.

What would remain at this point would be the issue of adjusting the details of the northern polar view to make its land and sea subdivisions as usable as possible as a physical A&A game map on which sculpts and territory markers and so forth can be deployed in adequate numbers. As is the case with the rectangular OOB map, this will – regretably but unavoidably – involve making selective size and shape distortions. China on the OOB Global 1940 map is a good example of what I’m referring to: compared with how China really looks on a real map, the A&A version is a fair approximation in terms of shape, but in terms of size it’s extremely compressed in the east-to-west direction relative to its north-to-south size. For your northern polar map, I think the first element you should target for adjustment is the problem you’ve mentioned yourself: the fact that most of the map is water. In real-world terms, the Pacific Ocean carries much of the blame: I think it occupies about one-third of the world’s surface. The Global 1940 map massively shrinks the Pacific Ocean, and even cuts out sections of it entirely (notably the huge area between Samoa and South America). So what you may want to do is measure the surface area allocated to each ocean on the Global 1940 map relative to the total land area, then replicate the same size ratios on your northen polar projection. That by itself may give you more than enough room to expand the land areas to a conveniently usable size.

The map certainly looks beautiful – it’s one of the most attractive variations of the Global 1940 map I’ve ever seen – but as you indicate in your post there are potential playability factors to consider.

You’ve already identified and compensated for some of the space problems that other projections would have caused, and you’ve said that the present version gives the same amount of real estate as a 72 x 32 standard map when printed at 54 inches. I’m interpreting this to mean the same amount of total land area as the rectangular map, but I’m wondering if this also applies to the area of individual labeled land territories. A substantially smaller area wouldn’t be a problem for the areas of the game map that rarely see much action, but it could lead to substantial sculpt crowding in the territories in which huge forces tend to pile up and fight each other. The normal A&A maps, after all, tend to distort size and shape in a way which sacrifices realism in order to gain “working space” for the major WWII zones of operation; a good example is North Africa, which a typical A&A map shows as being disproportionately large compared to the southern half of the continent.

You mentioned that you “tried to do a North pole perspective but the European continent is just too small for game purposes”. This is very puzzling because I would have thought the opposite. Then again (because I don’t know much about the technicalities of map projections), I may be being fooled by the shape-distortion aspect rather than the size aspect. The projection you’re using seems to have the least shape distortion in the middle and the most shape distortion at the outer edges, and I would have concluded from this that a northern polar projection would be preferable to a southern one because most of the world’s land masses are in the northern hemisphere (all of North America and Europe, most of Asia and Africa, and a good piece of South America), which means that the best candidate for maximum distortion at the edges of the map would theoretically be Antarctica (which doesn’t get used in the game) rather than Europe and North America and the USSR. But given that I haven’t seen what the northern polar projection you tried looked like, I’m simply speculating that in principle it ought to have worked well; in practice, it may have proved unworkable for reasons I’m not visualizing.

@Midnight_Reaper said in Custom carriers from OOB's and painted pieces:

While all of that is true, when Hasbro/WotC/AH print in the manual that it’s supposed to be a Shinano, I’m left to assume that the sculptors fudged it up. Should they be the same? Yes. Are they the same? No. Does it matter? Not really.

That’s a good way of looking at it. The A&A board games occupy a different niche than the older genre of tabletop tactical wargaming, which revolves around larger-scale, highly-detailed, and often exquisitely-painted miniatures – the genre which the A&A Miniatures product line falls into, for example. The A&A board game sculpts have a different type of appeal, which is that they provide players, at an affordable cost, with large numbers of a wide variety of WWII military units, at a level of detail and accuracy which is more than reasonable (I’d even say quite good) for their size and price. Just to give two examples, the Sherman and T-34 tanks are clearly recognizable as such, even though they’re small enough to fit on a dime. And the sculpts have proved quite suitable for substantial customization by the folks who enjoy this kind of upgrading work. The pictures of the custom paint jobs which I’ve seen posted on this forum over the years have always amazed me; it’s sometimes hard to believe that a close-up picture of a painted fighter or tank or warship or whatever is a photograph of an object the size of a coin or a golf pencil rather than a photo of a much larger assembled and painted plastic model kit.

@LHoffman said in Wreck of USS Hornet Located:

Looks like I may need to add the Hornet patch to my jacket now, in company with those for Yorktown and Enterprise. I have always thought the three sisters, who weathered the storm early in the war and delivered retribution at Midway, ought to be always spoken of together.

And the timing of the discovery is nice, given that a new Midway movie is currently in production. Your three-patch jacket would be a prefect item to wear when you go see the film.

@DMcLaren said in Custom carriers from OOB's and painted pieces:

When FOlewnik was researching the Taiho & Shinano, he noticed that the sculpt is much closer to the Taiho in it’s layout than it is the Shinano.

Interesting observation; I had never noticed this. Another point of comparison to check would be the hulls of the carrier sculpt and of the battleship sculpt. The scale is too small to allow much detail, and the Yamato sculpt has a few other accuracy problems (notably the stern, whose scallopped shape is too pointy), but technically a difference between the carrier’s hull shape (below the flight deck) and the battleship’s hull shape would further prove that the carrier isn’t the Shinano because the Shinano and the two Yamato-class battleships had identical hulls. Shinano was originally intended to be the third unit of the battleship class, but she was converted into a carrier in mid-construction.

WW II aircraft carrier found more than 75 years after it sank in the South Pacific

The Hornet was best known for its part in the Doolittle Raid in April 1942, the first air attack on Japan, and the Battle of Midway.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/uss-hornet-second-world-war-wreckage-1.5019915

@Patchman123 said in Infantry Pieces and Numeration/Nomenclature:
? I am having trouble sorting out the pieces for all of them and I have EVERY single Axis & Allies game ever made, from the 1984 edition to the latest reprint of Axis & Allies Anniversary Edition.

I am using these numbers to sort out many thousands of pieces

Your collection of A&A games sounds similar to mine, and I can relate to what you’ve said about the challenge of sorting out thousands of sculpts. It depends, however, on what you mean by sorting. If you’re talking about unscrambling a bunch of mixed-together sculpts and figuring out precisely which game each one came from, the basic answer is: it’s easy for the game-unique sculpts (like the blockhouses from D-Day), but anywhere from difficult to impossible for everything else because many sculpts have been re-used identically in several games. And by “identically” I mean identically down to the finest details, as opposed to sculpts which have undergone subtle (or not-so-subtle, or even flagrant) changes of design at some point or another. An example of a flagrant change is the Japanese artillery piece, whose towing struts were closed in the original version and are open in the current one. An example of a not-so-subtle change is the “refreshment” of the design of the five main power infantry units which occurred at some point; compare, for instance, the helmet shapes of the older and newer US and USSR infantrymen. An example of a subtle change is the American destroyer, which gained (or lost?) a notch in the funnel area of its superstructure, or the British Spitfire fighter, whose wings went from upturned to flat.

On top of all that, there’s the added complication of changes which may be intentional design changes or may just be manufacturing inconsitencies. The American Sherman tank, for instance, has many kinds of turret shapes and many types of semicircular hatch covers on top of the turret. An an extreme example: one of the German strategic bombers I own has a decidedly odd variant shape, even though it’s clearly the same plane (a Junkers JU-88) as all the other ones in my collection, and I can only conclude that it’s some sort of factory error caused by, perhaps, the injected plastic cooling in an abnormal way. (I jokingly designate it as the Fuhrer’s private airplane, even though his transport of choice was a three-engined aircraft).

All of this applies to colours and shades too. Some colour uses have a single possible source (e.g. the cherry-red Japanese units, which are from the first printing of the original Pacific game), while others are found all over the place. And shading differences which are evidently manufacturing inconsistencies further complicate the picture: I have some Europe 1940 / Pacific 1940 sculpts (some units are unique to those games, and some are even specific to either the first or second editions) in two different shades for the US and for Germany, even though the basic colours are the same.

The way I deal with all this, personally, is to keep identical sculpts together (sorted in plastic tackle boxes) without bothering about which game they come from. Just distinguishing between identical and non-identical ones already provides ample differentiation for me, given all the factors that have to be judged to decide whether two give sculpts are or aren’t exactly the same.

Incidentally, I’ve sometimes wondered about those infantry base numbers too and I’d be interested in hearing an authoritative answer from anyone who happens to know it. I don’t think the numbers are game-specific; my impression is that in any given game, each infantry sculpt from a given country has its own number. But that theory may not be correct…and it still doesn’t explain what purpose (if any) the numbers serve. Maybe they just have some sort of manufacturing-related function.

@Sarge said in Introduce or Re-Introduce Yourself (Jan. 2019):

I live in Northern Florida (Tallahassee ) and am Retired. I was first introduced and bought my first Axis and Allies in the 1989. Played for about 2 years then life took over my free time.

To balance things out, retirement is a great moment where free time allows Axis and Allies to take over from life. :) Welcome back to the A&A game and welcome to the forum!

As a historical footnote, Allied troops in Normany in the summer of 1944 got to enjoy quite a bit of “liberated cognac” as they advanced.

I haven’t searched for it on the forum (I don’t know if the search function has been reactivated; I think it was on hold for a while), but according to my files this subject came up in a thread titled “Total Domination (or close to)”. I don’t have a date for it, but here’s a copy of a post I made at the time in that thread:

The OOB A&A rules and the total domination variant both actually have something in common: the games can theoretically last forever – or at least for an extremely large number of rounds – and as such they’re unrealistic because a total war between major powers can’t be sustained forever.

Total war, on the scale seen in WWI and WWII, imposes enormous social and economic strains on the participant nations (in addition to the direct casualties and destruction which occur both on the battlefield and in civilian areas that are subjected to military attack). In many cases (the U.S. in both world wars being a significant exception), the resources and manpower of nations engaged in total war are expended more quickly than they can be replaced (particularly in the case of people, who even if they’re drafted as teenagers take 15 or more years to be replaced from newborns). The game rules don’t take these factors into account: the players can keep fighting as long as they can collect income, without worrying about running out of civilian workers or draft-age recruits, and without worrying about social breakdown or revolution at home (except in the case of the optional Russian Revolution rule in A&A 1914).

Barbara Tuchman’s book The Zimmermann Telegram describes vividly how nations can eventually crumble under the strain of total war. Her opening chapter, set in January 1917, says, “Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Alied side, already ruined and overrun. The enemy was no better off. Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with even harsher measures. The [recent German peace offer] had been a mere pretense, designed to be rejected so that the General Staff could wring from the home front and faltering Austria yet more endurance and more sacrifice. […] England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas. […] No prospect of any end was visible. […] It seemed there was nothing that would bring in the Americans before Europe exhausted itself beyond recovery.” Similarly, Gwynne Dyer’s book war makes the point that none of the regimes on the losing side (or rather sides) of WWI survived: the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were all destroyed, and the latter two were completely dismantled into a patchwork of successor states. The British and French empires survived on paper, but were greatly weakened and were ultimately finished off by WWII and its aftermath.

If a group of players wanted to prevent A&A games from going on forever (and in fairness, players don’t necessarily want this), one solution might be to create some sort of house rule that tracks the social and economic strain of waging total war, and which has some sort of built-in breaking point for each power depending on the particulars of its situation. Realistically, though, such a house rule would favour the Allies because of the US’s geographic isolation (which makes it difficult to attack) and its status as a net producer of war goods (unlike the UK, which was a net consumer), and the USSR’s vast manpower reserves. One factor that would compensate matters to some degree would be for the game to assume improved economic efficiency by Germany than was the case historically. (Germany in WWII was extremely inefficient at making use of its domestic and captured economic infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.)

@Sarge said in Diy Magnetic Paint:
All ya need to do is buy a box of Iron Oxide aka cement color.

AKA rust. :) I didn’t know the stuff was actually sold in boxes – but in any case this magentization concept is a clever idea. Thanks for sharing it.

Identification charts for the actual A&A sculpts can be found here:

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts

Clicking on each chart will expand it to full size for easier viewing.

I don’t use flight stands personally, but having two heights is potentially useful because it allows different types of planes to operate at different altitudes. This has the benefit of reducing board crowding and of adding another visual cue for unit type identification. To reduce the risk of tipping, the short stands could be used for the large, heavy bomber sculpts and the tall ones for the small, light fighter sculpts. The intermediate-size tactical bombers could go either way, of perhaps even be used with an intermediate-height (30mm) flight stand, if there’s any interest expressed for such an accessory.

@captain-walker said in On this day during W.W. 2:

On this day in 1945, Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas rescue 552 Allied prisoners from the Japanese POW camp at Cabanatuan.

An event re-enacted (with a fair bit of artistic licence, though some of the actual POWs were featured in the sequence) at the beginning of the 1945 John Wayne film Back to Bataan.

Hi JM,

I have a few books on wargame design, which is a topic that’s interested me over the years (though I’ve never had the time to actually design a full game, and which I’ll probably never have the time to do until I’m retired), and solo wargaming is one aspect of this topic which has always intrigued me because it poses such a difficult technical challenge. Game designers have come up with different ways to tackle that challenge, with varying degrees of success; I’ve never come across any solo-game system that I’ve found completely satisfactory, though I’ve sometimes come across some clever mechanisms that can be used in such games. I noticed your thread on your A&A solo-gaming project and I look forward to reading more about it.

I don’t have the A&A gaming expertise you’ve requested (I’m more of an A&A sculpt collector than anything else), so unfortunately I can’t provide the help you’re looking for, but there’s something I’m wondering about. It sounds as if you have an existing AI-based solo gaming system that you’ve already used with other games, and now you’re developing an A&A variant which uses this existing system. If, however, I understand correctly (which perhaps I’m not) your most recent post about the 4-territory objectives, it sounds as if you’re adapting A&A to fit your AI-based solo system, rather than adapting your AI-based solo system to fit A&A. That’s a perfectly valid approach, but one potential consequence is that the result might be a game that is conceptually and functionally quite different from A&A. To use a chess analogy: converting a full-sized table-top chess game to a portable pocket version (by, for instance, using a little magnetized board in a folding case, and round checkers-type magnetized tokens with chess piece pictures printed on them) doesn’t alter the nature of the game in any way, but converting it into a three-dimensional chess set produces a radically different game with very different strategies. But I may simply be misunderstanding the concept behind your project, which is one reason I look forward to learning more about it.

Here are a few more; the WWII-era US military videos are fun to watch, and the orchestration / performance of the service songs in question is quite lively and enthusiastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3QIHivAqA
SERVICE SONGS - Soundies , The Caissons Go Rolling Along , The Marines Hymn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pagjJ3DAabk
SEMPER PARATUS - The United States Coast Guard Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YlbiyiuMc
Red Army Choir: Polyushka Polye (“Oh Fields, Our Fields”; music composed by Lev Knipper; lyrics by Viktor Gusev, 1933)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvhEZuTeBE
Soviet Army March “Moscow in May” (music: Dmitry and Daniil Pokrass; lyrics: Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, 1937)