Posts made by dinosaur

Frimmel,

Man, you’re tough.  I’m gonna be painting pieces till I’m an old man if this keeps up.  I am surprised at the high ratings AAP is getting.  How could  that many people be wrong?  Never mind, this is an election year.  :-D

I have friends with keys that adjust the seats and stuff automatically.  The husband has his key and the wife has hers.  The keys do not have metal tonges that fit in a mechanism either.  They are chips in the end of a plastic holder that talks to the car to say, “He is driving the car now adjust the seats and mirrors.”  If you adjust the mirror or seat after the car starts, the car just lets it go.  But the next time the car is started with that key it still adjusts the seats and mirrors for the “owner” of that key.  It is all pretty neat.  I’m not a big fan of the big brother stuff though.  I expect to be able to trust my kids more than that.  We’ll see.

The technology to compute the spacing of the groves is not the biggest challenge, IMO.  The biggest challenge is having the equipment to cut the grooves as precisely as necessary.  And then what happens when folks get tired of the 1812?

We have a store selling a copy of Pacific for $30.  I was thinking of waiting for AA50 but my son would like to get AAP now.  What do y’all think?  We have AAR and AAG now.  I would like to get the new pieces from AA50.  Also, I paint ours and they look nice.  I even use skin tone for faces and hands, brown for rifles and boots, silver for jap bayonettes, and navy grey for all ship hulls.  A typical infantryman will have four colors, a tank of arty piece is only two colors (tracks are navy grey and rest in national colors), ships are typically three colors and planes are three or four colors.

Thanks for your reply as well.

Another modification you might consider since you are making these from scratch …

Could the “pips” be small stars, and could the five pip side have the stars arranged in the circle as they appear on a five-star generals insignia?

I figure you could help everyone by offering a special “expansion” set of dice with the three new countries.  Folks that only want them for AAR, or AAE could buy the “basic set” and folks that want to play AA50 could buy both sets.

I am glad you recognized my thoughts that although my idea has aesthetic merit, it doesn’t cut the economic mustard.

I’m with you there Jen.  I was just wanting to add a little upbeat conversation to the mix.

I’d like to know,  are teachers more upset about pay issues or behavior issues in the public schools?

Field Marshall,

Those are some nice dice and are a good value.  I may order a set or two for my son at Christmas.  How long does it take to ship?

Another idea I once had was to have dice arranged a different way.  The “ones” would be for rolling attacking infantry and such, and would have only one side marked with the logo as you have, but the other sides would just be blank.  The “twos” would have an artillery sillohette <sp?>on one side and an infantryman sillohette on a second side, with four blank sides.  These would be for things that attack or defend on a two.  The “threes” would have tank, airplane, and/or cruiser sillohettes and three blank sides.  The fours would have bombers and battleships with two blank sides.

Then when you roll, you shake the appropriate number of dice and just count the sillohettes.  A blank side is just a miss.  Only the ones come in nation specific groups because of the emblem.  The only two problems I see with this are you need a bucket load of dice and there are so many unusual dice to produce.  I figure you might need 10 #1 for each nation, 20 #2 dice, 20 #3 dice and 10 #4 dice.  In the rare instance you need a #5 die, just go find an old fashioned one and roll it.

It would speed up a few early turns with all these user friendly dice.  But you can’t use them for many other games.

BTW, has anyone thought of playing with 8-sided dice instead of 6-sided?  That would give the defender a bit of a boost.</sp?>

Whoa there, Jen, I still think there are some aspects of the US that support the future.  One aspect of the US is that we respect intellectual property, which is a great reason to apply yourself toward innovation, although in many arena this is under attack.  Because of our patent and copyright laws, innovators accross the globe want to come here.  Although that has its own side effects, not all positive.

Incidently, has anyone else noticed the article ad at the right that invites us to inquire about the “Aniversery Addition Special Event?”  I found that to be Shakespearean.

Fortunately, some kids are gifted, and if we support those gifted kids in the sciences we will still have home grown innovators and inventors.  My son has a gift for algebra, the number crunching part of math.  I have a gift for the geometry part.  I nurture his gift and I support him as he overcomes those areas in life where he is not gifted.  Another gift we have given him is proper behavior training.  Because all his teachers say he is such a well behaved boy, they want to help him overcome his problems.

We can’t rely on society to do our parenting jobs for us.  We are only now seeing the depth of our folly in the things going on now in the public arena.

I can’t tell you how much stuff like that burns me up.  Kids should be required to learn long division in or before 4th grade.  My son is being told by the teacher that is what calculators are for.  I don’t think a kid should use a calculator until they are doing trig problems.  If our kkids can’t do the math, they will never learn to budget.  But how many times do you hear about thirty year olds still living at home?  It is all part of the same problem.

I would rather have A&AR but AAG would be my second choice.  It is a very different game from AAR because of its scale, though.

Well, first I’d like to say I sure wish I had more Frimmels to work with.  I’m an engineer.  I learned how to compute the old fashioned way with pencil and paper.  Yes I did have the use of an electronic calculator but that only made the arithmatic go faster.  Most engineers I meet from school don’t know how to compute their answers for anything harder than a “look up” by hand.  They get wrong answers from the computer because the program has a bug and they don’t know enough to figure it out.  If you take away the Internet, they would hardly be able to give you an answer to anything except which music thingy has the most storage.  They walk around with their buds in their ears and texting their friends.  I fear for when they have children.  Not all of them.  I meet 1 in 20 that are worth something, but maybe that is because I graduated well and I have high expectations.

I don’t know as much as my dad.  I’m getting closer, but I’m not there yet.  But the things I know are more “bookish” than what he knows.  My son appears to be keeping the trend toward “bookishness” but I am making sure he knows a lot of stuff, and I hope to help him surpass me by quite a margin.

But by and large, we don’t expect much of the kids these days and they are living up to it.  Kids before WWII had to be adults by the time they were 14 or 15 helping out with the family in a substantial way.

I thought it might be a game called Stargate.  I played a game called Vector 3 by the same company long ago.  I’d love to get my hands on one of those now.  I think I bought it for about $5 back in the early 80s.

Jen,

I wish I had time for this sort of thing but I just can’t.  I hope y’all have a good time with it.

My “other bomber” would be the Memphis Belle.

Our other conversation is beginning to stray a bit, so I thought I’d start a new one concerning the AAG variant where the players play “to the death.”

How many of y’all have tried this variation and what kinds of things are radically different in that game regarding strategy?  I haven’t played that way myself, yet, but I think it is going to be a lot of fun.  I can see some epic battles and strategic sleight-of-hand where folks think you are going to launch an attack “next turn” but it comes this turn instead, and on a different island.  I could see both sides creating massive fleets all sparing to gain a position on the board.  I can see a submarine attack with a stack of subs.  There are all kinds of other things I might want to do but can’t in the OOB rules game.

So how many of y’all have tried this?

Well, lets add to your list of lessons.

First lesson, you almost certainly have a set of cruisers that don’t match the silohettes <sp?>on the game cards (the jap cruisers are green and the 'mericans are orange).  Wizards has an exceptional record for providing replacement cruisers at your request.  I got mine in about a week.

Lesson number two, the reinforcements in the printed rules are half the number they should be.  Each player gets ten points plus four for each controlled island.

Lesson number three, forget New Georgia on turn number one.  Take Santa Isabel, Malaita and Guadalcanal on the first turn.  This requires an all out effort, but it is well within reach of the US player.

Lesson number four, don’t send aircraft alone to tackle a substantial fleet unless you are desperate for Victory Points.

Lesson number five, escort your transports with destroyers.  Don’t load destroyers unless you have no choice.  Destroyers take any undesignated hits in the battle box.  Statistical analysis shows this becomes very expensive when you have loaded destroyers.

Lesson number six, send plenty of fighters to escort and protect your bombers.  Fighters sacrifice themselves for bombers just as destroyers sacrifice themselves for the fleet.

I wish you many seasons of pleasure with the game.  My son loves his.  Painting the ships and soldiers is very rewarding as well.  Good Luck.</sp?>

While I applaud innovation and such, I don’t think the scale of AAR lends itself to this sort of game play.  The only two things that I dislike strongly about AAR are the submarine rules that diminish the ability of subs and the Strategic bombing is only countered by AA fire and not fighters also.  The Airwar phase in this game fixes that very well and I would like to see that fixed in AAR.

I bought some Hell Cats and some Corsairs from a 1:350 set produced in either Japan or China.  They even have tiny Navy insignia to decal the wings.  I only wish I could find the bombers used in the Dolittle raid.  I’d just love to see the game with two of them sitting on the Solomon Islands.

On another note, my home computer is down.  I can still access my e-mail and thse boards using my wife’s notebook, but I don’t have acess to my spreadsheet.  If I ever get things sorted out, I hope to finish one or two more air attack comparisons.

I like M_I_Rs idea.  Aircraft don’t get real resiliance as a ship because if they are hit by a 2 they are still removed (killed).  They are just getting one final shot before they are done.  In this way, they could launch their weapon before getting shot on the way out.  That is perfectly reasonable to me.  I could consider having the “first AA roll” be fighters only, with 1 or 2 being an immediate kill and the “second AA roll” being ship/land based AA fire, with 2s allowed to make their attack.  This allows fighter CAP to be highly effective.  I think there are some interesting tweaks for air combat rules on the table here.

One concern for me is that your second method doesn’t allow destroyers and cruisers to protect the higher value ships.  For example, in my calculations that only deal with destroyers and supply ships, in the game destroyers absorb all but the direct shot against the supply ship.  Except for the direct shot, only one in six, you have to eliminate the destroyers to hit the supply ships.  This isn’t ideal, but it does allow destroyers to fulfill their primary duty as fleet/convoy escorts.  I do agree that having a destroyer take two damage points to kill, the same as a cruiser, is a bit of an oversite.  I could go with destroyers getting killed on a 1 or 2.  This helps cruisers gain their proper place too.  A destroyer gets only one hit, a cruiser might get two, and a battleship might get three hits to destroy.  A destroyer always gets one, a cruiser might get only one, and a battleship always gets two.  Sounds like a good balance.  Maybe we could let supply ships get killed on a 1, 2 or 3.  But you still have to peel away the escort ships.

Your idea about ship AA fire makes me think of kamikaze attacks.