Posts made by DoManMacgee

@Narvik Well I agree with basically all of your points, but we testers were only allowed to suggest changes about the balance. The “”“core experience”“” is set in stone by the new guy who is the lead designer and unfortunately he is pretty stubborn about his vision for A&A. It’s a pretty radical departure from the “easy to learn, hard to master” style that Larry Harris championed (which, in my opinion, is the reason the early A&A games are much better than anything that came later).

@Narvik said in Blog: The grand Strategy Game.:

The A&A maps looks good. I don’t like the glossy colors on the HBG maps.

That makes sense to me. The HBG map I have is a bit difficult to view clearly but that may be because I have the “standard” edition and not one of the larger ones. I don’t know for sure.

Most of all I want to mix the A&A 1914 and the A&A 1940 global maps, somehow, But again, legal issues? I can do so much in my basement with friends, but an official Blog? I dunno man.

Legal issues in America are strict, but generally if you are not making your blog for-profit, than there is no legal issue with using the game boards and pieces however you like. I can see the value in using the 1914 map because it gives a more province-by-province breakdown of Europe, which would be extremely helpful in detailing some of the combat that happened, especially in the earlier phases of the war.

the new Stalingrad game.

I was on the playtest team for that and agree with most of your sentiments (albeit in a different way. I wanted a larger-scale Case Blue game and was denied that opportunity because the developer + management wanted the game that ended up being produced). Urban warfare is still represented there, but it is in a very minor way via the ambush spaces + supply system. Not enough detail there to appease the die-hards that want a hyper-realistic game.

@Narvik said in Blog: The grand Strategy Game.:

@DoManMacgee Oh no, it’s not finished, it’s in progress. I need to figure out the Collect Income too, and that is not easy. We have the GDP that change all the time, and also the Military Outlays change from month to month. I don’t even know for sure how many aircrafts were made because the estimates differ from source to source. Some say US made 30 000 aircrafts but no more than 2000 were operational at any time, so where did all the planes go? And the estimates of casualties on the Eastern Front differ one million men give or take. In my Blog that is like 10 Infantry. I can’t make an accurate historical correct Blog if I don’t know the correct numbers.

Oh wow I didn’t know you were actively going back and editing it to be more correct. That makes it a much more interesting project because of the level of accuracy that you’re striving for.

to solve this I could let Germany dow USA in Round 9 fall. Also not historically correct, since in fact Japan dow’ed USA before Germany dow’ed USA. A very importent point is that Japan would’nt dow anyone before the german attack on Moscow was resolved. IF success Japan would attack USSR far east, but if failure Japan would attack USA.

Have you considered using one of the unofficial fangames like HBG’s Global War 1936 to go to a finer level of detail? It may help with some aspects of the simulation since basically every country from the era has its own space on the map (so, for example, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are their own territories, no “Hungary-Slovakia”).

To change the Turn order was never even considered. That would mess up everything.

Yes I agree. The point is to simulate the war using in-game rules as closely as possible.

I don’t see any other way to do it. A slight violation of the OOB rules yes, but also the less of many evils. But I am surprised it was no questions.

I didn’t mind the liberties you took because I was not familiar with other projects that have done similar things. I will have to go through and read some sections again to ask more detailed questions.

@Narvik Yes I have heard of similar projects but I had never seen anything like it myself before. I really appreciated seeing yours play out, even if I only got to see it after it was 100% completed.

@Narvik First of all, apologies for going through and liking every one of these posts. I just liked your thread that much.

Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to create this project. The idea of actually recreating WW2 on the actual board was a really good visual experience and it’s exactly this kind of thing that helps keep learning about history interesting. When I one day have a kid, I hope to use a similar idea to teach them about historical events in a way that can be visually represented easily.

Thanks again!

@Hansolo88 Anyway to give one last anecdotal addendum if you’re still out there, I busted out my own copy of the game yesterday and gave it a run. I haven’t touched the game in about a year so I’m pretty rusty, but I still remembered the basic strategies + all the rules enough to play at least a mid-level game.

I do agree that USSR is the much easier side to play, as they won. However, the game was a decent enough toss up that I felt it could have gone in Germany’s favor if I hadn’t botched some key decisions (mostly, I failed to heed my own advice and had Germany trying to break into all 3 city entrances instead of just focusing on 1-2 in-force. This left Pitomnik underdefended, which let the Soviets surround the city early (I had captured all but two territories in the city, those being the two factories). Once Germany was cut-off, they quickly burned through their supply crates and stalled out afterwards, letting the Uranus forces walk into the city and clean things up.

I’ll play more and hope I can get a better grasp on Germany in case others come asking for advice later.

UPDATE: In a second playthrough, I was able to win a total (although it took until about turn 12 to close the game out because some Soviets kept running around in the RP territories making me play whack-a-mole). I would generally recommend the following:

• All Optional Rules - OFF (basically all of them benefit the Soviets IMO).
• Have Germany focus on the northern flank of the city to rush towards the Tank/Artillery factories. If those can be shut-off quickly (turn 4/5/6) it shuts down USSR’s ability to effectively fight in the city.
• To that end, in the initial stages of the game, use Germany’s air to target the northern ferry and/or any stragglers you can find in that portion of the board. If USSR isn’t building Artillery on the river, you may also want to make a point of killing the one they start with to reduce their AA odds long-term.

@Krieghund Fair. The desire for the Renegade playtest staff to not be unfairly criticized is why I’ve been replying to these threads in the first place (like I said before, I don’t like back-seat gaming for others in most cases, as I think strategies/metagames should develop naturally as folks experiment).

Like you, I think there are other reasons that the current batch of games are seeing reports of issues with balance/etc. from new/low-level players, and I am privy to keeping my opinions to myself (probably for the same reason(s), if I had to guess).

EDIT: fixed some grammar flubs.

@Krieghund If you don’t mind me asking, was there turnover during the years between Revised and Zombies (the last game pre-renegade)? Revised and AA50 (42 1st Edition as well to a lesser extent, although that game is barely talked about these days) are highly regarded as among the most balanced games in the series, even at a high level, while everything after that point (2009) began to see issues in higher-level play (starting with P40 and continuing for the rest of that era).

Oh, one last point about balance/playtesting, etc. Especially compared to the older games like G40, etc.

From what I understand, playtesting pre-Renegade was done by some combination of Larry, his private staff/team (most of whom went on to form Nightingale Games and are now working on War Room, Imperial Borders, etc.) and internal Hasbro/WotC staff. I don’t know the names or skill levels of any of those people, or how the names/faces changed over the years, but I think that may be part of why you saw games like 42SE, G40 and 1914 (which all seem balanced enough at a low level but becomes lopsided once you start playing more seriously) come out over the latter part of that era of A&A.

Currently, Renegade open-sources its play-testers. Most of us are pretty hardened players with a lot of experience but that may be why, at least in this case, the experience from the casual/entry-level point of view doesn’t reflect the experience from people racking up 50+ games each.

There’s actually a sign-up thread on this very site ( https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/40917/open-call-for-play-testers-for-renegade-a-a-games/13 ) if you’re interesting in trying to help make a difference for future games. They ask a few basic questions about experience level with A&A, etc. but generally as long as you’re willing to put in the hours + contribute to discussions they’ll be happy to take you.

@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:

assuming you are talking about both scenarios (as I still think the tournament scenario feels superbly balanced right from the start).

Assuming you’re calling the “Operation Uranus” scenario the “Tournament Scenario”. That was not the intent by the staff. “Race to Stalingrad” is the full game that is expected to be played. The Uranus Scenario is supposed to be a teaching/tutorial scenario for a quick game.

I don’t claim to speak for the rest of the staff, but we actually spent far more time working on the base scenario Vs. the Uranus one. If anything, the Uranus one is an afterthought. I’d be alarmed/surprised if Gen Con and the other “powers that be” are promoting it as the “official” scenario. IMO USSR is better there, but there is a lot of variance due to the cards.

Playing with awareness of and trying to take advantage of “No Step Back”

This one is critical for German success, which you already seem to understand.

Gaining some experience on approaching and attacking into the city from the 3 possible options
Gaining familiarity with the force multiplier ability

Speaking strictly from a High-level, I would generally recommend picking 1-2 entry points max and not all 3, since Germany will get its forces spread too thin otherwise.

Being sufficiently aware of the supply system to take advantage of attacking the Volga ferries on specific turns etc.

Another point about supply that I see potentially being overlooked (from what little I’ve watched of others playing the game, anyway) is the rules nuance that each ferry only supplies one section of the city (color-coded), and that you cannot draw supply from a ferry to a different point, even if there is a clear land connection.

Understanding how to play to the victory conditions

This could potentially be a trap if Germany is aiming for something like a minor from the word go. If they can’t be aggressive and actively deny the Soviets their IPC-producing spaces in the city they’ll just get drowned (like what you are experiencing in your games).

I’m going to throw in a few (again, general high-level points since there is no TripleA plugin I can use to illustrate and I don’t like “backseat gaming” too much) other points of interest that I see get overlooked:

• Germany needing to know when to sacrifice its air ball (or at least risk sacrificing it) to break down a position on the city map.

• Making the supply drop via air to the cut-off territory (I forgot the name sorry) on turn 1 to ensure (or almost ensure) a win there.

• Not overstacking the river IPC territories on the north flank of the map (and just using the once-every-two-turns INF to bolster the numbers there).

• Not attacking into the Soviet reinforcement zones on the Don map (since, if they are not contested or occupied, they can only produce one unit per turn).

• Abandon normal A&A high-level concepts like slowly INF-pushing and pursuing a mobile war where you race to get on top of some of the IPC tiles in the city as quickly as possible.

• OOL timing being much different for Germany Vs. what you’d expect from A&A. I was typically going Minor Axis (since they can’t force multiply) -> ART -> STUG -> INF -> MECH -> TANK.

• Abusing the fact that the other player must attack in contested territories during their turn. This means that attacking into INF-heavy USSR territories can ultimately work out in the long-term as they are forced to attack @1 during their half of the turn.

• Intentionally contesting territories to deny the IPCs to the Soviet player.

@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:

As for the Soviets getting 100s of RPs worth of units, I don’t see how the Axis can prevent it. The Axis can’t truly penetrate into the city until Turn 4 at the earliest; by that point the Soviets have already picked up ~50 RPs directly, plus another ~40 from the factories,

40 from the factories? In 4 turns USSR would have 2 ART and 2 TANK, for 20 IPC. Minor nitpick but that might make a big difference if you were missing that detail.

and they’ll continue to get a lesser amount depending on how the fighting in the city goes. That’s in addition to the easily ~100-150 RPs worth of units from Operation Uranus.

If Germany is playing properly they should be able to properly layer blockers outside of the city to make the Uranus forces irrelevant with regards to the fighting inside the city. How exactly they go about doing that would vary greatly based on the game state, of course.

There simply aren’t enough Axis units to push through the starting Soviet units, deal with these constant reinforcements, AND garrison the RP spaces so that the Axis can eventually get some RPs of their own.

The reinforcements from the Soviets take ~3 turns to reach a relevant point in the city, if not longer depending on where the fighting is happening:
1: USSR buys units, places them in Krasnaya, and moves them onto the ferry (at a rate of 1 INF per turn before the river freezes later). Also note that ONLY INF cross the river.

2: The INF unloads in its relevant rally point. If any of these territories are going to be contested by the unloading then Germany is probably doing very well.

3: The INF move up.

Even then, if Germany doesn’t go overly wide in their attack, speaking strictly about reinforcements, only 1-2 Soviet INF per turn should be able to actively make it to a relevant area in the city in the first few rounds of the game. The TANKs from the tractor factory are a strong point for the Soviet player, since they have 2 Movement and good stats, but in the initial, critical turns where Germany is trying to get its foothold in the city there will only be two of them. Additionally, if the German player is targeting the factories (another point of interest; once a factory is lost once, it’s gone forever).

My point with this wall of text is that the IPC counts you’re referencing do not reflect the full reality of how the game actually plays out if Germany is not playing a conventional, slow-but-steady INF push strategy.

@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:

You are correct that bidding was included in the rules as an optional rule, per page 28. I have not attempted this yet but it’s in theory an easy fix for boosting the Axis starting forces.

Reducing/Boosting the Axis starting forces is actually very delicate. Given how small the IPC count is across the board (16 in the city, 4 on the outside), if Germany takes even 6 IPC off of USSR you will see that they begin to completely collapse across the board due to lack of reinforcements. The Uranus forces are extremely powerful (the general idea is that, if Germany can pressure USSR to blow their Uranus deployment early (round 5/6), then Germany will be at a huge advantage going into the late game, but if USSR is able to defend well enough to deploy on the last possible turn (round 7), then Soviets will have the edge unless Germany somehow racked up a huge IPC count for Winter Storm.

@Hansolo88 said in Axis & Allies Stalingrad: Early Review and Balance Impressions:

. However it does feel like the entire box ix focused on a narrow popular view of the campaign rather than the full picture of what the Axis were trying to accomplish

Two Last/minor points: Even though I defended them from a balance perspective in another thread, I do wish the Minor Axis pieces had something else to them to give them more flavor (beyond being yellow for Romania, anyway). They were actually added pretty late in development and there was a desire this time to avoid making the game feel overly bloated with minor/one-off rules (since the complexity level of North Africa was divisive).

There was also some discussion to make the starting date earlier, as the in-game start date reflects a point where the Germans already took a surprisingly large number of casualties by attrition (meaning the battle was basically already lost), but that was also sacrificed because the feeling was that the game was already running long (which was apparently the correct call, since F2F cons are apparently talking about using the shorter scenario for tournaments with the game as-is).

Happy to keep discussing if needed. I apologize that I keep generalizing but I generally do better with this sort of thing when I can have TripleA open in front of me to show specific moves/battles/probability calculations.

EDIT: I misstated that there were only 14 IPCs in the city. That was a typo. There are 16.

@Hansolo88 Saying that G40 (which OOB has something like a +60 bid) is more balanced than this game is quite the statement. From the perspective of someone who was on the playtest team the win rate was pretty close to even by the end of the ~8 months that were spent working on it.

I’d give advice, but without details of what you were doing with Germany (other than being “over the bulk of the learning curve as the Axis”) it’s hard to really give anything beyond vague platitudes. All I can really say is that if the USSR is spending “hundreds of IPC” over the course of the game Germany isn’t being aggressive enough. I will agree that the Germans are generally harder to play than the Soviets though, at least at a high level.

Re: Bids, like NA, bids should have been codified in the rulebook. I’m 99% sure they are, but I don’t have my copy with me right now to check.

Unrelated, but at the risk of breaking NDA I pushed for this to be a Case Blue game centered around the actual objectives of the campaign (getting the oil supply) instead of Stalingrad but was vetoed by the design staff, who wanted Stalingrad specifically (IIRC it was to appeal to the pop-culture understanding of the campaign as “Madman Hitler and his OBSESSION with the city that had Stalin’s name”, but the tests were a while ago so I don’t have the full details).

I’m glad that you at least enjoyed the game despite your grievances (everything other than the balance I actually agree with you on). Hopefully a TripleA implementation comes around at some point so it can be more thoroughly tested beyond kitchen table play.

@CPT-Flint At a high level, to go for a quick kill with Japan you’d actually want to try setting up for a J3 India takedown to force a win via the in-game victory conditions. To do this you’d want to:

• J1: Buy enough transports to carry the units from Japan + the Philippines. Move-wise you want to clear out China + kill any fleet in-range EXCEPT PEARL HARBOR. Do not attack there as you need to keep your pieces in-range to fight in India by J3.

• J2: Buy all Bombers. India is exactly 5 moves away from Japan on this map, so as long as you hold Burma you’ll be able to land. Load up every unit you possibly can into transports and move them to SZ36 (near Indochina) and unload in Burma. You should be able to take it. NCM all available air, Battleship(s), and Cruiser(s) into range as well.

• J3: With your units from Burma (load some back onto transports to take advantage of bombardments) + the air units you brought in during J2 + the bombers you bought on J2, you should be able to bust India unless your opponent played very well. Depending on what the US Player was doing, build either all DDs or all land units to defend Japan.

With India down, Axis should be able to win fairly quickly if Germany performed well.

Just as a warning, following this Germany guide + my suggestions here will only get you so far. Once you hit Gold League and beyond you’ll need to learn conventional long-term strategies to get wins as the Axis consistently. For that, the game plan is radically different:

• You do still want to focus on transports in the beginning, but mostly just enough to consistently move 8 land units at a time (probably INF) from Japan -> Yunnan every turn. Yunnan is the best location to ferry troops to because they can either go Yunnan -> Burma -> India OR Yunnan -> Sinkiang -> Kazakh -> Caucasus/Moscow depending on the overall game situation.

• Beyond that basic point, what you do with Japan is largely dependent on whether the Allies are trying to Kill Germany First (KGF) or Kill Japan First (KJF).

In the former case, you want to either take India (to start pumping out 3 land units per turn from its factory) or build a factory in Manchuria (or FIC) and start pumping out 3 land units per turn there. ONLY DO THIS ONCE JAPAN HAS THE SPARE INCOME TO AFFORD IT, ALWAYS PRIORITIZE GETTING YOUR 8 LAND UNITS ONTO TRANSPORTS. You’ll also want to try snagging the VC at Hawaii if you have the spare resources and USA evacuated the Pacific completely.

In the latter case, your builds are going to vary greatly depending on the Allied fleet composition and overall strategy. Some KJFs involve USA trying to 1v1 Japan. Others involve UK + USA both pumping all of their income into the Pacific. I haven’t touched AAO in years so I don’t know what the current metagame is, unfortunately. I do know, however, that if UK starts spending money in India the best way to stop them is to build a Baltic Fleet with Germany (usually accomplished buy building a Carrier or two to land Fighters on, then transports behind it) and threaten Sealion. This will force UK to start building in London again, meaning Japan can potentially take India regardless of what UK’s attempt at applying pressure.

Hopefully this is at least somewhat helpful. I am very rusty at 42SE so I don’t think this advice will get you much further than Silver League. Hopefully as you start to ramp up your game count as each faction, you can pay attention to what your opponents are doing and learn from them. In my opinion it’s best to get good as both the Axis and the Allies to get a more complete understanding of the game.

@CPT-Flint Give me a bit and I will get back to you. I don’t play 42SE much these days but I might be able to pull up some old notes.

Are you asking for AAO (or online play in-general), or for IRL Face-to-Face play (i.e. 6 turn time-limit, etc.)?

@klykke89 The convoys, the concept of supply, and the stacking limits are all very unusual for A&A.

You basically cannot play the game at a fundamental level without understanding these mechanics. The rest can be addressed as they come up as they are not as all-consuming as the three I mentioned.

@jim010 Seems to me it might just be a case of needing to try messing around with the German strategy, but again without a full game report I can’t really give super concrete advice.

One other thing you mentioned was that you’re not using air units in the city for fear of having them get shot down. That may be part of your issue as, in my opinion, Germany needs to be comfortable with the idea of gambling their air units to make decisive attacks against Soviet positions in the city during the initial attempt to break in, even if the air units get lost in the process. This is because:

A: you get more air units with winter storm later.
B: The “bad weather” mechanic in the later rounds of the game will eventually make your air units effectively worthless anyway.

So it’s a “use it before you lose it” kind of situation. In certain situations, the air units can be used to soak hits for tanks, as strange as that sounds.

@FranceNeedsMorePower If you can find Yellow HGB sculpts for the pieces that don’t exist in the game you can always house-rule it out. Buying the low-quality Romanians as your only pre-winter storm purchase option could also be something that (probably) wouldn’t affect balance much.

@FranceNeedsMorePower The only problem with this is that, as per the game, Germany does not buy/place reinforcements until Winter Storm (later in the game). That decision had nothing to do with balance as far as I can tell. It was just a fundamental part of the game before testing even began.

As for the lack of air units for Minor Axis, it’s probably just because they didn’t want to make the extra sculpts/rules. Germany already has decent number of air units, but unless the gear they had was significantly different from that of the Minor Axis I see no reason to differentiate them.

@FranceNeedsMorePower But you cannot buy minor Axis INF in the game. They are there as a handicap against the Germans. They are not supposed to be beneficial in any way.

For the sake of the discussion, I’ll hear your reasoning of course.

@FranceNeedsMorePower I think having them as a 3rd player for a game of this scale would cause more harm than good. Giving the minor axis autonomy to act freely would make them seem more competent than they actually were IRL and would let the Axis player set up can-opener type plays, which would be difficult to balance around.

If it were a broader Eastern Front game where the Western Allies are represented somehow (lend lease troops, partisans? I don’t know), I could see it.

@Faramir Given that I was on the playtest team for the game, I can assure you the pieces are there for balance and only not because “someone wanted them represented.”

EDIT: To elaborate/clarify in case my comment comes off as dismissive/rude, the number of German pieces in the initial setup were adjusted multiple times during the earlier phases of testing because it was found that Germany was winning too often. Demoting a few German INF to “minor Axis” Infantry was seen as a middle-ground approach.

EDIT #2: My initial post was unnecessarily harshly worded and if you read it before I edited it, I apologize. I’ve been on the opposite side of the looking glass (criticizing what I see as needlessly complicated design elements in the A&A games) before so I should have been more understanding of your viewpoint. Hopefully the explanation I gave in my first edit at least clarifies things for you a bit.