Posts made by KaLeu

Thank you. At first, I was under the impression that the rule would only pertain to British naval bases. So, just to make sure, I suppose that the damaged British battleship could not be repaired at Hawaii or New Zealand (assuming those territories are in Allied hands). And what about Alaska and the Aleutians, in the somewhat unlikely case of a US naval base there?

@Krieghund:

In the example of London having fallen while Calcutta is free, UK capital ships may be repaired at any operative Allied naval base except those that are part of the UK Europe economy.  The assumption is that the cost (too small to be represented by a full IPC) is borne by the UK Pacific economy.

But under the assumption that the UK Pacific economy bears the cost, why can’t a UK capital ship be repaired at a naval base in, say, unoccupied South Africa? And if that’s so, can the South African naval base still repair non-UK capital ships?

Depending on what Germany purchased and which German subs survived, and providing that none of those subs are in SZ106, it may be possible to save the UK battleship or to make sinking it unattractive by moving it to SZ123, and landing the Scottish and the French fighter on Iceland, assuming the English planes are used for Taranto. If Germany didn’t attack SZ106 or lost that battle, 2 Canadians can be sailed to Iceland to reinforce it against an invasion. Any surviving UK destroyers could also go to SZ123. In case of a J1 DOW, the US can further reinforce Iceland and/or SZ123.

If the Germans then still want to destroy the British battleship, they will need to send most or all of their warships. The US can help by building an Atlantic fleet poised to take out the Germans in SZ123, and the Axis can then prevent that only by postponing Japan’s DOW until turn 3.

My youthful appearance, probably.  :mrgreen: Anyway, I was born well after WW II.

I feel old now. My dad was born during the First World War.

@dreifeino:

Why didn’t UK scramble 4 fighters to SZ 109 (French from London and one from Scotland)?

My point exactly, and that was why I asked about the other battles. As the UK didn’t use the other two fighters in either SZ110 or SZ111, there would have been no reason not to use them in SZ109. Doing so would have almost guaranteed a British victory there.
Alternatively, the UK could have used the Scottish fighter to scramble in SZ111, where the German attack seems a bit underpowered, and still have 3 fighters for SZ109.

The destroyer.

If it was one of the German subs that hit, GB has no choice and must remove the destroyer because subs can’t hit planes. If it was the German fighter that scored the hit, I’d also lose the destroyer because Germany has a 2/3 chance of killing it next round anyway, and once teh destroyer is gone and GB hits round 2, Germany must lose the plane.

Not sure I’d have srambled that way, but it depends on the other fights of course. With two German subs in SZ109, at least one of the other attacks (106, 109, 111) has at most one sub.

Generic blowup boxes remind me of the marshaling cards that came with Revised. They worked well enough from a purely technical perspective, but I dislike troops being physically away from where they really are. Blowup boxes and marshaling cards make it more difficult to visualize the strength of the forces and especially, their potential actions. So I suppose we would either need an even bigger map, or alternatively, distort it even more to make some areas bigger.

Canadians got my mother to start smoking! They were generous enough to a pretty young woman, but she gave most of the pack to her brothers who were eagerly waiting around the corner. Fortunately, once the soldiers went home, she managed to quit soon.

I found a few of them here:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/18/world-leader-heights-tall

@StuckTojo:

In my travels, one other thing I’ve noticed about people from The Netherlands is that they speak better English than 90% of Canadians and Americans.  I’m not sure why that is.

@Arthur:

I do agree that the English of people in the Netherlands is better than a vast majority of people in North America.

On behalf of my countrymen, thanks for the compliments. Though maybe you guys mostly meet people who travel and are internationally oriented. But linguistically, we often end up somewhere in the mid Atlantic. I’ve been mistaken for an Englishman in the US and for an American in the UK. It’s a small country, so we need our languages…… from where I live, 150 miles west I need to know English, 150 miles south, French, 150 miles east, German, and 150 miles north… well, whatever the fish are speaking.

More on topic, I do agree with the general sentiment that having Canada as a separate power would be a welcome acknowledgment of their contribution to the Allied war effort. But it’s still a board game, so one we start going down that road, where does it end? Finland, for example, was a separate power that fought on the Axis’ side for most of the war, and the same can be said for Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary to some degree… and shouldn’t we indeed have separate Dutch units to better defend the DEI against Japan? And the Poles fought bravely, and so did the Belgians, and the Norwegians, and the Greeks, and expeditionary forces from countries around the world, and I’m probably missing quite a few others here…
Having said that, from a viewpoint of game mechanics, Canada does seem like a prime candidate.

@StuckTojo:

@GeneralHandGrenade:

Alberta is right between BC and Saskatchewan where it always was. You can’t miss it. It’s bigger than most of the countries on Earth.

Hahaha.  A big fist-bump from across the border, neighbour.   :lol:

Frankly, without you telling me that and/or me checking a map, I wouldn’t have been sure at all about Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I knew they were there, but not which one was which. A&A again wasn’t very helpful there, by merging them. So thank you - I guess I learnt a bit about geography myself.

@StuckTojo:

I’ve met a lot of people over the years from The Netherlands, and when asked where they’re from they invariably say “Holland”.  I’m guessing it’s because all the Netherlanders I’ve met are from the Holland part, but still, it’s interesting that they always say “Holland” and not “The Netherlands”.

I have to admit that we’re making things complicated. I live in Holland myself, but I know of people in other provinces who balk at being called “Hollanders”. To add to the confusion, the Netherlanders are mostly called the “Dutch” in English, a word that is etymologically related to “Deutsch”, which means “German” in German. So it all gets completely mixed up - for example, the “Pennsylvania Dutch”, were originally from Germany.

@StuckTojo:

Then again, when asked, I always say I’m from “Alberta”, but that’s just because I don’t feel like it makes sense to say “Canada” when the country is larger than some continents.  It doesn’t really narrow it down much.

But are you sure the people you talk to, know where Alberta is?

@General:

I have to post this video link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-csGDoSSZyc

:-D

And also…. sorry for completely derailing this topic.

While I feel no particular urge to involve myself in the topic of Canadian (or for that matter, Dutch) roundels on the A&A game board, I think it’s still appropriate to correct some geographical misconceptions here. Specifically:

@CWO:

… and which is 1,657 times the size of Holland in terms of surface area.  (To put it another way, Holland is a couple of hundred square kilometers smaller than Canada’s smallest province, P.E.I.).

The surface of Prince Edward Island is 5,660 km2. “Holland”, which has not existed as a single political entity since 1840, was a historical area of the Netherlands approximately contiguous with the current Dutch provinces of South Holland (2,818 km2) and North Holland (2,670 km2), for a total of 5,488 km2. So in that sense, the statement that Holland is smaller than PEI is correct. However, if you include the water area which Holland has and PEI strangely doesn’t have, at 7,494 km2 Holland is actually quite a bit larger than PEI. And the historical county of Holland was also larger as it included areas that are now part of different provinces, notably Brabant and Utrecht. The areas of the provinces vary slightly over the years anyway because sometimes their borders are changed as municipalities merge.

Quite apart from that, the larger and quite common misconception is of course, to equate Holland with the Netherlands, which at 41,543 is really a lot larger that PEI (and at 9,984,670 km2, Canada is “only” 240 times the size of that  :-) ). The A&A map unfortunately adds to this misunderstanding by having an are labeled “Holland Belgium”. The aforementioned Dutch provinces of North and South Holland don’t even border Belgium, so an area “Holland Belgium” would be a non-contiguous oddity, with the remainder of the Netherlands in between and to the north and east. “Low Countries” might have been a better name, also because it can to some degree be considered to encompass Luxembourg as well.

@Arthur:

You might as well issue an R1 DoW against Japan; at our gaming group we generally assume that Russia is at war unless stated otherwise.  So far I haven’t seen any reason in non-BM games to not opt for immediate war.

This makes perfect sense with experienced players, but I do remember a game where I, playing Russia, managed to delay a Japanese attack for quite a few turns by claiming that we had always been on good terms and that I had never done anything at all to damage Japan’s interests.  :-D

I actually think that the game is not that far off in this respect. Is it advantageous for Japan to march across Siberia in Global 1940? I hardly think so: the areas are not worth much, doing so will activate Mongolia on Russia’s side, and the Germans are at Moscow’s gates long before Japan can do the same. At least, in my own (limited) experience….

Japan can capture a few territories and tie down Soviet units, however. Which reflects what it could have done in the real war if a dedicated effort would have been made. It’s just that they decided otherwise after the battle of Khalkin Gol (as for “J remaining at peace with R” - that only happened after J had found out the hard way that R was quite a bit tougher than they may have believed based on their 1904-1905 confrontation). But suppose Japan would have persisted in spite of the outcome of that battle - would those Siberian troops that were so badly needed against the Germans then really have been available in the battle of Moscow?

Yes you can.

It’s quite unlikely, but I can indeed imagine a situation where you’d want to buy a naval base in a landlocked area.

Let’s say it’s Russia’s turn, and there are some valuable British units in Kazakhstan (say, planes), Novosibirsk is empty, and the Japanese hold Timguska where they have a strong force of tanks and mechs that could destroy the British by blitzing through Novosibirsk. And the situation on the board is such that Russia doesn’t have any units available that it could send there to block Japan.
Russia can then save the British units by building an air base in Novosibirsk, but that would imply giving that base to Japan for free. So the better choice for Russia if the rules would have allowed it, would have been to build a naval base there, which contrary to the air base, can never be used against the Allies after Japan takes it.

I haven’t explored this idea in the sense that I ever played it, but I’ve thought about it in the past and saw quite a few obstacles. So I wonder: did Jefferey suggest a strategy or scenario where this would be a good idea?

A few problems I can think of, are:
1. It takes a UK transport and Anzac inf to give Persia to Anzac in Anzac 2, and then you still need to build the complex itself. The UK would like to use its transport elsewhere, and the maneuver also weakens Egypt. It’s much easier to just march into Persia as the UK and build a British complex there.
2. The investment for the factory and for anything it produces comes out of Anzac’s not-so-deep pockets and thus weakens their homeland, so it only works when Japan either pursues a strategy that doesn’t put much pressure on Anzac (which seems suboptimal to me) or can be kept at bay by the US, which would need to go just about full Pacific to compensate for Anzac’s diminished investments in that area.
3. What will the Anzac units out of Persia do? The main tactical advantage is that they move after Italy so they can kill can openers in Russia or even in the Middle East, but that’s about it. A British factory in Persia would contribute much more to an offensive force in the area.

So maybe it could work if the US goes full Pacific but otherwise I can’t really see it. But maybe I’m missing something.

There is an additional limitation that naval bases can only be built in territories with a coastline. Of course it’s quite unlikely that anyone would want to build a naval base in a landlocked territory anyway, but in order to rule that out completely, the rules say:

Naval bases can be built on controlled territories with a coastline, including islands.