Posts made by Marquis

@Funcioneta:

What about China? Did they got totally killed after Japan 1 or Japan graciously ignore them? I assume at least the fighter was killed

Good question - China was a major problem for Japan, they couldn’t igone them so it took Japan a few turns to build up on the mainland before attacking in mass in China in into Russia.  China at one point even took Shanghi and liberated Hong Kong for the UK, I think on turn 2 or 3.  By turns 7 or 8 they were on the ropes but the fighter was the last Chinese piece to die.  It was easy for China to protect it.  Also it was difficult for Japan to attack India, as the only suitable mainland facotry site was up in Manchuria, and there is a whole lota China in the way.  Burma also proved to be a good buffer for the UK.  In the end China was completely overrun but I think that was do to the lack of American intervetion in the Pacific.  China is weak but it isn’t a push over

Last night in our game Germany got Paratroopers but not until mid-game.  By then they didn’t have any bombers so to use the Paratroopers they had to build some, they built 2, spending almost an entire turns worth or production.  This production would have been beter spent on infantry and tanks.  The paratroopers did take an undefended Norway and Finland, which divered two Russian tanks but otherwsie were not overly effective.  Ceratinly, the tech came to late to consider a drop onto London - and that’s the real issue, you can’t plan for tech.  You can spend a ton of money trying to “get” a roll on the chart then it’s random.  A strategy based on “getting” a tech will almost allways fail.

Now if Germany we lucky and got paratroopters early say on turn 1 or 2 then built around using them, then maybe they’d get lucky again and take London but that’s needing allot of luck.

Last night I had a chance to play the new AA50 with four of my regular board gaming friends.  All these guys are very competent gamers – over 40, been playing all sorts of board games for years and two of them plus myself have been playing all the AA variants going back as far as original from the 80’s.  However, we do have one younger chap (19 yrs.) with us and he’s still trying to figure it out.

The new AA50 game was met with great applause.  Here’s what we found:

•The National Objectives are the center piece to any strategy. All the previous game reviews that didn’t include them should be ignored.  They really change the game play.  This addition was well liked by everyone.

•The new tech tree and system is well founded and fun – nothing was a game breaker; it’s just too random to make a strategy out of “getting” the right tech.  In our game the Japanese did get Jet Fighters, allowing fighters to attack on 4s, and that made Japan very powerful – but there was no way for Japan to plan on that happening I would call getting a favorable tech, luck rather than strategy.

•The new rules on strategic bombing are great.  Once the Allies were able to reduce Italian production to nothing!  That was fun. I was playing on the Allied side.

•The Italians are more powerful than you might think.  In last nights game they retook France at least 3 time for the Germans and took Stalingrad twice.  Eventually they were overrun but not until late in the game.

•I really like the new rules on transports having 0/0.  This just simply makes the game better.

In our game Moscow fell in the same turn as Berlin.  The Americans tried to contest the Japanese, but were not very effective, eventually settling on a Germany first strategy – but to the Allies folly that left a much too powerful Japan and in the end Russia, which was doing well against German, couldn’t contain a two front war.  The Japanese were gaining up to 15 extra IPCs a turn and out building America – The Americans should have never abandoned the Pacific, it was a huge strategic error.

After one game it’s hard to say if there were any glaring imbalances.  We started with the 1941 set up and 6 hours later we were minus, Russia, Germany and Italy and still had no clear winner.  We considered it a draw.  All in all it seems like this version of Axis & Allies is winner – I’m already looking forward to next week’s game.

@Greand:

But just think about what USA/UK/JAPAN might do with it:
They may take the majority of the pacific islands without building a single transport.

And I’m sure its 1000 creative ways of using the paratrooper in totaly stupid ways.
Take Brazil, then from there threaten USA?

Long-range aircraft+paratroopers: Invasion of Japan by placing troops in alaska?

Sound like a fun tactic.  And that’s my point it’s fun not hisotrical - if you want hisotrical you’ll need to make a house rule or you could play Europe Engulfed - that’s a very fun hisotrical game but plan on spending 10+ hours in playing…

@Imperious:

I got a full dress German field Marshall uniform custom made and have no reason to wear it.

Constantly looking for an official 1941 Benz Cabriolet in black, so i can ride around in style

Your search is over: http://www.finecars.cc/en/detail/car/29643/index.html?no_cache=1&ret=202

and for the Allies: http://www.finecars.cc/en/detail/car/29607/index.html?no_cache=1&ret=202

I really like the bunker idea.  My FLGS is in an undeground portion of a building… maybe they would let me build a Furher bunker…

IL - where’s Okinawa and the Caroline Islands?  If you are going to include Midway you should include these too.  Also I’d like to see a version without the roundels, they seem to clutter up the map and are redundant as the controling nation is the same color.

As for the Phase 2 map - why not include some kind of text  as to the value of a convoy route.  You could use a roundel here to denote the origional control possibly in a dashed lined box of some other feature to set it off from the seazone?

-Keep up the good work.

As a publisher I can sympathize with minor errors such as punctuation.  But if my copy has 2 AA guns in Russia on the set up chart then that is completely absurd mistake.  It is incomprehensible that they wouldn’t give Larry are print proof of the entire game and have him approve all materials.

Wow. :-o

IL - I love your map! One thing that puts me slightly off the AA50 map is the color - your map has nice color and I rerally like the background work, very cool.

Do you plan on doing a 1939 version?  It’s the one thing that I crave the most out of all the AA varients.

OK I just wanted to put my review of these dice up here too -

It took them 6 days to reach me - it looks like they were shipped from Buffalo NY and I’m in Duluth MN so you west coasters add a few more days.

The dice are just as Imperial Leader says - very high quality.  They are full size, glossy and with very, very good color that should match the pieces nicely.

The dice bag is a nice touch.

I did think the price was a bit steep but I still bought 3 sets……

Overall they are:

Highly recomended!  A cool addition to any Axis & Allies board game.

Awesome!  Thanks.

Ok I’ve ordered three sets based on your recommendation!

But what I really want to know is how big are the dice?  I know they are smaller than a standard die but are they bigger than the dice you get in “bricks” of 36?  Do you know what I mean?

I could just wait for my dice to show up but…… I’ve already had to wait for AA50… ya WoTC is their own worst enemy - that company is something else.

We did this and yes it is very time consumming but fun.  In fact, I run the camapign games for the Wizards website.  If you want formulas for how we caculated the conversion from mini’s to board pieces and back I’d be willing to share - or you can look back a last years ETO/PTO articles when we did the entire war over six months.

-Dave

@Imperious:

Yes right:

find out why some things disappear when you PDF it and when its over 30 mb it basically wont work at all.

Why we cant save a jpeg thats larger than 12 MB

why PNG is also limited when we convert AARHE

why does illustrator sometimes freeze up

This would be for Dual Core with 4 GB ram ( best quality) and 7950 Nvidea card.

Ideally we want 100% vector for all AARHE in PDF… no loss in quality.

I"ll try: #1 I don’t know exactly what you are talking about but the export to PDF utility has options for compression, if you set these too low - then you loose quality, they can conversely be set high and the PDF quality stays good. So check you export setting.
          #2 If you want to save a JPEG - there is a dialog box in Photoshop that lets you save a larger file - again check the settings - but keep in mind that JPEG’s throw away pixels and compress data - so if you want to preserve all the pixels save the file as a tiff with no compression.  Making JPEGs out of JPEGs will degrade the image.
        #3  Why are you using PNG - give up on this format.
        #4  Ask Adobe.
        #5  This shouldn’t be a problem - again check you export to PDF diaglog box and change the setting.

Hope this helps -Dave

Alright!  I love new maps and new game concepts - where can we downlaod this sucker?  How big is it?  What do all the dot’s mean?

@Pervavita:

im new and wanted to see the map, the links in the first page are dead links.
is there a new up to date link?

Go back and see my post on page 43 or 42.  That should show you the map.

I’ve been thinking about a 39 start variant and one option would be to make cut out templates that would go over France and Poland and others, then when they are taken simply remove the template and the territory is German.

That would work for the map but then you’ve got set up and how to contain the Japanese until 41 etc. etc.

Ok here’s what I know about the file (otherwise know as the digital version of the map), it was indeed a JPEG and about 60" x 30" at 100 dpi.  I used photoshop to make it 300 dpi and 96" x 48".  then I added the industrial complexes and aa guns on the map then made it into a PDF.  The PDF is 17mb.  If anyone wants this PDF email me - subject XXL map at AAR@onwordboundbooks.com. I can send you that map and the player aids and the short rules and if you are into it my version of the Commander Cards.

Until I get someplace to host the file for download that’s the best I can do.  Please be aware that some “free” email services cap your download ability - so keep that in mind when requesting the map.

Last night we played form 6:00am to 1:30am and the game could have gone another 7 hours…a very good game indeed!

Cheers -Dave

The man asked for a larger picture so here it is:

As for the orgional photoshop file - it looks like the link at the start of this tread is dead - I downloaded it before it went dead and have it on my computer - I’m working on getting it posted and will put a link up at that time.  I’ll also post the player cards.  As for the “updated” version that takes up pages 5-42 of this thread - I have no connection with that - infact I’ll just say that I really didn’t like the work done on that particular version.  The orgional is waht I’ve got and what I printed.

Larger picture -

Almost a year ago I was looking for a bigger playing board - ideally I wanted something that combined the look of both the A&A Europe and Pacific maps but in a whole world persepctive. Anyway I found a map on Axis&Allies.org made by the chap - Positronica. I downloaded it and there it sat on my computer for about a year while I played out a full A&A mini’s campaign using Europe and Pacific maps.

Anyway, two weeks ago I though our playing group needed a change and so I printed out positronica’s map on 20+ peices of paper and tiled them all together. The consenus was that the map was fun to play on but too small and too crowded. So I took I thought, “What would make a good sized playing surface?” How about a 8 foot x 4 foot map…

After some photoshopping and a trip to a local sign printer we now have what I consider one of if not the world best playing board for Axis and Allies.

See for yourself -

As you can see the map is wonderfully large! We used Positronica’s set up and we arn’t sure if it’s balanced or not - the Axis won but it might have been more to the ineptness of the Allies. What makes this map intersting -a breath of fresh air really, is that it makes fleets very important, and the sheer size and number of the territories makes standard stratagy ineffective.

The German tank army did 14 hits on the first round - ouch! Did I mention that I was playing Russia and we lost… Anyway for you viewing pleasure.

Cheers -Dave