Posts made by MrMalachiCrunch

On page 11, bottom paragraph last sentence it states “However, if a warship chooses to sink an unescorted transport that warship must end its movement in that sea zone.”

Question #1, does the sentence portion “that warship” mean that you can drop one combat ship out of the fleet say a sub while the rest of the fleet moves on?

The wording seems to suggest to me that it could.  However, it does seem to somewhat contradict something on page 15 near the top of the page under the heading of Step 1. Sea Combat

From what I read it says if you do an amphibious assault and the only enemy units are subs and/or transports you don’t have to attack them and can ignore them but……next sentence…if you do attack the transports and/or subs then ALL ships must fight.

What if the only ships along the coast of the territory you are assaulting are transports?  That seems to be a similiar case to page 11 whereby you can ‘drop one warship’ to kill the transports?  A sub could do the job while the battleships and/or crusiers to offshore bombardment?

What are your thoughts and interpretations?

This has probably been adressed in an early game.  I’ve jumped from Axis & Allies 2nd Edition
to 1942 in one move.

OK, so the question:  In Axis & Allies 2nd Edition there was a rule whereby you were only allowed as many ‘stacks of units’ as you had original pieces.  IE, you could only have 3 bomber stacks, 10 tank stacks, 15 infantry stacks, 2 stacks of carriers etc.  Our group originally played this way but now we don’t as we don’t see anything in the rules about it.  Is this correct, no limits?  If so, out of curiousity, in what game did this stop as a rule?

If I recall correctly, the original NOVA game with paper map and cardboard pieces didn’t even allow you to use chips.  I remember playing Japan and having the maximum of 20 infantry, 15? tanks, a full airforce and saving enough money to completely replace the land and air forces after the big battle.  Maybe we were playing it wrong way back then but it certainly made the axis fight as they couldn’t build up for ever!

If by ‘real’ you mean actual wartime GDP ratios then I would have to disagree with the ratios.  If you mean IPC values from the map based on their war-time geography then yeah I guess, 'cept I don’t get China’s values.  For a bit of information on real wartime GDP of the powers I did a bit of research, ya might find it interesting.  What I found interesting as a Canuck ie 10% US GDP is that Canada produced more military trucks than the entire axis powers and the USSR combined.  I’m not impressed they have us down for zero bombers produced, mind you 430 Lancaster B Xs compared to over 97,000 by the Yanks……might as well be zero!

http://www.onwar.com/articles/0302.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II

Yup, that sounds pretty good.  It would be sweet if the input file was text, say comma delimited for all the units and properties.  A public template would be available, one could then modify it for house rules/new units etc.  or even modify it for foreign languages for unit names.

Objected-oriented design or not has nothing to do if the system is open or not, and I am not familiar with the term open-ended system other than when clients think the contract is open-ended and they can keep asking for free changes :-).  If an elephant is going to be a 2 hit unit, the ‘property’ of having 2 hit points must be coded.  Then facilities must be hard coded to allow units to have properties, how many properties?  If the cardinality is greater than 1 then datastructures must be created to implement this and some hardcode to access this date must be created.  If the hit point property were to be truly open, then you would have to hard code for N hit points and a field would have to be created and read by the program to determine if the unit has 1 or 5 or N hit points.  It’s actually probably the way to go for a complete rewrite.  You would have a static list of unit properties (again how could you write a program to deal with properties that are unknown at compile time) and a file that would describe a list of N units each of which has a set of properties ie, Name, Offense, Defense, Number of Hit points, Cost and then a pointer to a relator table to set up the Many to Many relationships between units and more unique properties such as first strike attack as in subs and partisans and first strike neutralization of subs and anti-partisans.  Special coding would have to be there to handle AA guns, they would be treated more like a regular unit with a property called AA which in this case means the unit cannot be a casualty in the battle and has a first strike ability of sorts.  This is all fairly doable, and from a clean sheet design would probably have been the way to go.  Depending on how the data was represented it still might not be too difficult to retrofit onto the existing program.

Programmers almost never have the luxury of seeing what the program should finallly be in the end when doing the initial design work.  Most often, we are given the task of creating a chevette, and over the years are instructed to constantly upgrade it towards being a corvette, had we been told to begin with we were going to build a corvette different design choices would have been initially used.

Now, how to handle dynamic rules or new properties……  That is the tricky part.  How would you handle dynamically say a unit that reflects 20% of the hits in a battle back to the attacker?  This property of damage reflection would never have been coded nor anticipated.  In theory its simple, just add 20% of the attackers hits to the defenders return hits, but how to make a program do that when it was never design to do something like that?

Veqryn, an open system whereby you can add new rules via an input file of some sort again good idea but would require a complete rewrite as all the rules are no-doubt in code rather than in data.  It’s realy far from trivial.  Just a guess but I bet AACalc has 100s of manhours in it, perhaps 1000s when dealing with constraints/workaround of legacy solutions/code.  I couldn’t even imagine how you would program a dynamic system whereby something like a partisan unit with first strike abilities and spies that would cancel it could be predicited and implemented.  A unit property called ‘First strike’ and ‘First strike negation’ would have to be programmed for beforehand, then a runtime file containing a set of records comprising the list of units and unit abilities/stats could be then used.  I just don’t see how runtime rules could easily be implemented.  This coming from a guy who writes genetic learning algorithms……

I think Dylan just forgot to prefix the entire plan with “As he says with tongue firmly planted in cheek……”.  I actually do have a 6 sided dice with 2 sets of 1, 2, 3, comes in handy at times…Just wish I had 10 of them… By the way, its easy to spot, its the only yellow die I have, sticks out real good like.

Veqryn you have some good ideas but there are some problems.  Not all 3’s or 1’s are the same when it comes to automated order of losses.  For a navy battle, you’d like to assign 2 hits to the 2 battleships right away to those 4s are different from the fighters 4 on defense.  When attacking peal harbour you might want the second hit on the third fighter rather than the sub as the extra fighter cannot stay, whereas the sub can.  (the first hit on the battleship).  The rules have to be hardcoded.  You could in theory create a generic engine that would accept a dynamic run-time file containing all the rules and values.  It would be completely open and would be awesome.  It would also add so much more complexity and be a complete rewrite.

Any system that can be written on paper can be coded into a program that is the easy part.  Exhaustively and thoroughly documenting every rule, scenario and exception and what course of action to take for each is actually the hard part.

Hey Funcioneta you’re right but…… I was refering to the old game where you did have technologies, and in that game a fully loaded carrier was 42 versus 45 for the bombers.

I believe habs4life9 is correct in that the defending sub would also be able to return fire even if the German sub scored a hit.  Paragraph 3 on page 17…“Once all attacking and defending submarines that conducted a surprise strike attack have fired, the casualties they have generated are removed from the game and this step is over.”  So there is always that 1/6 chance Germany loses its fodder on the first round due to the russian sub.  Why is it that it seems that russian sub always hits when I am Germany?  I scored a hit with my sub but his sub hit too, 1 hit with the bomber and fighter missed, battleship hit.  My bomber hits and his battleship hits again…figures.

I pretty much agree with Herr KaLeun.  I don’t miss the technologies much.  On the other hand it did force resolution to games.  I’ve had revised games go into extra innings where a slow advantage in attrition would require far too many turns to play out.  It often favoured the axis.  Say by turn 8-10, the Germans have a huge wall of infantry and are locked exchanging 1 territory.  The allies attacking seperately will really find it hard to push Germany back at this point but long term you eventually win.  While the Japanese are earning large but its pretty much a stalemate, africa is solidly in allied hands but the Japanese are always threatening.  The Germans could build nearly 2 bombers per turn, or a fighter and bomber per turn.  I prefer all bombers, greater range and threat projection, slightly better offense per IPC versus fighters, disadvantage few units per IPC versus a fighter.

Initially, the shear number of transports makes an attack too expensive, however, eventually, the allies have to start matching by adding carriers and fighters.  A fully loaded carrier cost 42 IPC total defense of 11, 3 units versus 3 bombers, cost 45 IPC, total offense 12 a slight advantage to Germany.  Basically, the allies have to spend an equal amount on defense as Germany does on offense, however bombers are much more versitile.  Then at some point Germany just goes all out on Tech.  You will get about 1 tech per turn.

They key to German success and indeed any success is economics.  Africa is key to German economic success and the Mediterranean fleet is key to that end, Germany knows it or should, and the allies do as well.  The allies should go all out to destroy the German fleet, the Germans to protect it long enough to allow forces to flow to africa and require a huge investment by the allies to push the German fleet away to allow landings in Africa.

My philosophy calls for economic success in africa, delay allied invasion of Norway, create asymmetrical economic threats, ie, make the bastards pay more to counter your threat than your threat cost.

The typical Russian move:

Build mostly infantry and a bit of artillery

Russia goes large into West Russian, takes out Ukraine to destory the fighter and goes into a defensive position in the east, sub in with the brit BB.

German builds, now it gets interesting.  Britain should be building bombers and subs to chase the German fleets, moving british air units to the Caucus territory quickly, the time to build german navy is now or never!

A carrier in the Mediterranean add a transport unless Russia really crushed in opening moves as you might be too thin.  The drawback in not building the transport on turn 1 is that the german surface fleet might want to stay in seazone 15 for turn 2-4 to lump forces in to an area where they can do combat and earn you territories quickly and take both sides of the canal.  You will need to combine the BB and Carrier right away.  Later you might sacrafice  1 of the transports to get units to the south of africa quickly or take Madagascar.  Sooner or later, the allies will probably force your navy to run into the red sea and your supply line to africa is lost.  By then the carrier has paid for itself several times in IPCs from africa and forced the allies to invest huge amounts of money in a navy that has no enemy to fight now.  The allies land huge in Africa and now their forces are abut 6 moves away from Russian and the navy useless.

Maybe also sub in the baltic,  make the Brit build destroyers, then make him trade a DD for a sub, your newly built sub plus air units will make short work of lone destoryers.  If the allies don’t chase the subs then they can be grouped with the Med navy to fend off allied landings requiring the allied navy to stay in seazone 12.  The drawback obviously is now Germany is short on land units and has a southern navy designed to moved 4 land units per turn into Africa.

Normally, as German I try to take out the British battleship, cruiser and destroyer, egypt and retake Ukraine (to destory the surviving russian tanks) leaving only the transport off Canada.  The naval battles seem a bit risky for Germany and expensive as you should count on losing about 2 planes using the typical all out against the brit navy tactic.  Egypt has gone wrong more often than it should which is fatal to Germany.

I have tried this exactly once, it worked and will do so tommorow night I believe!  Leave the Brit navy alone in seazone 1 and 2, Blasphemy I know!  Use the sub and 2 fighters against the cruiser.  BB against the DD, invading Egypt with 2 INF, 2 Tanks, bomber and fighter.  The two remaining fighers are used against russian forces.

You should end up with 2 tanks in egypt, the Brits should counter attack with forces from India sacraficing the transport and escaping the cruiser and carrier from the Japanese forces.  With wave 2 of the German forces the brits are a spent force in egypt, let the IPC harvest begin!

I had reinforced Norway with 2 INF and put 1 if not both other fighters in Norway as well.  I put the two german subs in sea zone 6 to attack anything that moved into sea zone 3.  However, just today I read in the AA42 FAQ and much to my horror, I read the Brits can build in sea zone 3?  That would allow the brits to invade norway and build a carrier in sea and 2 destroyers in sea zone 3 and have the US put fighters on it  Perhaps leaving Norway or even evacuating it would be the thing to do?

The next few turns would see the allies building enough navy to move into africa while defending against german subs, air and surface fleet.  The asymmetric costs and IPC differential I feel more than outweigh the initial cost of the fleet expansion and the lost opportunity of re-allocating resources elsewhere.  The German fleet once outnumbered moves into the Indian Ocean and provides cover against allied air for Japanese forays in the theatre and a threat to always move back into the mediterranean.

So, hairbrained or potentials here?

The weirdest game I had involved german bombers in Hawaii in conjunction with Japanese bombers strategically bombing the US.  Now, before I get accused of being a NOOB and buying battleships….a bit of context.  Our group having started playing the original paper map and cardboard piece original in the early 1980s tends to have games that follow typical lines.  Germany with massive amounts of infantry facing off against a multinational monstrosity on Karelia.  Germany is never quite strong enough to push the allies off of Karelia, nor can the independant allied armies do much to push Germany around.  The allies flow forces steady against the japs to clear them off russian territories using airpower and a few units.  The allies enjoy a slight economic advantage and with 3 players using co-ordinated airpower strategies, if one player clears the enemy but does not take the territory the next ally can.  IE, attack 3 defending infantry with only 2 attacking plus lots of air.  There is only a 1 in 27 chance the enemy gets 3 hits and takes an air unit.  If they get 2 hits then the next ally can take the territory usually.  Allies slowly win the war of attrition.

It is usually at this point I do what I normally hated doing, weapons development and the preparation for it.  By later round, when germany has over 100 infantry, you can afford a few rounds of funny play.  I started building bombers, the allies had to counter by building more navy to protect the supply lines and transports.  But carriers are not much use in land battles whereas bombers are and project threat across multiple targets.  I would wait until I had about 5-6 bombers then roll for weapons, the idea being heavy bombers of course.  it was at this point the US rolled a few dice and the lucky bastard got industrial tech.  HUGE with infantry push that he was using.  The only choice was strategic bombing, normally it has a payout of 17.5 IPC of damage per 15 IPC invested.  However, with infantry costing 2 IPC, the effictive damage of 17.5 meant the loss of nearly 9 infantry, normally a cost of 27 IPC.  I bombed the US to the point they could only afford a few infantry at best and held out long enough I got heavy bombers and bombed the allies into submission!

Hi people, this is my first post in many years since I was a member under the name BigBlocky I think it was.  It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is for non-programmers to determine programming complexity.  Hey Frood, what is the status of this thread and kudos for taking it as far as it has?  I’d love to pursue the source-code though I really don’t think I’m going to promise anything.  There shear number of rules/values from the various games becomes a combinatorical nightmare nevermind the OOL implementation.  Perhaps after enough time with the project rattling around in my head……who knows.  I’m a semi-retired software developer but it was mostly database programming, I would have several learning curves to bend.