Posts made by Narvik

@MeinHerr:

With  The Mahatma gambit, Japan usually has no choice but to declare on J2.

….and exactly where in the Europe map is Japan ?

…and what is wrong with the current OOB rule ?

I am not sure, but I guess that the Designer have calculated this swing in some way when he balanced the game, so this issue is taken care of as far as playability is concerned, I hope. But if you got problems when the Conquer get 3 IPC from a territory, what do you think about the 5 IPC NO bonus on top of that again ? I guess you don’t love it. Stalin, the original owner, could only receive 2 IPC from Leningrad, but Hitler is able to squize 7 IPC out of it every turn, and that is even after the territory was bombed, scorched, burned down and the population killed. So I figure the rules, and the NO rule in particular, are not up to exactly what happened in the real war. And if you ask me, I guess it was designed this way to make for a faster game. As simple as that.

But, since we are in the house rule forum, after all.

Russia could get a Scorched Earth national Advantage rule. Every time you capture a Russian territory, put a damage token over the IPC income number. This territory was scorched and nobody get income from it now. You need to pay 1 IPC to remove the damage token during the Repair phase in your next Turn. Now, the loot is at least delayed one turn. But it may effect the balance.

I don’t think this rule should go for France too. France did not blow up the Factories or burn down the corn fields when the Huns come. The GDP was halfed yes, Hitler got less than 50 % of the money France was making before the war, but in this A&A map that is taken care off. In this game France got a ridiculous low IPC value compared to the real France, so lets keep that as it is.

@KurtGodel7:

That confusion may have been one of the reasons the Germans were able to achieve a 10:1 exchange ratio during Operation Barbarossa.

By 1943, German soldiers were only 3 - 4 times as combat-effective as their Soviet counterparts. (There were also times–such as the Battle of Stalingrad–when the Soviets were able to come very close to achieving a 1:1 exchange ratio.) Given that the Germans were more combat-effective than the Soviets, it’s very possible the Finns were more combat-effective as well.

I think that is a very intriguing question. You do know the Dupuy Institute have made TDI reports about combat effectiveness in ground battles, and the big pictures looks like Germans at 100 %, then US is 20 % less effective, Poles and UK 30 % less effective, Russia 7:1 as you mentioned, Italians even poorer if possible. And all this is true. It is several reasons for this. Skilled leadership and morale, which effect your willingness to fight to the last stand, or surrender pretty fast. Weapons and training is important, a German infantry had more firepower than a Russian one. Terrain is important, as we have seen, mountains, swamps, forest and cold winter favor the defender. Surprise is a big deal, the shockwave of a Panzer Division, Battleships fleet from behind the horizon, or Bombers coming out of the sky. Then you have the supply line, 100 elite soldiers with no food is 100 dead elite soldiers. We could go on and on.

edit, oh and of course we have the combat fatigue. There seems to be a pattern here. An inexperienced Rookie has a low combat value. But after his baptism of fire he get battle hardened and gain experience. After two or three more battles he get brutalized and become an effective killer. But this won’t last, and it looks like after 400 hours of combat some kind of fatigue will make the soldier tired of fighting. The effect will be the same if the soldier are exposed to 400 hours of fighting in a short time span, or it is divided in several battles over many years. Currently I read about the US Civil War, and it have some cases that prove my point. The Vet companies that fight well during the first year, it looks like after 3 years of fighting, the steam go, and they start to preform poorly. Same with the UK Desert Rats of the 8 th Army that was fighting hard against Rommel in the desert, when they got ashore in Normandy they had a very low combat effectiveness.

When the Rulebook sucks, just fix it with houserules and be happy

Even the designer Larry Harris have made houserules to his own game since he was not satisfied with the Directors cut, he even named it LHTR but they are just house rules, no more official than the houserules you make, so go ahead and make your day man

To play until concession is exactly what they did in the real war, so yeah I would go for this

In two words….playability and stalling…

Now imagine US spend 400 IPC on battleships, carriers, destroyers, trannies with men and guns, etc etc and then sail this huge fleet to France in order to make an amphibious assault. Now Germany spend 6 IPC on a lone Sub with the ability to stall this huge invasion fleet, and there are no ways to deal with it. I guess you would have complained in this case too, asking why a lone Sub can stall this huge fleet, and if there were any cases in the real war to justify this. So, since the designer didn’t want this game to be too gamey and tricky, he made the rule Wittmann is talking about, a Sub or Tranny don’t make the seazone hostile. The Tranny is unarmed and the Sub is hiding under water, or submerged as the experts say. Now Germany need to spend 8 IPC on a Destroyer if they want to stall US, as if one single Destroyer could possible stall 200 Battleships in the real world, but as a Destroyer that can be easily removed by two UK planes before the US attack, and everybody is happy.

But do it make sense, is it rational ? You tell me. Look up the D\day landings and Battle of Normandy, and tell me how many ships were sunk by German subs during that campaign. I guess that will give you an answer.

As far as East Poland is concerned, it didn’t live any Poles there. After WWI Poland exploited that most countries of Europe were weakened and annihilated, so they stole a piece of Belorussia, a big slice of Ukraine, a part of Germany, Baltic and a bit of Czechoslovakia. Why should Stalin not accept the gift from Hitler, since this territory original had been Russian less than 20 years earlier ?

Thank you Wittman, and yes CWO, Finland is a country of obstacles, see the pic

@Quintus:

Would Spain have been open to taking him in in secret? Or would that be too close in Europe?

I don’t know what Francos opinion of Hitler was by the end of the war but it may have been worth a shot.

Since Franco did not want to join Hitler in 1940, when everybody believed that Germany would win the war, then why should Franco help Hitler in 1945 when Germany had lost the war ? It is rational to believe that the Allies would have put a lot of pressure on Franco to make him deliver Hitler to them. Spain was poor and depended on international trade. I don’t think Franco was eager to starve just to protect Hitler

The main reason is ….terrain…that favor the defenders.

Finland is all lakes, swamps and marshes in the summer, and arctic cold, snow and ice in the winter, and it is a challenge to make any kind of military offensive operations in this environment, and to establish a supply line is almost impossible. But to defend is very easy, since the aggressor is forced to attack through narrow bottlenecks, with the lakes as natural flank protection. All the campaigns from 1500 to today have been done in the winter, since the marshes are impassable during summer, and they say Finland would have won the war if it had last one more week, because the rain season would have saved them. I live in Norway, and it is the opposite here, during winter the mountains are impassable, so you have to attack us during summer. But you must attack through a narrow pass, that is heavily defended, so you need a million men, and we defend with 100 000 and still win.

In the poll you can choose between poor attackers or poor defenders. I say none of them were poor nor great. They were just regular soldiers. The Fins had two weeks of military training, the Russians a lot more. But the decisive difference was, that the Nordic people like Fins, Norwegians and Swedes are born with ski on our feet. We learn skiing before we learn walking, and we are used to cold and long winter, we love the snow and out door camping. Most of the Russian attackers come from big cities or Ukraine, they were not familiar with snow and skiing, so they had a biig disadvantage even before the battle started.

To prove that it is the terrain that favor the defenders, just look at the attacks that went the other way. Two weeks after Barbarossa had started, a big German army tried to attack Russia from the North. The two week initial delay happened because it was difficult for the Germans to track a supply line through the mountains of Norway and marshes of Finland. 70 years ago during WWII we were badlands and wilderness and did not got the roads and railways we have today, so the supply had to arrive the front on horse back. Now this supply issue should be a warning to the Germans, but they did not get the point so they attacked Russia anyway. The great Lappland Army would never reach Murmansk nor Leningrad, as it was stopped at the river Litza just a few miles in at the Russian territory. Like the million men strong Red ARmy with heavy tanks like the KV1 had been stopped by 200 000 Finnish soldiers with rifles in 1939, exactly the same happened to the million men strong and heavy armed crack German SS and mountain troops, as they too were stopped by two light Russian divisions. It turned out that Murmansk and Leningrad were surrounded by marshes too. And even if the elite SS and gebirgsjeger managed to struggle their way through the marshes, the supply didn’t follow, so the attack halted.

edit, oh and I forgot to tell about the ambush. Finland was forest too, and when the heavy Russian army with tanks and trucks come, they were pretty much stuck on the few narrow roads. So they got ambushed by Fins on ski. The long Russian columns got stopped in front by dug in Fins at bottlenecks, and then other Fins ambushed the rear, and cut the columns into a lot of small pockets, cut off from supply, starving, freezing and after days or weeks, attacked by Finnish snipers.

You playtest on the kitchen, when you eat ? I guess you spill more than coke on that map

Still way off topic

Now that depends, are you looking anything like your picture ?

If you play UK IMHO you should never scramble your fighters in UK anyway, but not because of the rules, but because its not a very clever move. This is only a good move when you want to lose your planes fast. IMHO

@ItIsILeClerc:

. Like getting 6 hits from 3 FTR attacking your 3 fully loaded CV (happend to me once), which is ofc rather silly to do in the first place…

I think that is what actually happened at Midway in the real war, and that is the beauty of using dice. Now if your friends got upset because of that, offer them hot beverage, that helps, it do for Sheldon anyway.

OK, being slightly borderline off topic, but IMHO what causes this issue is that France is way to overpowered. France was not that strong in the real world. It should be possible to play several turns with France alive, but in that case France and UK combined should not receive more IPC than Germany, and at least not poor Russia. When this 3 Allies out produce Germany 2 to 1, then the game is obviously scripted in the way that Germany need to capture France in T 1.

BTW, here are a pic from a game where France surrendered in Turn 1

@theROCmonster:

This is one reason why I have always favored doing LL for the first turn, and then dice after that. This makes it a much more level playing field.

LowLuck is ….maybe…good for Tournaments, but then why not play Chess, now that’s a fairly balanced game. When you gather 4 or 5 real men in your basement, some of them vets, then you don’t start the game with cheating and candy. You use the dice, man. If you cant handle bad dice, then play it safe, always attack 4 to 1, and if that miss too, whine until you get a reroll.

Now the real battle of France was not fairly balanced in the real world, it heavily favored the Allies. The Huns had to use everything they got, and they barely won, by luck. So why should the A&A battle of France be a sure thing ? It can be a sure thing if you throw in your planes too, but then the UK fleet survive. And you don’t want that, neither. So we got a dilemma, play it safe or gamble. I guess that’s A&A in a nutshell

@Black_Elk:

I honestly judge a player more based on how they handle a bad roll, than whether their strategies under optimal conditions are awesome. I think half the game is managing to keep it together when you’re down. Playing through a rut, and just grinding things out, trying to recover from a poor start. Most people would probably just quit if they got backed out of France, but I’d have total respect for person who played on hehe

The dice is what makes A&A games great. I believe there is some God of War out there rolling dice for real battles too. Just look at the attack on Singapore, Percival could not handle poor dice so he surrendered, same with Freyberg on Malta. Look at the Winter war in Finland, or the attack on Norway. Or what about the German attack on France 1940 ? The Germans were outnumbered in men, tanks, artillery, planes, everything, but anyway they won in 6 weeks, cant copy that in a game of A&A. They say the real world is more crazy than fantasy. And it all boil down to, as Black Elk says, who can handle the bad roll.

Finalized or not, I buy them anyway  :-D

@ChocolatePancake:

Also, don’t forget that the USA had the nuclear option.
If the war in Europe kept on grinding, then I bet the allies would have eventually nuked Germany out of existence.
With the overwhelming air and naval advantage the allies had, Germany would have had no chance.

I don’t think so. They only made two bombs, and had stuff for one more. You could hardly bomb any nation out of existence with that. Strategic bombing is also severely overrated, it cost more to build bombs than the value of the cornfields that most of them land in. The Allied bombing killed more French cows than Germans, and that’s a fact. I figure the Allies would have won anyway, but because of Patton and not the Bomb.