Yeah I really like the idea of the whole med too, honestly. I noticed when trying to find a closer crop, that anytime I tried to zoom in further, it felt pretty claustrophobic and I wanted to scroll beyond the edge, like ‘wait - why stop here?’ Lol
I think I’m too used to seeing maps of the full Med to really get past that. Also it’d be a nice touch for new Roman empire ambitions, even if that ship had already sailed by the likely start date. This would be the board where Italy really makes sense as a player nation to me, like the reason to justify the existence of all those sculpts. Whereas in AA50 and Global, it’s more of a stretch to get them in the mix in a satisfying way. I think a somewhat larger board than the previous tactical games, so they could do the full stretch from Casablanca to Beirut would be pretty cool!
This one shows a fair bit of distortion. Europe was already warped/enlarged, so you can see Spain is a bit beefy from trying to make France/Normandy larger lol, which wouldn’t really be needed for a board with the Med focus. The other side of the Med is more compressed than it’d need to be here. But basically taking the rough G40 divisions for the TTs and SZs, and then subdividing some of those again, like 2, 3, maybe 4 times? Just to get a sufficient number of tiles and a dynamic playpattern going. Stretch-rotate or crop in tighter at the top, like right at Marseille/Milan/Istria, with an transalpine cut at the Po, but aiming to get the whole med in there somehow, with a lot more Sea Zones than shown below, clearly… hehe.
warp detail.png
Sneakily foreshadowing a Stalingrad follow up by showing a bit of the Balkans? The theme could still be Torch, but something with a theater wide view on the Med would offer a lot of options if it crept on the margins a bit.
I dig the anti tank and sp artillery idea too! I played a D10 game that had them in the roster and they were fun. This scenario would be a cool one to see a jeep, and an infantry gun, and self propelled artillery. Perhaps an Armor advance towards the end where some even more boss tank types first come online. An apt scenario to do a heavy armor unlock or something.
This one has a lot of promise! More than the reprints/re-issues, with the ‘North Africa’ game we’ll really get to see what Renegade’s bringing to the table. I’m excited to check it out!
Ps. Random aside, but there were something like what, 10 million horses deployed in WW2 just by Germany and the USSR alone? I don’t know that we ever get that in our WW2 set piece sweeps. Except for the opening of the film Fury I guess lol. Might be cool to see one for some kind of general/logistics type bonus sculpt, where we can imagine him headed up the mountains towing a big gun in the endgame hehe.
pps.
A&Aorg Europe 1940.jpeg
Basically just blowing out the regional theaters of the Europe 1940 board, and doing each with a bunch more TT/SZ tiles. Maybe you put them all together like Voltron for the ultimate A&AE advanced board.
If they did the stretch on Europe a little different so you could make one larger board from the smaller theater scale maps.
Here’s an example using Turner’s, but imagining the stretch/warp so that center dividing line is more like the Rome Berlin Axis, doing the squish and pull for a nice spread.
turner triptych.png
Also, I’m curious, if they’re targeting a 2024 release date, if they already have the game basically roughed out in concept form? Like if they’re already alpha testing and play balancing something? I wish they’d use tripleA for that, like at least for an informal in-house testing type thing for their design team peeps. It could be done with a fairly quick turn around I’d imagine. Digital playtesting is pretty fast. They could probably clock triple the number of test games during the same period, even if it was closed playtesting for just their employees or whatever. It’s a cool tool, and something the A&A community sorta organically willed into existence with just the heart and love of the game, but it hasn’t really been used before for a real alpha test of a new game I don’t think. Although that would be kinda rad. Like it’s basically the role the thing was designed to play, as a map/game creator’s resource to trial the rough drafts. They could use the map creator tools to create a quickie templet, then use that to iterate in alpha. They don’t need to publish it that way, but they could test it like that. Since they can alter board states via edit and save stuff out locally.
Have Beamdog do the polished version with the UI that peeps are used to from A&AO with all the branding for the competitive digital play, after the honeymoon launch/CON FtF period, but by holding a digital AP run before the physical product goes to the actual printers, they could see if there are any big issues and shore em up way early. Like long before it hits the presses, after which point revisions have to be issued via errata. Just do the FtF and digital testing concurrently in-house to catch the breakers and shore it up. They could do that basically soon as they got their map ideas and unit roster ideas dialed. Like just pick someone on the team and have em learn the quickie creator tools to do the xml stuff hehe. Wouldn’t look as pretty, but it would work for the alpha drafting at least, presumably with rules similar to what we’ve seen up to the G40 level. Probably a pipe dream, like normal trend seems to be the opposite direction, but still, maybe Renegade will go renegade, and actually lean into it for a change? That would be so cool! Worth mentioning at least 🙂
