Patron 2010 - Silver

@fasthard
This is a beautifully designed table, and the wood-paneled room in which it’s located looks great too. And it’s a nice touch to have added those two monitors which, as far as I can tell, keep track of which territory is controlled by which power and the current status of the national objectives. Is that how those two charts get used during game play?

@midnight_reaper

And to follow up on Midnight Reaper’s question/comment about the flames: if they’re intended to represent smoke issuing from the chimney a functional undamaged facility or ship, an easy and inexpensive trick to achieve this effect is to use a bit of cotton wool (the stuff that’s sometimes found in unopened aspirin bottles), suitably fluffed up and stiffened with a bit of fine wire, or a section of pipe cleaner, or an unbent paperclip.

@andrewaagamer
And to expand on AndrewAAGamer’s answer, it sounds like a mangled account of the Remagen Bridge incident. Several of the details fit, but the part about the entire bridge going airborne then crashing back down on its supports is a wild exaggeration of what actually happened – and probably a sheer impossibility in terms of physics and engineering, given that the bridge in question was a massive structure over a thousand feet long. The Germans did make an attempt to blow up the bridge, but they bungled it; all they caused was minor damage. My guess is that a chain of explosions powerful enough to send the bridge sky-high would have sent it airborne in millions of pieces, not as an intact structure.

I’ve just renewed my Gold badge and PayPal worked fine for me.

You might want to try finding a second-hand copy of Donald Featherstone’s 1973 book Solo Wargaming. I read it ages ago, so I don’t recall much about it, but I remember that it mentions one particular wargamer who, as a multi-year project, solo-wargamed the entire Second World War – something that’s a little too ambitious for most people, but the chapter on that fellow (which includes his rules, if I remember correctly) could provide some useful ideas. The book might even be available online somewhere; there’s a link to it in the Wikipedia article on Featherstone, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Just a point of terminology, by the way, that I should have mentioned in my original answer: “miniatures” in the wargaming sense has two meanings. In the traditional sense, it refers to the scale models (soldiers and tanks and other land equipment, or ships for naval wargaming) which are used to fight “miniatures wargames”, which is also known as tabletop wargaming. They come in all sorts of sizes, and some of them are actually rather large; hobbyists often paint them in great detail, and sometimes build them from scratch. The A&A Miniatures line of products, which are pre-painted, are an example of these relatively large miniatures. The other meaning refers to the tiny plastic units used in A&A board games – sometimes called micro-miniatures, but more often called sculpts. To give you an idea of the scale, most A&A tank sculpts can fit on a dime (not counting the gun barrel). They’re essentially glorified gaming tokens. That’s not to take anything away from them: they’re great fun to use and collect (I own more of them than I can even estimate), and they add enormously to the WWII flavour of the game. But they’re closer to being game tokens that conventional “miniatures wargaming” units, which I think of as being conceptually closer to being model railroad trains or standalone plastic model kits.

In my opinion, the most basic difference between miniatures wargames (like Axis & Allies Miniatures, which has a whole section of its own in this forum) and board wargames (specifically the various Axis & Allies board games) is this. Miniatures wargames tend to be tactical in nature: they emphasize battles – specific engagements at a single place at a single time – and they can let you get into a very fine level of combat detail (such as which individual unit is shooting at which other enemy unit). They tend to be self-contained, meaning that they don’t lead from (or lead to) anything other than the battle itself. Board wargames tend to take the opposite approach. Their focus tends to be on either an entire war, or on a specific campaign within a war, so they’re strategic or operational in nature. The forces which fight each other are large (divisions and fleets, not individual tanks and ships) and the combat mechanics are fairly abstracted. In the A&A global-level games, economic management is an important factor, since units are purchased; miniatures games, by contrast, tend to be come-as-you-are games in which the units you have at the start of the battle are the only ones you’ll ever get to use.

@taamvan said in On this day during W.W. 2:

While it wasn’t the main factor early on in the war, the US had broken the Japanese codes and had functional radar, very long range planes and incredibly detailed information and plans (yamamoto ambush) and other unknown technologies–I personally think that this led the Japanese to paranoia as US ships and planes kept showing up at the most inopportune times.

And interestingly, the Japanese also suffered on at least one occasion – at Midway – of what could be called anti-paranoia, which was to assume that the Americans would obligingly follow the timeline which Japan had scripted for them. Their Midway operation did not include any contingency plans to deal with the possibility that one or more American carriers might inconveniently show up ahead of schedule…so when that actually happened, Nagumo had to improvise on the spot (and do so in the absence of adequate information, a problem that haunts every military commander) and the operation started falling apart. It didn’t help that the Japanese were trying to accomplish two contradictory things at once: conducting an amphibious landing, an operation which needs to be carefully coordinated and which needs to take into account such immutable factors as the tides, and destroying a mobile enemy carrier force, an operation which involves many unknowns and which requires a high degree of flexibility. Their concept was built around a “First A, then B” scenario, but they ended up facing an A+B scenario.

I’ve sometimes wondered how Midway would have turned out if Yamamoto had dispensed with the diversionary Aleutian operation and instead had assigned the light carriers Junyo and Ryujo to augment Nagumo’s main carrier group. This would have given him added reconnaissance capabilities, a reserve attack force, and a bigger combat air patrol to protect his fleet from enemy fighters.

I was admittedly oversimplifying things when I described Nagumo’s decision as timidity. The situation was more complicated than that. Nagumo went into the Pearl Harbor attack fully anticipating (and, to his credit, being mentally prepared for) the possibility that his task force would suffer heavy losses. When the operation ended up going fantastically well – two successful aircraft waves inflicting heavy damage to the enemy with minimal losses of their own, and with no counterattack against his ships – he found himself in the position (as one author put it) of a man who was running at a door to bash it in with his shoulder and who ended up having the door unexpectedly opened for him at the last moment. He went from being prepared lose a couple of his carriers to wanting to preserve his task force from harm…and indeed, he got all his ships back to Japan without even a scratch in their paint. Unfortunately, it was the wrong call. Nagumo had been chosen for the job because he had seniority, not because he was an aggressive commander; he dutifully did what he’d been ordered to do, but he didn’t go further.

There’s a scene in the movie Tora Tora Tora where Nagumo argues to his air commanders (who were pleading for a third strike, this one targeting Pearl Harbor’s fuel depots and shipyards) that the war is going to be long and hard and that Japan must keep its precious carriers intact for that protracted struggle. I don’t know if the scene is historically factual or not. Nagumo does have a point when he says that in the film, but he’s also missing a counterpoint: even at the risk (which we now know would have been minimal, though he had no way of knowing it) of his task force being found and attacked the the Americans, a strike against the tank farms and dockyards would still have been worth it. The combat-focused Japanese military had a surprisingly poor understanding of the importance of logistics and infrastructure…something that you can get away with in a short local war, but not in a long one (especially against the most industrialized nation on earth) across vast oceanic distances.

Hmm. The flak bursts are fairly uniform in size and seem to occupy a single plane of the image, instead of being of multiple sizes and at multiple locations all over the harbor – which makes me wonder if this picture was doctored for propaganda purposes at the time of its original release, possibly to support the quote about “all the flak that’s up.” It might be a completely authentic picture, or it might have been retouched. The part of the quote which says “Apparently one of the reasons that there wasn’t a third wave was that American antiaircraft fire had greatly improved in effectiveness on the second wave, and that’s when most of the 29 Japanese aircraft were shot down” is something which could reasonably have been believed at the time, though we know in retrospect that Nagumo didn’t launch a third wave out of timidity, even though his officers urged him to do so. But at any rate it’s certainly a great panoramic view, and the colorization was nicely done.