Q&A with Axis & Allies Online Developers, Beamdog

[Cernel]

When you add in the possibility of the transport carrying an Anti Aircraft Artillery and attempting an amphibious assault and the other unit dying in the assault, the AAA cannot win the combat, creating a complex rules scenario. The joy of written rules and exceptions is they can be easily interpreted by people when playing the board game.

Is @Krieghund, or anyone else the like that knows the rules, not involved in this project?

[djensen]

@Cernel I’ll give you my impression of what is meant here.

First, a human easily read and interpret the rules usually correctly. I know there’s a lot of Q&A around certain rules but once you kinda get the gist, you can figure out how to handle all the corner cases relatively easily. This is a lot more difficult to put into software or a game.

Second, for the less experienced players of A&A, how to you create a user experience to “explain” and enforce these corner cases so that it is as or more simple than a face-to-face gamer opening the rule book?

After talking with Beamdog and Trent, they know the rules. But if they missed something and it’s not already on the to do list, that’s what Early Access is for. Also keep in mind that knowing all the rules and catching those corner cases in software are two different things; the rule book is good for people but a terrible great software specification :wink: .

[mvk20]

I was wondering if this developer was working on bringing the game to tablets, especially iOS. That would definitely give us something that TripleA does not.

[djensen]

@mvk20 According to all the information we have now, we don’t know, and they would probably answer something like, “not at this time.” All I do know is that they’re busy trying to get the Steam version out for Early Access.

However, if you think about the following, you can draw your own conclusions:

1. Beamdog is super excited about this game and in it for the long haul and
2. Look at what Beamdog has done and is doing with Baldur’s Gate and the other classic D&D video games. The D&D games are on Steam, iOS, Android, and now they’re working on console versions.

I think we’re all super excited so we’re extrapolating all the possibilities of what the future could hold and I think that’s great. However, software just can’t be built at the speed of thought. 😁 So it has to be one step at a time.

[Ichabod]

I don’t really like the screen shots from what I’ve seen of AAO. Triplea has board game pieces that better resemble live 3d game pieces (tanks, artillery, infantry, planes, ships…ect). The AAO pieces look chits (round colored circles?). Tripleas’ Global 1940 online board is very well created and the pieces look very similar to my table top. To me, the game has to be pleasing to the eye in order to stare at it for several hours.

[djensen]

@Ichabod Look again. There are two views: the zoomed out view and the zoomed in view.

The zoomed out view has the chits and the zoomed in view has the 3D pieces.