India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?


  • @domanmacgee Fair enough. My own taste lies somewhere in between those extremes, at 8 to 10 turns: long enough to actually build up for and plan an attack that has multiple moving parts, but not so long that you win based on squeezing out 1 ipc per Battle of expected value over and over and over again.

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    @argothair I would typically agree with you about ideal game length, but as someone who’s gone to a decent number of IRL tournaments, you have to consider a few mitigating circumstances:

    A: Most tournaments (excluding stuff like the invitational tournaments @Young-Grasshopper and @siredblood have run out of their own homes) happen at large-scale conventions, so A&A only has a certain amount of allocated time to even hold its tournament.

    B: The sheer number of participants in the tournament demands that at least 3-4 rounds of preliminary games (if doing a swiss system) and/or another 2-3 rounds of playoff games need to be played over the course of the tournament. If you run a 8-9 round game in every round, you would need to have your tournament running for a fairly long amount of time, which leads me to my last point.

    C : Player fatigue. While stamina is a skill that should be factored in for Face-to-Face play, there has to be some level of realistic expectations of how much time players can allocate to the game during the tournament. People need to take time off of work/school to even attend a tournament in the first place, so realistically this only gives you 2-5 days to actually hold your tournament when you factor in travel time. A 5-6 turn game takes about 4-5 hours to play out (including the time it takes to set up the board/cleanup), and a 8-9 round game would probably take about 7 and a half hours or so unless the game is a one-sided curbstomp. Having matches go on for that long simply becomes unfeasible in a face-to-face environment (unless we one day have the honor of living in a world where A&A becomes as revered as something like Chess, of course, and corporations are willing to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at players to participate in large-scale tournaments).

    EDIT: Grammar.


  • @domanmacgee You raise an excellent point! I do think it’s important to keep tournament games playable in just a few hours each; otherwise you wind up with silliness where there are so few games that you can win every game you play in the tournament and still come in 3rd.

    That said, my preferred ways to shorten tournament games are:

    1. Clocks! Set a time limit on each team’s thinking time per turn or for the whole game or both, and penalize players who exceed those limits with escalating penalties. If you’re late the first time, maybe you lose 1 ipc per minute. If you’re late a second time, maybe your turn ends immediately without a chance to make further moves. Any pieces that you’ve bought and not yet placed are automatically placed in your capital. Many players seem to feel that using time controls for Axis & Allies is somehow ridiculous, but if you want to play a lot of games in a short amount of time, it’s profoundly unfair to let one or two players ruin that schedule for everyone else.

    2. Simplify! There are all kinds of little quality of life changes that can make the game inherently easier and faster to play. Get rid of cruisers and you cut out all the time players spend squinting at ship profiles trying to guess if a ship is a destroyer or a cruiser. Buy some of the young grasshopper dice, and you save the time sorting dice into piles based on which dice hit on 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, and so on. If you play with national objectives, use physical trackers so you know at all times which NOs you are entitled to collect and what territories you’d need to seize to add one. Either use an income tracker and make damn sure it stays accurate in real-time, or leave the tracker at home and count up your income fresh each turn…but don’t waste everyone’s time by stopping play to fiddle with a tracker and then second-guessing the tracker by doing a backup count before every other purchase.

    3. Etiquette. Get in the habit of counting up your income and make your purchase while the player before you is finishing their noncombat move – you can change your buy if you really need to, but most of the time it’ll be pretty similar. If you’re playing on a team, have your strategy discussions while the other team is thinking or moving, not while it’s your turn to move. If you break for lunch, have a scheduled break where both sides step away from the board; don’t pause play while the axis get lunch, only for the game to stop again 10 minutes later while the allies get lunch.

    4. Fast Forward. If you do all of the above and you still need to cut the total number of turns, at least start the game later on in history. A 1942 scenario that ends after 6 turns could at least plausibly have a real D-Day landing or a real return to the Philippines. A 1940 scenario that ends after 6 turns means that the US and USSR barely got to play.


  • They the key is having both sides of the map going at same time. This is no way any knock towards any guys games and such.
    I know some have time limits to play a country but if you have battle boards on each end of map plus cut back on strategy talking when both players are discussing 1 country which is fine to a certain point then say Germany plays while Japan plays and other side is defending same time.

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