He’s referring to the rule that you don’t need to keep rolling dice until the attackers hit. I think you should just ignore his first paragraph.
Stupid A&A G40 Rules
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@WILD:
Not really a rule, more lack there of. I think the game needs some type of coastal def against an amphib. In most cases you leave the coastal territories empty, and stack the inner territory for a counter attack.
Well… I had hoped that included in AnA40 were Block Houses which are in the D-Day game. These plotted around vital coastal coastlines would be an extra pest when the enemy does a
Shore Bombardment/Amphibious Assault having to deal with them.Of course you can add them as a House Rule.
Stupid Rule I think is the Research & Development. You can buy as many you want, then roll, and if you miss keep all of your token till the next turn.
Also…If you do get a successful 6 you then roll onto the chosen chart of choice. The best part is that if that one you rolled you already have, no worries, just roll again till you get one! ThankyouverymuchBH
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I’ve always been in favor of a “maneuvers” roll for transports: each transport gets to roll for a 1. If they get it, they survive.
GH: agree that the victory conditions for the Allies make no sense. I remember a lost game for the Allies where Berlin and Rome had fallen, but on the next turn Japan won by having 6 VC’s (a series of DD blockers made it impossible for the Allies to get it back on their turn). Makes absolutely no sense. I’d like something like this: Allies win if they capture Berlin OR Tokyo OR Rome + they control Norway, Normandy and Germany does not control Leningrad, Stalingrad or Moscow.
As for a rule I don’t like, bombers can travel too far. So Japan takes the Philippines then plants a few bombers there. Those bombers can reach India, Sydney, any DEI other than Sumatra, anywhere in Mainland China, etc. Even reducing their movement by just 1 space would balance them out.
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Units destroyed by offshore bombardments being able to shoot back at your landing troops. STUPID! House ruled that crap away. Bombardments are instakills!! Always gets me on triple A.
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Units destroyed by offshore bombardments being able to shoot back at your landing troops. STUPID! House ruled that crap away. Bombardments are instakills!! Always gets me on triple A.
Just to piggy back on that… I think damaged battleships being allowed to bombard is stupid.
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Never thought of that. Stupid! New house rule!!
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So, just to be clear, we have one guy here asking for amphibious assaults to be nerfed, and then we have another guy asking for amphibious assualts (specifically bombardment) to be increased in power (by their casualties not shooting back). Alright.
The rule change from A&A '42 where only one boat per landing unit can bombard was necessary, and helps with coastal defense. I don’t think there’s any good way to “fix” coastal defenses without adding several new rules, and perhaps this was not done for simplicity’s sake. Furthermore, in this game, even in land battles, it is very often better to fall back and counterattack than it is to try to defend your ground. Why the same shouldn’t be true for coastal assaults isn’t clear to me.
The dogfighting I feel is 100% fine. As someone else said, the situation for bombing raids in the war wasn’t some kind of grand aerial battle most of the time. It was a chaotic stew of firing relatively blindly, with the offending side flying into ground-based AA fire after a period, and the defending side not not often following them there. Having your bomber wings and fighters all roll 1’s for one round seems like both a somewhat accurate representation of this, as well as a way to allow you additional, yet conditional, defense against being SBR’d.
Transports being able to drop off at only one territory makes sense to me. It’s a pretty large logistical undertaking to offload troops. Doing it twice in one turn, along with picking up twice in one turn, is a pretty extreme adjustment. It would also drastically alter gameplay. Being able to land two infantry, one each in two territories, is a pretty hugelargebig difference, and generally favors the Axis (hello northern africa, money islands, multiple australian territories to prep for a landing zone for JP planes on the next turn, one transport to snag ireland/scotland during sea lion to prevent US bombers from having a place to land, etc, etc…).
Transports having some kind of way to defend themselves also seems weird, and would be a massive change to the G40 experience. The point of transports, as the rules are written now, is to keep them shielded, always, or make the sacrifice. Transports were not fast nor were they maneuverable.
The following are not meant to discuss potential house rules, but are to just mention what some people have suggested and how the changes would, without any potential (rational and decent) argument available against the facts, affect the game.
If you placed a limit on how many transports could be killed by a single unit, okay, that kind of makes sense, but how often would that even come up? Four transports sitting there. A destroyer comes in, can only kill three. Alright, one is left alive. It still can’t pick up any units from that Sea Zone on its turn, for instance. Do you really need this edge case rule to keep your one transport alive? It sounds to me like this is only a problem for people who have had a stack of naked transports killed because they forgot to count how many spaces enemy planes and boats could move.
If transports had a small, random chance to survive, that would be annoying for both sides, and also lead into rules complications/additions about amphibious assaults or moving over submarines undefended. Just think about the G1 single sub hitting the Canadian Dest/TT. 1/6th chance that your 50/50 gamble just doesn’t work… super. And by “survive”, do they just sit in the sea zone? What about amphibious assaults where the offensive sea battle fails? Adding a rule like this would require more supporting rules, somewhat further violating what little bit of simplicity G40 is able to retain.
Implementing tranports defending on a 1 and being able to take hits as in A&A 42 would be an extreme change
There’s nothing you can do to “fix” the rule of defenseless transports without redesigning several parts of the game.
As far as France goes, it really did crumple up like a beer can on the forehead of a stupid frat guy shortly after Paris fell (or before, even). China and France were extremely different situations, and I don’t think the China rules “insult” France, especially since they are so specific. Yes, France still “had” its Colonial empire, but the organization just wasn’t there. Had Washington D.C. fallen, would some part of America had continued to fight? Yeah probably, from some other cultural/industrial/political/military center: Chicago/Sanfran/etc. If London fell, would Canada still operate? Yeah, sure, and the game even splits it up into UK Atl/Pac. But you can’t convince me that the French colonial empire would have the same solidarity and ability to mobilize, especially given some historical insight on how well their colonies did/did not actually like them, and the vichy also trying to claim rightful custodianship. The capital = everything rule for nations is there for simplicity, and to force you to want to defend it. Moreover, France, more than any other nation save Japan, actually did depend on its capital territory as much as the game seems to force you to.
One I do agree is weird, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call stupid, is the retreating rules as previously mentioned. I can understand having them from a game simplicity point of view, but using them to warp slow units around the map always feels lame, even when I’m the one doing it. The only consistent use of this I’ve seen, however, is G1 for the Yugo shenanigans.
The OOB victory conditions are a bit of a slog for the allies, and it is strange that Japan can win by taking Hawaii, of all places, and all of a sudden, even though Russia/UK Atlantic/America are all making ~double their original income and are now coming for Japan which is only making ~100. “Okay, the vast majority of the world’s industrial capacity is now concentrated on one goal: killing you.” “Too bad, I took these tiny islands just now.” “Oh ����, yeah you did, okay, we surrender.”
I think the rule is there just to make sure you feel like you must play both sides of the map. My group often houserules this to a global VC # requirement, for both sides, to alleviate it.
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And battleships cost twenty. Twenty dude. Not being able to bombard after taking a hit seems like a needless punishment. These units are supposed to be worth their cost. Being fully operational even after surviving combat is part of that. -
Retreat rule indeed does not make sense at all. Units should retreat to where they came from.
You could now illegaly move through the gibraltar channel with surface ships.
No, you can’t. Bringing subs into the battle through the strait doesn’t allow surface ships to retreat through it, it just keeps the subs from retreating through it until the surface ships are all sunk.
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I think the silliest rule is that you can land fighters and tactical bombers on a newly created aircraft carrier. Â I don’t really mind the effect of the rule or its “unrealism”, I don’t like it because its an express violation of the turn order. Â It doesn’t affect the rules like it used to (in the old game you could only defend sea zones with carriers and newly created planes, all the existing planes had to sit on London etc.)
noncom–planes must land
but
noncom–my planes will be in SZ 110, without a carrier.
noncom ends
place units
place the purchased carrier
my planes landthere are also some really chunky “timing” rules and screening rules (such as foiling amphibious shots or leaving the defender with more information than the attacker before he has to commit to an unretreatable attack), but they seem to enhance rather than detract from play because they force you to make choices and then not wiggle out of them (by fighting battles in a certain order etc.)
As usual, you guys seem to have come up with a huge variety of house rules to cover situations that either never come up, or fix problems that don’t exist. Â Â
My house rule? Â No house rules. Â Â
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@Young:
The stupidest A&A G40 rule…
“The Allies win by controlling Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo for a complete round of play, as long as they control an Allied capital (Washington, London, Paris, or Moscow) at the end of that round”
This rule says to me that the designers got lazy in coming up with something fair for both sides. In turn they unknowingly created a kobiashi maro gaming environment where as the Allies you could lose without question, but could never win without surrender. Some say that in war there is surrender, but one could also say that in boardgames there are reachable game objectives for all players.
I second the nomination for this monstrosity is the stupidest rule.
Honourable mention goes to SBR damage to air and naval bases being repaired before combat movement instead of before noncombat movement, as this rule ensure that SBR of bases is pointless about 99.9999% of the time.
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I second the nomination for this monstrosity is the stupidest rule.
Honourable mention goes to SBR damage to air and naval bases being repaired before combat movement instead of before noncombat movement, as this rule ensure that SBR of bases is pointless about 99.9999% of the time.
I don’t mean to keep playing contrarian here, but I am going to have to disagree once again. I wouldn’t even be comfortable granting you 50%, let alone 99.9999%. There are a myriad of times where hitting a facility messes up an opposed power’s scrambling or ability to be mobile. The entire game can come down to boats moving only 2 instead of 3, or planes only moving 4 instead of 5.
Her are some immediate examples I can think of without putting any more thought into than typing them:
Example #1: Italy bombs UK/US air base. Air base is now non-functional during Germany’s turn, protecting them from scrambles.
Example #2: Any Axis player bombing a UK air base or naval base renders it unusable on the US’s turn (In the common case of Gibraltar/SZ 91, This can save Rome, Norway, and Western Germany for an entire additional turn).
Example #3: German bomber hits US air base on some pacific island. Now ANZAC fighters can’t scramble. Japan’s odds might go from something like 25% to 80% for killing the Allied Pacific fleet.
Example #4: Any time a power loses its capital and has damaged facilities.And even if the power can repair its damaged facility on its turn, the fact that you’ve destroyed 1-4 IPCs of enemy income counts for something.
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I agree about the stupid victory conditions for the allies.
I always simply had it where the Allies win by controlling 3 originally Axis victory city territories at the end of Italy’s turn, thus you only needed one capital at minimum.
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@Ryuzaki_Lawliet:
I agree about the stupid victory conditions for the allies.
I always simply had it where the Allies win by controlling 3 originally Axis victory city territories at the end of Italy’s turn, thus you only needed one capital at minimum.
That seems like a pretty good alternative, better than the oob rule for sure.
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It seems that one of the simplest ways to achieve a more balanced game would be to reduce the SBR bonus to +1, or 0, at least against the industrial complexes.
This rule affects all the bombers in the game, but they are primarily used by the Axis, the SBR damage against Russia (then UK Pac, then UK London) is one of the most paralyzing aspects of the economic game. When you are dealing with a few raids or bombers, the AAA shootdown and fighter cover rules seem to provide a good balance between a harsh raid and the ability to choose to use your fighters as a deterrent.
A good game goal for SBRs would be;
- want to give the Sbomber the ability to smash all of the productive capability of a MajIC with a modest stack of bombers, (check, that’s well covered by the rules as is, but as long as bombers live, theyre are more and more of them and they become impossible to stop)
- luck should matter (it really doesn’t–getting 3-4 bombers is enough to lock out most of Russias production at any given time)
- there should be a viable defense against it (again, there really isn’t–fighters rolling a 2 like the tech advancement pretty much would shut off SBR completely, AAA don’t fire at bombers that overfly them–that would also make AA worth something again)
- it should require trade offs or hard choices (not really in G40 because the bombers fly so far and the other planes are the same price, the big bombers can fly wherever they want and then land in a convenient place and are as strong on naval/land offense as they are SBRs)
- the SBR should work for every team’s benefit (in this game, it totally doesn’t. you have to own Korea or Iwo to bomb Japan. Germany has so many complexes you cant shut them all down so its pointless to hit any of them. Same America).
- they should not be trumping (with dark skies and SBR they are quite trumping…either better or best but never a bad option)
I know this would be one of those hated house rules, I’m a dirty dirty hypocrite…
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@Young:
@Ryuzaki_Lawliet:
I agree about the stupid victory conditions for the allies.
I always simply had it where the Allies win by controlling 3 originally Axis victory city territories at the end of Italy’s turn, thus you only needed one capital at minimum.
That seems like a pretty good alternative, better than the oob rule for sure.
I just realised after all this time, that this rule doesn’t help much. Shanghai is not an originally Japanese victory city.
Alternate victory conditions:
Allies win the game by either:
Control Paris, London, Moscow, and 1 originally European Axis victory city territory (Europe Allied Victory)
or
Control Calcutta, Sydney, Manila, and Shanghai/Tokyo (Pacific Allied Victory)Have either of these completed, at the end of Italy’s turn, to win the game as the Allies.
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@Ryuzaki_Lawliet:
@Young:
@Ryuzaki_Lawliet:
I agree about the stupid victory conditions for the allies.
I always simply had it where the Allies win by controlling 3 originally Axis victory city territories at the end of Italy’s turn, thus you only needed one capital at minimum.
That seems like a pretty good alternative, better than the oob rule for sure.
I just realised after all this time, that this rule doesn’t help much. Shanghai is not an originally Japanese victory city.
Alternate victory conditions:
Allies win the game by either:
Control Paris, London, Moscow, and 1 originally European Axis victory city territory (Europe Allied Victory)
or
Control Calcutta, Sydney, Manila, and Shanghai/Tokyo (Pacific Allied Victory)Have either of these completed, at the end of Italy’s turn, to win the game as the Allies.
That seems reasonable, but you should probably keep the whole “hold for one complete round” so the US can’t just win the game after taking Shanghai even if it’s counterable.
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Having just learned that 2 AAA against 2 aircraft is only 2 shots makes no sense to me! It just feels wrong! It should be 4 shots. Surely?
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@Private:
Having just learned that 2 AAA against 2 aircraft is only 2 shots makes no sense to me! It just feels wrong! It should be 4 shots. Surely?
Nope, that would make AA guns go from “meh” to “holy shit wow”. They are only “meh”.
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“Meh” indeed tes. Why can’t both AAAs fire at each plane? Where is the sense in that?
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@Private:
“Meh” indeed tes. Why can’t both AAAs fire at each plane? Where is the sense in that?
I’m not sure I understand your argument, which seems to be saying that the number of shots that can be fired by weapons in a given amount of time depends on the number of targets rather than on the number of weapons being fired. Let’s say that we have two AAA guns and one target plane, and that each gun can fire one shot in one unit of time, which is fine. Now let’s say that we have the same two AAA guns, but that we now have two target planes. Why would the rate of fire of the weapons suddenly double from one shot per unit of time to two shots per unit of time? The amount of time hasn’t changed and the number of guns hasn’t changed – so why would the guns be pumping twice as many shells into the sky?
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Well that’s how it works now… any number of AA guns from one to infinity still works out to one shot per plane total.
My guess is that the theory is that since WW2 era AA was basically “spray and pray”, not precisely targeted like current AA, it didn’t pump out more shots, just the shots that it did pump out were likely to hit something in proportion to the number of targets available to hit.
It might be interesting to see what happened if each AA gun got to fire, people would definitely buy them whereas they don’t now. It would severely decrease the value of air in land battles, making it nearly worthless with enough stacked AA. You’d have to have AA guns at a cost of 15 or more to balance that out and remove a lot of the starting AA.
In the current setup with AA, a cost of 3 would be more appropriate and get them used/purchased more often. If we removed their ability to take a hit in combat a cost of 2 might even work. WW2 AA weren’t sophisticated or expensive weapons, they were basically medium caliber machine guns. They certainly didn’t cost almost as much as a tank or a sub!
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