Differnt starting dates for the global game

@Black_Elk:

Here’s a little something I do, that I’ve found really helps to shave a few minutes off every turn.
It might seem simple, but you’d be surprised how much time can be spent digging and returning pieces to their trays, if you don’t have a good system in place…

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35904.msg1411574#msg1411574

You can see an example image in there at the bottom using 1942.2 but I adopt the same system in G40. Once I started doing this, I never went back. Now I’m a big proponent of grouping by shape, and trusting in color differentiation for easy recognition, rather than the other way round. Hard habit to break, for the OCD sculpt collector, but it works. Even chainsmoking degenerates like me can make the extra effort to be better orgnaized haha.

Also, like others have mentioned before and elsewhere too, my group separates combat movement, and combat proper with the purchase phase. So the phases like this…
repair, combat movement, purchase, combat, non com, placement, collect.
If you want to pick up the pace it’s highly effective for focusing your players. It doesn’t change anything compared to the standard phase order of “purchase, combat movement, combat proper” other than the speed with which your players will make decisions.

interesting, i like the idea of sorting by unit type instead of faction, i may toy around with that in a smaller version to see how it feels before doing it with the G40 units (it’d be a huge pain to re-sort them again after, lol)

@Maddog77:

After looking at the game table (board) I can understand why this idea is intriguing. But after thinking a bit, Russia & GB can very easily keep any the black sea ship free with their air force. At least if I was Russia, I would sink anything built there. Also would love Germany to spend that kind of $$ ion an IC & navy instead of tanks, art & inf……still, it might be fun to give it a go sometime.

I once built an airbase in Romania in a Tech game where I had rockets and paratroopers. If you had that, I guess you could protect a TT with scrambled fighters and hit Caucusus from the Ukraine.

Hitler lost five weeks by having to bail Mussolini out in Greece. Otherwise the Germans would have been to Moscow before bad weather. But there is no guarantee that the Russians would have surrendered even if they lost Moscow. Plans were underway to move the capital further East.

How a cheaper Navy helps the allies is this. The US comes in after turn 4. With a cheaper navy, namely transports, Japan could be a real threat to Australia, forcing the US to pay attention to it, making it historically accurate.

The US paying some attention to Japan helps the Germans.

Lastly, IMHO, the game is close enough that these changes don’t ruin the game. But seeing your point, to go along with this, you would also have to fix the sub problem which is horrible. The advantage Germany had in the beginning of the war with their subs just doesn’t exist in the game. They need to make the subs more stealthy, like rolling the dice to locate them before attacking them, (destroyers would have a better chance than other units) and greatly expanding the areas they can convoy. Also giving the Germans a wolf pack advantage that the US copies and made use of much later in the war against the Japanese.

This whole incredible aspect of WW2 was somehow left out of the game.  A real shame. That would bring some balance.

@Make_It_Round:

I think it is possible, however tedious, to count the number of meaningful choices that players have in any given game, and to guess at one’s enjoyment threshold in terms of these.

It is utterly impossible to count the number of meaningful choices that players have in any given game because each “meaningful choice” is a product of the other “meaningful choices” that were made previously. Furthermore, each “meaningful choice” is then subject to all of the possible dice outcomes, and thus multiplied by all of those possibilities and then multiplied by all of the “meaningful choices” offered by the various non-combat possibilities as they are determined by the dice outcomes. As you can see we get into these massive factorial situations where we are multiplying massive exponentials by even more massive exponentials until what is essentially infinity.

To make a comparison: In chess there are only 20 possible moves to make on the first turn. (16 pawn moves and 4 knight moves) The opponent is faced with the same. So the possible combinations for the opening 2 moves (1 each) in chess is 400. None of which are absolutely stupid. there are 8,902 possible moves by 2 each and by move 7 there are almost eleven MILLION possible positions. That’s without dice, with only 2 players, with a much much much more limited scope for unit movement, no scope for adding units and far far fewer spaces.

Now you asked about the “meaningful choices”. Some work has been done in this regard in chess and it seems that in the average game of about 30 moves (moving a single piece at at time. There are over 4.5 MILLION games outcomes in smart competitive situations. Now, multiply that by the factor of dice, multiple movement of units, game spaces, purchases and the fact that most AA games will see over 100 times that 60 units move factor and you have an utterly infinite combination of outcomes.

Which is part of the reason it is so much more entertaining than chess.

…or maybe just because we get to play with little tanks and planes.

So what’s the…wait.

I gets it now: there are 36 techs on 6 charts. Roll 1 die for the chart and 1 for the tech.

If that’s what he means definitely no.

@ghr2:

I would soo want germany next time :)

Sure thing!

@questioneer:

These look really good, but they are taking forever to produce it seems.  I’m waiting for the whole set to be available…at this rate, they won’t be done til late 2012.  Sooo long… :-(

Yeah really… I am itching to paint my pieces but I don’t want to begin if there are cooler ones coming out. The production process is taking very long… Italy was in the works back in August if I am not mistaken and they are still not deliverable yet.