Yup the territories are staying mostly intact except for the medals. I think what I’ll have to do is post 2 screen shots side by side, one being enlarged medals, and the second having just one medal at the current size but color coded. I originally planned on the color coding by ripping yellow, orange, and red off of the map to stay within he same color range but as you said makes it less interesting.
The purpose of the victory point system is three fold. My main goal or mission statement sort of speak is to get closer to games like World at War and Hearts of Iron in complexity while at the same time making the play time shorter and still fun. Sounds like competing goals but the VPs accomplish this by ending the old mechanic that once a side reaches an economic threshold they can usually compound statistically into a long drawn out win. I’m not saying that I’m a really good player but this is usually what happens when I play with friends that are equally matched in play styles. Similar to RTS games I think the fun factor drops off once you reach that economic threshold because now it’s just a game of steam roll your opponent. In terms of complexity now there’s various cost benefit choices to make such as do I tactically engage to destroy enemy forces, take a territory for its economic value, accomplish national objectives, or go for victory points? This supports more varied strategies while making useless territories important like Crete, Sicily, Vyborg, and others especially in the Pacific.
How it works is that as the game progresses the Axis have to be in control of less and less territories to win and if they lose too much the Allies win. This more closely reflects the end game stages of chess or checkers. Struggle for Europe and Pacific already had this system in place so it was pretty convenient to see how they distributed the points in this system which I’ve mostly converted over. One point of note though is that because they have a different movement mechanic feedback will probably be necessary to figure out what the right winning number conditions are. So far straight from the Struggle for Europe and Pacific global game the numbers will loosely be in these ranges:
Summer 1942 37(lose) -65(win), Winter 1942 37-64, Summer 1943 33-59, Winter 1943 28-52, Summer 1944 23-40, Winter 1944 17-27, Summer 1945 12-12.