A thought regarding initial set-up

My friends and I have only played a few games of A&A…and already we are hooked.

I am, however, getting a little bored with one thing.

I don’t like that the game starts out the exact same way every time. Sure, theres some historical accuracy involved, but it makes for a degree of predictability that I don’t much like in strategy games.

So I thought of something.

I added up IPC value of all the units that start on the board, minus one infantry in each territory that has at least one infantry.

I forget the exact numbers, but Russia had about 110 IPCs worth, US just under 200, and UK, Germany and Japan all had somewhere around 220-230 IPCs worth (UK was actually highest, with 4 or 5 dollars more than Germany).

I figure that people should be able to choose what they want to place, aside from the minimum requirement of one infantry where the game dictates.

You should only be able to place in sea-zones that units normally start in, but would have flexibility in exactly what naval elements are located in those sea-zones.

You also should place your units in reverse turn order. US first, then Japan etc. This is mainly so that Germany has to react to US/UK, rather than just put his whole economy on the Russian border in the hopes of a swift victory. It also allows Russia, with a much smaller starting position, to react to Germany’s placement, rather than the other way around.

I think this could make for some extremely interesting games, not to mention the multitude of new options that might be available in terms of tactics. Ususally, games follow the same basic structure. Germany and Japan double team Russia, Japan goes after India, Germany after Africa, and the US tries to be everywhere at once.

This startup could completely change that pattern.

Thoughts?

@xenon:

Do you accidently have the exact figures somewhere? I´m too lazy to count :lol:

To further balance this, I thought about placing 2/3 it in a first set up turn and the rest in a second one.

I would normally like the idea of a 2/3-1/3 set up, but with Russia so much weaker economically than the rest, I don’t think it would work too well.

I don’t have the exact figures, but I’ll post them sometime this weekend. I know Russia was 108, and I believe US was 198, but I forget the rest.