1914 - Neutral Italy

@The-Captain

Thank you for the advice!

Maybe there should be an “Axis and Allies following the rules of war” game.

@Imperious:

he does not like that, he wants it the way it is currently. no jr. boards for house rules in every game section. its too much he says

Thanks for the answer.
My idea was more simply a single junior board here in House Rule section, and only for 1914.
(No need to multiply all others because they mostly shared the same basic mechanics. The actual melting pot can do the job if paired with google search tool bar.)

1914 fans should deserved a more focused board for them to keep up their enthusiasm and share their passion and new ideas for this game.

P.S. Sorry Corporal for this small derailed.

But how would you know how many IPC Ottomans would have if you didn’t do any study on the economic capabilities of the other nations relating to 31 IPC? How would you know how many infantry they would have in each area if you didn’t study where they even had armies in 1914?

You need to just draw a map with territory borders that allows good player options and is realistic. Don’t redo 1914, that’s garbage. This is redesign, not use what you got

This is not checkers my friend.

Here’s how I would do it:

Don’t think of the new power as just “Italy.” Instead, think of the new power as “all minor Axis powers.” The starting territories would be Italy, Southern Europe, Algeria, Libya, Rumania/Bulgaria, Finland, French Indo-China Thailand, and Argentina (!). You can actually leave the starting unit setup as is – that will give the new player 2 fighters, a battleship, and a transport to start with, while still leaving Germany and Japan with a bomber and five fighters each.

Open the Turkish Straits.

Put Italy first in the turn order, e.g., Italy - Russia - Germany - UK - Japan - USA. This is OK because Italy’s not really in position to mess up the Russian starting units too badly.

Leave Italy at 3 IPCs, and create a new 2 IPC territory out of neutral “Peru Argentina” that starts out empty, under Italian control, just as Brazil starts out empty and under American control. This will give Italy 14 IPCs at the start of the game – enough to buy a carrier, or a fighter, or a bomber, or a cruiser.

It’s OK that Italy has only three production slots, because Italy’s going to want to drop some expensive air/sea units. For example, if on turn one Italy builds 3 infantry and saves 5 IPCs, then on the next turn Italy might have as much as 22 IPCs to spend – which is really easy to do; you could buy a fighter and a bomber, or a transport, a destroyer, and a tank. Having only three production slots doesn’t really cripple the Italian player, and it wouldn’t be realistic anyway for Italy to crank out enormous armies of infantry; Italy’s population just wasn’t that large. If you really want to, you can probably build an Italian factory on turn 2 in Rumania.

1914 house ruling is doomed in this forum

Some ideas:

As I’ve suggested before, a fighter that scores a kill is promoted to an Ace (rolls @3).

Air combat lasts a maximum of 3 rounds, perhaps only 2. Aircraft had very limited fuel capacities.

If, at the end of this time, both sides have fighters remaining then no side gets air supremacy. All planes must land with their ground units, and cannot strafe.

Fighters can pull out of dogfights after any round of combat, attackers choosing first. Planes simply land with their own troops. They cannot fire in the ground combat, but can be taken as casualties.

Only rolls of 1 actually destroy an enemy aircraft. Rolls of 2 (or 3 from Aces) only “force down” the rival fighter, which must land as per pulling out of a fight.

If there is any dispute over which plane shot down an enemy fighter and gets the promotion, a “kill” takes precedence over a “down”. Otherwise, if the owning players cannot agree, then nobody gets the credit.

Multiple mixed fighters should roll individual dice in combat; its handy to have a few dice of different colours to facilitate this.

Back when all we had was Classic, I tried out a game where Germany and Russia were pals and they fought against USA, UK and Japan.  The Germany/Russia combo was pretty devastating.  They rather quickly over ran the rest of the Asian continent and most of Africa, although Russia had some problems with Japan because Japan kept using their transports to drop off troops all along the coast and Russia didn’t yet have enought to put garrisons in each coastal territory. 
As powerful as Germany got by taking most of the Middle-East and Africa, they had a hard time trying to get at England because the Brits kept buying aircraft and sinking all the German ships.  So while Germany had lots of troops and tanks, they couldn’t keep ships to take them to England.  Also, Germany had put so many men along the coasts that America had to build a really huge invasion fleet to get over there.  They also had to be careful about staging their ships because Germany had a lot of Luftwaffe too.
It took a while, but Germany and Russia eventually won.  Russia finally got some planes over to sink the Japanese ships and Germany eventually whittled down the RAF enough that they started to keep and build a decent navy.  They also used lots of subs for fodder (remember back then planes could hit subs anytime).  The big American invasion took too long building and ended up being used to liberate England instead of attacking somewhere in Europe.  Germany had enough guys and transports to re-take England and after a couple of large naval battles, managed to reach North America and had enough transports to keep shuttling men and tanks from Europe to England to Canada, with even a few Russian troops sent over by their puny navy to take defense hits by US counterattacks.  Eventually, they even overwhelmed Eastern US.  Japan couldn’t help because every time they put ships in the water, Russian planes would sink them.

@The:

In AAR you couldn’t attack neutrals

Yes, and there’s a good reason for that. There’s no simple way to do the neutral situation without it being abused, so the OOB version tends towards making attacking true neutrals a rare option