Pacific Islands worth 3 icps

@SS:

So now you make these 6 islands Neutral but Pro either side. All you have to do is go and take it. Some islands will have some ground in them. So if Japan has Carolina island at start of game they do not get the money but they need to land a ground troop in it to activate and receive the ground troops and the 3 icps that will go towards there income. Same for US and rest of allies. If you want to activate an enemy island with ground troops you have to attack it and capture to receive the 3 icps. If you fail to capture island then other side gets the 3 icps added to there income.

Anyway post your thoughts to a certain point.

I don’t have any specific comments on the game-play effects that this proposal might have, but I’m wondering about the rationale for a couple of elements.

First, there’s the “Neutral but Pro either side” element.  As far as I know, there weren’t any islands in the Pacific which were “neutral”.  Most, if not all, of the islands in the Pacific were either full-blown possessions (colonial or otherwise) of one of the main powers, or were “mandate” territories, i.e. were administered by a particular power for the (supposed) good of its resident population (if any), under a mandate granted by the League of Nations in the aftermath of WWI.  A good example would be the Japanese mandate territories (“the Mandates” as they were sometimes called), which covered a vast area and which gave Japan a substantial head start in controlling the Pacific when WWII broke out.  (See my map analysis here for a breakdown of who contolled what at which date: http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=36590.0).

Second, there’s the “activation” element.  I’m unclear as to what this is meant to represent.  As I think I mentioned in the previous discussing thread to which your referred, many of the islands in the Pacific were extremely valuable as naval and air bases but had little value in the conventional economic sense.  Some were little more than uninhabited coral atolls, or uninhabited / barely inhabited islands, and maintaining military bases there required almost everything to be shipped in.  To put it another way, they were income-consuming rather than income-generating territories.

@SS:

The neutral suggestion means there pro allies or axis. With the value of 3 icps with the bases. In order to get more island hoping or warfare the territories need to be worth more money.
As far as activation didnt want to add money for controlled islands at start of game. Whole perpose is to get more island warfare.
Or then u split the islands.
Japan 3 3icp islands = 9 icps
US 2 3icp islands = 6 icps
FEC 1 3icp island = 3 icps
Each controls it at start of game. Income added to start of game.
But Id rather not do this. Maybe to strong for Japan.

I dont see anybody else suggestions that work.

You could go to NOs but make them only 3-4 island groups for a 5-8 icp bonus ea. Not 5-6 island groups.

Then with only use money pacific side gives u a extra piece buy. Im not gonna go after an a n base if its going to not work for me to far out of range.

One idea for getting pretty much the same thing for which you’re aiming, but without introducing the problematic neutral/pro concept, would be this approach (the first three elements of which are unchanged from the OOB rules):

• 0-IPC Pacific island territories start out under the control of certain specific powers (just as they do now) and with a value of 0 IPCs (just as they do now).

• 0-IPC Pacific island territories can be conquered by enemy powers in the normal way (just as they can now).

• A power which controls a 0-IPC Pacific island territory (either as the original owner, or through conquest) can build a naval base there, or can build an air base there, or can build both, (just as they do now, for the normal purchase price these bases cost).

• During the game round which included the construction of a naval base, or an air base, or both, on a 0-IPC Pacific island territory, this base construction has no IPC effect.  This reflects the fact that setting up a base in such a remote part of the world is initially a money-consuming action.  During every subsequent round, however, a power which controls such an island collects 3 bonus IPCs if he has a naval base there, or 3 bonus IPCs if he has an air base there, or 6 IPCs if he has both kinds of bases there.  This can be said to reflect the fact that, over time, the operational benefits of having such a base start to outweigh the initial set-up costs.

• A player who has one built just one type of base on an island during a particular round can build the other type in another round.  The +3 IPC bonus provided by the new base only becomes available in the round after its construction (as was the case when the first base was established).  In such a case, therefore, the player would, for one round, be collecting the +3 from his established base but would have to wait until the next round for the new base to bring his bonus up to a full +6.

@SS:

May work your suggestion but would need to crunch numbers to see if it benefits u in the long run. Just think that it may give out to much money early if u own them and already have bases. Nobody could do much without bases already there and u would spend to much money early on bases.
Would maybe have to see how many bases on mapand do the math.

These problems could perhaps be solved by one of these methods, of a combination of these methods.

• Players start out with no bases.  From that point on, there could be restrictions of some sort on when bases can be built, to prevent too much early building.  Players might only be allowed to build one base type on an island in one round, not both types at once.  There might also be threatre-wide restrictions, such as a player only being allowed to build a total of only 1 naval base and only 1 air base on 0-IPC Pacific islands in a given round.

• Rather than jumping straight from 0 (building round) to +3 (all subsequent rounds), each base could show a gradual increase in value over time (which would actually be more realistic): 0 IPC bonus on building round, +1 bonus on first round afterwards, +2 bonus on second round afterwards, and maximum +3 bonus on third round afterwards.

This is what I ended up with on the Global 40 map:

Gives all valueless Pacific Islands 1 PU when Japan is at war with any of the Western Allies. Must be at war to receive bonus.

Japans “Strategic_Defense_Perimeter” National Objective is replaced by “Strategic_Islands”. They now receive 3 PUs for control of “Midway, Wake Island and Guam” when at war with ANY of the Western Allies.  The USA also acquires the “Strategic_Islands” National Objective when at war with Japan.

On the Pacific Map, when at war with each other, Japan and the Western Allies will receive 2 PUs each time they Conquer a 2 PUs value Island or less (except the Philippines).

The Western Allies will receive 2 PUs each time they Conquer one of the following: Celebes, Sumatra, Borneo, Java or the Philippines from Japan.

The Japanese will receive 2 PUs every time they take control of Celebes, Sumatra, Borneo, Java or the Philippines after round 3.

US usually takes the Marshalls early. Japan Guam. Which they normally do anyway. Japan also will go after DNG, which is also normal. They’ll take Ceylon as well. The rest depends on what strategy one uses, but does seem to create a little more action and sometimes a lot.

Hi SS

Yea you get the 1 PU bonus every turn if you own it and are at war. So game start it doesn’t kick in unless Japan gets the ball rolling, which sometimes they do : ). The 2 bucks are every time you conquer it.

I found that an extra buck, others opinions as well, wasn’t enough incentive. 3 bucks every turn would be too much imo, so ended up with if you do battle and win, you get rewarded. So yea, 2 bucks for conquer and 1 for owner. Next turn you’d just get the 1 for owner if nothing changed.

You can spend the dough wherever you want, although US is probably only one that would spend it elsewhere in the global game. Maybe Japan.

I like your idea about the bases, but i also like having to build them. I play where bases only cost 12 bucks as opposed to 15 oob global ( not sure what yours are ) so they’re a little easier to build.

Yea I need to check your program out in detail some day. Just never seems to be enough time. : ) At any rate, just a couple ideas.

SS, it sounds like you have basically already decided to make your Pacific islands worth 3 IPCs each, and you’re just looking for minor advice about whether to move an island over by one sea zone or something like that. As always, if your rule is fun for your playgroup, then, great, have fun! You’re not hurting anyone. That said, I can’t really offer you advice about how to get the balance right on your 3-IPC islands, because I don’t like the overall concept. Your custom map is attractive and colorful and has some territories in just the right places, but I just can’t stomach the idea that the Solomon Islands are somehow worth more money than Colorado and Utah, or that the Caroline Islands are worth more money than Shanghai. I know it’s a game, but that breaks my suspension of disbelief. If the numbers are off by that much then I’d rather be playing Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or something that’s not even pretending to be historical.

The way I see it, the Central Pacific islands are a collection of tiny, barely inhabited rocks with no natural resources beyond a bit of fresh water, limestone, and coconut. In game terms, every central Pacific island put together (Iwo, Wake, Midway, Solomons, Carolines, Marshalls, etc.) is worth less than 1 IPC in terms of what can be generated or extracted from the islands themselves. So the question is, how can we make the islands relevant without blatantly ignoring the islands’ very low economic value?

I see basically three options:

• Naval Resupply Areas

• Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers

• Convoy Raiding Posts

Naval Resupply

Even if the islands didn’t have anything particularly useful on them, they were still a place where boats could dock, anchor, and make repairs or transfer cargo on a surface that wasn’t bobbing and sinking in the waves. 1940s naval technology made it difficult and risky to transfer fuel, personnel, spare parts, etc. on the high seas, so having control of some islands every few hundred miles where you could meet up with friendly ships and take care of logistics provided a real benefit to your overall naval war effort. In Global 1940-type maps, I think this is adequately represented by just putting naval bases on many of the islands. On smaller maps, you might choose to make the island chains worth 1 IPC each to abstractly represent this benefit. You could also have a national objective that provides, e.g., 3 IPCs if you have at least 2 island bases in the Pacific. It’s not clear that you really needed more than 2; having one staging ground to exchange parts and fuel and so on is a really big deal, but by the time you hit staging ground #5 in the same ocean, you start to see sharply diminishing returns.

Unsinkable Carriers

Another major use for the islands was as unsinkable aircraft carriers – numbers are tricky in Axis & Allies because we don’t know how many literal aircraft each “fighter plane” piece represents, but there was a big gap between the capacity of an “average” carrier and an “average” island air base. Truk hosted 300 Japanese aircraft, Rabaul hosted 117 Japanese aircraft, Henderson Field hosted 161 Allied aircraft, and Midway had 127 planes. By contrast, there were only 90 aircraft on the USS Enterprise, 78 aircraft on the USS Lexington, 72 aircraft on the fleet carrier Shokaku, and 30 aircraft on the light carrier Shoho. Officially, this gets picked up in the A&A rules by the fact that you can only put two “planes” on a carrier, but you can put as many “plane” miniatures as you like on an island. In practice, there is very little reason to ever put planes on an island in Axis & Allies because of the strange way that A&A counts aerial movement. Moving out of and then back onto an island counts as 2 movement points, and an airbase only boosts your movement by 1 movement point – so a tiny naval fighter plane sitting on a carrier somehow gets better range than a double-engine fighter plane sitting on a nice long flat runway next to a generous fuel depot, even when the carrier stays put and doesn’t sail toward battle to help pick up its expended fighters. In Global 1940, it’s sometimes helpful that an airbase lets you scramble 3 extra fighters to defend a sea zone, but the airbase is still of limited value, because that defense is static – the fighters landed on the island can’t easily be used to attack enemy targets in any other sea zone, especially if you’re short enough on carriers to want to bother with an airbase scramble. An airbase can help you cheaply maintain a naval stalemate, but it doesn’t give you much of a reason to want to own a chunk of the Pacific in the first place. I think if you wanted this to be the motive to take over Pacific islands, you’d need to fix the movement rules for islands. Maybe just make it so moving from an island to the sea zone that wholly encloses that island (or vice versa) is completely free.

Convoy Raiding Posts

This is really a special case of naval resupply, but part of the idea is that if you can base your subs and destroyers and so on closer to the merchant traffic that they’re preying on or protecting, then you can launch a lot more convoy raids or safely escort a lot more convoys. So, even if the islands themselves are economically worthless, the islands serve as a series of small, conveniently located naval bases that allow you to escort (or sink) ships carrying cargos that are worth a lot of money. The problem with this rationale is that 9 times out of 10, you’d be better off just using a convoy zone! If what you’re trying to represent is the idea that you’ve found a good place to raid merchant traffic, then put a merchant traffic icon on the map. Don’t put an island on the map. An island is not a fleet of merchant marine freighters.

@SS:

The basic idea was to get more action from islands and to see if there was anymore ideas out there.

I sympathize with SS when he wishes that the Central Pacific islands would see more action, which would indeed make the game more interesting if they did.  To draw a parallel, this is similar to the long-expressed wish by many players for the cruiser unit to get bought more often and see more action.  And in both cases, I think that the root cause of this under-use problem is the fact that the A&A games – even when it comes to a version as large and complex as Global 1940 – are (of necessity, since they’re board games rather than full-blown wargames) a highly simplified and abstracted representation of WWII.  As a result of the simplifications and abstractions they involve, certain map places (like the Central Pacific islands) and units (like the cruiser) end up looking rather pointless in the game, even though their importance was clear and substantial in the real Second World War.  To use those two cases as examples:

• The real-life importance of the Central Pacific islands in WWII had to do with the mechanics of how Japan and the US controlled (i.e., either fought to get control of, or fought to keep control of) the vast and mostly empty stretches of the Pacific Ocean – something which isn’t modeled into the A&A game, either in terms of how these operations actually worked or in terms of the completely unrealistic size of the Pacific Ocean on the map.  The gradual US advance westward across the Pacific from 1942 to 1945 illustrates that these operations hinged on island-based control of the airspace and of the waters of each successive region through which the US was advancing.  In short (and what I’ll describe here is a very simplified sketch), the script worked as follows.  By securing a new island territory – say, the Marshall Islands – the US gained both airbases and naval bases.  To conquer the next island territory down the line – say, the Carolines – the US would begin by using its Marshall Island airbases to start securing the airspace of the Carolines.  This initially would involve trying to demolish Japan’s Caroline Island air forces on the ground by long-range bomber attack.  As the airspace around the Carolines would become more secure, the US Navy would start venturing into the area to speed up the airspace-securing process (using medium-range carrier-based airstrikes against Japan’s planes and runways) and would also start securing the waters around the Carolines (in part to cut them off from resupply).  Once the Caroline’s airspace and waters were sufficiently secure, the US would send in an amphibious invasion force; this would operate in conjunction with continued US attacks from the air and from the sea (including naval bombardment and short-range carrier-based airstrikes).  Ground troops – Army and/or Marines – would ultimately be landed on the beaches and would fight their way inland until the island was secured.  Other islands in the island group would receive the same treatment.  And once the whole island group was secure, the US would repeat the whole process for the next island group down the line…say, the Marianas.  To put the whole thing in a nutshell: air forces would be used to secure the air, which in turn would allow naval forces to secure the water, which in turn would allow ground forces to conquer the land (specifically, island territory), and the newly-secured island territory would allow the process to be repeated in order to make the next jump westward.  A&A doesn’t work like that (at least not in that level of detail in its OOB form), so it’s not surprising that in A&A the Central Pacific islands don’t see much action.

• In real-life WWII, cruisers saw more action than battleships for a couple of reasons, both of them related to the cost differences between these two types of gun-armed surface-combat vessels (which were conceptually similar, though very different in terms of the scale of their features).  One reason was sheer weight of numbers: naval powers had far more cruisers than battleships in their fleets because cruisers (especially light cruisers) were cheaper and faster to build (just as destroyers were vastly cheaper and faster to build than cruisers; the US Navy ended up with hundreds of destroyers, if I’m not mistaken, though destroyers were conceptually quite different types of warships).  The other reason was that, because battleships were more expensive to operate (in terms of crew size and fuel consumption) and represented a more serious blow if they were lost in combat (because they represented such a huge investment), admirals tended to more cautious about sending battleships into combat that cruisers, whose combat loss was, frankly, more affordable.  For a classic example of this skittishness, look at the Japanese superbattleships Yamato and Musashi, which spent most of their careers at anchor in bases located far from the front lines.  The same thing happened in WWI with the battleships of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas fleet: they spent much of the war at anchor, in part because it was felt (though not necessarily said out loud) that it was more important for them to stay float than sink the enemy.  Again, A&A doesn’t model this very well in its OOB rules.  The battleship unit was the first A&A unit to be created, back in the original game, and then the destroyer was added in the original Europe and Pacific games; when the cruiser was introduced later (I can’t recall in which game), Larry may have had no choice but to try to jam it as best he could between the existing rule conception of the battleship and the existing rule conception of the destroyer, with (arguably) results that made the cruiser an unattractive purchase.

yea it seems to me that it’s generally easier to prevent a NO bonus than attain it. The big money islands for JPN being an exception, at least early. Still think it’s a good idea that could produce more action, depending on ones strategy.

Just have to try it out : )

Cool way you change up the  combat movement and non.

I seem late into this post but we have to sit down and figure out what the value of the territory is worth is based on. Most of us will automatically say it represents resources right? Well unfortunately, not every island is going to be worth anything if it is based on resources, take Iwo Jima as an example. The island is completely worthless but it became great worth based on its military value of having an airstrip long enough for bombers to takeoff and land.