Axis & Allies Guadalcanal

The release date is 30 days away. I suspect Avalon Hill will begin with some articles for hopefully not more than a few years after its been released. I have not heard anything from funagames.com since they last published some photos for this.

How may cruisers does the game have each for Japan and USA? And secondly, were you shorted any pieces?  I have a standing prediction of a 2 piece shortage of something….( 3 times the charm)

_If you look at the preview pictures on the game site, you will note that they have the cruisers mixed up.  The Japanese cruiser is really the Portland class USA cruiser.  And the American cruiser is the Japanese cruiser.  Did anyone notice this?  I sure hate to see them send the game to market with this mistake.  Typically the A&A games go through great lengths to preserve accuracy.

Commander Hara._

So what ?

generally Eagle, that is called an inconsistency…

GG

First let me say that I’m not too worried about AA ratings of ships, or if BB can sink subs etc, I just know these are fleets and the BB maybe one or more BB with 1 or probably many more DD etc.  What I do have a problem with is:

1. As far as I know, no costal guns of any sort (real costal guns or plain artillery) ever hit a ship during this champagne.  The would IMO only work if there was a direct landing against a beach something that neither side would do at this point of the war.  Yes yes Wake was a different story because there were no beaches that were NOT covered by Costal Defense (CD).
2. AA is way way way too affective, once again as far as I know, few, very few planes were shot down by AA.  AA made planes fly higher and thus reduced bombing accuracy and reduced strafing.  So in game terms the presence of AA should only reduce the hits that planes get on defending ground targets.  One defending AA would reduce one hit from the attacker.   I think I would limit the AA to one per target type, so one for each airbase, and one for all ground units.
3. Tanks were used by both sides, and as the USofA got use to tanks in the jungle, they became very effective and by mid 43 no offensive was ever considered without getting as much armor ashore ASAP.  I will include the half-track with French 75 mm as “tanks” at this stage of the war.  The IJA type 1 Chi_Ha tank with a short 57mm was actually a reasonable jungle tank.  There one employment was badly mistimed being mustered during a heavy barraged and then led across a sandpit into American 37 mm and half-track 75mm guns.  I have some ideas how to get a few units on both sides to reflect their capabilities as well as their huge drain on supply and maintenance.
4. Simplistic game and too bad it can’t or does not reflect some national aspects such as much better American AA, especially say game turn 4 when proximity fuses would come into play.  Or that only the IJN fighters can fly about the same distance as the Betty Bombers, the USArmyAir need to wait until turn 5 when the USArmyAir would get at least one P-38  P-47 a turn.

I agree with some of the things you are saying. In the thread “Attacking power of Units” I started a while back I talk about this. I too believe that Anti-Air is too powerful. I don’t think that it should be as useless you want it to be. There would be no point of buying it if can’t shoot down planes. Maybe 2 or 1 power instead of 3? Also I found it strange the use of Artillery to fire on ships. Still a wonderful game though and those couple things can always be changed with house rules.

I know this is a game but AA shot down very little.  It reduced damage to the fields, I think a one hit reduction is far more important then you think adn reflects what the AA was used for: keep the bad guys air away from you dudes on the ground, bombers had to fly much higher and straffing by fighters was much more limited.  Maybe allow an AA one to sit on the field and one to sit on the dudes?  This is for US AA AFAIK, IJA AA was far worst, I don’t know if the USArmyAir lost any plains to ground base AA, and clearly not the 50 or so planes that each counter represents.

I think AA could be corrected by making it a two die effect instead of three, if you think it needs correcting at all.  But the sub rules are much less realistic, I think.  However, if the sub rules were made realistic, you would see huge stacks of subs and destroyers.  There are just some sacrifices you have to expect to make a game balanced.

I agree and disagree, the idea is to cycle the units on the board.  If these factors were not added, than the board would be cluttered and players would have headaches keeping track of attrition, values, movement orders, etc.

Considering what happened in real life, the AA guns focused on bombers, artillery focused on landing craft, not the ship, since it’s like taking a baseball bat to a steer.  You’ll bruise it and really piss it off, but not completely kill it.  The ships on the other hand did take down a lot of aircraft since the AA guns there would focus fire their shots in the path of the planes.  This was quite effective according to my grandfather who helped load the guns on transport ships.  He did NOT stay below knowing that if the ship were to go down he would have a better chance of getting off the ship quickly.  Whether he would be shot… highly unlikely, since he was behind the gunner and getting ammo that was passed down through armored hallways.

His weapon of choice was the thompson and would carry alot of ammo since he would spray trees killing any snipers in them during patrols.  Other stuff would be fishing with hand grenades, since there were no fishing poles.  Too bad we can’t do that now-a-days.

Finally got my copy of the game.  I will probably do some playing once I finish my teaching stint teaching history using board games in a couple of weeks.  Do have a couple of initial comments.

1.  Cruisers mixed up.  Not impressed with that at all, and means another phone call to Wizards for correct parts.  I could us the green Takao-class ship to represent a Brooklyn-class light cruiser, need to think about that.  Not sure what to do with the pumpkin-colored Portland.  May need to toss it into my potential Italian unit pile.

2.  Choisel, Santa Isabel, and Malatia as air fields, NO.  I have flown over Choisel and Santa Isabel.  Nothing remotely close to a harbor, and NO flat land for an airfield.  Malatia never was occupied by either side as it was and is a malarial nightmare.  The Japanese did maintain a small seaplane base on Santa Isabel, but aside from night harassment, the planes did not do anything of significance.  I will allow Japanese units on Choisel and Santa Isabel, but anything on Malatia, from either side, is probably looking at a 50% chance of dying every turn.

3.  No sickness rule.  If you read any history of the Solomons campaign, you are going to hear a lot about sickness, mainly but not limited to malaria.  The Allies were a bit better off with respect to that than the Japanese, but units were still severely reduced in effectiveness because of disease.

4.  Need to play with the combat system a bit, but allowing destroyers to survive on a 2, along with cruisers, battleships, and carriers is a bit much.  The ship quality is also lower than on the other games that I have.  Does not impress me that much at all.  One of the US carriers has a deep trench in its flight deck from poor cooling and quality control.

You can contact Avalon Hill, timerover, and they will send you corrected Cruisers.

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=10827.0

All of my pieces are the usual quality miniatures you get in an A&A game no problems (except the cruiser switch which they corrected) with furrows or anything like that.

As to rule questions and historical accuracy I’m sure you’re right. I’ve found the game fun as is though.

AH customer service is very quick also.

Hay, has anyone thought to make cards for Guadalcanal like they have for almost every other A&A variant on this site? 
I’m just saying, it’d be nice to have a reference for things like what “Superior Fighters” and “Ranged Fire” do.

If I have to make them I will, but they won’t be very good quality probably.  More to come I guess.

This is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m trying to find a way to print them on a 3"x5" card so I can tape them to the reference sheets.

UScard.pdf
Japan Card.pdf