Best posts made by Argothair

6 tanks is a good R2/R3 buy if you think you can actually use those tanks to stop Germany from safely stacking Bryansk or Belarus or Eastern Ukraine or something like that. The most obvious reason why that might be true is if Germany attempted Sea Lion, but it could also happen if Germany got diced in Paris and lost most of their fast movers, or if Germany bought a ton of infantry and artillery on G1/G2, or if Germany bought a bunch of subs and bombers on G1/G2. Basically if you can slow Germany down by a full turn by preventing them from stacking the next territory in their lineup (or by taking that territory back from them after they’ve unsafely stacked there) then you gain almost a full additional turn of Russian income before the Russian capital and/or economy collapses, which more than pays for the inefficiency of tank purchases.

On the other hand, if you buy 6 tanks and don’t stop Germany from advancing on schedule, then, yeah, you’ve just blown money Russia can’t afford to lose, and Germany will get Moscow for cheap.

Buying 2 to 3 artillery and/or mech. infantry per turn as Russia is almost always a good idea, because it can force Germany to keep their forces together, or it can allow you to defensively stack, e.g., Leningrad for an extra turn and then safely retreat your mechanized forces (or send mechanized forces from Moscow to the rescue of a stack of infantry retreating to, e.g., Bryansk). You pull off one trick like that, and, again it pays for itself. You win a couple of battles against pairs of German units with 2 inf, 1 art, 1 ftr that you might have lost with 3 inf, 1 ftr, and, again, it pays for itself. Even if you don’t manage to pull that off, the difference between having 9 (or 27) Russian units and 10 (or 30) Russian units is not game-changing…we’re talking about a few percent on the Moscow battle or a few extra tanks for Germany after they conquer it; we’re not talking about throwing the game way.

It’s also just more fun to have something to do with the Russians other than turtle. If it’s not clearly worse to buy a few mechs and art, why not enjoy yourself?

Hello! I’m starting this thread to show off drafts of a new map for TripleA that I’m working on. I call it the “middleweight” map because it’s meant to have a medium size and complexity – somewhat larger than Revised, but somewhat smaller than World at War. I’ll be updating this top post as I progress through the design work. Some of my design goals for this map include:

(1) Break up the “capital areas” into multiple tiles, so that central Germany, continental USA, mainland Japan, etc. are not so easy to defend.
(2) Add a few buffer tiles that are meant to be traded back and forth in the opening so that players don’t lose their capitals or their entire economies on the first turn, e.g., Belgium and Argonne between France and Germany, or Vladivostok and Buryatia between Siberia and Manchuria.
(3) Place virtually all islands between sea zones instead of inside sea zones, so that controlling islands is a useful way to improve your mobility and logistics – you don’t have to waste an entire flying into and out of each sea zone, for example.
(4) Ensure that crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is difficult yet possible – players should have to put some thought and advance planning into how and where to cross, but the time lag should not be so extreme that you have to buy transports on turn 1 to have a chance of retaking a victory city on turn 5.
(5) Eliminate most of the ‘extra’ tiles in Siberia, China, Africa, etc. that are meant to take up space and slow down enemy invasions…enemy invasions should be slowed by defending troops in plausible chokepoints, not by sheer distance alone.
(6) Use clear visual signals to help call attention to the strategic features of the map, e.g., all Allies in light colors and all Axis in dark colors; all victory cities are in large circles that look visually distinct from other territories.
(7) Enhance replayability by offering many different economically valuable theaters to fight in; all territories are worth at least 1 IPC, and it should not be obvious which direction(s) each nation should be trying to expand.
(8) Reduce the importance of capital looting; you can still steal some cash when you sack a capital, but it shouldn’t totally shut down a players’ ability to manufacture new units.

The screenshots below are very early drafts; I haven’t assigned territory values or put down starting units yet, but hopefully it will give you an idea of where I’m headed. Feedback on game balance, strategy, software bugs (e.g. territories are missing a connection) and user experience is extremely welcome at all times. Feedback on graphic design and historical accuracy is welcome primarily if you are volunteering to do some of the work of improving those areas of the game, e.g., if you want to contribute some images or edit the .xml file to include proper country names, great, I will be happy to send you the files; if you just want to complain that I got your favorite territory’s name wrong, that’s not as useful.

I plan to make two different scenarios for this map, one for 1939 and one for 1942. If you want to make a different scenario, I will be happy to send you the source files! As always, thanks to all of my buddies here on the forum who have contributed ideas, images, and feedback over the years – I could not have started this project without you, and, frankly, if I didn’t have buddies like you to hang out with, then I wouldn’t even want to work on this type of map.

1939:

1942:

Against my better judgment, here are some thoughts on the “meta” or “structure” of an Allied playbook.

With respect to Germany and Japan, the Allies are like the black pieces in chess – they’re responding to Axis initiative, so a good Allied player needs a battle plan for each of the most popular German and Japanese openings.

With respect to Italy, the Allies are like the white pieces in chess – the Allies set the initiative, and Italy has to respond. Depending on what the Allies do, Italy could start the game with one transport or three transports, with a big force in East Africa or no units in East Africa with a big stack in Tobruk or no forces in Tobruk, with Vichy control guaranteed, or with Vichy nearly impossible and an Allied landing force in Greece. So a good Allied player doesn’t need different plans to use against Italy; they just need one good anti-Italian attack. (A master-class player will need different plans so they can perfectly adapt their play to the situation on the board and keep their opponent off-balance, but that’s beyond the scope of a “playbook.”)

As I see it, the most popular German openings are:

• Sea Lion (build transports and some surface ships, focus on taking London on G3),
• Barbarossa (build mechs and tanks, focus on taking Moscow G5 - G7 with enough tanks/planes left over to threaten Egypt),
• Dark Skies (build mechs and bombers, focus on holding all Allies at bay with bombers while Germany accumulates income advantages from Norway, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and maybe Egypt and/or Iraq).

The most popular Japanese openings, as far as I can tell, are:

• a J1 attack on the Philippines and Borneo with the idea of taking all of the money islands by J2-J3 and taking India J3-J6 or at least knocking the UK Pacific’s income down to near-zero very quickly
• a J1 attack on Pearl Harbor, with or without an invasion of Hawaii, with the idea of tying down US assets to help Germany win in Europe
• a conservative J2 or J3 attack that focuses on knocking out China early and making high-value trades to keep Japan’s options wide open so they can threaten Russia, India, or Australia later in the game
• a suicidal attack on Russia, often through China, with planes being sacrificed to airblitz open a path and/or strategically bomb Moscow to weaken Russia for a German win.

So a good Allied playbook needs ways to address all 7 of these Axis openings, as well as one good anti-Italian attack. Personally, I prefer scrambling no planes against the German naval attacks and then launching the Taranto raid every game, combined with moving the Pacific transport to Persia and the Mediterranean transport to either Southern France (if needed to prevent Vichy) or Greece (if Vichy will not be triggered). On turn 1, always, I like to buy a factory in Egypt and 2 inf, 1 ftr in London. I like to follow that up with a factory in Persia, build mostly land units until Italy is cleared out of Africa, Iraq, and/or Syria, and then build mostly subs to shut Italy down in Sea Zone 97. It’s not a foolproof plan and there are times when something else might be slightly better, but this plan will always work well enough, no matter what your Axis opponents are doing. The Allies have enough to think about in the opening without trying to memorize five different anti-Italian openings.

@trulpen I really like the way you are thinking about how to pose thorny dilemmas for your opponent, but I don’t think spending 15 IPCs to save a damaged Battleship is ever a cost-effective play against an opponent who can calmly respond to an unexpected opening.

The thing is, Germany barely has a use for a battleship. They’re not going to get into round after round of combat where they can keep repairing it and leveraging the efficiency of the free hit. They’re not going to be doing much shore bombardment. At least in the Baltic / North Sea region, they’re not brushing up against factory limits; you can drop 20 units a turn. As aequitas points out, in the long run Germany isn’t a naval power anyway; the US & UK will eventually win control of the Atlantic Ocean; it’s just a matter of time.

Would I spend 5 IPCs to save a German BB? Sure. It’s of some use; it’s a large piece. But 15 IPCs is almost the whole cost of the BB. The Axis need to expand explosively in the first few turns in order to compete; any investments you make need to pay a very high interest rate. The interest rate on rescuing your BB is low because you buy the AB turn 1, then turn 2 the BB goes back into the Baltic to lick its wounds, then on G3 you get to move the BB somewhere. Where, exactly? To hit Leningrad? I mean, OK, maybe – but that does what, exactly…reduces your chances of losing an 8 IPC destroyer? And has decent odds of bombarding one Soviet infantry? So ballpark you’re earning something like 4 IPC + 2 IPC = 6 IPC, two turns later, on your 15 IPC airbase investment.

Meanwhile, if you just leave the BB alone, and let it stay wounded in the British sea zone, it’s got a 2/3 chance of killing a British destroyer or fighter – there’s your 6 IPCs right there.

So, yes, you’re laying an interesting trap for your opponents by inviting them to hit a BB that’s defended by 3 fighters and either come in too weak or pass up on the chance to do Taranto and hit mostly air…but if they see the trap and ignore your BB and do Taranto anyway, then you’ve spent 15 IPC to save a piece that’s really only worth about 10 IPCs at most to the German side.

Third draft based on feedback from everyone and playtests with @axis_roll – thank you for commenting!

The conventional wisdom is that A&A 50th Anniversary Edition, 1941 Scenario requires a large bid for the Allies, so I thought I’d try my hand at creating an alternate set of national objectives that could balance the game not by giving the Allies a large up-front gift of units, but by giving the Allies a chance to develop a mighty economy that can turn the tides of war in the middle-game. The goal is to have some more adrenaline and some more asymmetry in the game play – the Axis will expand very rapidly in the first few turns, but they’ll need to shut down most of the Allied NOs as part of their initial expansion, or else they’re likely to get crushed around turn 7 or 8 by the Allied rebound. I’ve also slightly changed China’s starting setup (and some of the Chinese movement/income rules) to make China more relevant. Note that the Turkish Straits / Black Sea are considered open for both ships and planes for all players.

It’s not required, but I recommend adding the air interception rules from Global 1940’s Balanced Mod: fighters escort and intercept strategic bombing raids using one die per fighter that hits an enemy plane on a 2 or less, and strategic bombers roll one die per bomber that hits an enemy plane on a 1 or less if they are challenged by interceptors. Strategic bombers that make it through any interceptors and/or flak to roll damage should deal 1d6 + 1 points of damage to a factory, not 1d6: so if you roll a 3, you deal 4 points of damage to the factory. This makes bombing a little more attractive against unguarded factories, but much less attractive against a factory with a proper air force defending it.

You could also throw in Marines from Global 1940 Balanced Mod if you like; I don’t think it would make much difference either way to the game play.

Let me know what you think! All comments welcome.

GERMANY

• Scandinavian Iron – 5 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of: Norway, Finland, and NW Europe
• Eurasian Wheat – 5 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of: Karelia, Ukraine, Caucasus
• Archangel-Astrakhan Line – 5 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of: Archangel, Moscow, and Kazakh

RUSSIA

• Northern Lend-Lease – 3 IPCs after the start of turn 2 if Allies control Archangel with no Axis ships in SZ 3 or 4
• Southern Lend-Lease – 3 IPCs after the start of turn 2 if Allies control Persia & Caucasus w/ no Axis ships in SZ 34
• Eastern Lend-Lease – 3 IPCs after the start of turn 2 if Allies control SFE & Yakutsk w/ no Axis ships in SZ 63

JAPAN

• Chinese Coastline – 3 IPCs if Axis control Manchuria, Kiangsu, Fukien, Kwantung, and French Indochina
• Chinese Hegemony – 3 IPCs if Axis control literally all Chinese territories
• Bornese Oil – 3 IPCs if Axis control Borneo and no Allied warships anywhere in SZ 49, 50, 60, 61, or 62
• Javanese Rubber – 3 IPCs if Axis control East Indies and no Allied warships anywhere in SZ 38, 49, 50, 60, 61, or 62
• Central Pacific Islands – 3 IPCs if Axis control 4+ of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Midway, Wake, Carolines, Hawaii
• Co-Prosperity Sphere – 3 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of India, Australia, Hawaii, Yakut SSR

UK

• North Atlantic – 3 IPCs if Allies control E. Canada, Greenland, and Iceland with no Axis ships in SZs 1 through 9.
• Mediterranean Route – 3 IPCs if Allies control Gibraltar and Egypt with no Axis warships in SZ 13, 14, 15, or 16.
• Soft Underbelly – 3 IPCs if UK has at least one land unit in Italy and/or the Balkans.
• Indian Empire – 5 IPCs if Allies control India, Madagascar, and South Africa with no Axis ships in SZs 28 through 35.
• ANZAC – 5 IPCs if Allies control Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands.

ITALY

• Vichy Collaboration – 3 IPCs if Axis control France, Morocco, and Libya
• Mare Nostrum – 3 IPCs if there are no Allied ships in SZs 13, 14, 15, 16 and at least one Italian ship in SZ 13-16
• Abyssinian Adventure – 3 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of Sudan, Italian East Africa, Rhodesia
• Mideastern Oil – 5 IPCs if Axis control 2+ of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Persia, Caucasus

USA

• Arsenal of Democracy – 5 IPCs after the start of turn 3 if Allies control Western US, Central US, and Eastern US
• Manifest Destiny – 5 IPCs after the start of turn 3 if Allies control Mexico, Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska
• South Atlantic – 2 IPCs if Allies control West Indies and Brazil with no Axis warships in SZ 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, or 19
• Operation Torch – 3 IPCs if America has a land unit or flag in both Morocco and Libya
• Operation Overlord – 5 IPCs if USA has land units both NW Europe and France
• Central Pacific Islands – 3 IPCs if Allies control 4+ of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Midway, Wake, Carolines, Hawaii
• Alcor Aluminum – 2 IPCs if Allies control Australia, Solomon Islands, Hawaii, and Western US
• MacArthur was a Donkey – 5 IPCs if Allies control the Philippines
• West Pacific Airstrips – 5 IPCs if Allies control 3+ of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Formosa, Manchuria, Buryatia

CHINA

• Burma Road – +1 Chinese artillery for any Chinese-owned territory if Allies control India, Burma, and Yunnan
  ** Setup Change – Sikang starts the game with 1 infantry, 1 fighter. Yunnan starts with (only) 2 infantry.
  ** Movement Change – Chinese troops may move into Burma, French Indochina, and/or Kwangtung.
  ** Income Change – China receives all reinforcements based on the map after combat, just like other nations.

(Edited per axisroll’s comments about needing more relative weight in the Pacific)
(Thanks to Baron Munchhausen for suggesting addition of Greenland)
(Tweaked Russian and UK objectives to be somewhat harder based on playtests with Corpo24)
(Special thanks to axisroll for playtesting these with me for two full games!)

I would use these rules:

(1) if the defender sees a key battle coming and can predict that they’ll want an unusual order of loss, they can leave a note, send an e-mail, etc., informing the attacker of their preferred order of loss, and the attacker will then follow that order.

(2) if there is no note, the attacker will provisionally use a standard order of loss.

(3) after seeing the results of the battle, the defender can pay 2 IPCs to the bank per casualty that they want to switch. You didn’t want to lose your bomber after all? Fine, pay 2 IPCs, and you can have your bomber back in exchange for one of your infantry. This should be expensive enough to deter casual abuse but still cheap enough that if you would really be upset about the order of loss, you can fix it without too much drama. Don’t think it’s fair that you should have to pay to set up your order of loss exactly the way you want it? Well, then, you should have foreseen the battle and given orders in advance. Don’t feel like thinking that hard every turn? Well, then, you can always just cough up 2 IPCs. It’s a way of speeding up the game while making sure that nothing unacceptably bad will happen because of order of loss issues.

All right, sounds like an interesting learning game. Sometimes you do get diced in an early battle (or three of them) and then that reverberates across the game. Especially if Japan is not declaring war on the Anglo-Americans, then there’s not much wiggle room for the UK & Russia to defend Moscow; a few bad battles or a few bad choices and Moscow can fall really early, and that’s all normal. I would have discussed the overall strategic situation with the Russian player, and explained why it made sense for them to sit tight and wait for British aid to arrive from Persia/India, but it’s hard playing just one country all day, and sometimes you just want to make a frigging attack, you know? It can be a lot more fun making one big attack and losing badly because of it than literally sitting around all day biding time and then having your friends argue about whether the resulting position was slightly favoring the Axis or slightly favoring the Allies.

I almost think you have to discuss strategies like that ahead of time, and figure out what countries to give people based on what their playstyle is. Especially in a game of Global with multiple newbies – if you’ve got a reckless attacker, give 'em the Germans or the Japanese. If you’ve got a timid turtle, give 'em the Russians or give 'em UK Pac + Anzac + China. That’s hard to suss out; a lot of people aren’t self-aware about what their playstyle is and may not admit to being a turtle even if they know it, but I think as the host you at least have to try to have that conversation.

As far as strategy, I think the British destroyers have to be built in Canada (SZ 106) when the Germans are doing an aggressive forward deployment with carrier and airbases. Building in Wales (SZ 109) is just a gift; it lets the Germans sink 'em for cheap. I’d also be very careful about moving into the Southern France sea zone when the Luftwaffe is still intact, because the risk-reward ratio is all wrong. If your fleet holds, then you deny Italy its Mare Nostrum NO for 1 turn (5 IPCs), and you get some additional boats into the Battle of the Atlantic at the cost of giving Italy a credible threat against Eastern Med targets like Egypt, Jordan, Crete, and Syria. It’s not clear that those results are better than just doing Taranto and sinking 2 Italian transports, which likely denies them the New Roman Empire NO (5 IPCs) for the rest of the game, and that’s what you get when everything goes well – as you saw, if it goes poorly against either the Italians or the Germans on a follow-up G2 attack, then you lose both your Atlantic and your Med fleets and you have very, very little to show for it. But you knew that.

Anyway, if Germany is buying an airbase and a carrier on G1, that’s the entire G1 economy, so they have no destroyers on the board. That means one interesting British purchase is submarines for the Atlantic! Hit the carrier, hit the battleship, hit the convoy zones in Norway and Normandy…just generally make life uncomfortable for the Kriegsmarine, and if you bait Germany into buying a couple of destroyers on top of the airbase and carrier, then at that point Russia should be rich enough to hold its own. Alternatively, if Germany retreats into the Baltic, the subs are useful against Italy in the Med.

We could argue all week about what the exactly right balance is, but I imagine most of us agree in principle that you need to slightly adjust your British opening based off of the G1 attack and purchase. Like, if Germany buys 2 bombers and sinks both British home fleets and the Canadian transport without losing any planes, well, yeah, buy 8 or 9 inf for London and leave the Egypt factory for UK2; it can wait. Conversely, if Germany declares war on Russia G1 or loses half its air force, well, maybe you don’t even need the 2 inf, 1 ftr for London on UK1 and you can buy the Egypt factory plus a destroyer or whatever else you want for the Atlantic, instead. In the vast majority of games, though, you wind up with an average result that justifies an average buy to defend London: 3 inf if you’re feeling aggressive, or 2 inf, 1 ftr for a moderate position, or 6 inf if you’re feeling conservative.

I tried this in a face-to-face game against Karl7, who of course is very good with the German pieces, and wound up losing Moscow on G6 on a German attack that had 91% odds – but Germany lost about 80% of its stack taking Moscow, so it was likely that the Middle East would have held, and almost certain that Cairo would have held. We ultimately scooped at least as much because the Western Allies didn’t have a sufficient compensatory attack as because the German drive was unstoppable. Like, the Allies were able to barely take Rome on UK6 using a one-two punch, but trading both Moscow and Calcutta for Rome is not a good trade.

I think my main mistake was that on R2 I placed slow movers up front in Vyborg with fast movers behind the lines in Leningrad, with the idea of maximizing my threat to Finland. This might have worked fine if the Allies were swarming toward Norway, but the British Atlantic fleet was wiped out, there were German subs in the Atlantic, and the British and Americans were both focused on beating up Italy in the Mediterranean. Without Anglo-American pressure on Norway, the Russians can’t afford to invest too much against Finland. Karl7 was able to temporarily retreat all Finnish forces into Norway, and just come right back to Finland after Leningrad was dead zoned by the advancing Baltic States stack. I held Finland for one turn, and then I wound up with 10 slow movers stuck in Vyborg, unable to either kill the reinforced Finnish stack or safely stack up in Leningrad.

What I should have done was put the fast movers in Vyborg and the slow movers in Leningrad – that way I could have moved the entire stack to Archangel or Belarus to join up with the rest of my forces to form one mega-stack capable of temporarily holding out against the main German forces. Instead I was defeated in detail. All of my armies except the 10 inf/art in Vyborg and a blocking force of 4 inf + 1 AAA ultimately made it home to Moscow for the G6 battle, which is a somewhat impressive recovery rate (if I do say so myself) given that I was playing far enough forward that Germany wasn’t able to build any units in either Leningrad or Kiev until G6. Still, 15 armies is still too many to lose when you’re building mechs; the point of mechs is to get damn near everybody home.

I’ll try the strategy again with the proper configuration of fast and slow movers in another game and let you all know how it goes. Keep the faith! The Allies will find an answer to the German mech/tank rush.

Here’s an idea for lend-lease: add a new unit type called “Supply Crate.”

Crates cost 5 IPCs each, can be built at any factory, can be loaded onto and unloaded from any transport as if they were an infantry unit (so a transport could carry 2 crates, or a crate and a tank, or a crate and an infantry, or any similar combination), and do not participate in combat. They move 1 territory per turn, but only during the non-combat move.

At the start of your turn, if there is a supply crate in a territory with a factory that you control, then you may convert it into 5 IPCs for your treasury. Each factory can only convert 1 crate per turn per IPC value of the territory. For example, if the British build 4 Supply Crates in London on UK1 and ship them to Archangel on UK2 using 2 transports, then those Supply Crates could be unloaded in Archangel on UK2 and then, on UK3, walk to Leningrad. On R4, Russia would see that it had supply crates in one of its territories with a factory, and convert 2 supply crates into 10 IPCs. Then, on R5, Russia could covert the remaining 2 supply crates into another 10 IPCs, for a total of 20 IPCs of lend-lease.

Also, if after combat there is a supply crate in a territory that you have just conquered, then you must immediately “loot” them by converting them into 3 IPCs each for your treasury. The money will remain in your treasury until your next regular opportunity to purchase units. There is no limit on how many crates you can loot in a single turn.

The Supply Crate would help facilitate the creation of a Canadian power (by giving Canada something to do besides just build fighters and fly them to Moscow, and by giving them a reason to maintain a navy), would help fill the otherwise lackluster 5-IPC slot in the unit roster, and would more realistically simulate the war and sea and the ability of the Russians to field massive armies later in the war using the economic might of the Western Allies. Instead of a stack of 30 Russian infantry with 6 British fighters, you could have a stack of 30 Russian infantry, 10 Russian artillery, and 2 Russian tanks – but only if you can keep the sea lanes reasonably clear.

Supply Crates could also be used as a less disruptive form of bidding in conventional G40: because supply crates don’t unbalance any turn 1 battles, they’re a gentler way of giving the Allies some extra economic oomph.

It looks interesting – I’m also unhappy with the way France is treated in most A&A games, although I’m not sure that reincarnating France to slowly fight over west Africa is a good solution – does it really matter who controls French West Africa or French Madagascar? They’re usually of very little strategic and economic importance.

Tactical bombers could be a lot of fun if done right, although I find it very odd that they are allowed to bomb airbases / naval bases but not factories. Bombing air/naval bases is a very niche move that rarely pays off – I would like to see tactical bombers that can do at least some damage to factories, and strategic bombers that are of little or no use in regular combat.

Hard to comment on your national advantages without seeing the full list, but your cards are beautiful; I like the design. The French national advantages you display seem balanced.

I don’t think airbases will have too much effect on Anniversary; the map is already pretty accessible by air. You can fly from London to Moscow in one turn even without an airbase, for example. Airbases might possibly put the Italian fleet at slightly more risk if it ventures away from the central Med, and they might be of some use in the south Pacific.

The naval bases will dramatically change the game, especially in the Pacific. US and Japan are now one turn’s move away from each other, which requires you to garrison your home territory much more assertively. The Caroline Islands are now in range of India, and India is now in range of northwest Australia (although if you’re coming from the Sydney sea zone, you still can’t quite make it to India). Overall I like the effect of these changes; they help simulate the fog of war by providing more options.

In the Atlantic, the USA is now one move away from France, which I think will cramp Germany’s style a bit too much. Historically, the USA had no ability to invade France in June 1941 when Anniversary starts, or even in December 1941 when the USA joined the war – the north African landings weren’t until November 1942, and northwest Africa was much, much more lightly defended than France. In practical game terms, Germany is very short on infantry in the first two rounds of the 1941 scenario, and being forced to either leave 3-4 infantry behind in France or reserve 3-4 infantry in Germany to counter-attack an American landing in France will seriously slow down German expansion possibilities. That’s one way to balance the game, but it’s not my favorite – I’d rather see the Axis expand well out of the gate and then be contained later in the game by big Allied national objectives, as in Balanced Mod. Maybe I’ll make some balanced mod NOs for the Allies in Anniversary!

@Guam-Solo Good question, Guam Solo. In most games, the USA can push for one objective on each side of the map, but not literally at the same time – the push for one objective should start two or three turns earlier than the push for the second objective. The reasoning here is that during the first stage of your campaign, you will need transports and men and warships and some air support in order to safely occupy a sea zone and then gain control of your targeted land territories. This is very expensive and consumes 85%+ of the US’s resources. At best, your remaining resources can be used to garrison a region that is already Allied-controlled (e.g., stack Honolulu with infantry, or stack Gibraltar with fighters). However, during the second stage of your campaign, when you have already achieved regional naval supremacy, you generally do not need to build new warships, and you may even be able to recycle some of your transports by sending them on a loop back and forth between safe sea zones. You can re-fill four transports much, much more cheaply than you can build four new transports, fill those transports, build an escorting navy, and build an escorting air force – and the resulting savings can be used to open a new offensive campaign.

The exception to this rule is when all of the Axis powers press inward toward Moscow, without paying serious attention to contesting the USA’s attacks. If Germany sends its entire air force east and builds nothing but mechs and tanks while Japan sends its entire air force west while building nothing but minor factories, then you can probably get away with an all-out simultaneous two-front war, because your landing parties just won’t be facing much opposition, so you won’t need to build as many escort ships / planes to support each loaded transport.

Update: second draft posted at the top of the thread based on everyone’s comments. Thank you for commenting!

I like the way you’re thinking creatively, and it’s possible there’s some way to exploit the fact that Hawaii can be 100% blocked off from the USA for a turn with only 3 ships – maybe later in the game if you have a fleet in the Carolines or at a Japanese-occupied Midway with a naval base, or something crazy like that. You would also need to make sure ANZAC is not in position to liberate Hawaii after the US can-opens for them.

The specific plan of attack you’re proposing is crazy because you would need twice as many starting forces as Japan actually has to pull it off. J3 India Crush is plausible against a competent opponent, barely, if you send 100% of your starting forces in the general direction of India. The fact that you’re doing a Pearl Harbor attack on J1 means that J3 India Crush is off the table. The fact that you’re also diverting 4 transports and 2 carrier groups to take Hawaii means that you will eat flak and die in India. The most likely result is that you will lose half the Japanese air force while not taking India. Meanwhile, ANZAC eats the money islands, and UK Europe winds up very strong because the Italian fleet sailed away west to capture a 1-IPC territory, and the German fleet sailed away west to knock out 2 American warships, so at least one of the UK Home Fleets likely survived, and the UK winds up with easy/cheap control of the Med and can start convoying Italy right away, and can start landings in France/Holland/Denmark/Norway right away, too.

Another point to keep in mind is that with your bombers busy knocking out the UK battleship, and your transports and air power busy in the Philippines and then India and then Hawaii, you will be very lucky to stalemate China in its current position – you run a real risk of losing Shanghai, which would block your proposed J4 victory. After seeing Germany’s looney-tunes assault on the US Atlantic fleet, Russia can safely build planes and stack Amur and Kazakh on R1, and then declare war on Japan on R2 and invade from both Kazakh and Siberia, giving the starting mechs a decent chance of reaching the Chinese coast on R4, which would also block the proposed J4 victory.

@crockett36 Hey there! I’m glad you like it. You are more than welcome to read or summarize my advice on YouTube as long as you give me some credit for it as part of the video – I’m not likely to be recording a YouTube video of Global advice anytime soon.

My thought about strict neutrals is that they’re there to help you punish your opponent when they do something really strange or make a mistake. If neither America nor the UK is putting anything into the Atlantic, for example, then Germany can attack Sweden and Spain while Italy attacks Turkey, and you can mostly get away with it – this can help you take Gibraltar, Egypt, Iraq, etc. without wasting a ton of money on transports. Conversely, if Germany and Italy are dropping huge stacks of infantry into France and Rome but are leaving Poland / Romania / Bulgaria / Greece wide open, and the UK has a big stack of infantry in the Middle East, and Japan has already activated Mongolia as a pro-Allied neutral by invading Amur, then you might be able to attack eastern Europe from the Middle East through Turkey – sure, Germany can walk into Spain and Sweden, but that’s not a big deal; you’re basically allowing them to keep Western Europe in exchange for a British factory in Greece and a Russian tank swarm fueled by the Spread of Communism NO that will ultimately take Berlin before Spanish infantry can reach it.

These are pretty rare scenarios, though, and of 10 games where you’re tempted to invade a strict neutral, you should probably just pass in about 9 of those 10 games and stick to more conventional strategies. The Spanish beachhead is not as exciting as it looks – you’re closer to New York, but you’re correspondingly further from Berlin; it saves you a few bucks on transports, but you lose that money by needing to fight formerly neutral infantry, and the attack as a whole doesn’t necessarily save you any time.

Of course, if your opponent is foolish enough to invade a strict neutral, go claim your prizes! It often makes sense to leave one mech hanging around somewhere near the area where your opponent might be tempted to invade strict neutrals so that you can quickly capitalize on the newly available fighting forces. Once the mech runs in there, you’ll be able to fly in air support and get a decent offensive punch. Be aware that you cannot ever activate neutrals with a plane, so even if neutrals are ‘on your side’, they are still off-limits to your planes until you move a land unit into their territories.

This is basically my favorite topic.

I agree that in most A&A games, transports are too expensive, especially for tournament play (since tournaments usually have fewer rounds, which means there’s less opportunity for the transport to slowly pay for itself over many rounds).

I think it’s going too far to say that expensive transports are the reason why A&A games are unbalanced. I think the reason why A&A games are unbalanced is that most games are unbalanced by default, and it takes an enormous amount of skill and effort and testing to make a game balanced, and historically Avalon Hill etc. have not invested that level of effort into balancing their A&A games, and even if they did put more effort into balancing their games, it’s not always clear that they would be successful.

If you imagine the game designer as an archer who is shooting arrows at a paper target, then getting a “balanced” game is like the bullseye. If the average bid is 5 IPCs or less, then the game is at least roughly balanced. That’s the bullseye – it’s the width of a one-time payment of 5 IPCs. But there’s no special reason why the arrow has to hit the bullseye. Maybe the game will need a one-time payment of 10 or 20 or 80 IPCs. Maybe the game is so unbalanced that you’ve got to add extra national objectives or extra unit types for one side, or change the turn order, or something drastic like that. There are lots of ways to shoot an arrow at a balanced game and “miss.” The total design space is much, much wider than 5 IPCs – it’s hundreds and hundreds of IPCs “wide.”

At the start of an A&A game, the position is intentionally asymmetrical: the Axis will have more armies and planes, and the Allies will control more territory. That means you can’t necessarily tell whether the game is balanced just by glancing at it – it’s not obvious what the conversion factor should be between Total Unit Value (TUV) and Production (IPCs). Do the Axis need an extra 3 IPCs of TUV for every 1 IPC of Allied advantage in the production value of their starting territories? Or is the ratio closer to 2:1? 4:1? 5:1? It depends on what the best-available opening strategies are, and how effective they are, and how quickly and reliably the Axis can expect to conquer Allied territory, and, yes, on how much it will cost the Allies to build up a fleet of transports (or minor factories) with which to project their power from far-away sources of income such as New York City and London. It’s very hard to say what the exact ratio of TUV Advantage to Production Advantage should be without extensive playtesting and/or complicated, detailed analysis. It’s not something you can just eyeball.

So when you make a new Axis & Allies game, it might look balanced to the naked eye, but if you’re even slightly wrong about the proper ratio of TUV to Production, you could easily be so wrong that re-balancing your game will require a bid of 30 or 60 or 200 IPCs.

There’s a kind of horrible paradox in A&A design: if you design a great game, then people will play it to death over many years, and, in so doing, will invent all kinds of new openings that change how rapidly the Axis are able to conquer territory from the Allies. When people first started playing Global 1940 2nd Edition, even moderately-skilled players weren’t necessarily familiar with Dark Skies, or Middle Earth, or Bright Skies, or the Russian tank blitz, or the Yunnan stack – all of which are sort of core parts of the way the game is currently played. But if you’re looking at the game and trying to figure out how large of a bid the Allies need, well, that depends in part on how good the Allied opening strategies are and how good the Axis opening strategies are. So you’re trying to balance a game with literally hundreds of pieces so finely that you don’t want to need to add even two more pieces to one side – i.e., to within 1% tolerances – but you’re also hoping to build a game that’s dynamic and interesting enough that as people play it, they’ll develop new openings and new approaches to the game.

After all, if players could work out the “one best strategy” for an A&A game within a few months after it was released, and nobody could ever improve on that strategy, then it wouldn’t be a very good game, or, at least, it wouldn’t have much replay value. But if you can’t work out the “one best strategy” with 1,000 players in 6 months, then you probably also can’t work out the “one best strategy” with 10 playtesters in 2 years – so the playtesters are necessarily going to miss some of the best opening strategies, which in turn will throw off the balance in the opening.

I do fault the designers of Axis & Allies Spring 1942 2nd Edition, because the balance on that game isn’t even close – ordinary, straightforward play by the Axis should win at least 80% of the games at even a moderate skill level if the Allies don’t get a bid. You don’t have to do anything fancy to win that game as the Axis – just build 1/2 infantry, 1/6 artillery, and 1/3 tanks with both Germany and Japan, leave a couple of infantry at home to guard Berlin and Tokyo, and send the rest of the units to Moscow. Roll some dice, and then the Axis win. This is a strategy that the designers could have and should have discovered during playtesting, so they should have been aware that the game was not balanced out-of-the-box, and they should have changed the rules or the starting setup accordingly.

For the other games, I don’t necessarily fault the designers; they made a reasonable effort to hit the target, and they just happened to miss. World War I is massively biased in favor of the Allies, but it took a little while to figure that out; it wasn’t necessarily obvious that Britain needed to spend its entire budget in India, or that the USA needed to spend its entire budget on shoring up Rome via the Mediterranean. These are ahistorical strategies that haven’t really been tried in previous A&A games, so it’s fine that they came as a surprise to the designers.

Same thing with A&A Anniversary Edition 1941: it turns out that the Italians are able to can-open for the Germans in a way that devastates Russia, and that it’s too hard to stop Japan’s amphibious explosion because there’s nowhere sane for the Allies to build a Pacific factory, but those weren’t necessarily problems that were obvious in advance: these problems were the result of changes in the Italian and Chinese setup that were new to Anniversary.

I would like to see cheaper transports as an option, especially for tournament games, but I don’t think there’s any way to set a price on transports (or to scrap transports in favor of infantry-carrying cruiser groups) that would eliminate the hard problem of balance.

Returning for a moment to the transport-pricing question, I think one good way of analyzing that is to compare the cost of sending loaded transports vs. the cost of sending planes.

Suppose for the sake of argument that you have unchallenged control of the seas, so the only extra expense you have to incur for amphibious assaults is the cost of the transports themselves. Also for the sake of simplicity, suppose you have a token beachhead of 3 infantry that is already on the mainland, so that if you support that infantry with enough planes, it can theoretically conquer as many territories as necessary. These two assumptions cut in opposite directions (control of the seas makes transports better; having a beachhead makes planes better), so hopefully they at least roughly balance each other out.

If transports cost 7 IPCs and you are able to use the same transport twice over the course of a tournament game, then the cost of buying and delivering a supporting force of 2 inf, 1 art, 1 tnk is 6 + 4 + 5 + 7 = 22 IPCs. This results in a total force of 5 inf, 1 art, 1 tnk, which has 7 HP, 11 punch, and 15 defense.

Alternatively, if fighters cost 10 IPCs, and bombers cost 12 IPCs, then the cost of buying and delivering a supporting force of 1 inf, 1 bmr is 10 + 12 = 22 IPCs. This results in a total force of 3 inf, 1 ftr, 1 bmr, which has 5 HP, 10 punch, and 11 defense.

Under the (admittedly artificial) assumptions of the experiment, the transports are strictly better – you get more HP, more punch, and more defense for the same amount of money.

On the other hand, suppose each transport can only make one delivery during the length of the tournament game. Buying and delivering a supporting force of 2 inf, 2 tnk will now cost 6 + 10 + 7 + 7 = 30 IPCs. You could instead deliver 3 fighters for those 30 IPCs. The total amphibious forces (including the beachhead) would be 5 inf, 2 tnk = 7 HP, 11 punch, 16 defense. The total airborne forces (including the beachhead) would be 3 inf, 3 ftr = 6 HP, 12 punch, 18 defense. Those forces appear roughly equivalent to me – the airborne force has one fewer hit point, but it has slightly more punch and defense.

Finally, suppose the transports can only make one trip, and they also need to be escorted by a pair of destroyers in order to survive even that one trip. Buying and delivering a supporting force of 4 inf, 1 art, 1 tnk + 3 transports + 2 destroyers now costs 12 + 4 + 5 + 21 + 16 = 56 IPCs. For less money than that, you could afford 4 ftr, 1 bmr. The total amphibious forces (including the beachhead) would be 7 inf, 1 art, 1 tnk = 9 HP, 13 punch, 19 defense. The total airborne forces (including the beachhead) would be 3 inf, 4 ftr, 1 bmr = 8 HP, 19 punch, 23 defense. The airborne force appears superior to me – it would be able to reliably trash the amphibious force if they fought in direct combat.

Part of why I think transports are overpriced in tournament play is that you often do need something like destroyers to protect your transports. You might not be able to finish a second round-trip before the tournament game ends, especially for transports built after turn 3 or so, and you might need two or even three fleets of transports to efficiently ferry infantry from, e.g., New York to Rome/Berlin. If you have to set up a shuck-shuck where transports are constantly swapping places with each other (i.e., if you want to cross an ocean rather than just bridge a single sea zone) then that seriously increases your transportation costs.

If you have no beachhead at all, and you still want to fight in a region, then you need to send at least one transport full of actual land units. A single transport could cost 60 IPCs, and you’d still have little choice but to pay that price if you wanted to occupy a region that’s cut off from your forces by sea – although there are plenty of weird exceptions. Items like paratrooper technology, sub convoys, and strategic bombing become more important as the relative cost of transports rises.

As soon as you’re able to deliver one transport to your target, though, then the usual cost-benefit equation goes back into effect. Do you want one loaded transport plus 10 planes? Or five loaded transports? Or something in between?

Some of the fussiest rules in the A&A handbook are the rules for bombing runs, interceptors, AAA gunfire, and submarines.

Many people enjoy fussiness; they like learning all of the intricate details of a complicated ruleset and then finding ways to exploit them. That’s fine. If you enjoy complex rules for their own sake, this House Rule is not for you. This House Rule is for people who enjoy complicated gameplay but who want the rules to be as simple as possible. The idea is to get a lot of theme and a lot of strategy without needing too many different rules.

So, here’s my proposal:

Bombers – bombers can make bombing runs against any territory, even if the territory has no factory in it. If you wish, you may escort your bombers with fighters by moving the fighters into the territory. When you make a bombing run, the defender does not get any automatic AAA shots. Instead, the defender rolls one die per flak gun in the territory (flak guns hit on rolls of 1), and one die per fighter in the territory (fighters hit on rolls of 2 or less). For each hit scored by the defender, eliminate one attacking bomber or one attacking escort fighter (attacker’s choice). Any surviving bombers then roll 1d6 and destroy IPCs from the defender’s treasury equal to the value shown on the dice. The defender cannot lose more IPCs from a territory than the territory is worth (e.g. bombing India can lose you at most 3 IPCs), and the defender cannot lose more IPCs than their entire treasury.

Flak Guns – attack at 1, defend at 1, move 1 space, and behave exactly like a regular land unit. They can make a combat move, they can be taken as a casualty, they can conquer territories, and they don’t get a preemptive shot. The only two things that make a flak gun special are that (a) if they score a hit in a battle against you, and you have any planes in that battle, then you have to select one of your planes as the casualty, and (b) flak guns help defend against bombing runs.

Submarines – attack at 2, defend at 1, move 2 spaces, and behave exactly like a regular sea unit. They are blocked by enemy warships, do not submerge, can be hit by planes, can hit planes, and do not make sneak attacks. Instead, each submarine adjacent to an enemy territory during that enemy’s collect income reduces the enemy’s income by 1 IPC. The income from a territory cannot be reduced below zero by submarines. It is recommended (but not required) to raise the defensive value of destroyers from 2 to 3 to help keep submarines balanced.

All of this may sound like a lot to keep straight, but it’s mostly a matter of unlearning some of the fiddly rules that we’re used to playing with. These rules should be easier for new players to learn because they treat all units as essentially the same except for one or two special abilities: instead of submarines behaving totally differently from any other ship and requiring separate rolls and a separate phase of combat, submarines are just ships that are able to deal 1 IPC of industrial damage. Instead of AAA guns behaving totally differently from any other land unit and requiring separate rolls and unique rules for movement and capture, AAA guns are just land units that are able to preferentially target planes when they score a hit.

@Black_Elk said in Grand Plans, 3rd Edition?:

To me having more game tiles (a bunch of additional tt and sz) doesn’t really necessitate all the baseline rules complexity we see in 1940. What I mean is that you could surely find a way to make a more limited and much faster 5-6 man total war scenario, still with a larger game map more on the scale of global, and it wouldn’t be that much harder to learn than 1942.2 is currently.

I think there’s definitely some room for a modular starter map that has lots more ‘tiles’ than, say, 1941. I think once you get up near the Global 1940 scale, the amount of table space you need to set the thing up, in square feet, is excessive for a starter game. Not everybody has a giant living room table that they can reserve for a full day of gaming; it’s a barrier to entry if the flagship map is so big that casual players won’t even be able to set it up.

That’s just a quibble, though – I strongly agree with you on the missed opportunities for a modular map with a moderate size, lightweight rules that can expand to become more complicated as players get more sophisticated, and digital integration.

I’ve started work on a new map for TripleA that I hope will serve as a useful ‘middleweight’ option for people who want some complexity and variety, but who don’t need the comprehensive “kitchen sink” approach of World at War or Global. I’ve added a few tiles near Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, etc. to make capitals a bit more vulnerable to piecemeal attacks, but otherwise I’ve tried to remove and merge tiles where ever I could muster the will to press the ‘delete’ key. Here’s a very early draft with no territory values or units – just the ownership. I’m putting all the Allied factions in lighter pastels, and all the Axis factions in darker shades, to make it easier to tell at a glance which side owns a territory. All of the victory cities are 70-pixel-wide circles, and vice versa, to make it easier to tell at a glance who owns the victory cities and where they’re located.

These are very early drafts, still, but maybe it’ll give you a sense of where I’m headed. I don’t want to hijack this thread, so future updates will be posted at https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/33233/argo-s-middleweight-map-for-1939-1942, but I’m basically making this map as a direct response to the discussion we’ve been having here, so I thought I would at least mention it once.

1939:

1942:

Interesting ideas about making the map safe for color-blind players, @Black_Elk. I’ll see about adding in some saturation contrast among the colors inside a faction, so that everyone can tell them apart. And yes, my goal is to keep the mechanics quite simple – I don’t know if you saw my other post about simplified subs, bombers, and interceptors, but I’m trying to minimize the number of exceptions and special rules: the territory values are what you see printed on the map, not what’s on the map plus a national objective. The combat values are what you see printed on the purchasing chart, not what’s on the chart plus special situational bonuses. I’ve got free rein as a designer to at least try to create a map that works out of the box, so hopefully that will help me push toward simplicity.

Along those lines, @SS-GEN, thank you very much for the suggestions, but, yes, my goal is to have japanese tanks blitz just like any other tank, and to have planes move 4 spaces from islands just like they move 4 spaces from any other territory. If I design the map tiles correctly, then adding in extra movement won’t be necessary, because islands will be naturally on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. If I design the Russian economy correctly, then nerfing Japanese units won’t be necessary, because Japan will be naturally checked and balanced by Russian armies.

I plan to put a starting minor factory in the Urals for the 1942 setup that can deadzone Siberia, which acts as a natural chokepoint, and in the 1939 setup (Khalkin Gol!) Russia will have tanks in eastern Siberia that outnumber and outpunch the starting Japanese forces. Note that even Manchuria is 4 spaces from Moscow. Buryatia and Kamchatka will not support a factory, I think, and Vladivostok & Korea are 5 spaces from Moscow. That’s enough room to have an interesting battle – the key will be making sure Russia has the factory locations, dollars, and starting troops to effectively oppose Japan without automatically losing against Germany. I think I can do that. I’ll keep you posted!

@Guam-Solo That’s interesting. What do you mean by ‘landlocked’, exactly? Is the idea that Britain couldn’t keep a navy in the water, so British forces were confined to the UK and Africa, without being able to land on islands or in France?

Brilliant, thanks!

Now with territory values and a lighter color for the sea zone!