Posts made by Argothair

Corpo24, yeah. Karl7 was there but did not deign to play a house rules game that was not even based off the Global map.

I’ve got a “Balanced Mod” for Anniversary in the House Rules forum that tries to “backload” the Allied national objectives so that the Allies, especially the USA, will have a booming economy in the endgame if the Axis aren’t able to shut it down. That way instead of “Allies have more income, can the Axis catch up, yes, they can, they did, ok, great, now the Axis win” the story becomes “Allies have more income, can the Axis catch up, yes, they can, they did, but eventually the Allies will mobilize for total war; can the Allies rebound successfully before the Axis get so huge that even the extra national objectives won’t help, maybe, they might, it’s a really close call.”

Playtested it live for the first time a month ago, and it seemed quite fair to us. Axis roll and I have also played it online with decent results.

Yeah, I wondered about that when I saw the rules. Most of the pricier units (BBs, Carriers, Armor, etc.) require multiple hits to destroy in combat, but you can kill them with one hit from a strategic bombing raid. What’s the counter to strategic bombing? How do you stop it?

Well, OK, if the general plan is “try to save Yunnan by killing all remaining Japanese land units near Yunnan if Japan rolls average-to-poor on the first attacks against China” then I think that’s a good plan. I’m just objecting to the specific tactics you were discussing in the original post.

As far as the 12 planes vs. 10 ground + 3 ftr, sure, that’s a stupid attack for Japan to make – but I’m still not sure you get odds that are that good as China against average luck and a decent opponent.

Carriers in SZ 37, off the coast of Hainan, can reach Yunnan unless you own Szechuan and Hunan and Kweichow – possible, but not guaranteed given all the other commitments you’re talking about.

And now you’re saying buy 4 infantry on C2, but I thought you wanted to buy 3 artillery on C2 – you can’t buy both on the same turn, you don’t have enough cash. If you’re just buying infantry for Szechuan C2, then sure, maybe you can hold Szechuan against airblitzes, but you probably don’t have the offensive striking power to stop Japan from at least trading Yunnan, maybe even taking and holding it.

Meanwhile you have nothing to fight with in north/northwest China, right? Troops from Japanese Manchuria walk west and just eat your 6 IPCs there without a fight.

It’s not necessarily a bad strategy overall for the Allies, especially if Japan takes some unlucky hits J1/J2, but I think you’re somewhat overstating its benefits.

I haven’t done an exact count of the Chinese starting pieces, but just by eyeballing it, it sounds to me like you’re stretching China way too thin.

You send 2 infantry to Hunan C1 and 6 infantry to Yunnan C1 – that’s most of your starting pieces. When you “stack up” in Szechuan on C2 after building 3 artillery, that means your stack is what, 4 inf + 3 art? If that?

Even if Japan only landed part of its air force on the Chinese coast and Chinese coastal carriers (e.g. 12 planes or so, no special prep), that’s still a pretty good battle for Japan. Your Chinese armies only defend at 2, and the planes attack at 3.5, so 12 planes * 3.5 = 42 pips = 7 expected hits, i.e., you can expect to wipe out a stack of 7 Chinese armies in one round of combat. Those 7 armies only have 14 pips to fight back with, so you’re losing 2, maybe 3 planes in exchange for what’s left of the Chinese stack.

I see those as totally acceptable losses, especially if Britain has exposed itself by stacking Burma, sacrificing ships to block SZ37, and so on.

I agree with you that trading Chinese infantry 1:1 for Japanese planes is a great deal, but you’re not going to get that deal if you push China forward so aggressively in the first couple of turns.

If British India is very strong, then even losing 3 planes might be unacceptable, because you’ll need those extra planes to be sure of taking India on J5 or J6…but with the British navy gone, the British expeditionary force in Burma / French Indochina doomed, etc., then India will fall without too much extra effort, so the planes you lose demolishing China are expendable.

Thank you, @simon33. Can you try to specify what you mean by depth? What is depth? What makes a game deep?

Here’s our income chart, if anyone’s enough of a nerd to care about that much detail. Allies had 127 - 115 IPC advantage at end of round 3, and 121 - 108 IPC advantage at end of round 5. In the pictures above, blue chips are 3, and red chips are 5.

Update: finally got a live playtest in, with @Corpo24 and Angel taking the Axis against me and Quincy with the Allies. It was a very tense and exciting game – Germany took Egypt on G1 without a single casualty, but lost 2 fighters against Task Force G in the Western Med and failed to sink the Canadian DD + transport. Britain abandoned both India and Africa, used its navy to capture and hold Scandinavia early (saving Leningrad for the Russians), and built a factory in Australia, which was reinforced by the retreating Indians and some American soldiers and planes. Italy got rich off of national objectives and built a large navy, including a fully loaded carrier, and then shucked 2 loaded transports per turn to the Ukraine, where Germany’s main stack of 15 tanks was threatening both Stalingrad and Moscow.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Japan sent a fully loaded carrier with no escort ships down to Queensland as part of an effort to sink the remaining British Pacific boats (I won’t dignify a few stray transports and destroyers with the name of “Pacific Fleet.”) America seized the opportunity to blow it up and establish carrier parity (2 each), and the American and Japanese Pacific fleets mostly played footsie for the rest of the game, with Japan finally wiping Britain out of the East Indies on about J5, and America taking Iwo Jima on US6. Japan slowly expanded on all fronts, making it as far as Yakut in Siberia, cutting China down to one territory, and trading Persia with Russia. Japan also landed a squad in Rhodesia to help the German tank factory in Egypt make sure that the British didn’t get any funny ideas about a factory in South Africa.

Things looked grim for the Allies during turn 6 – the British were trading France with Germany, but were unable to fill their fifth transport (no extra factory in the west and no money to buy one); America was trading Morocco with Italy each turn and looked unlikely to penetrate further than Libya for a long time. Meanwhile, Japan’s slow, steady progress was becoming a real threat – Japan was about ready to break China and break the still-holding-but-slowly-retreating Siberian Guards, which could have created a decisive income swing. Allies were up about 10 IPCs as of turn 6, but that could have disappeared or even been reversed by turn 8 if things continued according to schedule.

Fortunately for the Allies, the back-and-forth trading in France left the Axis stack in Ukraine exposed to a Russian counter-attack. Russia attacked with 75% odds to win, and rolled better-than-expected, taking back the Ukraine with 3 artillery, 6 tanks, and 1 fighter remaining. At the same time, lightly supported Russian infantry rolled out of Leningrad to take the Baltics and Belorussia, rolling the Germans back in the northeast. The Germans and Italians had no forces available to counter the advancing Russian front – they could not both hold eastern Europe and keep trading France, so the Axis surrendered.

One fun gambit that we didn’t get to see the result of was the American bomber attack on the Italian fleet – the Americans built 3 extra bombers in the Eastern US and stacked land forces in Libya with the idea of holding it for a turn using British fighters that were no longer needed to defend Russia. The US bombers (including a couple that flew from Australia to Stalingrad to join the party) would fly 5 spaces to the central Med, and then land in Libya – which would then be permanently secured, because the Italian navy would no longer have the transports to help the Germans take it out. That attack could have gone quite badly for the Americans; the extra turn of setup meant that the Italians got a chance to build, so they could have dropped another 3 destroyers or something in the sea zone, and they might have won that battle, with disastrous results for the Western Allies – but we’ll never know, because Axis morale collapsed in the wake of the Russian victory in Third Battle of Kharkov.

Everybody had a good time, and we don’t feel that any changes are needed to the national objectives – they seemed to give everyone a fair chance to win and to choose their own style. There was a little grumbling about how German got ganged up on, but what do you expect when Egypt, Burma, Pearl Harbor, and the San Diego navy all fall turn 1 without a single Axis casualty, and the Luftwaffe bites the dust on turn 1 without a single Allied transport getting wet? I blame the dice, rather than the NOs, for that particular strategic decision.

@Imperious-Leader With respect, that’s off-topic. There are lots of other threads about 1942.2; this one is about Revised vs. Global. Please keep the 1942.2 discussion off of this thread.

@DoManMacgee Thanks; both of these posts were super-helpful for me.

@Slip-Capone Can you elaborate a little bit on how or why these rules opened up new strategies? It looks like almost every territory worth 2 IPCs or more is a Victory Territory. How does playing with this list of Victory Territories change the strategy compared to just saying “whoever has more money after 6 rounds wins?”

Very interesting, thank you. So, digging a little deeper, can anyone articulate what it means for something to be a “wargame” or why G40 would scratch the “wargame hunger” better than Revised? In concrete terms, why does G40 feel like a wargame?

Also, does anyone have a link to the WBC tournament rules for Revised? I’m not familiar with them.

And, yes, one thing I like about SiredBlood’s rules is that they encourage a broader variety of strategies, even in competitive play. At the first SiredBlood tournament, I saw neutral crushes, I saw Sea Lions, I saw paratroopers hitting Cairo, I saw India Crushes, I saw serious attempts by Japan to grab the eastern Pacific islands from US/UK, I saw Italians in Brazil and Canada and Pakistan, and I think once, just for variety, I saw the traditional Italian can-openers for German tanks rolling into Moscow. I’m sure some of that is because it’s new and people are still sorting out what works and how to counter the oddball openings, but I also think the victory conditions (where both VPs and IPCs are distributed more evenly across the map) helps players branch out a little, compared to either G40 2nd Edition or Revised, where the vast majority of the money and the VPs are in or adjacent to Berlin or Moscow.

Like, if you look at the strategies available in Revised, the Germans need to hold France / Rome / Berlin, all of which are adjacent to each other, and that’s 22 IPCs and 3 VPs, which is enough to hold out for a very long time. Similarly, if the Russians can keep trading the bubble of territories immediately adjacent to Moscow, that can bring in over 20 IPCs. So almost all the action focuses around those two ultra-rich clusters of money, factories, and VPs. It kind of has to, right?

But what else are you going to do? Either the action has a central focus (in which case people will complain that the only thing to do is go right for the center) or the action doesn’t have a central focus (in which case people will complain that it feels casual and screwy and ahistorical and winds up in stalemates where you trade the same peripheral territories forever). Maybe I’m feeling too philosophical today to talk sense. I’m just trying to figure out what makes A&A games fun and what makes them frustrating, at a really abstract and general level.

@Afrikakorps Mostly agree with Taamvan here – you’ve described an interesting gambit, but it sounds like your opponent fell for your trap by passively consolidating his Italian fleet and leaving it idle.

As other commenters have pointed out, the Axis can completely counter this strategy by using the Germans to clear away blockers, taking Egypt or Gibraltar pretty early and with potentially disastrous results for the British.

Even without German reinforcements, the Italian player can still actively consolidate their fleet by bringing it together in a different sea zone each turn, killing one British unit at a time. Italy-1, you kill a destroyer. Italy-2, you kill a cruiser. Take casualties on your air units or battleships, save your money on Italy’s first turn, and by turn 2 you can build an Italian carrier + sub, or carrier + fighter, or whatever else you need for naval parity. By passing up the opportunity to kill the Italian fleet on UK1, you may lose the opportunity to ever kill off that fleet, and if you follow through with plans to move the entire RAF to the Med, spend part of the UK economy in South Africa / Persia, etc., then Germany will have a free hand in the north Atlantic, and Moscow will be more vulnerable when the Germans are ready to attack it. Basically any time you concentrate the mobile British forces, you need to achieve decisive results within a couple of turns, because events will continue to develop elsewhere on the board, so if you’re merely stalemating the Italians in the Med while losing ground in the Atlantic and Moscow (and perhaps India as well), then you’re not making the right kind of forward progress on the globe as a whole.

This is a serious question – obviously people here are very passionate about Global; you might play dozens of Global games every year, and maybe you haven’t played a single Revised game in a decade.

The Global map is bigger, and there are more rules, and Global is the more recent release. For some people, that’s enough to justify only playing Global – they want the biggest, most gonzo experience they can find, or they want whatever the latest version is because they like new things or they like official things or it’s just what their friends are playing. Fine.

But if you have consciously chosen some form of Global because you like Global better than previous versions of A&A, especially A&A Revised from 2004, then why do you like Global better? What are the key features? What makes Global more satisfying or more fun? What are you able to do in Global that you’re not able to do in Revised?

Thanks! I’ll give it a try and let you know.

And I bet it does work; I bet that’s the same option that’s used for the AAA guns.

Is it possible to get TripleA to allow transports to move or unload only during noncombat? I was thinking it might be interesting to have two kinds of boats that move land units:

1. Transports, which move 3, carry any 3 land units, and can only unload during noncombat
2. Landing Craft, which move 1, carry 1 infantry, bombard at 1, and can load/unload at any time.

This would make it very challenging to win a beachhead, but very easy to reinforce a beachhead once you’ve got one – you could even follow up the same turn, e.g., landing craft to get from London to Normandy, and then if you actually capture Normandy then maybe transports can unload some tanks into Normandy from Canada or even New York during the non-combat phase of the same turn.

I’d like to find out if this is possible before finishing my sea zones.

Well, I’d agree with you that buying a single naked BB rarely makes sense – BBs are strongest when they can be used as the capstone of a larger, more diverse navy.

I’ve been known to buy CA + DD for the Brits in Anniversary, where the British fleet can just project monstrous power out of the English Channel – you’re threatening France, Norway, Berlin, Poland, etc. all from the same sea zone, and many of those territories come with large national objectives attached.

And in a social game of Balanced Mod Global, where I’m aiming to have fun more than I’m aiming to win, I could see buying CA + DD + Marine for Italy or Australia, just because Marines are a cool unit, and sometimes your economy means that you can’t afford a second loaded transport, but you can afford one loaded transport plus one marine, and that extra oomph will get you over the finish line to take Cairo or Singapore or whatever.

In Classic Global, though, I just don’t see it – if there is enough of an aerial threat that you need the DD+CA at all, then you probably need a massive fleet that includes at least one fully loaded carrier, and if you don’t have the cash to drop that fleet all at once, then it’s better to save up for a turn and buy the fleet next turn.

It’s a hard problem. My favorite rule so far is to give each team 3 “low luck” battles over the course of the game. You can declare a low luck battle either on offense or on defense before any dice are rolled – but only 3 times per game. It’s your choice how to use them; you could use them on opening naval battles, or on the battle for Moscow, or on little fiddly battles where you really want a guaranteed hit to knock out your enemy’s only infantry … but you can’t use them all the time, so you have to think about where you care enough to do the math, and where you’re willing to just accept the luck of the dice.

My main objection to LL is that with sufficiently motivated players, it turns every battle into a chess game; people go back and forth furiously calculating all of the numbers and find a way to shift an infantry over by one territory so that they can pick up an extra 8% chance of holding both territories…it feels more like work than like play, to me.

If you let players use LL when they really care about the battle, and force them to roll regular dice the rest of the time, then that keeps the game moving at a reasonable speed without leaving you feeling like you lost the whole game because the dice went against you in one crucial battle.

Well it’s not the one-shot rule that anyone is complaining about; I think everybody here agrees that BBs and CAs should only get one round of bombardments per battle. The question is whether an infantry that gets hits by that bombardment should be allowed to return fire.

And as far as CA & DD in pairs, again, that ignores the way that BBs can soak a free hit.

Let’s say you buy 6 CA & 6 DD to attack me, and I buy 5 BB, 1 DD, 2 SS to defend. You can expect to inflict an average of 5 hits, and I expect to inflict an average of 4 hits. As you say, a slim attack advantage for your fleet – but only on the first round of battle. After the first round, 4 of your DDs are dead, but all of my ships are still in the fight.

Now you have 6 CA + 2 DD = 22 pips of offense, against my 5 damaged BB + 1 DD + 2 SS = 24 pips of defense. Suppose you roll slightly above-average and score your 4 hits, and I roll average and score my 4 hits. Now you have 4 CA left, against my 4 damaged BB. Clearly at this point my fleet outclasses yours, and you should expect to lose the battle if average luck continues.

Pairing CAs with DDs might be the way to get max value out of CAs, but that certainly doesn’t mean you should routinely purchase them – the maximum value you can get out of a CA is still noticeably less than the maximum value you can get out of other ships.

I will often buy 1 or 2 battleships as Japan at some point in the middlegame – carriers are always better if you have free planes available to land on them, but sometimes most of my airforce is busy deep inland, e.g., taking India, or Yunnan, or Siberia. Because Japan is often the victim of a one-two punch by US + UK or US + ANZAC, it’s important to develop a fleet that has defensive staying power, and BBs can help with that.

A typical carrier group might be something like CV, fighter, tac bomber, DD, SS – total cost is 51 IPCs, you get 6 HP and 12 pips of defensive power.

For similar money, you can buy BB, BB, DD, SS – total cost is 54 IPCs, you get 6 HPs and 11 pips of defensive power.

As you can see, the stats are less favorable for the battleship group, but the battleship group holds up much better against one-two punches. If the carrier group takes 3 hits, then you have to either lose an expensive plane, or take a hit on the carrier and land both of your planes, assuming you even have a friendly island handy on which to land them. After taking 3 hits with the carrier group, all you have left is probably CV + fighter – which only has 6 pips of defense and can then be eaten alive by the Australians or the British. You’ve lost a total of 25 IPCs worth of material in those 3 hits (SS + DD + tac).

On the other hand, after the battleship group takes 3 hits, you have damagedBB, damagedBB, DD, with a total of 10 pips of defense, meaning that it might be too risky for UK or ANZAC to do their follow-up attack. Plus, you’ve only lost a cheap sub to the initial attack, for a total loss of 6 IPCs.

So in the particular case where I plan to be in range of one-two punches and a large part of my air force is busy in Asia, I think buying a couple of BBs can make sense for Japan, although even then, I would still buy more CVs than BBs over the course of the whole game.

The only reason to buy a cruiser is if you’re constrained by both a minor factory and your budget. E.g., Australia might buy a cruiser and 2 infantry for Queensland; the cruiser isn’t even slightly efficient, but maybe you need a warship right now and that’s the best you can do with your money.

For what it’s worth, I also miss the old bombardment rules, but we’re already playing with ludicrously easy amphibious invasions. In real life, getting soldiers off of a boat and onto a contested island or beach was incredibly hard and created a huge advantage for the defender. DK solves this neatly by giving the defender free notional hit points that help defend against amphibious assaults – like a bunker that has 2 or 3 HP and rolls nothing on defense. If your group has a high tolerance for house rules, you could try introducing DK’s imaginary bunkers and also re-introducing the pre-emptive bombardment, and capping the bombardment by the number of ground units that actually unload, e.g., if you have 1 infantry unloading with support from 7 battleships, you still only get 1 pre-emptive shot. This is maybe not the highest-priority thing to fix about A&A, though.

Update: I decided to manually trace a brand new vector map so that I can squash and enlarge continents as I see fit and then rescale when I’m done so that the smallest tiles will still be enough pixels wide to hold a few unit types each. Here’s Europe and Africa – you may notice that Africa is only half the height it ‘should’ be compared to Europe, and that the UK is about 140% of its proper size, and that the English Channel and North Sea are about triple their proper sizes. I plan to continue abusing geography for our wargaming convenience until I’ve finished the whole globe. This project is taking several years longer than I originally anticipated, but I do not plan to quit. Thanks again for all your support.

Thanks for checking in, but nothing new to report on this particular set of house rules.

I spent the spring studying data science, and much of the summer went to coping with roommate drama. I’m now comfortably ensconced in my own studio, which is refreshing, but it doesn’t really have the space to host Axis & Allies games (table’s way too small) and my schedule has mostly conflicted with the games that other people have been hosting. Karl S has been working pretty hard on some home remodeling, Karl S has been looking after his second newborn, James has been looking after his first newborn…the usual excuses. I’m still studying data science. I played a few games of Global (joined the ladder for about six months and did OK) and a few games of New World Order on TripleA. I’ve been working a little bit on my 1939 Middleweight Map, which is in the Customizations forum, and a little bit on Tiny Battles of World War 2, which might actually get published someday, and I’ve been playing some of the Battlefront: Strategic Command video games, which have that classic hex-and-counter setup from the 1970s grognard style of wargame, but on a PC. I’ll be playing WW2 Deluxe for the first time this weekend with Mike Kelley, which looks promising, but I can already see some of the potential flaws.

I am always happy to play A&A 50 with my house rules, but I’m not sure the locals are as into it; they mostly like Sired Blood’s Global rules, and I think we’re going to try Larry Harris’s new War Room soon.

@SS-GEN Yup, I’m just really busy. I’ll come back eventually!

@Karl7 It was an interesting game! Germany helped Italy take a pair of British factories in the Middle East with an airbase in Yugoslavia, and was able to take Leningrad early by sending two transports into the White Sea. Almost immediately after we switched to in-person play, I missed an American can-opener in trans-Jordan, with the American transport coming from Gibraltar and the American bomber coming from India to let British tanks from Egypt into Iraq, shutting down the factory. Meanwhile, the Russians went south to help make sure the Middle East fully converted to the Allied point of view.

Germany attacked an Allied beachhead in Normandy with 3 inf, 1 mech, 2 art, 2 ftr, 2 tac, and 1 strat bomber against 7 inf, 3 aaa guns; my battle calculator says that’s an 88% win chance for Germany…but the Allies scored 3 hits on their AAAs and then hit with 5 out of 7 infantry, virtually wiping out the German forces in one round. The Germans only scored 4 hits on 11 dice, so the Allies survived with a large beachhead.

That left very few options for the Axis – I tried hitting a Russian squad in Vologda with 1 mech, 1 tank, 1 ftr vs. 3 infantry, but that also got wiped out in one round, with all 3 defensive infantry hitting. That stopped me from moving in a stack of mechs, which stopped me from threatening Moscow.

I also tried hitting the main US Pacific fleet with the Japanese, probably at somewhat below 50% odds, but that was also a disaster on the dice – sometimes the dice just hate you!

I had fun anyway, and I will always cherish the opportunity to have repaired a damaged Italian battleship at the captured naval base in Singapore.

This was the last league game that I intend to play for quite some time; daily sessions of 1940 Global have been fun, but have been chewing up much more of my time and attention then I prefer to spend. If you’re passing within an hour of San Francisco and want to play a game in person on the weekend, let me know, and otherwise I hope to see some of you at Bloodbath 2020, the Bay Area Invitational Tournament (BAIT), and/or Gencon 2020. Thanks for all the games, and have fun!