@vodot Thanks! Let me know if you ever want to try a game; I think the balance still needs more playtesting from humans. :-)
Posts made by Argothair
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RE: Argo's Middleweight Map for 1939 & 1942
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RE: [AA50] Map Overlays - Splitting Australia, the Balkans, and Sea Zones; adding Cairo, Malaya, Singapore, Rio, Cape Town, Recruitment Centers and tons more!
@vodot Yeah, zeroing out Siberia is another one of those hard design choices that you have to make at this level of complexity. On the one hand, it’s cold and snowy and thinly populated and you want the map to reflect that in a way that’s clear to new wargamers. It’s no good having Yakutsk generate more income then, e.g., Yugoslavia.
On the other hand, the Soviets did relocate most of their industry to the Urals as the war went on, and much of that industry was fueled by mines and workshops in Siberia. They didn’t put all their millions of prisoners in the gulag just to be cruel; they were also mostly doing work vital to the war effort, I believe.
If you squint you can say that Moscow + Urals + Kazakhstan together cover the cities like Kuibyshev and Perm and Chelyabinsk where all that Ural manufacturing was taking place, but it seems to me that at least some of that industry was really in the Siberian part of the AA50 map. Perhaps more to the point, if the Axis conquer Moscow and Stalingrad then there is really nothing important left in the Soviet income, which is very ahistorical. In real life something like 40% of Soviet economy was in Moscow/Stalingrad and points west, but on the AA50 map it’s closer to 80%. Zeroing out Siberia would make that even worse.
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RE: [AA50] Map Overlays - Splitting Australia, the Balkans, and Sea Zones; adding Cairo, Malaya, Singapore, Rio, Cape Town, Recruitment Centers and tons more!
@vodot Sure, that all makes sense to me. There’s no in-game reason to separate the wheat and oil resources if they’re both just +1 IPC, unless you happen to have all the different resource tokens lying around and you’re looking for an excuse to play with your toys…not that there’s anything wrong with that. :)
I favor the preemptive raising of 1 chinese infantry that stops blitzes – tanks have no business blitzing through the dirt trails over the forested mountains of central China in any case. And it helps to suggest the omnipresence of chinese irregulars and partisans and half-trained regiments that were constantly rising up to resist Japanese occupation. Possibly some rejiggering of the territory borders would still be useful in addition to the guerillas; I’ll chew on it.
I think the answer to the VC issue is just to say that there’s a new threshold for Axis/Allies to win the game, and the number is not necessarily the same number. No reason you couldn’t require, e.g., 16 VP for Allied win and 12 VP for Axis win (or whatever the correct numbers turn out to be after you’ve chosen your victory cities).
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RE: [AA50] Map Overlays - Splitting Australia, the Balkans, and Sea Zones; adding Cairo, Malaya, Singapore, Rio, Cape Town, Recruitment Centers and tons more!
@vodot Looks fabulous, well done! This map would be much more fun to play on than the standard Anniversary.
If you’re looking for still yet more improvements, here are some thoughts I’ve had over the last couple of years after reading up on more WW2 history:
- Oil was more important to everyone’s war effort than is really appreciated on the A&A maps. In particular, valuing Trans-Jordan (Basra/Kuwait) and Persia (Bandar Abbas) at only 1 IPC each is a huge underestimate. I would want to bump Trans-Jordan to at least $2 and Persia to at least $3. However, they don’t make good factory sites, because despite the important oil production, they weren’t really industrialized and they weren’t places where it was easy to recruit infantry. So, possibly this is something that needs to be handled through national objectives rather than just adding IPCs on the map.
- Along similar lines, Rumania needs to be worth more than just 2 IPCs for Germany. I would probably just make Poland worth $2 and Rumania worth $3. Rumania is a perfectly reasonable place to build a factory because the Rumanians did send their own armies, tanks, and planes into battle on behalf of the Axis.
- Ukraine and Eastern Ukraine were hugely important to the Russian economy in terms of their industrial and agricultural production. I would probably bump them to $3 and $2.
- The Chinese map is still set up to allow the Japanese to quickly and reliably conquer all of China – there’s just not quite enough defensive depth. Everything except Chinghai is 2 spaces away from Shanghai, and if all you’ve got left is Chinghai then the Chinese have no income. I’m not sure of quite the right solution, but I guess I’d ideally like to see three ‘corners’ for the Chinese to hide and regroup in, each of which requires a separate angle of attack for the Japanese – a northern region that the Russians can easily reinforce, a southern region that the British can easily reinforce, and a western region where the Chinese themselves can generate their own units that won’t be immediately blown up. Part of the answer here might be to get away from the “every Chinese territory is worth $1” setup. E.g. if you add a Chungking region worth $3 in the far southwest, and bump Ningxia to $2 and add a buffer territory to the east of Ningxia? There’s still the question of how to physically get Russian troops into China; right now Ningxia is at least 3 moves away from the nearest Russian factory, yet only 2 moves away from a hypothetical Japanese factory in Manchuria. Somehow that ratio needs to be reversed.
Finally, I’d love to see victory cities in South Africa and Brazil – less because of history and more because it’s nice to have that region of the world acknowledged as part of the game. It takes a long time for the Axis to penetrate that deeply into the Allied south/west, which means that if we’re playing for any reasonable number of turns, there won’t be enough time to build up forces, take those territories, profit from the extra IPCs, turn those IPCs into new units, and use those new units to seize a victory city. Unless we’re literally playing to concession, I probably have to ignore those regions of the map to focus on victory cities, which is less fun. The map is there to be played on; I don’t want to ignore any part of it! :-)
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RE: We need an allied playbook.
@marshmallowofwar If you don’t do Taranto, how do you stop Italy from taking Egypt? Not saying it can’t be done, but you do have to do something, and I’m curious what that is. Especially with a factory placed in Egypt on UK1, it starts to get tempting for Germany to send a large air force toward Tobruk/Alexandria to try to do an all-air attack against some of the British units and weaken them enough that Italy can seize the factory.
Also, are you doing Gibastion? If not, where are you stacking the British Med fleet, and how do you stop the Luftwaffe from killing it?
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RE: We need an allied playbook.
@cornwallis Samoa is a clever place to build a naval base; I did not see that it connects to both New York and Queensland. That’s really interesting that you are able to redirect forces that quickly. For me, though, the question is whether the tactical surprise is really worth the investment. On the one hand you’ve got the $15 for the naval base in Samoa, which is expensive. On the other hand, by committing to travel through Samoa, you take pressure off of many of the potential Japanese targets.
As you move boats from San Francisco to Hawaii to Queensland, you are incidentally threatening Tokyo, Korea, Iwo Jima, Wake, Midway, and the Caroline Islands.
As you move boats from New York to Samoa to Queensland, you do not threaten any of those targets – so unless you want to slow down your attack on Japanese hot spots by a full turn, you are kind of broadcasting to Japan exactly where you are going to attack.
Meanwhile, unless Japan panics and commits an unforced error, it’s usually not that hard for Japan to reorient from a land-based strategy to a naval strategy. They start with a massive air force that can be used on land in China, Burma, Siberia, etc., and then that same air force can be flown away and placed on newly built carriers to defend the Pacific islands. Even in a worst-case scenario, where Japan built 3 minor factories on the mainland, they can still pivot to building something like like 3 carriers, 1 destroyer, 5 infantry, and 1 artillery for $75. The carriers accommodate the existing Japanese air force, and the infantry/artillery continue the fight in mainland Asia. The US has to build its own planes, and defender has the advantage anyway, so matching that defending Japanese force would require something like 3 carriers, 2 subs, 3 fighters, 3 tacs for $123. Throw in a couple of loaded transports for $30 so that you can actually retake some of the money islands, and the total bill is $153…basically two full turns of American income just to match one turn of Japanese spending, even when Japan is caught totally by surprise.
Similarly, the European Axis might think that they have to do a lot of defense against an incoming American invasion of Italy or whatever, but as long as they planned that defense intelligently, without panicking, they can still take Moscow on schedule. Right, like so you have a couple extra Italian infantry in Rome instead of a tank, or you have a couple of German subs in the Baltic and it turns out you don’t need them because the whole Allied fleet sailed through the Panama Canal. OK, no big deal. The infantry in Italy can eventually go by transport to Morocco or Syria or wherever they can be useful for harassing the British; the extra subs can go to the Irish Sea for convoy damage. Meanwhile, hopefully the Germans mostly did their defense by buying air power, which can both threaten to shoot down Allied ships, or, if those ships never show up, can fly to the eastern front and support an attack on Moscow.
So while I do like the Samoa naval base for the sheer amusement value and for the chance to break a psychologically weak opponent, I think it’s probably not a valid element of top-tier competitive play. I’m stumped to see how you could recover enough value from the naval base to justify the cost.
One idea I have been playing around with recently is a naval base in Wake Island. It probably only works in Balanced Mod or Path to Victory, because without the extra national objectives for the smaller islands the extra range just isn’t very important, but it’s always bothered me that ships are only moving 2 spaces from San Francisco to Hawaii – it seems inefficient. If you move them 3 spaces from San Francisco to Wake, then another 3 spaces can threaten the widest possible range of Japanese targets, as well as making it harder for Japan to protect Tokyo by interposing a single blocking destroyer.
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RE: We need an allied playbook.
@cornwallis Some interesting ideas in there. I appreciate in particular bombing the sub off Quebec and then landing in Iceland; I hadn’t thought of that, and it’s good to return the bomber as far east as you can as quickly as you can.
I think against your proposed opening I would do a Sea Lion most games, regardless of whether the US looked prepared. Once the British fighters land in west Africa, they can’t make it back to defend London, because there is no airbase there. Likewise the fighter from Gibraltar appears committed to the Tobruk strafe and then presumably lands in Egypt, where it can’t reach London. The new bomber in London is not going to contribute much to defense, so the proposed defensive buy for London is really only 3 units, which in my opinion is not enough after you’ve permanently sent all the fighters away to Africa. Also we’re assuming the Canadian transport was sunk, so no reinforcements arrive from Canada.
Egypt is relatively well-defended for now, but if Britain loses the capital or even if just Britain has to spend its UK2 income on max defense for London, then Italy will have a chance to catch up.
Can you say more about the purpose of strafing Tobruk? What are you trying to accomplish there, exactly?
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RE: Argo's Middleweight Map for 1939 & 1942
@vodot @barnee @Black_Elk @General-6-Stars @Karl7 @Navalland
After years of development, I am pleased to report that Argo’s Middleweight Map is live on TripleA! Look for it as “argomidweight” under the Experimental tab from the “Map Downloads” button, and let me know if you have any trouble. Karl, the paratrooper controls have been fixed; I promise they work now. Vodot, the Azores are a usable territory. Navalland, Case Blue is totally a thing now. I think you’re all going to have some fun. :)
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
Two more bugs – Rio de Oro should connect to French West Africa but doesn’t, and I’m not able to win a triggered victory with the Axis for controlling 13+ Victory Cities for a full turn (see attached saved game). The Axis had 14 VCs at the start of G9, and they still have 14 VCs at the end of G10, but the game isn’t showing any kind of victory message.2022-4-26-WW2-Path-to-Victory.tsvg
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RE: Argo's Middleweight Map for 1939 & 1942
@navalland Thank you again for the feedback on the Caucasus – I have finally implemented the split.
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
@flyingbadger Yup, I checked the XML. It’s a bug; the territory is being assigned to Europe instead of Pacific. The maintainers need to add
<option name="changeUnitOwners" value="British"/> <option name="whenCapturedByGoesTo" value="British:UK_Pacific"/>
to the Kyushu territory attachment.
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
Has anyone thought about making a 3-faction 1939 version of Path to Victory, with Liberals, Communists, and Fascists as three separate alliances? I think the extra territories would be very helpful for simulating Communist vs. Nationalist China, as well as for the historical division of Persia. You could add a new territory type called “pro-Communist” for areas like Baltic States, East Poland, and Northwest Persia. (Not that these areas actually liked the Soviets in any kind of democratic sense; just that the Soviets were able to successfully pull off coups there.) And then you could add a second Chinese-style nation for some of the northwest Chinese provinces that was allied with Russia instead of with the Liberals.
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
@flyingbadger One more bug, I think – as UK Pacific, I was unable to place a minor factory in Kyushu even after controlling it for two full turns. It works fine on edit mode, just not as part of the normal unit placement. I feel like Japan should be part of the Pacific economy, no?
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RE: UK/US Joint Strategy For Africa
@the-spaceman Seems like a good start. A few thoughts to throw into the mix:
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I would say UK’s naval priorities should be first the Baltic fleet, then any stray transports, then any stray subs. The subs don’t do any convoy damage or anything like that, so they’re really just targets of opportunity; it’s not like you can safely leave British transports unattended anyway because of the German bomber, so the subs aren’t doing that much more harm. The Baltic fleet is top priority because it allows Germans to cheaply conquer Norway/Finland/Karelia, and because it’s too expensive for Germany to sanely replace.
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The Australian transport can flee across Argentina to the Atlantic, but I would leave the destroyer behind to block a J2 attack on Australia – I think it does more good slowing down Japan and keeping some of the UK income than it does to get a destroyer added to your Atlantic fleet, like, 3 turns later. For similar reasons, I usually won’t move the starting US Pacific fleet to the Atlantic. If the Allies took unusually heavy naval losses, then maybe it’s worthwhile, but the Pacific fleet is earning you nothing the whole time it’s in transit through the Panama Canal. Having a few starting boats in the Pacific – even just CV, ftr, DD, tran – means that if you ever do need to upgrade the Pacific fleet into a formidable force because Japan is grabbing Alaska and Hawaii or whatever, then you can do so with one turn of purchases. If you can’t quickly reinforce the US Pacific fleet to the point where it can drive away the Japanese navy, then you might be forced to buy 10 infantry for the Western US instead or something similarly expensive and wasteful.
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It doesn’t always make sense to build a huge Atlantic fleet at all as the Allies – sometimes you can sink the Italian fleet using primarily air power and subs, and/or build a pair of factories in Egypt, South Africa, India, or Australia. Some games you won’t have enough good safe factory sites, and some games you’ll need a big fleet because, e.g., Germany is heavy on air power (so you need protection for your transports) but short on infantry (so invading France is really attractive). On the other hand, if Germany trades its entire air force to wipe out your boats on G1, builds a factory in France on G1, and then drops 6 infantry there on G2, maybe just let the Atlantic navy go for several turns and rely on factories instead, or have the British build factories and let the Americans reinforce with a fleet into Morocco after they build up.
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
I’m trying this out for the first time; it’s pretty interesting so far. I like the islands in the middle of sea zones, and I like having some of the extra sea zones to maneuver in. I also like the larger Lake Ladoga and the revised stats for mechanized infantry.
I used a variation of simon’s Pearl Harbor attack and it seemed to work fine against the AI; I got Hawaii itself on J2 and was able to hold it for a couple of turns, although I think I’ll let it go on US4 to focus on India/Australia. US has been building nothing but DD/ftr/CV in San Diego since the game started, so that’s a win in terms of distracting the US and reducing its income. Obviously a human would do better than an AI, but, you know, I’d do better if it weren’t my very first time on this map.
I saw what I thought was a bug – I activated Vichy on F2, and most of the French colonies went pro-Axis, as they should, but Southern France stayed bright blue. It looked like the French were able to attack Northern Italy out of Southern France if they wanted to. Is that coded differently than it is in Global Bal Mod, or am I missing something?
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RE: WW2 Path to Victory - Feedback Thread
@simon33 Yeah, the Siberian factory is in a very strange spot. It’s on the coast of SZ 5, which Japan can conveniently reach from its main sea zones, from the Formosa/Hong Kong sea zone, or from Guam. Once you capture that factory there’s nowhere else in Asia for Russia to build another one, but if Russia leaves its troops in Siberia proper to defend the factory, then you might as well not have them, because you’re not adjacent to any Japanese territories, so you’re not threatening Japan.
I guess it’s nice to be able to build some artillery to support your infantry stack – but any troops built in Siberia on R1 will still be behind (east) of the main Siberian infantry stack, so they can’t actually help those troops, e.g., attack a German stack in Kazakh on R7. You could theoretically build some mechs and tanks in Siberia on R2 or R3 and have them catch up with the infantry on the march, but you’re never going to have the cash to spare for that; you need the money in Leningrad/Moscow/Stalingrad.
It’s nice to be able to build a transport or whatever that could simulate a Russian invasion of Hokkaido ala a 1946 Operation Downfall if the atomic bomb was never developed, but that’s really just fluff at that point – if a Russian fleet in the Okhotsk Sea can survive a Japanese air attack, then Japan has already lost.
Bottom line is I just don’t see these changes as giving Russia any practical ability to either resist a Japanese invasion or force Japan to heavily garrison Manchuria. I like the spirit of the changes but I’m not convinced that they solve the problem of having Russia be impotent in Asia.
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RE: Medium Luck Combat System
@general-6-stars It’s mostly a matter of perspective. If you’re used to playing BBR or G36 or G40, then of course they’ll seem natural to you.
If you’re not used to those games, then learning that each AA gun rolls up to 3 dice, but only in the first round of combat, and only up to the total number of attacking planes, and they can only hit planes, whereas strategic bombers roll 2 dice that hit at 2, but only in the first round of combat, and they can hit anything, and tactical bombers attack at a 3 unless they’re paired with a fighter or tank, in which case they attack at a 4, but they always defend at 3, even if they’re paired up, whereas fighters always attack at 3 and defend at 4…is a mouthful and a lot to keep track of.
It’s not obvious to me that this is easier than putting your pieces in a colored band and then rolling 1 die for every 3 pieces in that band. It’s just that the BBR rules are more familiar.
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RE: Medium Luck Combat System
@vodot Great questions, as always. And yeah, like you said, it’s a tough sell – but I don’t think it’s that much crazier than BBR combat rules. When you add up the rules for submarines’ special abilities, for the way they get cancelled by destroyers, the various bonuses you get for having different types of pieces together, e.g., fighters + tac, or tac + tank, some of the stuff people are playing with already is pretty complicated. This system has kind of a minimum amount of crunchiness that you have to be prepared to swallow or you can’t play it at all, but once you digest that, there aren’t a ton of extra rules.
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I think it probably makes sense for the attacker to dispose all their forces first, all at once, followed by the defender.
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I’d be very open to the idea of a ‘reserve’ pool. You can place units in reserve at the start of battle instead of putting them in one of the color rows. You can do this regardless of whether you’re over the six-die limit or not. At the start of each round of combat other than round 1, you can move as many units as you like from reserves to one or more particular color(s). Once they’re deployed to a color, they stay there for the rest of the battle or until they’re dead. Thanks for the suggestion. :)
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My design goal in terms of the relative power of each band is that the relative power will be almost 100% situational. If you’re attacking with a small group of infantry and a large stack of bombers, then the yellow band becomes much more important for the defenders, because air power can sweep your bombers off the field. On the other hand, if you’re engaging at sea with mostly battleships and destroyers, then the yellow band is not very important and you might struggle to find a use for your fighters. The red band is normally very important in land combat because it’s the only band that allows you to eliminate units of your choice, so you can pick off enemy tanks or planes, which simulates a blitzkrieg that gets behind enemy lines and disrupts HQ areas. However, if you’re fighting a stack of 20 infantry with no heavy weaponry, then choosing your casualties is much less important – although it’s still marginally useful to have some tank support, because the red casualties get eliminated before the white dice can fire, and because your first tank gets a whole die to itself, whereas you might need 3 more infantry to get an additional white die, or you might be capped on white dice if your infantry stack is large enough.
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The defender gets an extra white die in every combat, which matters a lot in small battles. The attacker also has to dispose their forces first, which can create a tactical advantage for the defender. In very large battles like Kursk, Stalingrad, Normandy, Midway, etc., it’s difficult to say that there was a defender – both sides historically launched dozens of attacks and counterattacks over the course of what would be considered “one battle” in A&A game terms. One effect that bothers me is that the defender in a closely contested front will typically have no air support at all – you can’t land fighters in a newly conquered territory, and under my system an AAA gun is only useful to boost the power of fighters. One way to handle this is to allow fighters to intercept from an air base to any neighboring battle, whether that battle involves an amphibious assault or not. Another is to say that you can land, say, 2 planes in a newly conquered territory, representing your first couple of rough airfields that your engineers throw together there.
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RE: The Afrika Korps
@squirecam I’m late to this thread, but what’s the importance of taking Sweden before you take Turkey? Wouldn’t it be better to just let Sweden be for a turn? If you’re building a second carrier to hold the Baltic and putting pressure on Leningrad, it’s quite hard for the Allies to get any troops into Sweden; Sweden doesn’t have a coastline on the White Sea. I’d much rather risk the Allies getting control of Sweden around turn 6 than risk having the Russians reinforce Turkey on turn 4. If you lose Sweden it creates moderate economic problems later in the game; if you lose Turkey the entire strategy falls apart.
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RE: Axis are underpowered.
@arthur-bomber-harris I know you’re good at this game, but you’ve got to at least partly back up your claims when you’re throwing that much shade – otherwise it’s just rude. It’s not obvious why J3 DoW is a bad strategy; either tell us why you think it’s shit, or link to someone who did.