That would be cool. I’d buy in for sure. It would be a pretty legit offering if it gave the US those warhawks in the Europe set, and the lightnings in the Pacific set. That way we’d get a bunch of warhawks and when you combine the boards you’d have a nice substitution at the ready for the Flying tiger in G40. I’d probably get more excited about seeing some of the 1941 scultps in a 3rd edition than France, but it would be nice for completion. Especially if the manual provided some extra options to expand the game, and perhaps put a new spin on it maybe with marines or vichy stuff. I think a second set up for the Global Board with an alternative start date would be cool and well received. Like they did for AA50

What would also be nice some map corrections for the roundels on Western Canada and Sierra Leon, if doing a new reprint.

@aardvarkpepper Yeah I mean not saying it is representative, just that dude was actually playing hehe. Even with an oddball Japan stall opener there were at least 3 occassions where the AAZ carrier rules altered a move I would otherwise have made.

I think what feels a little strange to me is the primacy given to PBEM or asynchronous play over live play. Like I don’t know anyone who is spending time trying to do things asynchronously on the physical board. I guess in the 80s maybe you could set up 2 boards and make a phone call or whatever, but I don’t see anyone trying to pull this off before dice rollers and email. Its novel sure, but not exactly traditional by any stretch. The original game was clearly intended for live play, and a lot of the nuts and bolts assume at least 2 people in the room actually playing at the same time.

TripleA remains pretty ideal for me, but there isn’t much of a playerbase for 1942 over there. If ever there was those peeps have mostly moved on by now to other games. So the draw of A&Aonline is mainly that, the players. I guess steam is just a more popular or convenient way in, or at least many people seem more comfortable playing a steam game version despite its evident shortcomings right now. Even after GTO demonstrated how easily those can go the way of the dinosaur as soon as the publisher pulls the plug. Doesn’t matter how much time or energy or money you put into GTO, there’s no way to access it anymore. Online only means we’re dependent on continued dev support to keep it running. I guess even TripleA and A&Aorg have to run donation drives to keep the servers up, but least once you have the application installed you can always run it locally. I can still play Hasbro in single player even if the cd is kind of scratched hehe. But yeah, the draw I see is the players coming out of the woodwork, many who probably would never have found tripleA or these boards on their own, but who have found their way to A&Aonline. I still think they’d have more pull if the game was live play primarily, by the book, with asynchronous just as an alternative option.

I don’t know about the devs, but I was playing the gencon set up with Julius last night and had a good time via discord. I’m like a complete insomniac and he was in a timezone way off so guess it aligned. I went for a pacific stall plan that panned out after making making a pretty clean sweep with Russia. Went with the blast on Borneo x2 inf/New Guinea x2 inf 1 cruiser bombard, sz61 1 fighter one cruiser (landed in Bury for the pacific press), Australian Submarine immediate dive in sz 37 for the extra attack forward attack pip and carrier forward to block at Philippines. Starting bomber to Kazakh. UK opened damn near flawlessly, placed a new bomber in India and pair of tanks in India, for UK2 crush on IJN from the air, and rush up of British mobile ground support to eastern front.

Some good early headaches thrown at Axis in the Pacific, but even when you nuke the hell out Japan’s starting fleet, Pearl is still on the table and they got a lot of options on defense. Still seemed to come down to getting ahead in the Atlantic, and basically down to trade German air vs Allied main transport group, after UK finally dropped a deck in round 3. Peeled off too many German air in that exchange for Axis to recover position on the center so called it inside of 7 rounds.

The whole defense profile and AAZ rules for carriers definitely changes some key things. But still feels like A&A even if different than the 1942.2 I was playing a few years back. I guess it works, but it would really be nice if more live play features were introduced and just keeping the asynchronous style as a default option, but with the option to enter live play and normal defender chooses casualties. I think that would probably make most people happy. Clean up the movement UI, and finish up with some basic unit editor (so you can fix player mistakes to save an otherwise hosed game, or bid via added units.) They do that and it probably ends up a pretty good platform for casual pick up games. But yeah, roll out was a little rough. I kind of expected it to be in a more complete state, but the last patch and hotfix added some nice stuff. Hopefully they keep going with it.

I probably use A&Aonline just to keep up, and maybe more new players find a way in that way. I’m too deep into Iron War and probably when 1914 Pops off that will eat up all my time in triplea heheh. It’s hard to go back to v5, but I can’t imagine any other way to play the global game than triplea and don’t see that as something very likely to crack off online elsewhere. I think they’d have an easier time adding the Anniversary game online than G40.

Having LHTR is a big deal for sure! All the other fixes are great, and I’d still love to see the other stuff mentioned in this section taken up in weeks to come (like for movement UI), but for my part its just a lot easier to get excited about the game now all around. I think people probably willing to endure other things, and wait longer for development to proceed when there is a new official set-up to play. Also a nice precedent I think, that could potentially allow for other set-ups down the road, but I dig how you set it up from game launch. I think it has a much better chance of gaining popularity that way and was stoked to see that happen when I hit create game (as opposed to buried in a settings tab or something.) It’s “bam, what’s this!?” so of course you gotta load it up. I honestly don’t know what kind of run this set-up received in the final, certainly many fewer games played than the boxed game I’m sure, and so maybe there are still cool strats to tease out to keep casual users entertained. I feel pretty confident that it will make for better introductions, esp when the new player or less experienced player wants to take Allies rather than Axis. Compared to OOB Allies do feel more in the driver’s seat LHTR, even if that Russian opener is still heart attack inducing hehe.

Anyhow, nice work. Thanks for pushing that out

This is really good news! Thanks man

I think for many players this will bring the board largely into balance. At least the bid in the tournament patch was much narrower.

Yeah I saw that one last night and had to dive in haha. I was in a game with David yesterday so not sure when it launched, but I’ll fire off Japan when I get back from work. Most games default to PBEM style unless you’re really keep an eye on the launch. I think I hung out for maybe 30 min to see if it would launch after joining but after that its like asynchronous only most times and who knows when people are around. For pick up games closer to live play I’d use Discord. The only live games I’ve played to completetion have been by meeting up in the Discord chat rooms. Games are pretty boring otherwise with no way to talk.

ps. Just got home and fired it off. The emperor was pleased with our rolls. Hopefully will get back round to G before too long, best of luck Imperious. If you hop on the A&A Discord I use the same handle there.

More screens for consideration. These show things like View settings or Map settings/options. Right now the only settings we can really access or change in A&AOnline are for the defense profiles. But basically more features, both for graphics type stuff or general game options that can be accessed or viewed from the in game tabs. Currently most tabs we can click only provide reference information, anything graphics setting or map view related is just like on/off for animations or sounds etc, but no real way to alter what’s displayed or how.

Some of the Hasbro menus (lot of game options in that one, note especially stuff like Quick Roll or Ruleset, but also novel options like USSR Restricted or Kamikazes. Also Timemachine, which is very useful.

Some TripleA menus

Again alas I don’t have any access to GTO because its defunct, but that one had a fair number of game/display options as well.

So another area where I think we could see more. Thoughts?

Also just for the record, I am enjoying Axis and Allies Online.

I picked this thread to drop those screens because I just wanted to re-iterate that I think the work so far has been pretty good, and I am using it more than I thought I would be, and weirdly way into 1942 sec edition again. But all that said, I think there are many ways it could be improved, and its hard to talk about that at Steam because threads get buried or subject goes negative, and sending feedback direct is kind of one sided, whereas I find it easier to gather my thoughts in discussion.

One thing I did like about GTO was the handling of the battleboard screen and fast combat. This was organized pretty well there I thought.

Here are some more screens for comparison.

Hasbro Combat

TRIPLEA Combat

GTO Combat

BEAMDOG Combat

I tried to grab a few screens since it’s animated by default, the final was with those animations turned off… You can see like Microprose its basically a full screen combat menu, rather than a windowed one. I prefer a combat window for fast battle, that allows us to still drag around the map.

Also here are screens of the SBR handling. I don’t have GTO for that but I think it also had a prompt/confirm. (I was pulling from a youtube video for GTO, kind of sucks that even when you drop the ducats you don’t get to own the software like you used to. Like obviously I can still load up my old Hasbro CDs, but when an online only platform goes down you’re just outta luck.) Anyhow in the beamdog version the arrow line turns red if the factory is clicked, but no prompt. If you put the bomber into the territory instead of the factory the line remains white and the bomber will attack, even if unaccompanied.

Yeah I get what you’re saying man. All I’m saying is that you could put your own map into TripleA and customize other things if you wanted, but you gotta do your own legwork for that to happen. There’s not any sort of team on it. Most of the people who created the artwork that tripleA uses aren’t even around anymore, and the default stuff is usually just a selection of whatever seemed popular from previous iterations of like 5-10 years ago. Not saying its the easiest thing in the world to get under the hood and alter graphics, but least there are ways to do it. If you find the default ugly, it can be changed on the fly by the user, all I was trying to point out.

(ps. Also gotta remember that we got DMCA’d a long time back, with the result that TripleA lost a large share of its user base, and some of the best graphics we had developed for the official games. We also lost the project creator at that time. I haven’t seen or heard from Sean in forever, but there was a point there where it was poised to look really beautiful. But someone at corporate must have axed us hard, so they could launch the GTO version or whatever. I honestly don’t know what happened, since I usually take long breaks from A&A and then return in a fit of excitement, but something must have gone down. I know it went dark for a few months and returned sans some of that content. I’m still kind of bitter about it. Felt like some of the most dedicated enthusiasts I knew were iced out, and nobody would touch the older mods. Which honestly is part of the reason it’s butt ugly if it is, because it was too good for its own good in other areas hehe.)

Sorry trying not to veer off topic here overmuch with tripleA. Just wanted to call attention again to the Beamdog screen that I took above, focusing especially on the movement arrows. Or here is another that I sent to their feedback site, which shows some of what I find problematic…

One thing you might notice is that the “moved” units often occupy a different position along the arrow line. Sometimes the unit rides the line where the arch of the curve is most extreme, sometimes it’s at the beginning of the line, sometimes it’s near the end by the arrow point. Often if the unit is riding a bend, it can be hard to trace the line when it picks back up again on the other side of the unit.

In general I’d say it’s just visually confusing and hard to parse. There might be an argument to be made about the visual appeal of an “attack pattern” with a bunch of arrows, or for having a kind of more organic look to the way units are grouped (instead of all straight vector lines, or units in neat rows and columns) but from the perspective of reading the UI at a glance, I just find it a tangle. It’s not that I dislike the visual per se, I just think those sort of graphics/animations could be used for something other than planning out movements. Like if it was just a flash of attack routes that took place before combat zoom, that’d be great. But trying to parse all those curved lines during the actual movement phase (when you’re trying to do/undo stuff) is really quite difficult and requires a ton of clicks.

IL I know you like making maps for the physical boards, this is one area where you could probably help if you wanted. Hepps is blowing my mind lately with the work he’s been doing for newer custom games, but I’d agree that many of the older WWII maps leave something to be desired. I also know you aren’t the biggest fan of the boxed 1942.2 gamemap. Sure there are limits to the baseline maps tripleA uses, but you can do a lot with skins and map details. The PDF you have posted in the 1942 sec edition section for example, that’s something I imagine could be added as an optional map skin. Same deal with the unit graphics, like if you don’t dig the default ones, alternative icons can be used. Territory colors can be adjusted using Hex Codes. Anyhow, main point is that nobody over there catches a paycheck for their contributions, and nobody is really beholden to anyone else’s views on map aesthetics. On the upside though, anyone can contribute and try to make it better, just gotta throw the hat in there.

Right now this level of functionality or customization doesn’t exist in A&AOnline, so we have to rely on their in-house art team. But it would certainly be nice if it did have some tools or ways to import custom art assets, or allow for more modern approaches to graphics.