Indications from the latest Q&A would seem to confirm that A&Aonline won’t have a lot in the way of set up adjustment, at least in early access. So I’m suggesting this rule as the only thing I can think of right now to reset the playbalance in a way that will actually work with the game we get.

I still don’t know what sort of patterns would ultimately develop on balance, but at least it is a way to get something new going for a 1942.2 that strictly uses the boxed starting set up.

I imagine this only works for PvP, so not sure how they will handle solo play vs the AI.

@Argothair

Yeah, although making a colorblind friendly map isn’t the goal in itself, its just a natural consequence of making better graphic design choices hehe. The stuff I’m talking about is very much for players with normal vision. Since our brains fixate on patterns and our eyes are drawn to contrast in any image, and because value is such an extremely powerful component in that, the first thing I’m drawn to in your draft (just like the WWII maps), is all the neutral tiles. So my eye darts around from Sweden to Arabia to South America etc, because that is where the highest value contrasts are occuring. There are lots of ways contrast can be used to highlight various focal points in an image, I just think that the standard WWII maps do a poor job of it, so I wouldn’t suggest following them as a model.

Instead I would set the primary value contrast between the land tiles and the ocean tiles, so the whole map reads well at a glance. If you have the variation on land be in the mid-range values, which can still be very dramatic at either end of the mids, you can eliminate the unseemly pops while still preserving the high contrast for something more relevant like you wanted between Axis territories and Allied territories.

I just brought it up since its a new map you are free to make a different color value choice for the ocean than they did for Revised/Global, which is now the default for all those WWII maps.

For sure, I read over the ideas on how to streamline and simplify, Russia balance etc and it all sounds good to me. Nice work

Pps. one more quick illustration of what I mean. Sorry for briefly turning the thread into an expose on sea zone color theory, but I’ve spent a kind of ridiculous amount of time thinking about it hehe, and haven’t had a chance to talk about this stuff in a while.

Below I attached two versions of the AA50 baseline, the first has a very dark ocean with all the land territories at roughly 50% gray. The second has a very light ocean, again with all the land territories at roughly 50% gray.

What I wanted to show was that, we can use a lot a variation above/below 50% value for land colors, (colors with values that are still very easy to differentiate from one another), but which are unlikely to ever be confused with the basic sea zone color value. This is why I like to save the mid-dark tones for the land territories, instead of wasting the 50% sweet spot in on the ocean, if that makes sense. I think the range between 20%-80% grey can give you a lot of variation in color value for land territories, just saving that last 10-20% at either end for the Ocean, depending on whether you like it light like Classic, or dark like Revised (the physical game boards I mean.) That way you have a lot of room to work the values in mid range, while still maintaining an overall map that reads easily at a glance, value-wise, with fewer pops. In my mind neutral/impassible territories should never draw the eye, but should kind of fade into the background, which is part of why the color values for the current WWII maps in tripleA kind of bug me. I think there was a better approach, but for whatever reason it keeps going back to the tripleA revised map aesthetic, which sadly was colored before I got involved in the project hehe.

Also one other quick note on baseline drafting that might be helpful. I’d take your basic baseline as far as you can before adding in the circular territories. When I made the domination map for tripleA I learned the hard way about including circles too soon, since it can be a pain to move or adjust their location later, if you change your mind about something or have to redraw the baseline borders again. Especially since its pretty easy to include them later when setting up the final draft. Might also be worth considering waiting to fill impassible territories for the last minute too, just in case, since that’s another one that can be a pain if you need to return to redraw something later. Just for the working baseline in tripleA I mean, I know the stuff above is more of a mockup.

Oh and Gimp is a pretty useful application to have on hand for messing with the baselines, and its free, if you like to do more complicated stuff like selecting or replacing colors quickly and don’t want to spring for adobe products. I drew the originals in MS paint if you can imagine, pixel by pixel, good grief, but I’d use Gimp now for most stuff since its basically photoshop for the cheap seats hehe.

Anyhow, you can definitely do a ton of stuff now with map details and skins later on than used to be the case, but I still think a really clean baseline with a nice read for the ocean is worth it.

Will keep an eye on things and check back as it gets further along.
Best,
Elk

@Argothair

Point 3 is major. I remember bringing it up on the Larry boards and trying to explain the merits of that approach back before AA50 came out, since we had tried it with Midway and a couple other spots in Pact of Steel and I thought it made things a lot more interesting. But he seemed pretty committed to his definition of an island being entirely contained within a sz (despite UK breaking with that definition all along.) Anyhow, I think the gameplay is more dynamic for island hoping and naval cat and mouse when they straddle the sz borders.

For colors I don’t have a strong opinion when it comes to individual nations, but I guess I do have strong opinions when it comes to the overall color scheme for the whole, which I’ll elaborate on here in a sec. In tripleA its easy to edit the territory colors in the gamefile hex code on the player’s end, though much harder to adjust the color for the unit graphics themselves, so I guess that is something to keep in mind. One thing I’ve found helpful in the past is to differentiate the various national colors on 2 out of the 3 color dimensions. Color pedantics to follow hehe…

So for any color you have Hue, Value, and Saturation.

Hue just means ‘color’ in old english, which isn’t very helpful, but it basically refers to position in the rainbow, roygbiv.

Value is often described as the position along a grayscale, from white to black or tint to shade.

Saturation or Vibrancy is the intensity of the color, or how much light it kicks off. They are basically synonymous but sometimes vibrancy is an easier tool to work with in a graphics editor since it usually isolates the totals at one end and leaves the mids, whereas a saturation tool usually moves everything at once.

Even people who may have trouble distinguishing Hue (red/green colorblind is the most common), will usually still be able to distinguish Value or Saturation pretty easily. I think Value is the most recognizable and easiest to work with. The quickest way to determine what Values you have is to desaturate everything and make the map grayscale. If you can still differentiate the various nations in grayscale then you are usually solid. Just note that the defaults for most nations in tripleA do a really poor job of this. Some nation’s territories are almost identical in value/saturation. Many people have a strong aesthetic preference for colors at a certain value/saturation threshold and end up just changing the hue, which can lead to everything being more similar than one might realize at first.

In the WW2 tripleA games the color values for many nations are very similar Germany/USA almost identical, Japan/Neutral the same, Russia/Britain the same. Here with Argos draft it is divided more by side Allies are lighter, Axis darker, which I like.

Also one last thought on color, when I made the original baselines for AA50 and the World Projection Map, parts of which have been used for various other tripleA maps, I put the ocean at a pretty light value intentionally. I honestly think I could have gone even lighter, so that nothing competed with it on the high end, and the ocean was always lighter than land. But for whatever reason someone changed the ocean to a mid-range value almost 50% gray, which was a weird call in my view. In the standard WWII maps it creates these strange visual ‘pops’, where some land territory colors are significantly higher value (closer to white), than other land tiles or than the sea (i.e. impassible neutrals, or lighter nations like Japan.) I think it is better to go way light or way dark on the Ocean color value. Below are examples of those same baseline maps I posted before, but totally desaturated to show how far you can push the value and still be blue just with hue/saturation adjustment. The last set shows an extremely light ocean color, probably about as far as I’d go before it gets obnoxiously light for me, but which would definitely allow all the darks/mids of the land tiles to be easily distinguished from the sea zone tiles, and make the overall ‘world’ of the world map feel more visually cohesive.

I’m not 100% percent, but I don’t think the ocean color for the standard WWII tripleA maps is something that can be quickly edited in the map file (its not listed with the hex codes for everything else), and the mapmaker will take any color other than pure black/white as a sz, so its kind of a pet peeve that all those standard A&A maps use a blue that is so close in value to true gray. Basically you need to turn on map details and provide a skin to make it look better after the fact, but yeah, the default ocean color is pretty far from what I had originally envisioned before they cut up the baseline. Alas. Logan’s color choice for the ocean tiles in the tripleA Classic map was better in my view, though still a little “neon glow” for my taste, but everything recent follows the standard color choices made for tripleA Revised, which is a little unfortunate. Anyhow, I think sea zone color is an important first choice, since it carries through after you color the baseline.

Totally on board with points 5-8. I really believe that its possible to have a more complex map (in terms of total territories/sz, or number of player nations, even the unit roster) without upending the learning curve, provided the basic rules are universal and other stuff isn’t too wild like with objectives and whatnot.

Anyhow, just wanted to offer some encouragement. Looks cool so far

ps. curious historical aside, in western painting blue pigment was rare and so many famous painters used clever tricks to limit its use. With a limited pallet of Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ocher (red mud, brown mud, yellow mud) + Black and White, you can create the illusion of blue in your grays. Rembrandt was pretty slick at it. The storm on the sea of Galilee is a fun example. Almost all the blues you see in the sky/ocean there are actually grays, but they appear blue when viewed next to the colors that surround them. I think its cool. Anyhow point being, probably way too much thought can go into choosing the blues and the grays lol, but I think its important hehe.

ps. That one was keyed off a scenario more late colonial era/early 1900s for Europe, but found it pretty easy to adjust for different eras once I knew where those spots were relative to each. Usually just needs a couple tweaks to make it recognizably 1940s after collapsing stuff down into larger regional tiles.

I think its easier to key in all the sz tiles first before adjusting the ocean color for tripleA use, but its pretty easy to switch after you have the divisions in place. Here the Atlantic ocean is compressed quite a bit since you didn’t need a ton of space there for AA50 scale, but is also pretty simple to extend, or move the wrap line if you need to add in more sz space.

That last one is about as dark as I can go before I can’t see the black pixels anymore, but you can make sz boundaries white after with a mapskin which seems to work pretty well for a more revised style look.

The A&A world map is pretty crazy, but I was fairly happy with how that projection turned out. I try to keep this one in mind when thinking overmuch on the relative scale, but I feel you can get away with a lot and have a world map that looks pretty familiar while still being playable for stuff like unit crowding…

https://goo.gl/images/4E3LH9

I like those ideas for a more advanced board. I think you could get some fun production values and choke points using something like that.

Here’s a baseline with a bunch of tiles if anyone wants to play around. You can erase borders or redraw the geometry. I had the ocean pretty light from a while back, and don’t have any sea zones drawn on this one, but those are easy to add. The islands are probably overkill for a smaller board, but they’re simple to delete or round out into larger groups. There is a little clipping at the top with Norway since it was an older draft, but still pretty easy to carve up or extend if anyone likes to play around with ideas. This was off the AA50 projection I did, but it warps pretty well if people like to re-scale it. I tried to put in a lot of smaller political boundaries so that they could stretch relative to each other, before knocking em out to form larger divisions. Europe is pretty large here relative to the rest of the globe (I had it pulling off at Gibraltar in this draft for a larger med) but I think you might be able to stretch even larger there if desired just by tweaking the aspect, and still feel pretty recognizable. To get AA50 I just compressed Spain and expanded UK a bit. Usually some liberties are taken when drafting the eastern front or central Russia to match the A&A distortions, but tried to have Asia/China a bit easier to work with and Europe/Med scaled up as much as possible without smashing Africa too much. Scandinavia can also be compressed or tilted even more than I did here and I think it still works if people like a taller Europe or need more room for sz, but this was kinda where I settled for something similar to a classic projection but with less blobbing and some recognizable 20th century political boundaries to draw from.

here’s a darker one more like revised if you like something deeper for the briny blue.

ps. for the sitzkrieg round in G40, if you did the skip phase thing for playing digitally you’d be one round closer to round 4 for the political game before combat begins in earnest, so sort of speeding things up on the timeline a little. I wonder if there’s any interesting production or base builds, or any major battle breakers that could throw things for a loop?

Secret purchase might be fun on the table top, I can see some nail bitters that way haha. Digitally its a little harder to time a simultaneous reveal which is why I figured following the regular turn sequence would probably be easiest to implement there.

In the AA50 1942 scenario it can get pretty wild, since Japan has enough for 4 transports or the option to drop a factory and 2 transports, or pair of bombers and another transport, or probably a lot of other builds. But the Allies also have a few ways to bolster the Russian and British openers, and to get the USA ready to move out a bit sooner. In the AA50 1941 scenario I see Germany and Russia could stack up quite a few tanks against each other, or maybe try to tango with air depending on what G does. Japan has less money to throw around, but they’re all set to stomp anyway in 41, so least it gives the Allies a chance put a few more hitpoints in China and for the Americans to prep for a response. Saving up some of their loot for a major purchase in round 2 is also a possibility for UK/USA if they want to keep the Axis side guessing, or stack drop fleets all at once for a stronger defense, since Axis have so many starting aircraft.

In 1942.2/1942.3 I think 1 fighter 2 art 2 inf might be a nice conservative build for Russia. You could put the ground in Caucasus to ice Ukraine and have the 3rd fighter in Karelia for Sea Lion coverage just in case, but without giving up too much of the defensive edge, since you’d still have those boots on the ground down south. A little more punch each round coming from the extra fighter if it goes more traditional ground war like it probably would, and let the other Allies pick up the slack. For a more aggressive Russian opener you could put two more hitpoints into Karelia to try and snake Baltic states or Belo without it being quite so dicey, and still have enough juice to deal with the Ukraine situation. Or you could try to do like fleet killer stuff in the skies with a Red Dawn bomber play. I think it could be pretty cool.

Hehe for sure, least it has the benefit of being simple to explain whatever the ultimate shake down on balance. If nothing else bound to be interesting for a switch up I’d think.

Seems like something that’s been proposed before, but haven’t actually seen it in operation for the more recent boards. Might be fun in a tournament just to throw everyone a curve ball

In 1942 Russia could build another pair of fighters or a pair of strategic bombers. Wondering if that might be enough to back down an all out Sea Lion play by Germany (where they try to max transports to take England on G2)? If a Russian air build can deter an easy Sea Lion and at least make it too dicey, then I think you might have an interesting game there, since G would have to consider surface ships to cover vs a Soviet R1 air strike rather going all transport crazy which might be fun. If UK can afford to build a couple ships in the zero round and stack up with their remainder, and if the USA can save their Atlantic transports that’s pretty major for team Allies. Potential for KJF if Russia uses air to the Pacific?

Axis still get a build too though, so wondering how they might play it with an extra preliminary purchase?

In AA50 and especially in G40 there is a lot more going on. But still wondering how those might play too? Especially if zero round production or naval buys might be interesting for flipping the opening combat dynamic during round two on its head.