To follow up on my last post, here’s a rough example of what the miniature rosette concept would look like. I used my own string of badges as a prototype, and the mini version ended up being about 50% shorter than the full-sized string. The minis are squared-off versions of the rectangular badges, which actually works better than circular rosettes – it’s equivalent in compactness, and it reflects more effectively the angular (rather than circular) shape of the full-sized badges.

@djensen said in Forum Migration To Do List:

@CWO-Marc I think we have a unique use of badges in our community. BGG aside most other services just give you a badge for your subscription period and don’t date stamp it. What I would like is tick marks (maybe 3-5 pixels wide) for “hidden” badges and they expand when you roll over them. So you could have 1-2 primary badges and the rest are small blocks of color.

Yes, our community’s use of badges does resemble what could be called the “Marshal Zhukov aesthetic” (a uniform covered in medals, orders and decorations), which isn’t surprising in view of the WWII theme of A&A.

At any rate, your idea to have the badges normally display as small images which could individually expand to full size (such as when you roll over them or put your pointer on them) sounds like a good approach. Rather than using an abstract tick mark, however, I’d suggest using some sort of small circular rosette, which would be similar to the practice which is often used for civilian decorations: the full-sized decoration is only worn on certain formal occasions, but in day-to-day life the recipient can wear a miniature version of the insignia, which is essentially a lapel pin. See the attached picture as an example. The full-sized A&A badge could (and I think should) keep its traditional horizontal rectangular form, which has the advantage of being similar to a military service ribbon but has the disadvantage of having a space-consuming shape even when it’s reduced to a tiny icon.

@djensen said in Forum Migration To Do List:

@Panther said in Forum Migration To Do List:

So the task is to find a solution for correctly displaying text when many badges are present.

Not a task for us, that’s a bug and needs to be reported to the NodeBB team.

Hmm…interesting problem. It would be nice if the NodeBB folks could find a solution to this problem, such as by having an excessively long line of badges display as two superimposed shorter lines if it goes over a certain length limit. Badges are an incentive for members to donate funding to support the forum, and it would be a shame (and ironic) if contributors ended up having to hide the record of those incentives because of a design problem in the software of the very forum that they’re supporting. A further irony is that the members most affected by the problem would mainly be the ones who have the longest record of supporting the site.

Along similar lines: General Joseph E. Johnston, who had surrendered his forces to General William Tecumseh Sherman in the last days of the Civil War, died just a few weeks after Sherman. He had attended Sherman’s funeral and had kept his hat off during the proceedings (despite the cold and rainy weather) as a sign of respect to his former adversary; he caught a cold as a result, and it developed into pneumonia.

@Panther said in Category and topic sorting questions:

@CWO-Marc said in Category and topic sorting questions:

On an unrelated point, I note that Panther’s full array of badges displays in his posts but that most of mine don’t; only the customizer one does. Is this something I need to adjust via the Settings menu?

Yes: Profile -> Edit -> Group Title (select there)

Great, thanks – it worked.

Ah, okay – now I see the pattern. I’ve just looked at a few other board sections, and the pattern looks consistent, so yes that clears things up. Thanks for shedding light on this minor mystery.

On an unrelated point, I note that Panther’s full array of badges displays in his posts but that most of mine don’t; only the customizer one does. Is this something I need to adjust via the Settings menu?

Thanks for clarifying that (if I understand correctly), the non-pinned threads are indeed sorted by how recently a post was added to them, that the newest post in a given thread is shown in the right-side column, and that the dates given on the left side of the screen are the dates of original thread creation rather than the date of the most recent post (which explains the non-chronological order of those dates). If you compare the picture posted by Panther with the screenshot I’ve posted below, however, you’ll note that the order of the posts on the left side of the screen matches but the order on the right side of the screen doesn’t match. In my screenshot, the chronological order jumps around on both sides of the screen, which is puzzling. (This actually looks more like Djensen’s screenshot than Panther’s.)

Today I reset my password and signed on to the new forum for the first time. I’m still in the early stages of familiarizing myself with the new look and functionalities, but there’s one thing that’s puzzling me. Each section of the forum has a “Sort By” clickable setting with four options: Newest to Oldest, Oldest to Newest, Most Posts and Most Votes. The default is Newest to Oldest, which is great because that’s my preference, but it doesn’t seem to work properly. As an example: a short while ago, I went to page 1 of the A&A&Zombies section. The section starts, correctly, with half a dozen pinned threads (which are in the right recency order), but then it’s followed by this list of threads (see below) whose order jumps around chronologically. Is the sorting function still being fine-tuned? Or does the “Newest to Oldest” concept reflect the date of a thread’s original creation, rather than reflecting how recently a new post was added to it?

Zombies and 1942 scenario
a day ago • Cimmric 0

Attacking Zombie controlled territories
6 days ago • lozmoid 0

Piece Count
5 days ago • lozmoid 0

Somebody please make a “MOD” of AAZ for Axis and allies 1940 global
6 days ago • Maxiheimer 0

Axis win condition strategies always the same?
10 days ago • P-Unit 0

Where WOTC got the idea for this game…
about a month ago • Imperious Leader 0

Deutschland uber Zombes: German AAZ Strategy Discussion
14 days ago • taamvan 0

How to Play Axis and Allies Video
11 days ago • Wolfshanze 0

Video: AAZ Unboxing
20 days ago • djensen 0

Anybody want to write an AAZ strategy article?
15 days ago • djensen 0

Polygon A&A&Z article, October 30, 2018
15 days ago • zooooma 0

I Think Joshua From “War Games” Said It Best….
about a month ago • hkytown1 0

A&A&Z set up cards question
16 days ago • robert t 0

Shore bombardment is different
19 days ago • Panther 0

Subjective Complaints about AAZ (Zombies are stupid thread)
6 months ago • variance 0

AAZ Tournament Rules brainstorming
20 days ago • djensen 0

The Chainsaw Tank, kept forgetting to use it…
about a month ago • Narvik 0

Rule question regarding allies as defenders against zombies
24 days ago • Caesar Seriona 0

Cold War 1962 and Zombies, how it should have been
about a month ago • Narvik

And to add a supplementary reason to the ones already mentioned by P@nther and Krieghund, consider the following argument.

The area under dispute shows two borderlines: the yellow terrestrial one between Newfoundland/Labrador and Quebec, and the blue maritime one between SZ 116 and SZ 106.  The yellow one runs horizontally west-to-east, then make a 90-degree turn and runs vertically southward.  The blue one runs horizontally east-to-west, and connects with the vertical component of the yellow one, forming a right angle.

In most places on the map, the end-points of borderlines are clear and unambiguous. WolfPack points out, correctly, that this particular intersection of two borderlines in question isn’t clear and unambiguous: the point at which the yellow and blue lines meet is a fuzzy dark line rather than a hard transition from yellow to blue. And it’s quite correct that this creates ambiguity, as is shown by the fact that an official clarification once had to be issued on the matter.  WolfPack’s “I think you may change your mind that NF doesn’t border SZ106” follow-up post seems to indicate that he doesn’t agree with the official clarification.  The supplementary argument I’d make, therefore, has to do with the concept of the mapmaker’s probable intent.

If you imagine that the yellow and blue lines are solid red – i.e. if you draw a long vertical red line through the middle of the vertical yellow one and a long horizontal red line through the middle of the horizontal blue one – there’s no question that they form a right angle and that the territory of Newfoundland/Labrador lies entirely within that right angle, and thus that there’s no connection between Newfoundland/Labrador and SZ 106.  This would fit with Theory A: the mapmakers intended for that right angle to be a hard, clean border, but an unintended graphic error made the border look confusingly fuzzy.  This explanation has the virtue of being both simple and plausible.

Theory B, on the other hand, goes like this: the little fuzzy dark line between the yellow line and the blue line was deliberately put there by the mapmakers in order to connect Newfoundland/Labrador to SZ 106.  This theory seems neither simple nor plausible.  If the mapmakers genuinely wanted to connect Newfoundland/Labrador to SZ 106, why would they do so by using a “pixel-wide trace” technique which is used nowhere else on the map, and which is so open to debate, rather than by cleanly and unambiguously giving Newfoundland/Labrador a coastline on SZ 106, which would have been quite easy to do?

@SS:

@Argothair:

It’s clear that cruisers are overpriced; people very rarely want to buy them. What’s less clear is how to fix the problem or what kind of theme or niche cruisers are supposed to fill.

Your suggestion still makes the Sub and Destroyer stronger than the Cruiser and Battleship compared with cost and punch. I think your aiming at having a fleet escorted by subs and destroyers to protect your capital ships ?

In case this is a useful element to add to this discussion, US Navy doctrine in the Pacific ultimately settled on the concept of the carrier-based task force, and those task forces were generally set up to provide multiple layers of protection to the carriers at their centre.  The protection emphasized anti-aircraft capability (because by the end of WWII naval aviation had overtaken gunnery as the primary offensive weapon of major fleets), but it also was designed to protect against enemy surface-combat ships (whose approach is easy to detect, and thus which are relatively straightforward to deal with) and against submarines (which pose a more difficult defense problem because they’re harder to detect when they’re submerged).  Perhaps the A&A cruiser problem could be solved by applying this model in some way, possibly as some sort of combined-arms bonus, so that the cruiser by itself would still be a debatable purchse but a cruiser as part of a combined-arms defensive setup would be of definite value.

The multi-layered defense model used by the US Navy basically had two components: the task force itself, disposed in a concentric-ring arrangement, and distant scouting elements which were arranged more loosely and which weren’t necessarily part of the task force itself (they might include, for instance, subs which were on patrol missions for other purposes).  The job of these distant elements was to alert the fleet about any enemy units they happened to come across, whether by accident or by design.  That part probably isn’t applicable to A&A, where all the players can see all the units on the board.

An enemy force (for simplicity, I’ll simply deal with an enemy force of aircraft) approaching the task force itself would run into its layered defensive structure, which was designed to subject the attackers to increasingly dense firepower and wear them down by attrition.  The outermost ring would consist of destroyers (both conventional ones and specialized anti-aircraft destroyers).  The next ring would consist of cruisers, which carried more (and heavier) guns that destroyers.  The next ring would consist of battleships, which carried even more (and heavier) guns that cruisers.  Mixed in with all this was the task force’s combat air patrol (CAP), i.e. fighter planes launched from the carriers, whose job was to shoot down incoming enemy planes (ideally as far away from the task force’s centre as possible).  At the centre of the task force were the carriers themselves, which had a certain amount of anti-aircraft firepower of their own for last-ditch defense against incoming planes, though not as much firepower as the battleships and cruisers.

Obviously this ring structure, which is a tactical formation that involved many dozens of ships, isn’t suited for literal replication on an A&A board, but it could be implied by placing one or more ships of each type into a group and by applying to the group some kind of combined-arms bonus (perhaps specifically an anti-aircraft combined-arms bonus) whose value would depend on which types of ships are present in the group.  A complete group would have the best bonus – so in that context, the value of purchasing a cruiser would be that it allows a player to obtain a full-bonus complete group.  To give a concrete example: a full-bonus complete group might consist of at least one destroyer, one cruiser, one battleship and one carrier (and maybe one submarine too), and the absence of one particular unit type (let’s say, the cruiser) could not be compensated for by throwing in multiple units of a different type (say, several destroyers).