I don’t know if this could be of any use for your project, but I’ll mention it in case it’s relevant. I once read a book about miniatures-based wargaming campaigns, and it mentioned a particular wargamer who wanted to create his own fictitious continent for a medieval-era game. He had few graphic design skills, but he was a creative thinker and he figured out an easy and low-cost (in fact, no-cost) way to carry out his project. (Note that at the time he was using 1980s resources, and that today this would be even easier to do with GoogleMaps.) He got himself a bunch of free tourist pamphlets and travel brochures containing decent-sized maps of lesser-known places within countries rather than of countries themselves – like the island of Corsica, for instance. He fitted them together in a way that looked attractive, put a large sheet of paper over them and traced their outlines to produce the main countries / nations of his fictional continent. The small awkward gaps between the map sections were put to good use by being turned into little independent principalities (like Lichstenstein in in real world). He used similar techniques to insert coastlines, mountains, lakes and rivers into his fictional map. The result was a large, attractive, geographically plausible continental map which looked completely different from the real world because its component countries weren’t originally countries in our world, weren’t originally near each other, and weren’t originally of similar sizes. Using GoogleMaps today would be even easier because you can scale its maps up or down as much as you want just by rolling the wheel on your mouse.
Best posts made by CWO Marc
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RE: Axis and Allies on a Fictional Map / Earth-2 (idea for a new A&A game?)
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RE: Older Battleships
I haven’t checked their catalogues specifically for what you’re looking for, but these two sources might work nicely. I’ve bought stuff from them and was happy with my purchases.
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RE: Some questions
And on a related point: in the early printings, which had red Japanese pieces, the Chinese infantry units were straight copies of the Russian infantry units (brown, as I recall), stamped “RU” under the base. In the later printings, which had orange Japanese pieces, the Chinese infantry units were still copies of the Russian infantry units, but they were stamped “CH” under the base and they were red in colour. I own a few of those sculpts (eight, to be precise), and I think of them as, quite literally, “Red Chinese infantry” units.
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RE: Obusier de 520 modèle 1916
Interesting – I’d never heard that the French had a WWI-era railway gun that was used by the Germans in WWII. Just from a theoretical viewpoint, however, I doubt that it could have been used to intentionally target Red Navy ships or even shore facilities; guns of that type probably weren’t accurate enough to hit anything specific within a city-sized target. It was probably used for general-purpose shelling during the siege of the city, to add to the overall misery of the population.
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RE: A&A 1940 Customization Photoshop Files
The pre-digital printing technique that was originally used in comic books (among other applications) is called halftone printing, or halftoning; raster imaging is its digital equivalent. Roy Lichtenstein once painted a giant comic strip panel titled Whaam!, and I think Andy Warhol was also fond of producing oversized images in which the halftone dotting effect was magnified.
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RE: Pearl Harbour Attack
@taamvan said in Pearl Harbour Attack:
Love it. While chess isn’t my personal favorite, it is a model for wargaming. Its amazing that with such a limited set of starting options and pieces, that the game has a tremendous following and has, in all its variants, for centuries.
Some people believe that the sides in chess are equal. This is a misconception; the players start with symmetrical forces, but the White player has + one more unit of initiative, and the Black player has + one more piece of information (what White did). This is a good analogy to our favorite game, and is the starting point for all “asymmetrical” wargames, where the players share common units types and resources, but are each different and unique.
I once heard about a Russian chess grandmaster (I forget who, so I’ll call him So-and-So) who was asked whether he prefers to play the white or black pieces. He answered: “It makes no difference to me. When I play white, I win because I play first. When I play black, I win because I am So-and-So.”
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
Hmm. The flak bursts are fairly uniform in size and seem to occupy a single plane of the image, instead of being of multiple sizes and at multiple locations all over the harbor – which makes me wonder if this picture was doctored for propaganda purposes at the time of its original release, possibly to support the quote about “all the flak that’s up.” It might be a completely authentic picture, or it might have been retouched. The part of the quote which says “Apparently one of the reasons that there wasn’t a third wave was that American antiaircraft fire had greatly improved in effectiveness on the second wave, and that’s when most of the 29 Japanese aircraft were shot down” is something which could reasonably have been believed at the time, though we know in retrospect that Nagumo didn’t launch a third wave out of timidity, even though his officers urged him to do so. But at any rate it’s certainly a great panoramic view, and the colorization was nicely done.
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RE: My idea for an Axis and Allies Game
For whatever it’s worth, here are a few thoughts on the game concept that’s being proposed.
The concept is ambitious, and it would no doubt appeal to players who enjoy free-for-all A&A variants in which all the players play against each other; such variants don’t appeal to me personally, but that’s just my own taste, and the free-for-all idea has certainly been mentioned enough in previous threads on this forum to indicate that some people do indeed find such variations enjoyable.
My main comments aren’t about the free-for-all element but about something else. I initially didn’t know how best to explain those points, but I eventually thought of doing so by making reference to two works of science-fiction which provide useful parallels: Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 future-history novel “Last and First Men”, and the various mirror-universe episodes of the Star Trek franchise.
The game, as described in AandAClassicDude’s posts, would start in the year 1900 and would run until the year 2000. If I understand the concept correctly, the world depicted at the start of the game would correspond to the world as it existed in 1900 in terms of its borders, in terms of the major and minor powers of the time, in terms (presumably) of its background rulers and politicians, and in terms of its military technology. As a starting point, this is fine. What I’m wondering is: as the game progresses over the course of a century, to what extent do these things remain the same and to what extent do they change? And as far as the changes go, to what extent do they deviate from the course of real history and to what extent do they correspond to what actually happened in the real world? And if they do correspond to what actually happened in the real world, what makes them (in terms of the game’s fictional scenario) correspond to it?
To expand on that last point, here’s one specific example. WWII happened (at least in its recognizable form) to a large extent because of the outcome of WWI, which among other things led to rise of the Nazi party during the interwar years. If, let’s say, a game which is played starting in 1900 happens to result in a WWI whose outcome is different from the historical one, or happens to result in WWI not happening at all, how does WWII end up happening in a recognizable form? Does WWII happen at all? Does it happen in a radically different form? What causes it to happen?
As far as I can tell, there are two basic possible answers to the above questions, and in my opinion each one is problematic in its own way. The first possible answer is that the game makes no attempt to replicate real history – meaning that the further away it gets from its 1900 starting date, the more it veers into the realm of historical fantasy. Personally, I wouldn’t find that appealing…and this is where Olaf Stapledon’s novel comes in. I read it a long time ago, and as I recall it starts out in a recognizable version of the late 1920s. From that point onward, however, the first chapter or so provides a future history of how a series of political and military crises plunge the world into a global war then ends up destroying most of civilization. Reading it from the perspective of the 1990s (of thereabouts), I found this part of the novel to be ridiculously unconvincing, antiquated and naive. It probably didn’t sound that way in 1930, but my point is that I was reading it from a late-20th-century perspective, not a mid-20th-century one. So I’d probably have trouble relating to a fictional game history of the 20th century extrapolated from the world as it existed in 1900.
The second possible answer is that the game scenario somehow makes the game stick more or less to the actual course of the 20th century (for example: WWI followed by WWII followed by the Cold War), for the sake of recognisability. That would solve one problem, but it would introduce a new one: providing a credible explanation for how the game manages to stick to the actual course of history, regardless of what the players do. And that’s where Star Trek’s mirror universe comes in. Several Star Trek series have had episodes set in that mirror universe, covering a span of about two centuries. What’s (in my opinion) completely non-credible about those episodes is the fact that, no matter which series is involved, no matter what century it’s set in, and no matter how radically that universe differs from the normal Trek universe in terms of its history, those episodes invariably include characters who are exact (though inverted) counterparts to the ones on the regular show. This perpetual correspondence across the centuries is never explained – or at least not in the shows themselves, though perhaps the novels have tried to rationalize it in some manner. Perhaps such an explanation could be devised for the game scenario in order to make it convincing; offhand, this would suggest a fair amount of game scripting, which actually runs counter to the concept of the game being a free-for-all (unless I’ve completely misunderstood it).
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RE: Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific)
@Cloudesley said in Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific):
@Cloudesley I don’t like these, they are too low resolutions and grey on grey is hard to read, anyone got a snappier style?!
If you’re looking for high-resolution silhouettes of the units, you could use the ones in my unit identification charts:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts
Click on each chart to expand them to full size.
Your four-part table mostly consists of text, plus unit silhouettes, so you could create a higher-resolution new chart by:
- Having one-part large table rather than having four quarter-size tables
- Using images from my ID charts
- Using a larger text font
I don’t know, however, where you could get a larger image of the four grey squares depicting bases and ICs.
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RE: Questions regarding a 1936 start date
A reference source which you might find useful to consult is the Global 1940 map analysis I posted here…
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis?page=1
…because it indicates the pre-war status of the various map territories back to about 1931.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
I was admittedly oversimplifying things when I described Nagumo’s decision as timidity. The situation was more complicated than that. Nagumo went into the Pearl Harbor attack fully anticipating (and, to his credit, being mentally prepared for) the possibility that his task force would suffer heavy losses. When the operation ended up going fantastically well – two successful aircraft waves inflicting heavy damage to the enemy with minimal losses of their own, and with no counterattack against his ships – he found himself in the position (as one author put it) of a man who was running at a door to bash it in with his shoulder and who ended up having the door unexpectedly opened for him at the last moment. He went from being prepared lose a couple of his carriers to wanting to preserve his task force from harm…and indeed, he got all his ships back to Japan without even a scratch in their paint. Unfortunately, it was the wrong call. Nagumo had been chosen for the job because he had seniority, not because he was an aggressive commander; he dutifully did what he’d been ordered to do, but he didn’t go further.
There’s a scene in the movie Tora Tora Tora where Nagumo argues to his air commanders (who were pleading for a third strike, this one targeting Pearl Harbor’s fuel depots and shipyards) that the war is going to be long and hard and that Japan must keep its precious carriers intact for that protracted struggle. I don’t know if the scene is historically factual or not. Nagumo does have a point when he says that in the film, but he’s also missing a counterpoint: even at the risk (which we now know would have been minimal, though he had no way of knowing it) of his task force being found and attacked the the Americans, a strike against the tank farms and dockyards would still have been worth it. The combat-focused Japanese military had a surprisingly poor understanding of the importance of logistics and infrastructure…something that you can get away with in a short local war, but not in a long one (especially against the most industrialized nation on earth) across vast oceanic distances.
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RE: Possible Kursk Game?
It depends on what “work” means – in other words, on whether players would consider a Kursk scenario appealing. Conceptually, Kursk would be similar to A&A D-Day (minus the water) in the sense that the battle was fundamentally a frontal assault on a heavily-defended static position, and similar to A&A Battle of the Bulge in the sense that it would involve ground forces driving into enemy lines, but different from both games in the sense that from the German point of view Kursk was a pincer movement aimed at pinching off a salient, and that from the Russian point of view it was a two-stage offensive-defensive battle. Personally I think it has good potential to make an interesting game, if it’s designed properly.
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RE: Huge maps
I suppose it could be argued that a big table gives the players more maneuvering room, and creates less opportunity for collisions than if they were crammed around a small one. The greatest potential for players to keep crashing into each other would actually be if they were all following the advice of that other Chinese sage, Sun Tse: “When we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
Reaching across a big table is admittedly awkward, but a few techniques can help:
- Have a good supply of long-handled croupier sticks, a.k.a. war rakes, to help you reach across the table as needed. See here and here for inspiration:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/33813/home-made-war-rakes
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plotting_Table.jpg
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Have a good snack table on the other side of the room. That will give people an alternate place to congregate, away from the gaming table.
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A similar trick is to put together a big slideshow of WWII photos and videos and run them on a continuous loop on a computer near the snack table.
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Here’s a deluxe concept that technically would require a split-level room, but which perhaps could be improvised on a more modest scale. The RAF’s plotting rooms had observation galleries…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Radar_and_Electronic_Warfare_1939-1945_CH13680.jpg
…which gave analysts an elevated view of the plotting tables. Combining that concept with the simpler method of providing an array of chairs (as in the other photo above), what could perhaps be done – given a large enough gaming room – is to get a bunch of sturdy second-hand empty wooden boxes of some sort and use them to set up an improvised slightly elevated observation platform on which observer chairs could be lined up. That might get a few players away from the table itself. The boxes could be removed and stacked in a corner, or a garage, afterwards, to free up the floor space between games.
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RE: [House Rules] The Cruiser
And just to add a clarification: destroyers were versatile, but they were not “small and cheap” in the same sense that a tiny plywood PT boat was cheap. Destroyers were high-powered (both in terms of speed and armaments), fully-fledged, ocean-going surface-combat vessels. They may have been smaller and cheaper and faster to build than a cruiser (to say nothing of a battleship), but they were still substantial pieces of naval construction…actual “ships”, as opposed to “craft” and “boats”, which is what “small and cheap” refers to in absolute terms rather than just relative terms.
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RE: Favorite German Merchant Raider
This is the June 1941 Life article in which photographer David E. Scherman published the “mug shot” he took at sea of the raider Atlantis (operating under the false name “Tamesis”), on which he’d been held prisonner. He managed to smuggle the film back to New York when he was freed, American being still neutral at the time. I’ve heard that the photo was soon distributed to every warship in the Royal Navy, who from that point onward knew what the notorious raider looked like. They caught and sank her four months later.
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RE: Favorite Axis and allies game
Pacific 2001 was the first game with convoy zones, naval bases and air bases, and my favorite, the CAP, Combat Air Patrol, the current scrambling is by far not that good.
Another novel feature of the original Pacific game was that it came with two types of American infantry units (regular infantry and Marines, represented by one sculpt model in two different shades of green) and two American fighter units represented by two different sculpts (though their cost and characteristics in the rules were identical).
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RE: Is 1941 better year than 1942 for WWII scenarios?
Interesting question. One of the basic problems with depicting WWII in a board game is that WWII was a conflict that grew in several major stages, with each stage bringing in one or more major powers who were not previously at war. And each stage, it should be noted, had very roughly the same structure: an initial phase of relatively rapid gains by the aggressor, followed by point where the initial offensive stalled, followed by a long period of grinding attrition warfare (punctuated here and there with major offensives). Japan invaded the main part of China in 1937, made initial rapid gains, then stalled. Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (which brought France and Britain into the war), then conquered continental western Europe in 1940 (taking just six weeks to do so), then stalled. Germany invaded western Russia in mid-1941 (which brought the Soviet Union into the war), got almost all the way to Moscow, then stalled. Between late 1941 and mid-1942, Japan overran Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, and several British and American possessions in Asia and the Pacific (which brought the United States into the war), then stalled. In other words, the global picture of who’s in control of what, and of who the opponents are, looks very different depending on which phase gets chosen as the game’s starting point. This is why many of the global-scale A&A games, over the decades, have used mid-1942 as their starting point: it’s the moment of the war where all the Allied powers are finally in play (though the USSR didn’t go to war against Japan until August 1945), and the point where both sides are, in principle, the most balanced, with no clear indication of who will ultimately win the war.
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RE: Global 1940 2nd Edition Map Analysis
SECTION 5B:
SOVIET UNION BLOCK: Selective NotesTERRITORIES OCCUPIED BY THE SOVIET UNION
Disputable map situation:
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Baltic States
The Baltic States (comprising Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were annexed by the USSR between September 1939 and August 1940, the latter date being two months after the June 1940 starting date of the game. -
Bessarabia
Bessarabia, which had previously been a part of Romania, was annexed by the USSR in June 1940. Romania joined the Axis in July 1940 and eventually participated in the Axis war against the Soviet Union which started in June 1941, reappropriating Bessarabia in the process. -
Eastern Poland
The eastern part of Poland was invaded by the USSR in September 1939 and occupied. -
Vyborg
The area labeled “Vyborg” on the G40/2 map corresponds more or less to the Karelian Isthmus. It was originally part of Finland, but it was annexed by the USSR in March 1940 following the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Finland, fighting as an Axis co-belligerent, reappropriated it in June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
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RE: Favourite WW2 Tank
Tough question. I have a soft spot for the Panther, the first tank of which I ever owned a model. It looks good, and it’s a fair match with the T-34 as the best medium tank of the war, but the T-34 had a significant edge when it cames to mechanical reliability and ease of production, so the T-34 would win on points despite its rougher looks. I also rather like the Maus, which looks surprisingly sleek for such an outrageously enormous machine; it gets additional points for ambition and record-setting, but a big entry in the debit column for being wastefully impractical. I don’t have any great affection for the Sherman, but I have to give it credit for recognizability: to paraphrase the Ronson lighter slogan that was applied to it, it’s the only WWII tank that I can “always spot the first time, every time” when I see one in a movie, due to the elongated chevron shape of its upper hull. I’ve seen at least one low-budget WWII film (made during the war) in which a couple of obvious Shermans are being passed off as Japanese tanks by having had a rising sun flag painted on their sides. I got a good laugh out of that one.