@baron-Münchhausen said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

So, the correct setting was only 1/6 per unit, either DD or TcB, for a single opportunity before Subs submerge.

This is interesting but I think that due to the size of sea zones, it should be for all fleets. In my current naval redesign, I made subs cheaper (4) and they attack and defend on a 1 (they were terrible at any kind of engagement where they were spotted) but they need to be spotted first. Surprise attack is still a 2.

I also halved the attack value of aircraft against vessels except for tactical bombers (which can be thought of as naval bombers as well) so fighters on a 2 and tac on a 3. Strategic bombers don’t have any use outside strategic attacks but strategic attacks matter more.

This means that air power needs volume to act as a deterrent.

Then I created a tech deck and you can develop radar and ASDIC to counter subs (centimetric radar was vital in the war of the atlantic as planes now could detect submarines far away and limit their on surface time which effectively hindered their ability to operate) and you can also develop Submarine tech to counter to some extent such advances (metox, decoys, snorkels, sonar ablative counters) and then the Type XXI and XXIII subs which can provide a new advantage if you are still in the battle of the Atlantic.

I also think that the rules for aerial combat from 1914 are the best ones yet and I kind of co-opted them. Planes can intervene only in the first round of combat and you can use TAC and fighters to attack enemy troops and there is a mandatory air superiority round (like the 1914 one) to decide intervention though both sides can scramble fighters and tac bombers to intervene in the ground combat.

I am in the process of revamping ground combat to a more interesting approach but I need to test a lot of things. Bottom line is that I always disliked the “one hit and you are out” system of A&A and I am trying things where units have multiple hit points and they represent army corps instead of divisions.

Here’s a couple of changes I am testing out so far (if anyone interested, we could arrange a tabletop simulator or another online platform game to try it out… It is quite a tedious process though as we aren’t playing a game really. Lots of testing, restarting, testing again):

When you buy an infantry corps, it has 3 disks under it (2 for Italy to represent their 2 brigade infantry divisions which in practice meant that their infantry formations were inherently weaker than French, British or German) and attack with 2 dice on a 1. Every hit, you remove one disc from under it. First disc is “free” and nothing much happens it just means that your infantry corps is getting disorganized. Second disc, you lose one attack die so now you only roll one die for attack. You need to pay 1IC per disc to recover org and strength. You lose another one and that unit is not combat effective anymore and wont roll any dice and another hit will remove it from the game (you will need to basically pay 3 IC to get it up to strength the advantage being that this inf corps will be at the frontline already).
This also means that Italian infantry after sustaining a single hit loses a lot of their grunt and in North Africa it seems to work quite well as the British with less apparent units can sustain themselves against Italy quite well especially on the defense since after the first round of combat, the Italians will lose a lot of their firepower and quickly becoming very ineffective.

The advantage of this is that for Operation Barbarossa in 1941, you can give a malus to the soviet infantry where they use only one die to represent the lack of organization due to the red army purges and whatnot meaning that the early german advance will be easier even with a numerical disadvantage (more on that on another post ^^).

I am also toying with the idea that combat is limited to 2 rounds (armored and mechanized units can fight an extra round) and then you need to pay with discs to push the attack representing lack of organization and attrition. It also changes the concept of Blitzkrieg for armoured units as it means that the concept of contested provinces gets introduced here (again, a great concept from 1914) and I want armoured units to be able to push through a contested province and attack the next one which can lead to encirclements.

This also seems to make (more testing needed to calibrate costs and stuff) your IC having to be split between building new units and maintaining the ones you have.

Artillery also work a bit differently and instead of increasing infantry attack, they have a pre-attack barrage which can hit on a 1 before combat starts. And I am toying with the idea of artillery in neighbouring provinces being allowed to take part in this bombardment. And they attack normally on a 2 afterwards.

Anyway, there are still many, many more changes I am working on (to do with the planning level of the game) and if there is any interest, I can discuss them.

@SS-GEN that is another kettle of fish altogether. I am trying not to go into new sculpts (or ways to identify new units) as that is another headache altogether and for now using Fighters as fighter/CAS, TAC as TAC/NAV and STR as STR.

I think an attack on ships should be preceeded by an AA defense equal to half the ship’s defense.

And I like the idea of TAC/NAV being allowed to chose target.

Another thing I thought of was to fix a scale for the units in game so we can have some more interesting OOB.

I think that each ship should represent 2 or 3 real ships and I like the idea that capital ships should take multiple turns to build…

I am going to organize and playtest some of my ideas sometime this week focusing on the naval side first. Will come back with the outcome of them.

@baron-Münchhausen said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

However, the Triple A mechanic was done so each TcB and DD gets 1 roll @1 prior to Subs surprise strike to act like active AntiSubmarine patrol both air and sea. If missed, means Subs has passed through the net. And only time DD get their opportunity to fire at them is after Subs revealed themselves through a Surprise attack of torpedos. However, if DD or TcB get a hit during this AS Patrol, it is like a AA gun. Subs are not able to roll at all. It is like they were caught off gard at surface and DD or TcB depth charge and sink them.

Yeah… My idea for my rework revolved around DD making an ASW check if subs decide to do a surprise attack. If successful, the submarines will be sunk.

This will tie in with a change to the convoy system as well. I like the convoy system in global but I think it doesn’t represent strategically what the opposing forces were doing.

I like the idea of having a “convoy” unit representing merchant fleets and have different nations having to contribute to build up that force or risk shortages. The UK had about 30 million tons of cargo capacity at war start and needed about 1/3rd of that capacity at sea to keep fighting at full capacity iirc (They needed around 30 million tons a year of imports so with 1/3rd of the fleet at sea we get about that yearly).

So I want to have the ability to spend money on convoys and escorts and the uboats reducing that amount with successful attacks. Kind of bringing a bit more of the strategic humpf to this boardgame.

I like DDs with a 2:2 value as I think it is fitting. Submarines are downgraded to 1:1 but they will also cost a lot less like 4 or even 3.
Their impact will also be more over time than immediate.

Sooo many things to try out…

@SS-GEN That map is awesome!

Regarding subs:
Yeah, the idea is that they have no fleet use and are purely strategic weapons. If they can surprise fire at a battleship, they can. But if they get discovered in an ASW sweep, they are gone. I want attrition and for them to be cheap. I honestly tried the idea of naval searches being a thing and it works quite well. Since Britain’s initial fleet survives more often than not. This leads to Germany never being able to get off the back-foot naval wise unless a serious investment is made (and to be fair, this game starts far too late for a proper naval development cycle. We needed a game that would start at least in 1935 or 1936 for Germany to properly invest in a surface fleet but that of course brings other implications and this game is definitely not prepared for that yet).
I always wanted proper submarine and anti-submarine warfare in this game that would translate the strategic impact of the battle of the Atlantic. D-Day wouldn’t have happened if the German submarines weren’t pushed back and I would love to be able to represent that in this game… For now, I am happy if the battle for the Atlantic becomes one of the main focus for axis players instead of an afterthought.

EDIT: Regarding history, the Japanese did not use convoys. Hence the success of the American submarine campaign in the Pacific. The way I am thinking of implementing it is really to give a bonus in submarine warfare against the japanese.
Instead of finding convoys on a 3, it could be on a 4 or even a 5.

@barnee I am testing using TTS (it is easier to replicate these changes). I did not know of HBG but the map looks amazing. The rules… I have my issues with them (lack of scale consistency being the biggest one). And I want to make these changes to regular A&A so I guess Global it will be (not to mention having to source every single piece for the armies is more work than it is worth… If they ever make bundles I might consider it).

Not to mention that claiming to have the biggest wargame of the genre when things like WiF (which I own) and War of the Pacific are around… hmmmmm

@barnee WiF is the best game I never play ^^
Seriously, the game is very good. But I never play it because, if you think Axis and Allies takes long, WiF, with all bells and whistles, can take literally months. As in LITERAL monthS<— .

I do still have a copy of 1942 all the way back in Portugal (one of the reasons I sold my Eur+Pacific copy) but that is a bit far away hence thinking about rebuying global. The Anniversary edition looks like a good compromise but of course it starts in 1941 not 1940 and it is a smaller map. Though it has Italy and China which are two powers that make things interesting.

Basically I want my changes to make Axis and Allies a proper strategic game.

@SS-GEN Yeah… Did some limited testing. Combat mechanics only, not tried the economical changes. Really liked the new submarines. Did a sneak attack on the British fleet in Scapa flow and sunk a BB (with 2 points of damage per hit and target selection for submarine sneak attack). Subs got caught afterwards and failed an ASW roll so they were sunk. Still, pretty good result!

@barnee said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

right on. I kinda got the abstract thing it was the other that threw me. How’s the playtest going ?

Early days. I hope to get the brunt of it done over the weekend with proper 10k rolls and stuff like that. So far it feels good.

Submarines seem to be useful for hit and run tactics if they can escape. I ended up choosing for naval scale, BBs represent 2 ships and CVs represent either 4 light carriers or two fleet carriers (so that the air wing size of 100 planes makes sense).

I am redoing OOB in my spare time for the game as well so we have a more accurate force composition to the situation in 1940.

Oh and I think only Japanese and American carriers will be able to load 2 air wings at the start too. British and German carriers had quite smaller air wings (but had armoured decks so maybe an extra hitpoint?).

@barnee said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

Right on. I got ya now. You’re trying to decide how many dudes a unit represents. Kinda ? Anyway, you’ll still use the minatures to represent. Looking forward to what you come up with.

Yeah. I feel it can make the game more consistent. One thing that always bothered me was the on off combat system for instance where you “killed” a unit in combat in one hit. These units are meant to represent divisions or something (I think corps is the better scale for this game) a division or a corp doesn’t disappear in one hit. And ships being fully destroyed was not that common either and neither were air wings. You could damage it but more likely than not it wouldn’t be all the planes in a wing would be shot down.

So yeah, trying to make it more consistent and then balancing it around it.

@baron-Münchhausen It has to do with scale. I Don’t mind the micro so much as long as we can get a more accurate representation of the back and forth of a battle. So far testing has been ok. Haven’t done as much as I wanted but so far I like the results. There is a lot more of backwards and forwards and fleets that might have been defeated will come back and haunt you if you don’t follow through.

Some of my early findings:
Submarines 0/1 costing 4 work well. Surprise attack 2 at 2 dmg per hit is also interesting.

DDs… might lower the overall attack to 1. With their special ASW roll they work as a great hunter killer unit and fleet protection… Although, there is an argument to be made in order to abstract destroyers played this way and just give BBs and CAs inherent DD cover (like WiF does for instance) and use the DD purely as hunter killers and convoy escorts. Like a strategic unit you can place in sea zones that can make the submarine rolls harder.

Now that is an idea. They wouldn’t count for fleet vs fleet action and only count as ASW units (DDs and CVEs).

As I was testing, a submarine could get destroyed on a convoy attack as soon as escorts were available but what if with one DD in the same sea area, instead of on a 1, you have to roll a 2? That would increase submarine atrition nicely which was something that I was struggling with (too easy for Germany to just build up inordinate ammounts of subs while not sacrificing resources elsewhere).

So basically, all sea units would have organic ASW instead of just DDs so when a sub tries to attack a lone BB or a carrier, it has to go through an ASW check and if detected it could be either pushed back or destroyed (will have to test to see what works best. Remmember, each sub is not just one sub so outright destruction might not be the correct way to do it).

@baron-Münchhausen I won’t go into a discussion about why the Japanese didn’t attack the fuel facilities and the submarines but it was not in their immediate strategic goals for a reason.

Even if you go a full combat round without retaliation in A&A you will still not achieve the immediate result.

A&As scale a fleet being in port on in the adjacent sea are doesn’t really matter. There are other battles we can use to fine tune naval combat like Coral Sea or Midway even but each has their own particularities. The role of Naval intelligence was huge (hence this all began for me with adding a roll to see if you even find a ship or not).

But even in a pitched Sea Battle, a Battleship ability to swat an air wing out of the sky was certainly not as high as it is represented in this game. Neither should strat bombers attack on a 4.

@baron-Münchhausen The other reason to represent ships on a 2:1 ratio is that that was basically what a Battleship or Carrier division was. So you get ar,y corps on land and fleet divisions on sea. Heavy cruiser divisions were also 2 or 3 heavy cruisers and light cruiser divisions were 4 light cruisers. At Pearl Harbour there were 6 light cruisers and 2 heavy cruisers so that is roughly 2 cruiser fleets (since two of the cruisers were lead ships of DD flotillas) and if I don’t abstract the DDs, 2 DD flotillas… That might be a good scale) for the American side and 6 fleet carriers for the Japanese (3 carrier figures).

the math would be:

8 BBs on a A:4D:4 2 HP
2 Cruisers A3D3
2DDs A2D2
(and an air wing AND AA defense but I won’t even deal with that for now)

vs

6 fighters A3D4
(9 fighters at 3 per carrier division)

So that makes it on average:
3 hits or 4.3 hits for the japanese and six or nine hitpoints

6.3 or 7 hits for the Americans and 8 or 10 hitpoints of which 4 are “free”.

This means that on average, you would not destroy a single ship while you would get swated from the skies.

If you allowed air wings to take two hits, the combat would go a second round but you would never get the results obtained historically.

The idea of a -1 bonus to die rolls for surprise attacks is a cool one and I might play around with it.

With my changes so far, what you would have on average for the combat however:
American Fleet:
4 BB Divisions each rolling 2 D6s for air defense (hit on a 1)
2 cruisers rolling 1D6 for AA
optional (though I do like the representation of DD flotillas at this scale) 2 DD flotillas rolling 1D6 for AA

you would get 1.6 to 2 hits from AA

6 fighters rolling on a 2 would be 2 hits. 9 fighters would be 3.6 hits.

This still feels a bit low so a bonus from carrier based planes against naval targets could be an option.

It would still not be enough to get an historical result but it is getting there. I can either lower the AA value of BBs to one D6 ,which would remove 0.6 hits so it would make the American fleet get one hit or 1.3 hits Depending on DDs being there or not.

This would make it so that planes would suffer one hit on the AA barrage, and damage 2 to 4 BBs… Second round of combat could see the naval forces destroy another plane and suffer another 2 or 3 hits… This would make that you could destroy one BB division (2 BBs) possibly but of course, a savy player would allocate hits to cruisers or DDs. So the Japanese would damage BBs and destroy a single ship on two rounds But lose as much as half their striking force (2 or 3 planes) and now things would continue to worsen.

The removal of the extra defensive die would also make other fleets more vulnerable to air attack but again, I need to revise OOB on the other theaters which I didn’t get around to yet so I will have to do a bit more work I guess.
This would get us closer to the result.

Anyway, if planes had the ability to soak some hits as well (becoming disrupted and attrition) this would be different and probably a lot closed to the historical result. The Japanese are unlikely to suffer any losses until round 4 or 5 and even with six fighters rolling on a 2, you would get 8 hits in four rounds. That would make the enemy fleets lose a lot of ships. But now the Japanese are a bit too strong as That would wipe out basically all cruisers and DDs and leave the BBs with one health. For no immediate losses or maybe one aircraft loss (and we still need to add the aircraft and the base AA to the result).

If we had objectives to an attack (like, the Battleship moorings were an actual objective for the Japanese fleet), we could say that the Japanese player has one hit choice or two hit choices or something.

I will game this out
but it looks like it is on the right track imho. Then we can play around with surprise attack rules (like enemy units do not get a defensive shot in the first round of combat) and see how it goes.

But that is basically the reasoning behind my proposed changes.

@baron-Münchhausen said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

IMO, Axis and Allies is much more pleasant as a tabletop game because of eye candies it provides with all these little sculpts. Especially warships and aircraft on carriers.
On land, I usually use chips for Infantry, MechInf, Artys, but not Tank, when there is enough room in the TT. However, in SZ and Naval, I will never use chips. Just the sculpts.
My personal taste would be to rather increase the number of units but not going into damaged units besides aircraft or Battleship.
US and IJN have a limited numbers of Carriers and Battleships, per se.
These number might provide a level of individual unit which remain manageable.
At Pearl Harbor Raid time, there was no more than 8 US Carrier with various aircraft capacity (before Essex was launched) . I noticed that Light Carriers or Escort Carriers were able to carry around 30 aircraft while Fleet was around 90.
So about one third. For me, this provided the ratio: 1 aircraft on light Carrier, then 3 aircraft sculpt on a US Fleet Carrier.
So, all sturdier aircraft carriers might just hold two. It works on the table top. The only issue is about TcB scultp. 3 does not hold on a Carrier, but 2 TcB and 1 Fg can be put on a Carrier sculpt.
If this can be your starting point, then think about 1 aircraft Carrier unit figures for about 4 or 5 Carriers. Take a look at how many Fleet Carriers were available for Japan.
For instance, 2 US Carriers (for 8 to 10), if IJN gets 5 Carrier sculpt then would signify around 20 to 25 Carriers.
This might come handy if you want to set an adequate numbers for each sculpt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Japanese_Navy_in_World_War_II

A certain level of abstraction is needed of course but I went with a 2:1 ratio (fleet carriers to light carriers) for flexibility. I am not considering escort carriers as they were not used in fleet to fleet action. Although some could carry 30 aircraft others could carry a lot less and they were not suitable to military operations.

Pearl Harbour is the next scenario I am intending on “gaming” and it would include 3 Japanese carriers with 6 fighters on top vs 4 American BBs and 2 Cruisers (with a similar conversion of 2 Light cruisers to a single heavy cruiser and DDs abstracted).

This will be a great balancing scenario I believe as regular Axis and Allies would not be able to give you historical results regardless of what you did (4 BBs would take 8 hits to destroy and would defend on a 4 so fighters would go down faster than anything).

Regarding damage, a simple solution could be allowing units to retreat battle to absorb hits. So after a round of combat and damage assignment, if there were no hits left to assign and units had their HP depleted, they could chose to abandon the Sea Zone instead of being destroyed. Units in bases would be the exception.

@SS-GEN said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

What ever you feel is historic. Basically you looking for correct hit status based on Divisions or corps like you mentioned. Ground is a different animal a bit.

hmmmm I am not sure about naval hitpoints. I mean, I keep going backwards and forwards and sometimes I step dangerously close to a CRT… Because I just find the overall attrition rate too high. Star Wars Rebellion does this with the hit markers under each ship but I also find that not very elegant. For instance, things like the sinking of the Bismark or the Hood were not that common and results like the battle of Riverplate were more common, I want there to be a chance of back and forwards and a single battle not being a monumental victory or defeat like game most of the time represents them (kind of because you then get the insane rebuilding economy). What I am trying to achieve (naval for now, land for later) is a sense of strategic warfare like A&A sometimes gives us but other times fails to do.

Anyway, I am sure I will reach a solution… Not sure it will be as simple as I want it to be.

@baron-Münchhausen It has to do with scale. I Don’t mind the micro so much as long as we can get a more accurate representation of the back and forth of a battle. So far testing has been ok. Haven’t done as much as I wanted but so far I like the results. There is a lot more of backwards and forwards and fleets that might have been defeated will come back and haunt you if you don’t follow through.

Some of my early findings:
Submarines 0/1 costing 4 work well. Surprise attack 2 at 2 dmg per hit is also interesting.

DDs… might lower the overall attack to 1. With their special ASW roll they work as a great hunter killer unit and fleet protection… Although, there is an argument to be made in order to abstract destroyers played this way and just give BBs and CAs inherent DD cover (like WiF does for instance) and use the DD purely as hunter killers and convoy escorts. Like a strategic unit you can place in sea zones that can make the submarine rolls harder.

Now that is an idea. They wouldn’t count for fleet vs fleet action and only count as ASW units (DDs and CVEs).

As I was testing, a submarine could get destroyed on a convoy attack as soon as escorts were available but what if with one DD in the same sea area, instead of on a 1, you have to roll a 2? That would increase submarine atrition nicely which was something that I was struggling with (too easy for Germany to just build up inordinate ammounts of subs while not sacrificing resources elsewhere).

So basically, all sea units would have organic ASW instead of just DDs so when a sub tries to attack a lone BB or a carrier, it has to go through an ASW check and if detected it could be either pushed back or destroyed (will have to test to see what works best. Remmember, each sub is not just one sub so outright destruction might not be the correct way to do it).

@baron-Münchhausen Hmmmmm… I have issues with that. As I said, I don’t want a single hit to completely remove aircraft. And remember that I am considering that each carrier figure represents 2 fleet carriers or 4 light carriers so capacities are similar. Carriers outside of the US at this scale will have half capacity and maybe an extra hitpoint (because they had armoured decks).

As I said, I will try this over the weekend and will get some results for Monday.

@barnee said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

Right on. I got ya now. You’re trying to decide how many dudes a unit represents. Kinda ? Anyway, you’ll still use the minatures to represent. Looking forward to what you come up with.

Yeah. I feel it can make the game more consistent. One thing that always bothered me was the on off combat system for instance where you “killed” a unit in combat in one hit. These units are meant to represent divisions or something (I think corps is the better scale for this game) a division or a corp doesn’t disappear in one hit. And ships being fully destroyed was not that common either and neither were air wings. You could damage it but more likely than not it wouldn’t be all the planes in a wing would be shot down.

So yeah, trying to make it more consistent and then balancing it around it.

@barnee said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

right on. I kinda got the abstract thing it was the other that threw me. How’s the playtest going ?

Early days. I hope to get the brunt of it done over the weekend with proper 10k rolls and stuff like that. So far it feels good.

Submarines seem to be useful for hit and run tactics if they can escape. I ended up choosing for naval scale, BBs represent 2 ships and CVs represent either 4 light carriers or two fleet carriers (so that the air wing size of 100 planes makes sense).

I am redoing OOB in my spare time for the game as well so we have a more accurate force composition to the situation in 1940.

Oh and I think only Japanese and American carriers will be able to load 2 air wings at the start too. British and German carriers had quite smaller air wings (but had armoured decks so maybe an extra hitpoint?).

@barnee Yes, I was asking if they were a real unit ^^

I was thinking about ways of abstracting them into DD squadrons as a form of general ASW units or fleet destroyers depending on where they were placed.

@barnee Do you explicitly have escort carriers or do you abstract them?