Pacific Islands worth 3 icps

[General 6 Stars]

@Argothair:

SS, it sounds like you have basically already decided to make your Pacific islands worth 3 IPCs each, and you’re just looking for minor advice about whether to move an island over by one sea zone or something like that. As always, if your rule is fun for your playgroup, then, great, have fun! You’re not hurting anyone. That said, I can’t really offer you advice about how to get the balance right on your 3-IPC islands, because I don’t like the overall concept. Your custom map is attractive and colorful and has some territories in just the right places, but I just can’t stomach the idea that the Solomon Islands are somehow worth more money than Colorado and Utah, or that the Caroline Islands are worth more money than Shanghai. I know it’s a game, but that breaks my suspension of disbelief. If the numbers are off by that much then I’d rather be playing Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or something that’s not even pretending to be historical.

The way I see it, the Central Pacific islands are a collection of tiny, barely inhabited rocks with no natural resources beyond a bit of fresh water, limestone, and coconut. In game terms, every central Pacific island put together (Iwo, Wake, Midway, Solomons, Carolines, Marshalls, etc.) is worth less than 1 IPC in terms of what can be generated or extracted from the islands themselves. So the question is, how can we make the islands relevant without blatantly ignoring the islands’ very low economic value?

I see basically three options:

• Naval Resupply Areas

• Unsinkable Aircraft Carriers

• Convoy Raiding Posts

Naval Resupply

Even if the islands didn’t have anything particularly useful on them, they were still a place where boats could dock, anchor, and make repairs or transfer cargo on a surface that wasn’t bobbing and sinking in the waves. 1940s naval technology made it difficult and risky to transfer fuel, personnel, spare parts, etc. on the high seas, so having control of some islands every few hundred miles where you could meet up with friendly ships and take care of logistics provided a real benefit to your overall naval war effort. In Global 1940-type maps, I think this is adequately represented by just putting naval bases on many of the islands. On smaller maps, you might choose to make the island chains worth 1 IPC each to abstractly represent this benefit. You could also have a national objective that provides, e.g., 3 IPCs if you have at least 2 island bases in the Pacific. It’s not clear that you really needed more than 2; having one staging ground to exchange parts and fuel and so on is a really big deal, but by the time you hit staging ground #5 in the same ocean, you start to see sharply diminishing returns.

Unsinkable Carriers

Another major use for the islands was as unsinkable aircraft carriers – numbers are tricky in Axis & Allies because we don’t know how many literal aircraft each “fighter plane” piece represents, but there was a big gap between the capacity of an “average” carrier and an “average” island air base. Truk hosted 300 Japanese aircraft, Rabaul hosted 117 Japanese aircraft, Henderson Field hosted 161 Allied aircraft, and Midway had 127 planes. By contrast, there were only 90 aircraft on the USS Enterprise, 78 aircraft on the USS Lexington, 72 aircraft on the fleet carrier Shokaku, and 30 aircraft on the light carrier Shoho. Officially, this gets picked up in the A&A rules by the fact that you can only put two “planes” on a carrier, but you can put as many “plane” miniatures as you like on an island. In practice, there is very little reason to ever put planes on an island in Axis & Allies because of the strange way that A&A counts aerial movement. Moving out of and then back onto an island counts as 2 movement points, and an airbase only boosts your movement by 1 movement point – so a tiny naval fighter plane sitting on a carrier somehow gets better range than a double-engine fighter plane sitting on a nice long flat runway next to a generous fuel depot, even when the carrier stays put and doesn’t sail toward battle to help pick up its expended fighters. In Global 1940, it’s sometimes helpful that an airbase lets you scramble 3 extra fighters to defend a sea zone, but the airbase is still of limited value, because that defense is static – the fighters landed on the island can’t easily be used to attack enemy targets in any other sea zone, especially if you’re short enough on carriers to want to bother with an airbase scramble. An airbase can help you cheaply maintain a naval stalemate, but it doesn’t give you much of a reason to want to own a chunk of the Pacific in the first place. I think if you wanted this to be the motive to take over Pacific islands, you’d need to fix the movement rules for islands. Maybe just make it so moving from an island to the sea zone that wholly encloses that island (or vice versa) is completely free.

Convoy Raiding Posts

This is really a special case of naval resupply, but part of the idea is that if you can base your subs and destroyers and so on closer to the merchant traffic that they’re preying on or protecting, then you can launch a lot more convoy raids or safely escort a lot more convoys. So, even if the islands themselves are economically worthless, the islands serve as a series of small, conveniently located naval bases that allow you to escort (or sink) ships carrying cargos that are worth a lot of money. The problem with this rationale is that 9 times out of 10, you’d be better off just using a convoy zone! If what you’re trying to represent is the idea that you’ve found a good place to raid merchant traffic, then put a merchant traffic icon on the map. Don’t put an island on the map. An island is not a fleet of merchant marine freighters.

Thanks for reply. As far as 3 icp islands that is not going to happen. The basic idea was to get more action from islands and to see if there was anymore ideas out there. I probably go with each non value island will become worth 1 icp.
I dont have NOs in game as of now. I dont believe in them unless it has to do with capturing territories and being rewarded for it for fuel and supplies etc. But if I dont go with barneys idea with a few tweaks probably have to go with island groups give you a NO bonus. If I dont go with 1 icp islands then I’ll go with 2-3 island NO bonuses of maybe 5 icps ea. If you make the NO worth 5-10 icps then that would make more Island warfare. I have to find the right island groups.

I think going with NO for Island groups is the simple way to go. Just dont give any non value Islands a value.
Also I could raise the convoy raid outside of a convoy box to 2 icp damage instead of 1 In the Pacific only.

4 ships doing ave damage of 6-9 per convoy box in game now.
4 ships doing ave damage of 9-11 per convoy box is probably to high. But at least now in game you can do more damage around a convoy box besides just inside it. Europe side is awesome. Constant raid battles going on on that side for most of game if Italy runs out 2-3 subs from Med. The problem was only raiding convoy boxes on inside. But now in game at least you can get to outside of some convoy boxes. So at least Some raiding increased in the Pacific.

[General 6 Stars]

Heres a list of island groups NOs for starters and can be adjusted.
There for either Japan or US.

A group    Grey
Midway
Wake
Marianas

B group    Orange
Carolina
Marshall
Palan

C group    Blue
Dutch New Guinea   Japan
New Britain                or
Papua                     Anzac/Allies

D group    Red
Iwo Jima
Bonin
Wake

E group    Green
Carolina          
New Britain        
Solomon

F group    White
Borneo
Celebes
Java
Sumatra

All worth 5 icp bonus. This bonus may increase for certain island groups for more battles.

I will also have 1 or 2 island group NOs for the Med.

Barney you got any thoughts on this or tweaks from your play as far as with your pacific island changes ?

[CWO Marc]

@SS:

The basic idea was to get more action from islands and to see if there was anymore ideas out there.

I sympathize with SS when he wishes that the Central Pacific islands would see more action, which would indeed make the game more interesting if they did.  To draw a parallel, this is similar to the long-expressed wish by many players for the cruiser unit to get bought more often and see more action.  And in both cases, I think that the root cause of this under-use problem is the fact that the A&A games – even when it comes to a version as large and complex as Global 1940 – are (of necessity, since they’re board games rather than full-blown wargames) a highly simplified and abstracted representation of WWII.  As a result of the simplifications and abstractions they involve, certain map places (like the Central Pacific islands) and units (like the cruiser) end up looking rather pointless in the game, even though their importance was clear and substantial in the real Second World War.  To use those two cases as examples:

• The real-life importance of the Central Pacific islands in WWII had to do with the mechanics of how Japan and the US controlled (i.e., either fought to get control of, or fought to keep control of) the vast and mostly empty stretches of the Pacific Ocean – something which isn’t modeled into the A&A game, either in terms of how these operations actually worked or in terms of the completely unrealistic size of the Pacific Ocean on the map.  The gradual US advance westward across the Pacific from 1942 to 1945 illustrates that these operations hinged on island-based control of the airspace and of the waters of each successive region through which the US was advancing.  In short (and what I’ll describe here is a very simplified sketch), the script worked as follows.  By securing a new island territory – say, the Marshall Islands – the US gained both airbases and naval bases.  To conquer the next island territory down the line – say, the Carolines – the US would begin by using its Marshall Island airbases to start securing the airspace of the Carolines.  This initially would involve trying to demolish Japan’s Caroline Island air forces on the ground by long-range bomber attack.  As the airspace around the Carolines would become more secure, the US Navy would start venturing into the area to speed up the airspace-securing process (using medium-range carrier-based airstrikes against Japan’s planes and runways) and would also start securing the waters around the Carolines (in part to cut them off from resupply).  Once the Caroline’s airspace and waters were sufficiently secure, the US would send in an amphibious invasion force; this would operate in conjunction with continued US attacks from the air and from the sea (including naval bombardment and short-range carrier-based airstrikes).  Ground troops – Army and/or Marines – would ultimately be landed on the beaches and would fight their way inland until the island was secured.  Other islands in the island group would receive the same treatment.  And once the whole island group was secure, the US would repeat the whole process for the next island group down the line…say, the Marianas.  To put the whole thing in a nutshell: air forces would be used to secure the air, which in turn would allow naval forces to secure the water, which in turn would allow ground forces to conquer the land (specifically, island territory), and the newly-secured island territory would allow the process to be repeated in order to make the next jump westward.  A&A doesn’t work like that (at least not in that level of detail in its OOB form), so it’s not surprising that in A&A the Central Pacific islands don’t see much action.

• In real-life WWII, cruisers saw more action than battleships for a couple of reasons, both of them related to the cost differences between these two types of gun-armed surface-combat vessels (which were conceptually similar, though very different in terms of the scale of their features).  One reason was sheer weight of numbers: naval powers had far more cruisers than battleships in their fleets because cruisers (especially light cruisers) were cheaper and faster to build (just as destroyers were vastly cheaper and faster to build than cruisers; the US Navy ended up with hundreds of destroyers, if I’m not mistaken, though destroyers were conceptually quite different types of warships).  The other reason was that, because battleships were more expensive to operate (in terms of crew size and fuel consumption) and represented a more serious blow if they were lost in combat (because they represented such a huge investment), admirals tended to more cautious about sending battleships into combat that cruisers, whose combat loss was, frankly, more affordable.  For a classic example of this skittishness, look at the Japanese superbattleships Yamato and Musashi, which spent most of their careers at anchor in bases located far from the front lines.  The same thing happened in WWI with the battleships of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas fleet: they spent much of the war at anchor, in part because it was felt (though not necessarily said out loud) that it was more important for them to stay float than sink the enemy.  Again, A&A doesn’t model this very well in its OOB rules.  The battleship unit was the first A&A unit to be created, back in the original game, and then the destroyer was added in the original Europe and Pacific games; when the cruiser was introduced later (I can’t recall in which game), Larry may have had no choice but to try to jam it as best he could between the existing rule conception of the battleship and the existing rule conception of the destroyer, with (arguably) results that made the cruiser an unattractive purchase.

[General 6 Stars]

Yes CWO in my game cruisers can M3
D12 system
Cruisers A7 D7 M3 C9
Battleships A9 D9 M2 C15
Naval Bases
Move from any naval base in combat is only 2
Combat should slow you down
Move from a naval base in non combat is 3
This is nice because it forces you to plan naval battles.
Now the Cruiser can M4 this does help you send out faster to some sz. as blockers or future attacks. But remember subs get FS and can take them out plus they cant due nothing to a sub if its convoy raiding. You need tacs and destroyers for them. Plus Sub can submerge even if destroyer present. Destroyer then would use its Depth Charge Attack.

Plus if US gets there NA of fast carriers the can also move 3.
Plus there is a tech in game that has carriers can carry 3 planes.

Plus figs and tacs M5 in game
Plus figs cant land on carriers only naval figs and dive bombers and those planes only M4

Plus Us and Japan has the NA island bases where they get a +1 move from them. So now planes can M7 from an airbase.
This has not unbalanced the game. Havent had a game yet where US got all 3. There is a lot more action in the pacific also with Tacs can hit surfaced subs and subs cant hit subs.

This has made the convoy raiding just like it was in war on Europe side.

[General 6 Stars]

@SS:

Heres a list of island groups NOs for starters and can be adjusted.
There for either Japan or US.
Colored chip shows the island groups in map pic. Helps to see them and to tweak.

A group     Grey
Midway
Wake
Marianas

B group     Orange
Carolina
Marshall
Palan

C group     Blue
Dutch New Guinea   Japan
New Britain                or
Papua                     Anzac/Allies

D group     Red
Iwo Jima
Bonin
Wake

E group     Green
Carolina          
New Britain        
Solomon

F group     White
Borneo
Celebes
Java
Sumatra

All worth 5 icp bonus. This bonus may increase for certain island groups for more battles.

I will also have 1 or 2 island group NOs for the Med.

Barney you got any thoughts on this or tweaks from your play as far as with your pacific island changes ?

[barney]

yea it seems to me that it’s generally easier to prevent a NO bonus than attain it. The big money islands for JPN being an exception, at least early. Still think it’s a good idea that could produce more action, depending on ones strategy.

Just have to try it out : )

Cool way you change up the  combat movement and non.

[General 6 Stars]

@barney:

yea it seems to me that it’s generally easier to prevent a NO bonus than attain it. The big money islands for JPN being an exception, at least early. Still think it’s a good idea that could produce more action, depending on ones strategy.

Just have to try it out : )

Cool way you change up the  combat movement and non.

Still may not go with the Dutch Island bonus. There worth more money each now. But if Japan owns all 4 islands and the 3 islands are maxed out on Oil Derrick damage 15, they would still collect the NO 5 bonus. Because Oil derrick damage goes against your income total. So Japan would lose 15 icps in income but gain back 5 from NO bonus. If you capture a territory with a damaged Oil Derrick the damage doesnt go against your income total. But you have to repair it if you want the territory to count towards a NO or a 1 VC Bonus point in game.

[Caesar-Seriona]

I seem late into this post but we have to sit down and figure out what the value of the territory is worth is based on. Most of us will automatically say it represents resources right? Well unfortunately, not every island is going to be worth anything if it is based on resources, take Iwo Jima as an example. The island is completely worthless but it became great worth based on its military value of having an airstrip long enough for bombers to takeoff and land.

[General 6 Stars]

In the Med just going with 2 sets of 3 islands
Gibraltar
Malta
Cyprus

Malta
Crete
Cyprus

Control 3 receive 5 icps NO
May change. Play test it

[Caesar-Seriona]

I agree with those islands having actual worth. As I pointed out time and time again, I have no idea how the hell the testers came up with the values of each territory as most are very incorrect in my opinion.

[General 6 Stars]

I m also going with you can only spend the money in the Pacific side with no ground buys going towards India or China. Figs cost 11 icps so it would take either side 2-3 turns  just to buy a plane if it went against China or India.
Same for Med. Place a token on top of money showing NO bonus money only goes P or Med. Just use a token with the letter P or M on it.