[AA50] Looking for ways to add more income without national objectives

[Wise Guy]

Our game group plays A&A AE a lot and we are looking for a way to give the countries more income but without using national objectives. We like the way the game flows with more cash but we don�t like the static nature of the game when objectives are added.

I don�t want it to be as simple as just all get X cash each where X is the game turn number or that all have War Bonds from start but I was thinking of some kind of chart showing how much cash each country will get depending on what game turn it is. Maybe the average income from national objectives for all those games played online could act as a base for this? Is that kind of data accessible somewhere or does someone have such a list?

[CWO Marc]

The information you’ve provided about what you want (and don’t want) seems to indicate that you’re looking for a system in which:

• The extra money arrives automatically, rather than being tied to anything which the players do.

• All countries periodically receive more money, but not all countries receive the same amount of extra money.

If so, you may already have preferences about which countries you want to see receiving more money than others.  If that’s the case, then it’s just a matter of setting up a table stating which country will get how much money at which time, and then working backwards to invent a justification for what this money is supposed to represent (if that justification matters to the players in your group, which it may not).

On the other hand, if you want to start with a rationale first, and then see from that rationale how much money this would generate for such-and-such a country, then you would have to be prepared for the possibility that the system won’t generate the specific amounts you want for the specific countries you want (if that’s a consideration which is important to the players in your group, which it may not be).

[Wise Guy]

Well, I want the income to be more or less as if we played with national objectives but without the need to have to do the same attacks every game…

[General 6 Stars]

You try lowering piece costs and not use NO s ?
Try this. Cost adjusted without figuring how much money ea country should get.
Costs
Inf - 3
Art - 3
Tank - 5
AA - 5

Fig - 9
Bom - 11

Sub - 5
Tran - 6
Dest - 7
Crus - 10
AC - 14
Batt - 16

By lowering cost most pieces go up in AD for the cost.
You would get more art in game maybe. For 1 icp
Less get a +1 bonus A for inf.
Try it out by play testing.

If your looking for more strategy changes you may try NA s or more added stuff. My game goes a lot like 60%
Normal way but 40% a different way ea game.  Heres my game.
Just scroll to page like 26 or so. Have charts I use. Game has other things added to change every game.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=38459.0

Other wise youd have to go with something like this
Add this amount to your starting income.
Ger 10
Japan 10
Italy 5

USSR 5
UK 10
US 10
May have to raise tank cost to 6

But this could vary too.
I like the lower piece cost chart. Wether it works maybe some AA 50 players may have tried it already ? You can still tweak a cost to a piece if need be.

[Nowhere Man]

You could try a “Warbonds” house rule… each nation has some sort of national drive to raise more funds… either buying war bonds, donating scrap metal, or women working in factories… whatever you want the excuse to be…

Then, use dice to award the random bonus from War Bonds each turn… it could be as simple as each nation rolls a standard six-sided die and that’s their bonus income, or you can get more detailed with additional dice for bigger nations (say 1-6 for Italy, 2-12 for Germany, 3-18 for the US)… though I would recommend getting some Fantasy Dice so you can use dice of differing amounts for different nations… 4-sided, 8-sided, 12-sided and 20-sided dice could all be used in addition or instead of your 6-sided dice.

[General 6 Stars]

Id be aware of one side rolling high dollar amounts than other side.
You have to keep it more even for both sides. But of course random dice amounts will make game more radical.

[Wise Guy]

Thanks for all suggestions! We have played this game so many times so changing the cost of the units would mess us up completely :)
What I was looking for was some kind of statistics how much each nation in average gets from NOs per turn and use that to simulate the swing in income, forcing German and Italy to be on the offensive before the cash flow runs out, however I liked the idea with different dice.
How would a chart look like if I should use that? I have all kinds of dice, maybe Formula De dice could work.

Maybe Ger has a D12 the first 4 turns and then a D6 in a couple of turns and then nothing…
Could you help me out with some suggestions for the other nations?

[General 6 Stars]

@Wise:

Thanks for all suggestions! We have played this game so many times so changing the cost of the units would mess us up completely :)
What I was looking for was some kind of statistics how much each nation in average gets from NOs per turn and use that to simulate the swing in income, forcing German and Italy to be on the offensive before the cash flow runs out, however I liked the idea with different dice.
How would a chart look like if I should use that? I have all kinds of dice, maybe Formula De dice could work.

Maybe Ger has a D12 the first 4 turns and then a D6 in a couple of turns and then nothing…
Could you help me out with some suggestions for the other nations?

If you played that many games the piece cost change wouldnt be a factor. Play where all pieces only cost 1 less but inf and tank.
You should have an idea when countries get most of there NO s on most turns.

Just try this. 1 die roll per country at start of every turn.
Ger - d12
Japan - d12
Italy - d6

USSR - d6
UK - d12
US - d12

Got to start some where. No matter what you come up with you will need to tweak it.

[Private-Panic]

Thanks to Marc for his answer in my duplicating thread and to P@nther for redirecting that discussion here. Clearly Wise Guy is the same chap as the gentleman on BGG!

Just wanted to reply to Marc’s reply in the other thread, which was:

Conceptually, the notion raises a couple of issues.  First, it seems to have a kind of “all the gain without the pain” undertone, i.e. the idea of wanting to have all the economic benefits of accomplishing national objectives but without doing any of the actual work.  On that point, my own feeling is that it would be more straightforward to just provide more income, without having an arguable rationale for it.  Second, it misses a point about national objectives: the point that they’re not automatically pursued by players, that they’re not automatically accomplished even when they are pursued, and that the various NOs play off of each other in different combinations in a given game depending on which ones get accomplished and which ones don’t.  In other words, they’re variables rather than constants; the part of the question which inquires about a table seems to assume that they’re constants, or at least that they average out to being constants over the course of multiple games.

Personally I like NOs, Marc, and think they add another layer. But a friend (who often plays 1942.2 and 1914 but not Anniversary if he can help it!) dislikes the way they “skew” (in his mind) strategy. Occasionally I find myself thinking the same thing with regard to the France NOs, which combine to represent such a huge swing in income between the two sides. But that is the game and for me the challenge adds interest.

There seem to be three options if replacing NOs:

1. Reduce unit costs, as SS has suggested.
2. Add an agreed level of income to each Power’s economy regardless, as Wise Guy is looking to do.
3. Add income in some other way. There have been many ideas on these boards about how to do this for different variants, such as increasing each territory value in some way, or a capital / victory city bonus, or a dice roll, or assuming a technology.

When I have considered increasing incomes for 1942.2 or 1941 I have always felt that the most interesting option would be to add NOs. Which just goes to show that I would not remove them in Anniversary!

[General 6 Stars]

I m not a big fan of NO bonus money unless its tied to a territory for supplys minerals and fuel. In my game I dont have them but I am putting some in now in my game to spice up the Pacific without raising the islands values. The problem I see is to get some NO is to hard or way later in game when one side is winning big when you get them. The goal is to get bonus money without sending full fleets. So I reduced the island territories down to groups of 3 for a NO.
So maybe if you removed a territory or two to a NO that will change game piece moves a bit or just tweak them. I posted pick of island groups by color of chips. There also is 2 island groups in the Med.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=42442.0;attach=666517;image

[CWO Marc]

@Private:

But a friend (who often plays 1942.2 and 1914 but not Anniversary if he can help it!) dislikes the way they “skew” (in his mind) strategy.

According to Larry’s introduction in the Anniversary rulebook, the “National Objectives & Bonus Income” optional rule was designed to encourage players to play the game in a “more historical” way by rewarding them with extra cash if they achieve certain “stated historical objectives of the real countries involved in the war.”  As a history buff, I think that this general concept this is a fine idea…but as a history buff, I do have some reservations about how the concept was translated into actual game rules.

If you look at the NO/BI chart in the rulebook, you’ll note that for each country this information is presented in three parts: a thematic phrase, an explanatory paragraph, and a list of “Gain X IPCs if Y is achieved” objectives.  The objectives all involve the same thing: controlling certain blocks of territories and / or sea zones.  In other words, they’re all territorial objectives.  Players already collect income from controlling territories which have an IPC value, so in effect the NOs are a form of double-dipping: you get hard-wired individual-territory IPCs from the territories you hold, plus conditional collective-territory bonus IPCs if the territories you hold correspond to certain territorial clusters.  If these NOs are perceived by players as “skewing strategy”, this seems to suggest three things about these NOs, whose purpose is supposed to be to make the game more historical.  First, it could mean that players feel that NOs force them to pursue a strategy which is a less-than-optimal way of winning the game; if that’s the case, then this would indicate that the game’s rules are historically problematic because they give players a better chance of winning if they violate history rather than if they follow it.  Second, it could mean that game’s basic rules are all right in terms of winning conditions, but that the NOs themselves need to be improved.  Third, it could mean that the basic rules and the NOs are both all right, but that some players perceive this as scripting and have a personal preference for non-scripted games (which, as a personal preference, is a completely legitimate position to take).

The main reservation I have with the NOs has to do with the way they’re presented in the rulebook.  The formulation of the three Axis NOs (Lebensraum, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and Mare Nostrum) are fine in my opinion: all three Axis powers definitely had the objective of acquiring new territory (which fits with the territorial-control nature of the rulebook NOs), and this objective is expressed well by those three slogans, which were indeed real ones used by those three powers in WWII.

The three Allies NOs, however, don’t work quite as well.  The American one is expressed by the phrase “The Arsenal of Democracy,” which is quite genuine (it was coined by Roosevelt) but which has nothing to do with the notion of terriorial control; as the explanatory paragraph in the rulebook itself indicates, the concept was actually economic (more specifically industrial) and political in nature.

The British one is expressed by the phrase “The British Empire,” which by itself is rather bland and isn’t actually a thematic slogan at all.  The explanatory paragraph says, “At the time the war broke out, the United Kingdom had stretched its empire around the world. But the empire was stretched thin and was trying to retain its control on its old centers of power.”  That description is fair enough, and it does tie fairly satisfactorily with the notion of terriorial control.  My guess is that “The British Empire” is meant to be a shorthand version of the much more expressive phrase “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” which I would have much preferred as a NO slogan; my second choice, if a concise phrase was needed, would have been “Rule Britannia” or “Britannia Rules the Waves.”

The Soviet NO is expressed by the phrase “The Great Patriotic War,” which was recycled in 1941 from the Napoleonic Wars and which is indeed what the Russians called their phase of WWII.  The problem here is that there’s a mistmatch between the slogan and the descriptive paragraph and the individual NOS.  The slogan refers to the 1941-1945 war between Germany and Russia.  The descriptive paragraph refers to the USSR’s pre-1941 campaigns to build – by invasion or annexation – a buffer zone between themselves and Germany.  The NOs partially reflect and partially don’t reflect what that buffer zone actually consisted of (though this may simply be a function of the Anniversary map, of which I don’t have an image file handy at the moment; in Global 1940, it consists of Vyborg, the Baltic States, Eastern Poland and Bessarabia).

[Private-Panic]

Some interesting comments Marc.

My friend is not a history buff. So driving the game towards historical actuality is of little interest to him. His enjoyment of A&A is founded upon a simple rule set presenting so many complex scenarios. I think that for him NOs detract from the simplicity of the rule set. Perhaps Wise Guy and his players share some if that outlook?

You started me thinking how non-territorial NOs might look, so as to avoid “double dipping”? UK gaining from more US resources going east than west? US from China continuing to fight? Germany from Italy continuing to fight? Japan from “peace” with Russia? Etc. Mmmm. All of these turned out to rely on the actions of other Powers, which is interesting.

[CWO Marc]

@Private:

You started me thinking how non-territorial NOs might look, so as to avoid “double dipping”? UK gaining from more US resources going east than west? US from China continuing to fight? Germany from Italy continuing to fight? Japan from “peace” with Russia? Etc. Mmmm. All of these turned out to rely on the actions of other Powers, which is interesting.

I don’t know if this specific example would be a good idea to transform into an actual NO, but it’s at least useful to illustrate the concept of non-territorial NOs might look like.  Great Britain’s (or at least Winston Churchill’s) greatest “national objective” during WWII is easy to identify: it was to get the US to join the war (and to do so on Britain’s side, obviously).  Roosevelt knew this perfectly well, and he knew that Churchill was a shewd political operator and a powerful orator, so he was always careful in his pre-Pearl Harbor dealings with the British Prime Minister (such as at the Atlantic Charter conference of August 1941).  It helped that Roosevelt himself was a shewd political operator and a powerful orator; the dynamics between then must have been interesting to watch for the aides who were in the room with them.

[Narvik]

If you dont want to mess up unit cost or use a pencil on your map, then why dont you get extra income from your seazones ? You can name it International trade. Any empty and dedicated tranny adjacent to a neutral country give you a 5 IPC bonus.

[CWO Marc]

@Narvik:

If you dont want to mess up unit cost or use a pencil on your map, then why dont you get extra income from your seazones ? You can name it International trade. Any empty and dedicated tranny adjacent to a neutral country give you a 5 IPC bonus.

Technically this would (or ought to) only benefit the Allies because none of the Axis powers engaged in significant maritime international trade during WWII.  The Allies were pretty much able deny the use of the high seas to the Axis as far as trading with each other went: Germany and Italy could trade with each other far more easily overland through occupied Europe than by the much longer sea route between the two countries, and Japan was even more isolated from its Axis partners because it was on the other side of the world and it didn’t have a free land route to reach them.

[Wise Guy]

I’ll go with variable dice depending on witch turn it is, I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Johnson73]

Go with Oil Fields and Oil Derricks.  Add Oil Fields on your Map.  House Rule:  When an Oil Derrick is built, the controling country gets a +1 IPC value to the territory.  If you take over or conquer a Territory with an Oil Deposit you get a one time plunder roll.  We use a 1D6 and take 1/2 (round up).  If Russia has 5 Territories with Oil Fields and they build Oil Derricks for each, that is +5 per round.  Can be bombed and destroyed by enemy however.  We added Iron Ore to our territories as well.  Same idea with the plunder.  Thinking of added Iron Ore Mines, similar to the oil derricks.  Once mined you add +1 IPC to territory.

These stickers and derricks can be purchased at combatminiaturs.org

[Wise Guy]

Oil also sounds interesting! I found this, https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=34322.0
but how would the land list and starting production look like for AA50?

[General 6 Stars]

I would lay out black chips on Burans land list and see who controls the most. The allies just using the value numbers is 3 times more than axis. Plus you have to worry about US taking all of South America. oil. Japan would need to get the islands for there oil.

Oil setup and rules can be very touchy. I would stay away from whats on the list until you figure out your random dice roll incomes in your next coming games. Maybe just put Oil Derricks on islands and in some key areas for countries and use Combat Min. rules so if Japan wants extra money go to the islands and germany wants oil have to go to Russia.

[Wise Guy]

Thanks SS for the Oil rules you sent to me. I’ll think we will go with those instead of dice. I’ll be back with a review when we have played with them.