Hi everyone. Quick Axis and Allies G40 house rules question from Tallinn, Estonia.
I am just setting up an AA G40 table in my office (allready set up actually). The board is set up in a common area and the plan is to take turns one by one without necessarily having the other players (colleagues) present. This will rely heavily on the honour of players but I believe we can make it work. Presumably one game might take anywhere between 1 - 3 months to complete (depending on peoples schedules).
Does anyone know of any pre-existing “away from table” rulesets that allow this type of gaming. I do not mean AA Chess here because I do not wish to get rid of rolling the dice - that is a key element of the game for me.
The problems I see arising have to do with the following aspects of the game:
Possibly even more problems will arise.
So how has this been solved in the past and how would you recommend we solve this.
@Rauno-Kinkar I have been watching the Youtube wars using Siredblood’s map and tournament rules. This game is played similar to what you are setting up. Each player takes their turn and records it and then uploads the turn onto Youtube for the other players (and viewers like myself) to watch. I have noticed that the players communicate through messenger about casualty choices, scrambling, and kamikaze. Maybe you can watch some of those videos and see how they do it. Hope that helps.
@Rauno-Kinkar Here is a link that shows kamikazi and casualty selection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU2bx4Px7j8
Nice idea!
People often encounter this when playing by forum: one player makes his combat moves, but needs to know a few things before rolling dice (like in your examples). In most cases, it can be solved by going ahead according to an honour system, where you choose the option you perceive as optimal. The opponent would be informed of choices you made on their behalf, and was given the option to redo a battle according to their wishes (this shouldn’t happen since the choice was obvious!).
When the optimal choice isn’t entirely clear, we’d usually ask the opponent (via phone).
Another option for this kind of asynchronous play is to have each player establish an OoL, or an Order of Loss.
An OoL would work something like this: Ground: AAA - Inf - Mech Inf - Arty - Tank - Strat Bomber - Tac Bomber - Fighter; Naval: Capital Ship first hit (a non-sinking hit on a Battleship or a Carrier) - Submarine - Destroyer - Tac Bomber - Cruiser - Fighter - wounded Carrier - wounded Battleship.
With an OoL, you have a rough guide as to how that player wants to take handle taking casualties. And by following that OoL, you can take defensive hits off for the defender with confidence that the defensive player really would like to lose something expensive but not entirely useful over something that is cheaper but also a better defender.
My 2 IPCs,
-Midnight_Reaper
@Rauno-Kinkar Generally, if there is any choice that is not obvious then you would post the combat moves then ask the defender for his decisions before rolling the battles. That is how its handled using TripleA and doing PBEM/PBF.
Yups. In Global, probably 90% of the in-combat decisions would be obvious, and about 95%-98% subject to at most, a minority view. Sometimes you want to lose a mech vs artillery, sometimes a destroyer instead of another ship.
The most crucial decisions regard the last living land unit, and sacrificing planes instead–to make the difference on taking a territory vs clearing it.
Redrum has a fine idea–play until the combat movement is set up and decided upon, then have some live method of rolling the battle out, then return to a 1 player game to complete the turn. Some turns won’t result in the need for decisions by all (or any) opposing players.
Another idea that comes to mind is to elect a third party decisionmaker during the rollout. This could be another available member of that player’s team, or someone else–even an adversary. That player should roll with the best interests of the represented player in mind–most of us would know what the best decisions/outcomes are, objectively speaking. Because there are so few actions that involve a truly split choice over which experienced players would differ, this may be workable.
AAZ mixes all this up–in AAZ order of casualties becomes much more of a choice, upon which experienced minds might differ.
Hope this helps–looking forward to photos of Baltic Blast 2019
I would use these rules:
(1) if the defender sees a key battle coming and can predict that they’ll want an unusual order of loss, they can leave a note, send an e-mail, etc., informing the attacker of their preferred order of loss, and the attacker will then follow that order.
(2) if there is no note, the attacker will provisionally use a standard order of loss.
(3) after seeing the results of the battle, the defender can pay 2 IPCs to the bank per casualty that they want to switch. You didn’t want to lose your bomber after all? Fine, pay 2 IPCs, and you can have your bomber back in exchange for one of your infantry. This should be expensive enough to deter casual abuse but still cheap enough that if you would really be upset about the order of loss, you can fix it without too much drama. Don’t think it’s fair that you should have to pay to set up your order of loss exactly the way you want it? Well, then, you should have foreseen the battle and given orders in advance. Don’t feel like thinking that hard every turn? Well, then, you can always just cough up 2 IPCs. It’s a way of speeding up the game while making sure that nothing unacceptably bad will happen because of order of loss issues.
