I have recently completed an advanced rules set for a WWII strategy game. This rules set is intended to do several things.
To give each unit type a historically accurate role. Fighters excel at shooting down enemy planes, but are not very well suited to attacking land or naval targets. Dive bombers are strong against land targets, are solid against naval targets, and can hold their own in a dogfight. Torpedo bombers are better than dive bombers against naval targets and submarines, can also hold their own in a dogfight, but are not well-suited to attacking land targets. Strategic bombers are intended to attack the enemy’s cities, and to create semi-permanent reductions in the enemy’s income and war-making ability.
To cause players to make big picture decisions involving research, industrialization, building up transportation networks, and other increases in war making capacity. No aspect of research, industrialization, and so forth is even remotely luck-based.
To provide a historically plausible representation of WWII. I freely admit that game balance has required me to interpret information in Axis-friendly ways. For example, Germany is able to convert its fighter force to jets on turn 4 (spring of '44), even though jets represented only a very small fraction of Germany’s military aircraft production for '44. But while I am willing to imagine away the difficulty of putting prototypes into widespread production, that represents the approximate maximum I will accept in deviating from the historically plausible.
Because this is the WWII history section, I’d like to ask people’s input about the game’s historical plausibility. Does this rules set overstate or understate the impact of specific technologies? Am I being too generous, or not generous enough, in my depiction of any given nation? Are there any technologies I have missed which should be included?
Please confine your comments to history-related questions such as the above. I also strongly welcome other comments about this rules set. The appropriate place for non-history-related comments is the main thread about Advanced Flames and Steel. Thanks.
