[Global 1940] New Complex Idea

[TheAandAClassicDude]

I had this cool idea where there would be another type of factory called a Micro Complex. Its a step lower than even a Minor Complex. It can produce 1 unit per turn and costs 7 IPCs to produce. The only placement rule is that the territory you put it in must have a value of at least 1. You can upgrade a Micro to a Minor for 8 IPCs.

Moderator’s edit: Added tag [Global 1940] to title.

[AxisAndAllies1940]

I too have thought about this- it would be good for the Americans to put in the Philippines and the Italians to put in Libya.

[Dauvio Vann]

Sounds like my idea.

I use a factory ship that cost 8, and it only produces one infantry per turn with territories that has IPC value.

[Charles de Gaulle]

This has some very serious implications:
All of eastern Russia and China will become easy places for Japan to build up.
Soviets can be building in the east.
The big Pacific islands that Japan usually takes can be easily reinforced from within.
An invasion of Australia is more realistic because micros can be built in the west.
The U.S. will be building micros just about wherever it can (North Africa, Hawaii, Iwo Jima).
Africa in general becomes a factory haven.

I like this idea, but the board is not really made for it.

[TheAandAClassicDude]

@Charles:

This has some very serious implications:
All of eastern Russia and China will become easy places for Japan to build up.
Soviets can be building in the east.
The big Pacific islands that Japan usually takes can be easily reinforced from within.
An invasion of Australia is more realistic because micros can be built in the west.
The U.S. will be building micros just about wherever it can (North Africa, Hawaii, Iwo Jima).
Africa in general becomes a factory haven.

I like this idea, but the board is not really made for it.

Would you say so? It sounds to me like there aren’t enough IPCs to make what you claim a reality. Even if there is, it doesn’t sound like to leans towards one side anyway.

[Johnson73]

we call them Recruitment Centers.  This picture is of one I put a red-cross flag on to represent a hospital.  I sell them at my shapeways store.  https://www.shapeways.com/shops/war-game-miniatures

[barney]

@Combat:

we call them Recruitment Centers.  This picture is of one I put a red-cross flag on to represent a hospital.  I sell them at my shapeways store.  https://www.shapeways.com/shops/war-game-miniatures

how much

[TheAandAClassicDude]

@Combat:

we call them Recruitment Centers.  This picture is of one I put a red-cross flag on to represent a hospital.  I sell them at my shapeways store.  https://www.shapeways.com/shops/war-game-miniatures

I really like the name of your factory, and the complexes look nice too!  :-D Do I have your permission to call them Recruitment Centers as well?

[Argothair]

I like this idea, but the board is not really made for it.

General De Gaulle nailed it here – having a third tier of factories would be really interesting, but most of the map isn’t designed with a third tier of countries in mind. In Soviet Russia, there are some obviously plausible “tertiary” factory sites like Vladivostok, Vologda, Archangel, Chelyabinsk, Perm, and Kazakh, all of which had notable concentrations of heavy industry in the 1940s…but these are all worth the same 1 IPC as completely ridiculous locations like Sakha or Nenetsia that couldn’t manufacture even one squadron of airplanes if they broke the local economy trying to do it.

Same thing in Africa – the idea of having the Gold Coast or French Central Africa pump out combat-worthy tanks is just laughable; these places couldn’t even manufacture sliced bread in the 1940s. On the other hand, Rhodesia or Ethiopia probably could have managed it. They’re all worth the same 1 IPC.

Same thing in the Pacific – there’s no industry or even enough locals to recruit on Iwo Jima, which is worth 1 IPC, but you could have easily recruited a few infantry regiments and equipped them with locally sourced rifles in, e.g., New Guinea, which is worth 0 IPCs.

So I think you either need a totally custom map, or you need some other way of extending the unit roster for production centers. I favor the “training camp,” which might also cost about 7 IPCs, but where you can recruit up to 2 infantry (only) per turn, and no other units. This helps get at the idea that you can set up a recruiting station just about anywhere, even if there’s no industry to speak of, because rifles are lightweight and easy to ship or haul across a continent – but you can only manufacture tanks and planes in genuine industrial centers that were built up at least a little bit before the war started.

[TheAandAClassicDude]

@Argothair:

I like this idea, but the board is not really made for it.

General De Gaulle nailed it here – having a third tier of factories would be really interesting, but most of the map isn’t designed with a third tier of countries in mind. In Soviet Russia, there are some obviously plausible “tertiary” factory sites like Vladivostok, Vologda, Archangel, Chelyabinsk, Perm, and Kazakh, all of which had notable concentrations of heavy industry in the 1940s…but these are all worth the same 1 IPC as completely ridiculous locations like Sakha or Nenetsia that couldn’t manufacture even one squadron of airplanes if they broke the local economy trying to do it.

Same thing in Africa – the idea of having the Gold Coast or French Central Africa pump out combat-worthy tanks is just laughable; these places couldn’t even manufacture sliced bread in the 1940s. On the other hand, Rhodesia or Ethiopia probably could have managed it. They’re all worth the same 1 IPC.

Same thing in the Pacific – there’s no industry or even enough locals to recruit on Iwo Jima, which is worth 1 IPC, but you could have easily recruited a few infantry regiments and equipped them with locally sourced rifles in, e.g., New Guinea, which is worth 0 IPCs.

So I think you either need a totally custom map, or you need some other way of extending the unit roster for production centers. I favor the “training camp,” which might also cost about 7 IPCs, but where you can recruit up to 2 infantry (only) per turn, and no other units. This helps get at the idea that you can set up a recruiting station just about anywhere, even if there’s no industry to speak of, because rifles are lightweight and easy to ship or haul across a continent – but you can only manufacture tanks and planes in genuine industrial centers that were built up at least a little bit before the war started.

But at the end of the day, so much of the game is unrealistic. Why bother getting it down to the very last detail when there are other aforementioned inaccuracies such as Siberian territories being worth as much as they are. You didn’t mention once how it would break the game, only how unrealistic it is.

[Argothair]

Well, I’m not a stickler for perfect detail; I just think mechanics in the game should correspond roughly to what they’re meant to thematically represent, because that makes the game more entertaining and easier to ‘model’ in your head…instead of having to memorize hundreds of rules, you can just apply a bit of common sense. Can I strategically bomb this factory even though it’s guarded by thirty fighter planes? I might not remember the exact interceptor rules, but I can still be pretty sure that it’s a bad idea. If you make the pieces shaped like bombers represent horse cavalry, and you make the pieces shaped like destroyers represent minefields, then common sense stops being useful, and every rule has to be tediously memorized. A little bit of unrealism (especially oversimplification) for better game play is perfectly acceptable, but we shouldn’t be totally cavalier about accepting unnecessary unrealism. Or, at least, that’s my opinion.

With that in mind, allowing players to manufacture tanks and planes in what would today be modern-day Chad or Sierra Leone or Yakutsk or Bali strikes me as very unnecessary unrealism. Those places still can’t build planes today, 75 years later.

As far as breaking the game, I think other commenters have already pointed out the downsides better than I could – the Japanese would be able to easily recruit reinforcements in western China and/or central Asia, which would make a mockery of the carefully crafted supply line difficulties in that region. The whole point of the Japan-China war is that Japan has better technology (tanks, planes, etc.) and initially superior numbers, but Japan has trouble pressing its advantage because as Japan eats up Chinese territory, it gets increasingly far from a source of reinforcements and loses its flexibility. Meanwhile, the Chinese are constantly hemorrhaging units, but they can deploy what units they do have literally in any of their territories. That’s an interesting asymmetry that gets flattened by the new rule about micro-factories.

You get similar problems for the British in central Africa (it’s interesting that the British have to figure out how to ship troops north from the naval base and minor factory at South Africa and have trouble penetrating deep inland; drop a micro-factory in the Congo and all of a sudden that interest is gone), for the Germans in Scandinavia after the Baltic Fleet gets sunk (it’s not worth defending Norway with a whole minor factory, but on the other hand if you leave Norway without any defenses then the Americans can easily pick it off with one transport and make a huge profit by denying the German NO), or for Japan in Western Australia (normally ANZAC can fight on for a while against a modest Japanese landing because Australia is so far from Tokyo, but if Australia has been kicked out of the money islands and Japan gets any toehold at all, then Japan can build micro-factories in every Australian territory it conquers and snowball its way into Sydney, meaning that a minor ANZAC defeat automatically becomes a total ANZAC defeat, which is less interesting).

[TheAandAClassicDude]

@Argothair:

Well, I’m not a stickler for perfect detail; I just think mechanics in the game should correspond roughly to what they’re meant to thematically represent, because that makes the game more entertaining and easier to ‘model’ in your head…instead of having to memorize hundreds of rules, you can just apply a bit of common sense. Can I strategically bomb this factory even though it’s guarded by thirty fighter planes? I might not remember the exact interceptor rules, but I can still be pretty sure that it’s a bad idea. If you make the pieces shaped like bombers represent horse cavalry, and you make the pieces shaped like destroyers represent minefields, then common sense stops being useful, and every rule has to be tediously memorized. A little bit of unrealism (especially oversimplification) for better game play is perfectly acceptable, but we shouldn’t be totally cavalier about accepting unnecessary unrealism. Or, at least, that’s my opinion.

With that in mind, allowing players to manufacture tanks and planes in what would today be modern-day Chad or Sierra Leone or Yakutsk or Bali strikes me as very unnecessary unrealism. Those places still can’t build planes today, 75 years later.

As far as breaking the game, I think other commenters have already pointed out the downsides better than I could – the Japanese would be able to easily recruit reinforcements in western China and/or central Asia, which would make a mockery of the carefully crafted supply line difficulties in that region. The whole point of the Japan-China war is that Japan has better technology (tanks, planes, etc.) and initially superior numbers, but Japan has trouble pressing its advantage because as Japan eats up Chinese territory, it gets increasingly far from a source of reinforcements and loses its flexibility. Meanwhile, the Chinese are constantly hemorrhaging units, but they can deploy what units they do have literally in any of their territories. That’s an interesting asymmetry that gets flattened by the new rule about micro-factories.

You get similar problems for the British in central Africa (it’s interesting that the British have to figure out how to ship troops north from the naval base and minor factory at South Africa and have trouble penetrating deep inland; drop a micro-factory in the Congo and all of a sudden that interest is gone), for the Germans in Scandinavia after the Baltic Fleet gets sunk (it’s not worth defending Norway with a whole minor factory, but on the other hand if you leave Norway without any defenses then the Americans can easily pick it off with one transport and make a huge profit by denying the German NO), or for Japan in Western Australia (normally ANZAC can fight on for a while against a modest Japanese landing because Australia is so far from Tokyo, but if Australia has been kicked out of the money islands and Japan gets any toehold at all, then Japan can build micro-factories in every Australian territory it conquers and snowball its way into Sydney, meaning that a minor ANZAC defeat automatically becomes a total ANZAC defeat, which is less interesting).

Okay, I’m convinced. I must have not seen the repercussions that this had. Thanks for pointing them out Argothair!

[Johnson73]

We use these on our custom 1939 Map as Infantry only Recruitment Centers.  Takes (2) Turns to build at a cost of (6) each turn.  We are on a D20 System,  And units have production schedules.

Allows Player to build Infantry where there is no Factory.  (1) Infantry per Recruitment Center (can have more then one in territory).  Territory must have value of (1) or more.

[Charles de Gaulle]

I like the recruitment center idea of infantry only.  It’s realistic and not overpowered.  Now, to prevent abuse by Japan particularly, simply make it that you may only build recruitment centers in original territories or pro-your side territories you own that are 1 IPC or more.  Furthermore, make it that recruitment centers get destroyed if the territory is overrun.  These small adjustments work beautifully for both history and game balance.  Observe:

Germany can recruit from its eastern allies, the northern European Quislings, and Poland (conscripts).

Russia can get far eastern troops to secure its border with Japan and also reinforce the frontline with locals from around the Soviet Union.

Japan can get help from its ally Thailand, and recruit soldiers from occupied Korea and Formosa and Japanese in Okinawa.  Iwo Jima might look like a problem, but it’s really not.  I doubt Japan would want to be build there, and even if they did, it could be excused as Japanese mainalanders volunteering to defend the island.

The United States could recruit citizens from Hawaii and Alaska and the freedom-loving Filipinos.  They could also try to get Central Americans or Brazillians to fight, but as was really the case, it’s not practical in the game.

The UK could recruit soldiers from all around the Empire.  All the African nations can send their local military or volunteers (it’s amazing how much Rhodesia did in the war), Palestinians and Zionists could theoretically help in Trans-Jordan, more Scots and Canadians could make a showing (not really good in a gameplay perspective), Persia could be persuaded to fight (but it’s way better to build industry there), Chinese could join in defense of Hong Kong, and southeast Asians could even make an appearance (many of them fought Japan).

In essence, China already has this recruitment rule on an accelerated scale.

Italy will be able to recruit from anti-British locals in Africa and also friendly Albania.

ANZAC could recruit soldiers in the west, and New Zealand can finally get the attention it deserves.

If France were ever liberated, then locals from around the empire could be recruited.  The majority of French troops in the empire were actually locals on most occasions.

I like this idea plenty.

[CWO Marc]

If the cost/benefit (or rather complication/realism) ratio is worth it, a distinction could be drawn between a) recruitment centers built in territories that have the same printed roundel as the power building the R/C (or one of its allies) and b) recruitment centers built in captured foreign territories.  The “b” category, in real-life WWII, would have tended to produce either small recruitment numbers, or recruits of dubious loyalty/competence, or both.  I’m not sure how this could be reflected in the rules; perhaps it could be done by adapting one of the house rules for militia-grade troops.  And perhaps the same problem (few recruits or poor recruits) might even apply in some territories of the “a” category, on a case-by-case basis.  For example, as CdG indirectly indicated, Iwo Jima had a tiny local civilian population at the time (a thousand or so).  And a complication of a different sort, as far as the big colonial (officially or otherwise) powers are concerned, is that when they recruited locals from various corners of their empires / territories, they sometimes treated them as second-rate “colonial” (or worse) troops in terms of such things as their assignments and their equipment.  In fairness, however, it did make sense to use the locals locally when there was a need for troops in those locations, and the combat which took place in those locations wasn’t necessarily the type of large-scale mechanized ground warfare seen in, let’s say, Europe.

[Ichabod]

@Charles:

I like the recruitment center idea of infantry only.  It’s realistic and not overpowered.  Now, to prevent abuse by Japan particularly, simply make it that you may only build recruitment centers in original territories or pro-your side territories you own that are 1 IPC or more.  Furthermore, make it that recruitment centers get destroyed if the territory is overrun.  These small adjustments work beautifully for both history and game balance.  Observe:

Even if the rule was a 1 IPC territory (not just an original territory), meaning Japan could still build a micro complex (even if only infantry), I don’t see how super effective it would be. If Japan spent 7 IPCs to place a micro, and then build 1 unit the next turn, they could have just built 2 mech instead out of a minor in Manchuria. Japan is spending that kind of money for a micro in the back of Russia seems like a silly expenditure. I think that would be more harmful than helpful.

I see this as mostly helping the US replenish units in an island hopping campaign.

[Charles de Gaulle]

I have to disagree.  Imagine Japan building a micro in western China or the Novosibirsk area.  That would allow a quick overrun of the unprotected Soviet territoriies while the Russians are cornered in Moscow.  It tales a fast unit four turns to get from the Chinese coast (where factories can be built) to Moscow, while a micro could bring troops to the front immediately.

Even a micro in the Shan State or Yunnan could be detrimental to India simply because of the added range. Though a micro is not as economical as a minor, it gives Japan a privilege it rarely ever gets early on: building inland.