Vichy is a must in my opinion, even if you get the worse case situation and get nothing. Southern France being Vichy blocks Italy from being conquered through France. This is a good reason why you may not want to take Switzerland as the Axis.
Development of Alternate Version of Rules
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@SS:
Bud, I’d be interested in your rules and setups to. I know the group wouldn’t play but a buddy or 2 might. I’m hopin to setup a 3rd gaming table were I could pretty much change out games, keep setup for certain games for a period of time.
I do have 3 HBG G39 maps.Have you thought about having ships move only 2 spaces from a naval base and if no naval base, can only move 1 space for the whole map ?
Then you wouldn’t need the blue dots.Also agree with your comment about time and space.
The blue dots in the Pacific seem to be fine. We’re not sure about the Atlantic. If we decrease the mobility of ships then it won’t be historically accurate at all. It took about 15 days of sailing from Virginia to Morocco. We have to make sure that’s possible in our game - i.e. to be able to do that in one month of the game. Therefore, we eliminated SZ35 and gave the US “Improved Naval Bases” along with the UK (which is reasonable).
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I hate to be the guy that bothers you for your progress on this, but I was just curious to check in and see how your development has been going? This game certainly had a ton of interest for me!
Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays, and will have a great New Year’s!
Chris
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Hey Chris, I am working with Bud on the rules and we are close to doing a launch. We hope to hear feedback. Our play test is going well with many interesting twists and turns. It is quite different than what actually happened but also plausible. With a complex gaming system, the play testing constantly provides us with new scenarios that we have not thought of before. That is the challenge but also the fun of it.
We have to keep in mind that this is a strategic-level gaming system and despite my attraction of individual tactics and scenarios, some of those are just out of the scope of the game.
Thanks for asking and we hear you loud and clear!
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Right on Mike. It just seemed really well thought out, and I was very curious to see how it was coming!
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Hello,
Any progress? I’m looking forward to see a sample of the work you have done.
Cheers! -
Anything yet on the rules being written down yet. I am looking forward seeing on what you have completed and trying it out with my gaming group.
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To all those who wanted rules for an alternate version of this game, we’ve hit a wall. We’ve play-tested it several times but arrived several conclusions:
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The map, in our view, requires so many alterations that players in the community might not want to go through all the trouble. It’s a decent map but spaces = distances is so distorted that it makes things ridiculously artificial. We have used scotch tape and a marker to add new territories and sea zones (we think the Pacific Ocean is just too small, for example, and that Africa should have more territories to simulate its enormous size geographically).
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The units, like infantry, tanks, planes - just doesn’t really reflect reality enough for us to continue using them. We’re developing a more realistic set of military units (see below).
Our other rules, about terrain, weather, leadership, strategic and tactical phases, the monthly pace/turn, initiative, offensive and defensive posture during battles, combat supply units, strategic assets, etc. do work. They work well. We even set up the game again, thinking to play-test one more round, but the above 2 issues, especially #2, just made it impossible to continue.
We’d like to make a new map and publish that, but we don’t have time to do all the work. So, we’re going to “fix” the map we have. It’s not a bad map…it just could be better! :-)
As for the military units: we’re developing 5/8" counters - like old Avalon Hill strategy games - of division-sized units (a few regimental and brigade units too). This is an enormous task. We’re currently researching every division in World War II for every nation - and adding extra ones in case a player uses more than what was actually used (like the U.S. - who had 90 divisions give or take but the War Dept. at one point had a plan to raise 255 divisions should the war have gone badly). It gets complicated. Some divisions were re-organized and some were deactivated - we’re going to make some command decisions regarding those. Also included will be combat supply units. We realize that the Soviet Union, Germany and China had enormous armies - that Soviet divisions were smaller than German/American/British divisions - their scores will reflect that.
Every unit will have scores or levels for attack, defense, hit points (how much damage they can take), AAA score, cost, stacking points (how much logistically cumbersome it is) and training level (A-E, A being very well-trained, E being more or less auxiliary units). We’ve also made planes and ships too as well as counters for Corps (1-6 divisions), Armies (7-20 divisions) and Army Groups (21+ divisions). Those Corps, Armies and Army Group counters are what actually goes on the board during game play - the actual divisions are hidden from other players in trays - so you don’t know what the other guy has until you either a) fight him or b) recon or c) espionage. The fog of war… It’ll be like that for ships too - Task Forces and Fleets… If you want to attack a fleet in a sea zone you have to “find it” first during strategic combat with reconnaissance aircraft.
I’ve developed a combat system that is based on a Combat Results Table. Damage depends on the amount of combat power being thrown at the enemy. If you have 1 division and the enemy has 6 divisions being thrown at you, you’re not going to destroy all of them by a long shot. But you might hurt them badly enough that it turns the battle in your favor - or gives you more favorable odds. Battles can last several rounds sometimes - so several rolls of the dice - each round players have to roll initiative. The system is complicated but it looks like it’ll work. Battles will take a while to resolve. You get to be the commander, decide which divisions will suffer damage, which ones you should withdraw out of the territory, what you’ll do if you gain the initiative… You’ll have to manage how you’re going to bring in replacements to bring units back up to full strength when damaged. Sometimes your units might just get wiped out entirely - and that’s it for them. Terrain and weather will modify dice rolls, as well as commanders. The CRT has columns and odds: 1-4 all the way up to 7-1. It’s dangerous to attack an enemy when you only have 1-1 odds (your attack factor in total from all your divisions vs. his total defense factor from all of his). Damages are from 1/16 to 1 - 1 being 100% of your combat power effects the enemy (a really good hit). Rolls are determined by the D12. So, it you have an attack of 90 and you achieve “1/2” against the enemy, they take 45 hit points of damage - spread across their army as the defender sees fit. That’s the idea anyways. Sometimes the result will be that you suffer no damage but the enemy does, or vice versa.
Aircraft: we’ve determined that each aircraft unit (Fighters, Fighter Bombers) are about 100 planes. Can 100 Fighter Bombers destroy and entire SS panzer division? We’re not sure. It can certainly damage it. But planes, although effective, won’t be able to just strafe anything on the ground at will and destroy it. It’ll be more realistic.
So that’s what we’re working on. We’re sorry that the version we’ve been working on for a while just didn’t pan out. We just don’t want to play with figurines anymore. It doesn’t make sense to us. It isn’t all that interesting. If we’re going to spend hours playing a war game, we figure it might as well be interesting.
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The map, in our view, requires so many alterations that players in the community might not want to go through all the trouble.
Global 39 or Global 36. they are different
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Global 1939. Didn’t want to invest in Global 1936. We looked at it and it had the same issue anyways…
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Looks like your project has evolved into something that can no longer be called Axis and Allies…
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Perhaps not… I don’t know any more. It’s inspired by Axis and Allies and Global War 1939… I guess it just takes things even further. Maybe in ways Axis and Allies players will find unrecognizable.
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I don’t have the space to keep a game setup for months and I can’t play every week. If I could, though, I would surely want to play this game. You guys deserve congratulations and encouragement for such a major undertaking 8-) :-D :-D 8-)
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Thanks cb4 for your affirmation. We love history and historical accuracy, and we think that a version that encapsulates that more would be an interesting variant, even if it looks quite different from the original.
We are determined to write rules that explain things clearly with examples. But that project is Phase II. We’re on Phase I really. Phase III is to play-test and adjust rules. Phase IV is to enjoy it for years to come.
But our time is extremely limited right now. That’s the main problem!
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I think based on the much higher quality of the 1936 map, you may gain alot more support for revisions since that’s the new standard for the game. The changes could be made by HBG once you provide a workable rules rewrite, since this would entail even more popularity of the game. I want to buy that 36 map but the 75 pages of rules are daunting to overcome. I was hoping for a 20-24 page document because my time is also limited.
Remember the 36 map is what everyone or most of us already has or is playing
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I agree with what u say IL. 35000 pages for game rules. I have the map. I have never played on it. Make me an offer I’ll sell it to you if you want the map. Unless those 20 pages of rules does come out by somebody. Oh wait now you have a new project you can work on. :-D
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I agree with IL above re maps. The 1936 map I have is just awesome. Though I can understand you’d want to make changes to cater to your game, I would agree that adopting the 1936 map would be a better way to go to get larger support here.
Also, one way you could alleviate so many changes would be to just sit down and talk about what you want. By that I mean, when you look at a single turn of your game, what is the scope? Is it a single month? Six months? Point being, the areas being too small for you (using your post on the Pacific being too small) and greatly be altered by what you want a turn to be. If a turn is one month, for example, ships from the US should more than be able to reach Australia within a single turn based on how long it would take a ship in real life to travel the distance.
What I mean is, if you want the naval/air war in the Pacific to last longer, or whatever your goal may be, maybe find an alternative to changing the map so much. I’ve thought about that too, and one thing I’ve toyed with would be ships/planes having to “search” for each other. There could be a dice roll where maybe you just couldn’t find the enemy ships, etc.
With that said, that also changes based on turn length. If a turn represents a month, it would be unrealistic to say on a single dice roll that no action occurred that month because they couldn’t find each other.
Just trying to think of ways where you won’t have to alter maps so much! :-)
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Ya you could have sea planes instead that need to go out and find fleets on a roll of 3 or less.
Alter the game. Simple, throw away 50 pages of rules and make it KISS.
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Yea just rebuild the game using the 36 map. You could import global rules and tweek them for 36 time period, or just skip to 39. You only need to add rail rules and add some new factions. I would keep the thing where its really three sides ( Soviet, Axis, Western Allies), and change techs using the provided player aids. Not a fan of 3 or 4 turn builds for BB and CV, i would get rid of that and keep it global 40 ideas.
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Actually I find the BB and CV rules for Global War 36/39 to be more realistic vs being able to just drop 2 battleships or 4 carriers in one turn. It makes those units more valuable to keep safe vs just throwing them away its one of the reasons I do enjoy the game it makes you think more. in G40 its to the point where the moves are all clock work ( if you do this I do that) it has become to cookie cutter imo
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Hi have you got the setups for download cause I would really like to try this on map I’ve been working on
I took modern world map enlarge European contents(spelled wrong I know) then then broke every country into their administration division that I could.
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