If only there was an online version of G40 that was customizable for all of us to play. That would make play testing something like this much more effective. I’m stating something that everyone’s aware of already, but I just like to put it out there. That would allow several different play styles to come together, which would make the process of refining these projects go much faster.
From what I read, everyone seems to have some sort of strategy they’ve adopted and stick to, which they deviate a little bit from game to game with no drastic core changes.
I’ll try to put this into perspective a little bit. In the games that I play with the group I meet up with (which are G40 and the big GW39 variant), Japan pretty much evacuates China immediately, because the Japanese have no actual real incentive to fight the Chinese, forcing the Chinese to literally become completely irrelevant to the whole war. There’s no bonus in the OOB rules to conquer China, and there’s enough cities out there to make up for Hong Kong and Shanghai. No factories ever get built in China. The real target is the Commonwealth in our games. China is just a distraction, period. Even with that bonus 5 Delta gives for wiping out China, the Japanese SAs actually have great potential of being well balanced by isolating China. That’s just a small example of how things differ from group to group, game to game. Another one too would be that I never do the Taranto raid UK1 (for my own reasons, of course), which might have a factor in a development in some undetermined way of some other HR that some other guy is developing. Just speaking hypothetically here about these scenarios. I’ll repeat myself here: the more scenarios you can base your judgement on for making these rules (providing the scenarios are preferable and good ones, overall), the better you can refine them.
About the banzai attacks being on the 1st round of combat only, I wouldn’t play the game with that rule in place. I like it to be recurring as it stands now with the rest of the advantages.
As for the German artillery having pre-emptive shots from a long way away, that duty was actually given to rail guns. You know those ridiculously huge guns that you could barely operate? :p I have them for GW39, they work good for that. I think a separate unit would be necessary for this kind of thing. I realize that won’t work for this project though, so I’m not sure how else to approach that.
