So, just to be clear, we have one guy here asking for amphibious assaults to be nerfed, and then we have another guy asking for amphibious assualts (specifically bombardment) to be increased in power (by their casualties not shooting back). Alright.
The rule change from A&A '42 where only one boat per landing unit can bombard was necessary, and helps with coastal defense. I don’t think there’s any good way to “fix” coastal defenses without adding several new rules, and perhaps this was not done for simplicity’s sake. Furthermore, in this game, even in land battles, it is very often better to fall back and counterattack than it is to try to defend your ground. Why the same shouldn’t be true for coastal assaults isn’t clear to me.
The dogfighting I feel is 100% fine. As someone else said, the situation for bombing raids in the war wasn’t some kind of grand aerial battle most of the time. It was a chaotic stew of firing relatively blindly, with the offending side flying into ground-based AA fire after a period, and the defending side not not often following them there. Having your bomber wings and fighters all roll 1’s for one round seems like both a somewhat accurate representation of this, as well as a way to allow you additional, yet conditional, defense against being SBR’d.
Transports being able to drop off at only one territory makes sense to me. It’s a pretty large logistical undertaking to offload troops. Doing it twice in one turn, along with picking up twice in one turn, is a pretty extreme adjustment. It would also drastically alter gameplay. Being able to land two infantry, one each in two territories, is a pretty hugelargebig difference, and generally favors the Axis (hello northern africa, money islands, multiple australian territories to prep for a landing zone for JP planes on the next turn, one transport to snag ireland/scotland during sea lion to prevent US bombers from having a place to land, etc, etc…).
Transports having some kind of way to defend themselves also seems weird, and would be a massive change to the G40 experience. The point of transports, as the rules are written now, is to keep them shielded, always, or make the sacrifice. Transports were not fast nor were they maneuverable.
The following are not meant to discuss potential house rules, but are to just mention what some people have suggested and how the changes would, without any potential (rational and decent) argument available against the facts, affect the game.
If you placed a limit on how many transports could be killed by a single unit, okay, that kind of makes sense, but how often would that even come up? Four transports sitting there. A destroyer comes in, can only kill three. Alright, one is left alive. It still can’t pick up any units from that Sea Zone on its turn, for instance. Do you really need this edge case rule to keep your one transport alive? It sounds to me like this is only a problem for people who have had a stack of naked transports killed because they forgot to count how many spaces enemy planes and boats could move.
If transports had a small, random chance to survive, that would be annoying for both sides, and also lead into rules complications/additions about amphibious assaults or moving over submarines undefended. Just think about the G1 single sub hitting the Canadian Dest/TT. 1/6th chance that your 50/50 gamble just doesn’t work… super. And by “survive”, do they just sit in the sea zone? What about amphibious assaults where the offensive sea battle fails? Adding a rule like this would require more supporting rules, somewhat further violating what little bit of simplicity G40 is able to retain.
Implementing tranports defending on a 1 and being able to take hits as in A&A 42 would be an extreme change
There’s nothing you can do to “fix” the rule of defenseless transports without redesigning several parts of the game.
As far as France goes, it really did crumple up like a beer can on the forehead of a stupid frat guy shortly after Paris fell (or before, even). China and France were extremely different situations, and I don’t think the China rules “insult” France, especially since they are so specific. Yes, France still “had” its Colonial empire, but the organization just wasn’t there. Had Washington D.C. fallen, would some part of America had continued to fight? Yeah probably, from some other cultural/industrial/political/military center: Chicago/Sanfran/etc. If London fell, would Canada still operate? Yeah, sure, and the game even splits it up into UK Atl/Pac. But you can’t convince me that the French colonial empire would have the same solidarity and ability to mobilize, especially given some historical insight on how well their colonies did/did not actually like them, and the vichy also trying to claim rightful custodianship. The capital = everything rule for nations is there for simplicity, and to force you to want to defend it. Moreover, France, more than any other nation save Japan, actually did depend on its capital territory as much as the game seems to force you to.
One I do agree is weird, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call stupid, is the retreating rules as previously mentioned. I can understand having them from a game simplicity point of view, but using them to warp slow units around the map always feels lame, even when I’m the one doing it. The only consistent use of this I’ve seen, however, is G1 for the Yugo shenanigans.
The OOB victory conditions are a bit of a slog for the allies, and it is strange that Japan can win by taking Hawaii, of all places, and all of a sudden, even though Russia/UK Atlantic/America are all making ~double their original income and are now coming for Japan which is only making ~100. “Okay, the vast majority of the world’s industrial capacity is now concentrated on one goal: killing you.” “Too bad, I took these tiny islands just now.” “Oh ����, yeah you did, okay, we surrender.”
I think the rule is there just to make sure you feel like you must play both sides of the map. My group often houserules this to a global VC # requirement, for both sides, to alleviate it.
edit-
And battleships cost twenty. Twenty dude. Not being able to bombard after taking a hit seems like a needless punishment. These units are supposed to be worth their cost. Being fully operational even after surviving combat is part of that.
