@taamvan:
Its similar to the victory conditions in Risk. Ok; we start with 5 players, 3 are eliminated over the course of 3 hours…then they sit and watch while the last two of us spend ANOTHER 3 hours trying to take EVERY territory to win.
The OOB A&A rules and the total domination variant both actually have something in common: the games can theoretically last forever – or at least for an extremely large number of rounds – and as such they’re unrealistic because a total war between major powers can’t be sustained forever.
Total war, on the scale seen in WWI and WWII, imposes enormous social and economic strains on the participant nations (in addition to the direct casualties and destruction which occur both on the battlefield and in civilian areas that are subjected to military attack). In many cases (the U.S. in both world wars being a significant exception), the resources and manpower of nations engaged in total war are expended more quickly than they can be replaced (particularly in the case of people, who even if they’re drafted as teenagers take 15 or more years to be replaced from newborns). The game rules don’t take these factors into account: the players can keep fighting as long as they can collect income, without worrying about running out of civilian workers or draft-age recruits, and without worrying about social breakdown or revolution at home (except in the case of the optional Russian Revolution rule in A&A 1914).
Barbara Tuchman’s book The Zimmermann Telegram describes vividly how nations can eventually crumble under the strain of total war. Her opening chapter, set in January 1917, says, “Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Alied side, already ruined and overrun. The enemy was no better off. Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with even harsher measures. The [recent German peace offer] had been a mere pretense, designed to be rejected so that the General Staff could wring from the home front and faltering Austria yet more endurance and more sacrifice. […] England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas. […] No prospect of any end was visible. […] It seemed there was nothing that would bring in the Americans before Europe exhausted itself beyond recovery.” Similarly, Gwynne Dyer’s book war makes the point that none of the regimes on the losing side (or rather sides) of WWI survived: the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were all destroyed, and the latter two were completely dismantled into a patchwork of successor states. The British and French empires survived on paper, but were greatly weakened and were ultimately finished off by WWII and its aftermath.
If a group of players wanted to prevent A&A games from going on forever (and in fairness, players don’t necessarily want this), one solution might be to create some sort of house rule that tracks the social and economic strain of waging total war, and which has some sort of built-in breaking point for each power depending on the particulars of its situation. Realistically, though, such a house rule would favour the Allies because of the US’s geographic isolation (which makes it difficult to attack) and its status as a net producer of war goods (unlike the UK, which was a net consumer), and the USSR’s vast manpower reserves. One factor that would compensate matters to some degree would be for the game to assume improved economic efficiency by Germany than was the case historically. (Germany in WWII was extremely inefficient at making use of its domestic and captured economic infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.)
