Lack of board flatness

@drummerinheat:

Does the blue color for the oceans match?  My Pacific side is a liter or more faded blue than the Europe side.  Even the replacement was off colored.

I have the same, and I never even noticed it until someone else mentioned it to me. Now I can’t un-see it :p

Still, the difference is quite minor–enough to not even notice for five months and a half dozen games.

@aequitas:

@knp7765:

Or how about Germany? In our game, it’s 1 battle and done. In reality it took the Allies on both sides from December 1944 to May 1945 to conquer all of that single country and that was with their main thrusts involved for the US/UK and USSR.

That was because the Americans dragged it out because of the good Food here in Germany.
Name one american who can resist Bratwurst and  Sauerkraut or Schweinsbraten??

Oh and 'mericans love Castles so there you go, they got a lot of them here.
(Not to mention the good beer,though)

Well, I do like a good Bratwurst. Don’t care for Sauerkraut (although I loved it as a kid) and I don’t even know what a Schweinsbraten is.
I must admit, castles are pretty cool too. And who doesn’t love a good cold beer (especially if it’s served up by a lovely blond fraulein)?

This is why I interpret IPCs in A&A as abstract and flexible. Lets looks at some examples by Region from Revised up to G40…

Canada: from 4 ipcs up to 7 ipcs
America (the continental USA): from 28 ipcs up to 45 ipcs
Africa: from 11 ipcs up to 20
China (unoccupied): from 4 ipcs up to 12 ipcs
Western Europe (France/Holland/Denmark): from 6 ipcs to 14 ipcs
Germany: from 10 ipcs to 14 ipcs
Australia: from 2 ipcs to 8 ipcs

United Kingdom: from 8 ipcs to 8 ipcs
Japan: from 8 ipcs to 8 ipcs
Hawai: from 1 ipc to 1 ipc

Philippines: from 3 ipcs down to 2 ipcs

I could go on, but the point here is that there is no hard and fast relative scale for how these values are being worked out over successive boards. Sometimes the same region nearly doubles in value, sometimes it triples, sometimes it stays roughly the same.

This is a very strong indication to me that IPCs are not the iron values sometimes suggested, or that IPC values in A&A are somehow set in stone. They have been changing to suit the gameplay for a while now.

I want to point this out because I think it speaks to a more general feeling I get, that money/production should be flexible, to suite the needs of the gameplay, rather than something highly rigid or that must somehow retain consistency along historical lines, or to match up with previous boards. It just seems arbitrary for the most part, and more so when you look at the values side by side for successive boards. Clearly IPCs are there for the gameplay. They are distributed in the way they are for gameplay purposes, not in some highly fine tuned or particularly accurate spread for historical or “real world” reasons.

If for example, China’s total value can increase by 300%, or Australia can go up by 400%, while Hawaii stays exactly the same, and Philippines is decreased by 33%, then why should we expect anything consistent out of IPCs anywhere on the gamemap?

To me this is encouraging, because it suggests that IPC value and “collect income” can be tweaked for game balance (on a regional basis) without upsetting some underlying foundation. The fact that these values have changed so much over time, indicates a high level of abstraction going on.

The thing to notice is that IPCs are already being counted differently (in terms of relative value) depending on where they are located on the gamemap. I think this is an important thing to bear in mind when considering what IPCs really represent, and to see why gameplay (and not necessarily historical production analogy) is the critical factor in determining how these should be distributed across the map on any given board.

Well, a redesigned larger map would give extra space in which to put the plastic units, which would be nice, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean that it would take longer for the units to travel across the board because that would depend on whether the sea zones and land territories are large in size but few in number, or small in size but large in number.  In the particular case of my custom table, neither factor was changed because the plastic units only get put on the normal four-panel part of the map.  The auxiliary map panel on the left is just meant to help with the wrap-around visualization – though as a bonus, it also gives some extra free space as a handy working surface, as do the two table wings.

Yes it was the first thing I printed up to use looking for game aids.

They look really cool.

Everyone kept losing one or dropping them on the floor.
(I dont know how many times someone has picked up their box with the lid on and the bottom tray falls out and spilled the contents all over the place. I even have one friend that keeps finding a Japanese infantry months after we played at his house. :roll:)

We have set up a small separate table to keep our IPC chart away from the game board and for us the larger objectives with token markers sit out on either side of the IPC chart or can be placed next to the actual player needing to keeptrack of their stuff.

I guess this style just meets our individual needs.

Bid the Artillery Breakthrough for India?

Hi,
I can’t find the old thread where people used tiny magnets to secure planes to carriers. So i got the magnets, and plan on a board on my wall with units with magnets on the bottom. What to use as the metal behind the board? Suggestions?  I know they said in the thread something about sheet metel. Any other ideas?
thanks,
-qwertyuiop