Super Size Me

Very interesting, Mr. Marc.  We have some friends here in Kansas City that work/teach/study at the Leavenworth staff college and we were just discussing a few weeks ago the German Staff College Kriegspiele Game and how these original 19th c. simulations are the origin of modern wargaming, with many of the modern conventions reflected, such as dice, complex ruleset, modular setup, special rules/exceptions, piece types, attempted realism, etc.  The professor in our group spoke about how he uses modern wargames to teach modern warfighting and what games/rules they emphasize, he’s basically a professional gamer (jealous!).

I find it interesting that many of the older Jules Verne style early wargames, like the one you describe, required some measure of dexterity in order to fire at your enemy as opposed to dice based games that simulate the hits/misses/damage.  Real naval gunfire has some element of timing/patterning/watching your misses in order to zero onto your target, there are some different considerations than trying to fire a pog or something.  I think we would hate to lose to people who are simply better shots than we are rather than better generals.

This is one of the rare topics that everyone seems to agree upon, because its pretty theoretical rather than applied.

Cruisers and Battleships are too expensive, use the ones you already have but build more sparingly if at all.  The bombardment shots are too easy to block and are not first-strike.

Carriers are awesome, the only drawback is that they can take hits (esp from kamikazes and subs) which would render them unable to support planes.  Carriers cannot attack but they can permit you to shuttle-stage your fliers (so as many as 4 planes can actually use the carriers on a single turn).  The fact that US, UK, Japan and Germany start with copious numbers of planes contributes to this belief.  It is actually a good idea to build even more carriers than you can fill with planes, because they can soak hits and provide free landing spaces for non coms and allied fighters.

Destroyers are too pricey, but they are the only cheap ship that blocks movement and sub ambushes.  This means you can’t live without them, but that you cannot build your stack out of them either

Subs are tempting, they are the best unit for the price until you consider that their special rules require that you must also have a traditional fleet to support your sub strikeforce, they can never really operate on their own unless your opponent is already suppressed.

Transports full of attack teams cost 14 IPCs, so they are almost as expensive as any two small units or a carrier, highlighting the challenge of playing the US.

Thanks, that’s great! I should be able to get those to work.

You have your choice of a PhD or a headache.  Take the headache.

@Cow:

Tell you what if 5 inf central, 1 armor egypt, 1 sub sz 98, 1 inf new guinea, 1 bomber archangel is not to your liking…

Then you can have allies at 18 ipc 1 unit per territory.

So you can choose either one of the above two conditions  8-). By ‘central’ Cow means Central USA.

@Cow:
Looks like you’ve got enough challenges now ;-).

@Entek:

AFAIK in league you can’t add any units to China or to France with a bid, and you can only add units to territories or Sea Zones that already have units.

The Chinese bid is perfectly legal in the Global `40 league (unless it just changed).  Strictly speaking it is also legal to bid Chinese units which they cannot buy in the normal course of a game, but that probably will be changed if it hasn’t already.  There has been plenty of discussion on that topic.

Placing a French bid in Paris should also be perfectly legal.  I don’t think doing so would be that helpful since at best maybe you’ve delayed the German attack on S. France or Normandy by one turn, which i don’t see as having a lot of strategic impact on German play.

well japan goes for his win while germany goes all out russia. you can only at most ever ship 10 a round to europe with usa or uk, uk will be busy with the italian problem unless he allows it to make an income then it defends europe while germany gets russia.

@mrninjaz:

One more question for you folks that have A&A40, is there a difference in the scale of the pieces from the older games, or are they the same?

Mostly the same.  The British and German battleships are a bit larger than the earliest version of those pieces.  And there’s also the special case of the Stuka dive bomber, which was used (in a smaller version) in the earliest games as the German fighter piece, before the current fighter piece was introduced.  The Europe 1940 Stuka, which is correctly used as a tac bomber, is bigger than the one which was previously incorrectly used as a fighter.