Real value of units

I’d rather have cheaper, defenseless transport planes myself.

I think that’s totally reasonable, Midnight_Reaper. You could introduce cheaper air transports into this roster without breaking anything important. My preference is for more expensive air transports because the extra price thematically represents (a) the up-front cost of developing the technology and tactics (nobody has to spend money on researching paratroopers for this roster), and (b) the relatively limited supply of air transport available during World War II. There’s a fun little article below about how most of the American Air Force’s transports were either hastily converted civilian planes, or wooden gliders manufactured in piano factories. If the Americans had to make do with makeshift equipment, you can only imagine what the Italians were using.

https://amcmuseum.org/history/world-war-ii-transport-and-troop-carrier/

Strategically, air transports provide a much deeper threat into enemy territory that requires a much larger garrison. E.g. if you put an assault boat in the English Channel, it threatens Normandy, Holland, Norway, Hanover, and Denmark. If you put an air transport in London, it threatens all of those plus Paris, Marseilles, Gibraltar, Morocco, Milan, Berlin, Poland, Finland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. It’s not that I expect anyone to fly many air transports into a battle to use as fodder; it’s just that spending 12 bucks on one air transport can force your opponent to spend more than 12 bucks on extra defending infantry.

In terms of rules simplicity, I have tried to eliminate the concept of the “defenseless unit” from my unit roster. I find automatic combat losses to be something of a downer, and I’d rather use that spot in the rulebook for a more interesting rule.

All of that said, again, this is mostly personal preference – if you want a $9 defenseless air transport with 4 movement, that’s almost certainly fine.

Right. The ordinance they dropped was substantial by the standards of those days, but the effect was to reduce the morale of the populations: effect was to reduce IPC by effecting the will of the people to continue the fight.

So allow them SBR capability.

Additionally, they were good fighters in the air and air units could not even reach them till latter in the war if they conducted high altitude attacks. Basically their biplanes were very slow at climbing and had a limited ceiling.

@Tamer:

I like your original idea, but what about carriers?  They were the most important ships to keep afloat during the war, and a great deal of repair was done for them as well.

I do not recall any instance off-hand during the war in which a carrier was re-floated after having been sunk and then returned to active service.

The Amagi and Graf Zeppelin were both sunk and re-floated, but neither saw active service during the war and Graf Zeppelin wasn’t even complete.

The re-floating idea is kind of cool, but it may need to be reduced somehow to make it a more rare occurrence. As Marc said, it was a long and expensive process and not every ship that was sunk qualified for such a salvage operation. Unfortunately with A&A, we do not have the granularity in gameplay to determine how badly ships are damaged.

I suppose that you could modify the rule so that after combat you need to roll for each ship lost to determine IF it can be salvaged. Say you need a 2 or less to float a given ship. If you roll that, then you can decide to pay half to re-float.

It complicates things, but definitely makes it so you can’t just regenerate 2 battleships and 3 cruisers if you want.

I will offer another limitation that sounds logical to me, but you can consider:

Ships may only be raised on the following turn and to do so, there may not be any hostile warships in the sea zone where the ships were sunk. This implies that any ships not raised the following turn will be lost forever, as you said, and that the territory with your naval base cannot be taken by the enemy in that time.

Example:    Gibraltar is amphib assaulted by Italy. All UK warships are destroyed. Italy has no warships present in sea zone, only transports. Italy takes Gibraltar. US player lands and liberates Gibraltar on their turn, returning it to UK control. The UK player cannot then re-float ships lost in previous turn combat with Italy because they did not retain full control of Gibraltar.

Somewhat complicated perhaps, but I think some of these limitations need to be placed, otherwise I see this as being a huge advantage for the Axis. Germany and Italy in particular, because they tend to hole up their navies in home water areas and can potentially get double the naval power at half the cost. It will further incentivize them to stock up and stay in port knowing they can effectively respawn capital ships on the cheap. An element of chance and tactical consideration should be added so that it isn’t just automatic.

@Imperious:

The Strategic Bomber is just fine as it is. The only OOB unit that’s problematic is the Cruiser at 10 IPC.

People buy Bombers because of their reach for both land and sea, numbers don’t quantity that value.

Sorry IL but it is a totally different paradigm we were talking about.
A game changer for Strategic bomber, no more A4 C12 M6.
It is a much different dynamic and have way more interesting implications.

Here is the link to this Redesign discussion:
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=39384.msg1632453#msg1632453

Soon, you will be able to playtest G40 both AA Cruiser C12 and bomber C5 on Triple A.

This method is to compare between SBR values in itself.
It cannot consider general combat values for sure.

And a way to explain why some SBR method and values may be unbalanced even without a lot of gametests.

@Der:

Planes WERE historically superior to ships as far as bang for the buck - that’s why carriers replaced battleships.

That is correct, but the 1940 fighters did not got the range to sink the Royal Navy in the real war. Taking off from Normandy they barely crossed the English Channel and got 10 minutes of operational time before they run out of gas. In this A&A game a Fighter unit can easily cross the Atlantic and sink everything afloat. And that is not historical correct, and I doubt it make the game better

long distance attacking planes ?
Yes

AL.

With the newer titles you have blank factory tiles that would work well for your ideas as well as the tiles marked “3” and “10” from the Global games.

SBR Rules are intersting…