Should Imperious make a map for this?

@general-6-stars looking good!

Tjoek where are you?

Hello, Baron Munchhausen. Nice to hear from you!

You raise many interesting points, and I’ll try to respond to two of them. First, can a Southern Pacific strategy work for Japan even without assigning thematically ridiculous IPC values to tiny island chains? I think so. I agree that it would be off-putting to play a game where, e.g., the Solomon Islands plus the Caroline Islands were treated as more economically valuable than France. There are limits to how much you can edit the map without breaking the suspension of disbelief and ruining the theme.

That said, I don’t think the 1942.2 map would take all that much tweaking. On the 1942.2 board, players will occasionally send a transport to take Australia even though it’s not worth much, and there’s little or nothing to use as an encore. If you valued Australia at 4 IPCs, New Zealand at 2 IPCs, the Solomons and Carolines at 1 IPC each, and Hawaii at 2 IPCs, that’s 10 IPCs right there. It’s not hard to find another 8 IPCs in South America: 2 IPCs in Chile/Peru/Bolivia, 2 IPCs in Argentina, 3 IPCs in Brazil, and 1 IPC in Colombia/Venezuela. All together you’ve got 18 IPCs, which I think is very respectable.

You could compare that total to a Western Pacific strategy (India, Persia, Burma, Italian East Africa, Egypt, Transjordan, Kazakh, Yunnan, and Szechuan add up to only 13 IPCs) or to a Northern Asia strategy (Soviet Far East, Buryatia, Sinkiang, etc. all the way west to Archangelsk, Vologda, and Novosibirsk is worth about 13 IPCs). Either strategy plus Moscow is still only 21 IPCs. So the Southern Pacific strategy doesn’t strike me as hopelessly inefficient from an economic point of view.

Second, is a Southern Pacific campaign inherently too slow to be fun? I’ll readily admit that it’s less direct; if you head off toward southern Argentina, you are obviously not heading for the global epicenter of military power. You can’t force a British surrender by crushing Buenos Aires; that’s just not how that works. On the other hand, if the Axis controlled the entire southern hemisphere, with a sphere of influence stretching from Tokyo through Singapore, Basra, Addis Ababa, Capetown, Buenos Aires, and Sydney, isn’t that a kind of win for the Axis? I understand there used to be an “economic win condition” for the Axis where they could win by controlling 100 IPCs or so worth of territory, and although the victory city mechanic has never been well-executed, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be improved to the point where people actually prefer using a victory city win condition.

I think the whole “race to the capital” mechanic is unrealistic and less-than-fun anyway; if you sack one capital without wrecking the empire it rules, the people who live in the capital will just relocate the capital and keep ruling their empire. You’ll get some bragging rights and a few million barrels of oil, but nobody surrenders an intact superpower just because you squeeze into their capital – look at Napoleon in Moscow, or Robert Ross in Washington, or for that matter the British in World War II, who laid down supplies and trained secret army units in Worcester to protect Parliament, the royal family, and the BBC, with plans to continue retreating to Liverpool and then Canada if necessary.

So, yeah, if Japan just blitzes straight for San Francisco, then that’s foolish and the Axis will lose. Similarly, if the designers allow you to drive tanks straight over the Himalayas with no movement penalty, and you pass up that opportunity, then that’s foolish, and you deserve to lose. But if the designers tweak the map so that the trackless Himalayan Mountains and barren Gobi Desert and frozen Siberian tundra are harder to cross than the balmy, oil-rich South Pacific ocean – and if the Axis seize that opportunity to invade South America – then I think you’d get a really interesting game, where the players had to make gut-wrenching choices about what resources to invest in what theaters.

Got you.  Thank you for your clarification.

Thank you for the quick response!!

@UrJohn:

I have read some criticism of the standard 9/10 VC victory condition, and it made me think about the victory cities.

Here’s what I came up with:
–The VCs don’t matter at all unless it’s the 9th for the Axis or 10th for the Allies for the standard victory or unless it’s the 13th one for the total victory. The IPCs, Industrial Complexes, and Capitals attached to the spaces matter, but the VCs themselves don’t.
–That last VC means everything.
–Players don’t necessarily worry about every single VC. Whereas, in the real war, both sides were majorly concerned with protecting all of those cities that belonged to their sides.
–Players will sometimes make otherwise ridiculous attacks on a VC when success in the attack automatically wins the game.

VCs on the 1st Edition of the game were useless, no one plays for the all-VC victory and the Axis could only get the 9 VC by conquering Russia, which pretty much meant game over since the Allies would concede at that point.
But on 2nd Edition, with Honolulu as VC the scenario completely changes for Axis. If the Axis retain Berlin, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Shanghai and Manila, while conquering Honolulu, Calcutta and Leningrad at the end of the US turn, they win without having to conquer Moscow. This makes the 9 VC scenario a lot more attractive for Axis - specially when the Allies go KGF and leave Honolulu up for Japan to grab.
And you need to worry about all the VCs - otherwise the US can land and liberate one for a single turn and deny the Axis victory.

Not to be a complete nerd, but this just reminds me of the old Death Star problem:  the engineers probably told the defense coordinators they were placing a venting shaft directly out of the reactor, and when the defense coordinators complained to the general contractor, the general contractor blew them off citing cost overruns that would occur if they put a simple angel in the shaft line so proton torpedoes couldn’t dive straight down. Really?

Avalon Hill can’t spare one person looking fresh at all the game components before they go out to make sure they, like, add up?  Really?

Actually, I have come to reverse my previous position on the aesthetics of the map. It’s not that bad. Just a few things stood out to me initially, like mongolia, or saudia arabia’s nipple.

But I got a refresher of an old pic from an ex (MB and even Revised). And I’m quite happy with this new picece of tail.

Glad I produced a chuckle or two.