I’m at work but just wanted to say that I’m following this discussion with interest, and the feedback so far is great.
Just real quickly, to Marc’s point about the 1943 start date being a little less flexible than an earlier one, I can totally appreciate that. The advantage in my mind is first, that people seem to be interested, probably because a late War scenario has not been attempted yet on previous A&A boards (whereas 39, 41, 42 etc all have.) It’s hard, pretty damn hard, to make a custom scenario for A&A, unless you have at least some critical mass for early feedback. It takes a while to set these things up for playtesting purposes, especially if you’re trying to do it on the physical board. Often times people put a lot of effort into designing a great mod, only to have it languish with a relatively small player base, as evanescent enthusiasm is almost a hallmark of A&A custom games. If you have a half dozen people on board expressing interest right away, I’d take that as a sign that it might be worth pursuing. There is also a certain advantage to building things out in a collaborative way, with all the push and pull that entails, as opposed to having one grand architect of the mod, or calling it “Somebody’s 1943” scenario. Here you can take the ego out of it, and get enough designers invested in the process to actually carry it through to completion, not unlike the “alpha” process that the 1940 Global game underwent to arrive at the 2nd Edition.
For me the main appeal of 1943, is that it allows you to create a set-up that would make for faster game resolution and much simpler rules than 1940, while still using the same large map.
When I consider the historical reality vs the gameplay merits of 1943 vs say 1942 or 1941, I would remind everyone that a start date in A&A is just that, a start date. The game almost always diverges from the history immediately after the first round.
Take Classic for example, here the start date is 1942, but by the time you get to a position in the game that might reasonably correspond to 1943 or 1944, the territory ownership will almost always look way different than anything that happened in the history. So what players tend to do is search for sign posts or markers, that might indicate the general timeframe for their play narrative. For example, if America has just launched a D-Day invasion, then players tend to associate that game round with 1944, regardless of how long (in game rounds) it took to set up that move. Similarly if Berlin is about to fall, then players tend to look at things “as if” the current round was 1945, regardless of the original start date, or how many rounds you’ve actually been playing.
The basic point I’m trying to make is that it really doesn’t matter at all after the first round of the start date, what happened historically, because the A&A game does a rather poor job modelling the real war after the first round. Once you’re 5 or 6 rounds in, it’s anything goes. Usually by that point Japan has done much better in-game than they ever had a prayer of doing in the real war. And nobody cares for the most part, because it’s a game.
This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t aspire to make a historically valid set up for our start date, with a reasonable distribution of forces/production for the period, but just acknowledging that there’s only so much you can do in A&A before the war in-game departs from the war in-reality.
I would try to pick a watershed theme for the opening 2 rounds to clearly indicate where we are in time. To my mind the most recognizable theme for the average player and casual student of history would probably be the invasion of Italy. But as Marc suggested, the earlier we go in 1943, the more historically feasible it becomes to imagine an Axis break out, or a major Allied upset of some sort, to justify the balance of the thing as a game worth playing.
It might be cool to just avoid the idea of “seasons” or “months” altogether, and leave the start date vaguely anachronous, “sometime in 1943.” I think A&A does a notoriously bad job of accurately tracking/modelling the passage of time as a function of turns or game rounds anyway. So I have no problem suspending my disbelief when some chronological oddity appears as the result of the turn sequence. This is just something I accept as part of the nature of the turn based game. I think other players frequently adopt this attitude as well. The “Pearl Harbor” attack occuring again in 1942 is a good example of how players are willing to just throw out the relative timeline as soon as gameplay begins haha.
In that respect I tend to agree with Argothair and others, that we shouldn’t try to prohibit certain things from happening with a hard rules restriction (e.g. Russia and Japan can’t go to war with each other.) We can make certain attack patterns more or less attractive to keep the flavor of 1943, without really needing a DoW rule, we can use unit positioning or NOs for that.
This same attitude should probabably apply to the eastern front. We just need to give an incentive for historical attack patterns, but without forcing them. For example if 1943 was defined mainly by German reverses and Russian advances, then we can encourage the Russian player to be agressive and the German player to be defensive, simply through the TUV distribution and the Objective bonuses in play. Just pick a couple watershed moments, and set the odds in the opening battles to reflect the general situation.
So what are the main things that happened? And how much of it can we handle in the first round or first 2 rounds, given that time in a turn based game is already highly abstract? I’m just yanking stuff off a wiki timeline at this point, for play points that might be interesting to capture in the first 2 rounds of gameplay…
:-D
Final Russian offensive in Stalingrad, and destruction of the German 6th army.
Bombing of Berlin in earnest
SAND AND SEA in the Med…
Allies in north Africa, Libya and Tunisia.
Allies in Greece.
Allies in Sicily and Italy
SAND AND SEA: In the Pacific…
Guadalcanal and New Guinea
Japanese bombings in Australia
Japanese pull out from the Aleutians
Solomon islands etc
Tarawa
Kursk and the Summer offensive!
Allied expeditionary force formed for the invasion of Europe, and Overlord plans put in place.
There’s gotta be enough in there to form a scenario worth playing right?
Maybe not as many swing situations as 1942, but it’s still got some cool stuff going on. I’d approach it a little like the 1942.2 or Classic board, after like 6 rounds of gameplay, when the Western Allies already have their logistics to London in place, so that the game just launches right into the action.
Also to Argothair, I rather like that idea of giving “original control” of French territories to USA rather than UK, if this produces a more interesting play balance.
The upside here is that, in gameplay terms, UK could launch an amphibious invasion against France and liberate it for USA. Meaning that on USA’S turn they could build here! That would be a major incentive for Germany to hold Normandy/France instead of trading it endlessly with UK, the way they usually do in a 5 man.
Similarly if France is under original USA control for the purposes of liberation, then UK also has a stronger incentive to make invasions in the Med, like Italy, for income. The same could be said of Holland or Scandinavia.
I think this could be a real game changer for Allies, to have France under original USA control. It would make D Day and Paris much more integral to the Allied war plan. While providing some added interest to the Med in the process.
I like it!
:-D
ps. I also like this second draft, that just came in as I was typing. It seems to fit the bill rather nicely!
Another way to do a “dead heat,” if you wanted to explore an alternative turn order, would be to just make up the difference in potential starting NOs. You could basically use this to “round-up” the starting income numbers, which have always seemed annoyingly hard to cash out for players at the start, on previous boards. Something you can handle easily would be nice, with 5s, 10s or 20s, in paper bills or poker chips, for the starting piles of cash to each individual nation. I think this would aid the impression of overall balance and game craftsmanship for the new player just coming to the mod for the first time.
For example, using those production numbers you suggested, if Axis had 23 ipcs in potential round 1 NOs, and Allies had 17 ipcs in potential round 1 NOs, that’d be 150 Axis vs 150 Allies.
For a total of 300 IPCs in contention!
Nice and round so everyone gets the picture haha. Its anyone’s game ;)
Conventiently 17 ipcs in Allied starting NOs + 23 ipc in Axis starting NOs, is a solid 40 ipcs in contention from objective bonuses. Again nice and round, so the causal player can read the situation, and the income balance, at a gland.
Add to the 40 ipcs in bonuses, 10 more ipcs in contention, from the first round combats/territory exchanges, and that’s your 50 ipc income swing right there!
Axis can deny Allied NOs in the opening round, providing their team with the desired income edge, while at the same time giving the Allies an initiative incentive (ie. Allies have to push forward against Axis soon, to reclaim their NO territories, or risk losing out in the overall income game.) Then set up the rest of the balance by sides via the TUV and starting unit composition, and you’re pretty much on your way.
:-D
For a 5 man game I think you could get away with 15 total NOs. Like three NOs for each player. maybe 2 large Objectives and 1 small Objective to help guide the playstyle and give it a proper 1943 historical flavor.
What would be the best candidates for 1943 Objectives for each nation?
