1942.2 New NAP, Soviet Japanese Non Aggression Pact

The reason Japan attacks Russia in most games is to combine with Germany to knock Russia out of the game - by far the most likely means of eliminating an Allied power.

The problem is not as acute as when Moscow was placed in the middle of Siberia, but its still the optimum Axis strategy. Every power piling as many units as possible into Stalingrad/Moscow is something seen altogether too many times in Axis and Allies, and an effective NAP is the only solution. You may want the What If? scenario that there was no pact, but you may as well have the possibility of a Western Allies - Soviet war, something that very nearly happened over Finland while the Soviets were still Allied to Germany.

But this fusion of two entirely separate conflicts is unhistorical and blocks any chance of a remotely familiar playout. The reason Japan initiated a Pacific war was because it had secured itself against the possibility of another conflict with Russia. Enact the Pact, and Japan must attack USA in the Pacific to drain American resources away from the European front. Russia becomes stronger and can concentrate on fighting a Germany less likely to be worn down by American attacks. Anything else just isn’t WWII.

Every power piling as many units as possible into Stalingrad/Moscow is something seen altogether too many times in Axis and Allies…

Couldn’t agree more.

…and an effective NAP is the only solution.

That’s crazy talk. For any game design problem, there are always dozens of potential solutions, several of which will be interesting and fun for at least some types of players. I’m just going to brainstorm some other solutions that could help avoid the repetitive rush to Moscow:

1. Give Russia lots more starting infantry and slightly less income so that conquering Russia is relatively less attractive
2. Give the UK fewer starting infantry and slightly more income so that conquering London is relatively more attractive
3. Shift the Axis starting troops toward the extreme periphery, e.g., in France, Norway, Morocco, Midway, and New Guinea, so that attacks against the USA and the UK are easier to pull off and attacks against Moscow are slower.
4. Change the capital-capture rules so that conquering Moscow doesn’t automatically prevent the Russians from mobilizing new units or provide the Axis with a massive economic windfall
5. Write a house rule for partisans and revolts so that ungarrisoned territories have a chance to shake off enemy control, making it less attractive to try to occupy all of Russia’s low-value territories
6. Use national objectives to give Russia and Japan incentives to attack other nations
7. Use national objectives to give Russia and Japan incentives not to attack each other
8. Treat the USSR as a ‘third faction’ that isn’t necessarily on the same team as either the Allies or the Axis, so that if the Axis gang up on the USSR and ignore the US/UK, they risk throwing the game to the US/UK
9. Write a house rule for supply lines so that it’s difficult for Germany and Japan to project power across 4+ land territories to get to Moscow, but relatively easy for them to project power across sea zones to London, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, Capetown, Sydney, and Honolulu
10. End the game after a set number of turns, and put more victory cities in US / UK / French / Chinese nations than in the USSR, forcing the Axis to attack other nations besides just Russia if they want to win

That’s really just off the top of my head. If you want a non-aggression pact, fine, enjoy it, but don’t pretend like the only way to get an interesting game is to force players into a rigidly scripted version of history. Some players enjoy alternate histories, and that’s a legitimate part of what Axis & Allies is about.

@Argothair:

I suggested giving Russia an NO for +5 IPCs/turn if Russia controls Amur and is not at war with Japan, and giving Japan an NO for +5 IPCs/turn if Japan controls Manchuria and Korea and is not at war with Russia. That may not be exactly the right number, but that’s the kind of house rule I’d prefer to see – something that makes keeping the peace win-win for Russia and Japan unless one or both of them decide to launch a serious invasion.

I like that. Like Germany and Russia have a 5 IPC trade NO when not at war, why not give Japan and Russia the same kind of deal ?

Or, a deal that was historical correct. Russia got Lend Lease stuff by 3 routes, the Murmansk route, the Persian Corridor and the Arctic Line. In game rules, that will be
5 IPC for seazone 125 and Archangelsk
5 IPC for seazone 80, Persia and Caucasus
5 IPC for seazone 5 and Amur.

Now, lets say Japan got a 5 IPC trade NO from neutral Mongolia.

No non-aggressions pact nor treaties that are not worth the paper, but pure consequence if one choose to attack the other. Russia invade Manchuria, then Japan sail a Battleship into seazone 5 and block the American Lend Lease. Japan attack Russia, and they loose the 5 IPC trade NO. No straight jacket or scripts, just free will to choose.

Some nice ideas here, but always remember the long term goals:

Japan’s main incentive to attack in the Pacific (if it is blocked from Siberia) is to aid Germany by forcing America to burn units fighting over the Pacific. This is a more palpable goal than IPCs or VCs. You can offer as many carrots as you like in terms of bonuses and NOs but in the long term throwing everything at Moscow is still going to be the  obvious way for the Axis to win. If you want a serious Pacific war enforce the treaty. A game in which USSR and Japan are at war before the Nuclear age is set in a parallel universe.

I agree on changing capture the capital rules so that its not all about Moscow.

Another alternative would be to introduce 2 complementary rules - rail movement and arms to Russia. That is, any western Allied unit moved into a Soviet factory can be converted into a Red unit. Then, allow unlimited non-combat rail movement (e.g. from Soviet far east to Moscow in one move).

This gives Russia big a incentive not to annoy the Japanese; I prefer this sort of thing to the more abstract NO solutions.

I’ve been glancing at this thread on-and-off for a while.  I don’t have any particular opinion on the NAP options being discussed, but here are a few bits of background information in case they’re of any use.  I’d also like to put forward a few arguments to suggest that an outbreak of war between Japan and the USSR in the early 1940s wasn’t a flat-out impossibility, and to suggest that any game scenario featuring such an outbreak might plausibly use Mongolia or Manchuria as its flashpoint.

In the decades before WWII, there was no love lost between Japan and the USSR (or its predecessor, Tsarist Russia), with a lot of tension existing between them over areas like Korea, Mongolia and Manchuria.  These were all areas which underwent various degrees of jurisdictional flux in those years, as the  Chinese empire crumbled.  Japanese ambitions in mainland Asia led to the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, whose outcome helped (along with Russia ambitions for a Pacific warm-water port) to bring about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-1906.  Japan’s intervention (along with other nations) in the Vladivistok region during the Russian Civil War, and its occupation of Russian territories in that area until around 1922 even after the other intervening nations had left, caused a lot of bad blood with Russia.  It also fueled the ambitions of the members of the Japanese military who dreamed of acquiring large tracts of Siberian real estate.  Also in the period from 1917 to 1922, Mongolia (on which Japan may have had an eye too) broke away from China with the help of the Russians and eventually became a nominally independent but heavily Soviet-leaning people’s republic.  Japan’s 1933 invasion of Manchuria, which it turned into a puppet state, didn’t help to calm things down in that part of Asia either.

In other words, Mongolia and Manchuria were tinderboxes located on the overlapping outer fringes of three powers – China, Russia and Japan, all undergoing political convolutions of one sort or another – who for decades had been struggling with each other for influence in that area.  To complicate matters, some of the borders involved were disputed and poorly defined.  All of this finally led to a series of shooting incidents between Japan and the Soviet Union, starting in 1937 and eventually culminating in the Soviet–Japanese Border War of 1939.  To quote what Hirohito would later say about WWII, the outcome of this border war with the USSR was “not necessarily favourable to Japan” – due in no small part to the fact that one of the commanders on the Soviet side was a talented fellow by the name of Georgi Zhukov, who clobbered the Japanese in the last two weeks of August 1939.

It’s at this point that events in Europe – specifically the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23 – had a major ricochet effect on that little border war.  The Japanese were furious that the Nazis, with whom Japan had partnered in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936, would reverse their position and become (at least on paper) buddy-buddies with the Commies, with whom the Japanese were at war at that very moment (and by whom they were being trounced).  Japan therefore did essentially the same thing: it wound down the border war via a ceasefire and later (in April 1941) signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact.

The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, however, didn’t meant that Japan had given up its ambitions on the eastern side of the USSR anymore than the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant that Germany had given up its ambitions on the western side of the USSR.  The Japanese Army remained convinced that the proper policy of Japan should be to expand “north and west” into China and Siberia.  As I recall, some of its officers were completely serious about the concept of Japan taking control of all the Russian land east of Lake Baikal – which, as can be seen from a map, is not a trifling number of square miles.  Overly ambitious as the Japanese Army plans may have been (particularly considering that it was doing badly in China and had done even worse against the Russians in 1939), the Soviets still took the threat of a Japanese invasion very seriously, despite the fact that it had a non-aggression pact with Japan.  They took it so seriously, in fact, that it was only in the fall of 1941 – months after Germany has blitzed into the USSR – that Stalin transfered his elite Siberian troops from the Soviet far east (where the USSR was at peace with Japan) to the other side of the country (where the USSR was at war with Germany).  If there was truly no chance of war between Russia and Japan in 1941, Stalin wouldn’t have left his best troops twiddling their mittened thumbs for months on the fringes of Mongolia and Manchuria while the Nazis were overrunning the European side of his country.

The reason why he finally moved his Siberian troops (in the nick of time to save Moscow, as it turned out) was that he’d received convincing information about Japan’s immediate plans from his top man in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, who – somewhat uncharacteristically – Stalin chose to believe.  Sorge basically told Stalin that Japan, rather than following the Japanese Army’s wish to expand “north and west”, would be following that Japanese Navy’s preference for expanding “south and east” towards the D.E.I. (for oil), Malaysia (for assorted resources) and the islands of the central Pacific held by Britain and America (to extend Japan’s defensive perimeter).  The Japanese Army wasn’t too happy about this: it still hankered to attack Russia, the officers of the Manchuria-based Kwantung Army being particularly inclined in that direction.  What nevertheless won the case for the Navy’s “south and east” strategy (in addition to what should have been the self-evident fact that the D.E.I. were a much better source than Siberia for the resource Japan needed most, oil) was apparently the argument that the “south and east” strategy would be to a large extent a naval operation, and hence would only require a minimum number of Army troops.  A huge percentage of the Japanese Army was still bogged down in China, where it had been fighting since 1937, so this limited the number of troops it could scrape together for any further campaign of expansion.

So in a sense, it could be argued that the chief factor which restrained Japan from attacking Russia in 1941 wasn’t the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, nor any lack of Japanese Army ambition or aggression directed towards Siberia, nor any lack of tension on the borders between the USSR, Mongolia and Japanese-controlled Manchuria.  The restraining factor was actually the fact that Japan’s war in China was going badly.  A war with the USSR could nevertheless still have broken out if Japan had shifted its priorities from China to Siberia, or if the Kwantung Army – which had a track record of provoking (on its own initiative) incidents leading to war – had taken matters into its own hands once again.

That was exceptionally well written CWO.

Elk have you ever tried China with no restrictions?

@Black_Elk:

If I thought it’d get much traction, I’d necromance any number of threads where I was pulling for a stronger China (including one or two on the Larry Boards going way back.) I even tried to make the case that we’d have a better chance of selling the game in China, where it’s made these days anyway, if we gave them a nod and made that faction into something other than a speed bump for Japanese expansion.

And I think you’d have a good historical basis for it.  If you can get your hands on a copy of the book “Victory at Sea: World War II in the Pacific” by wargame designer James Dunnigan, you’ll find a section in there called (if I remember correctly), “The War (a Big One) in China.”  I haven’t read it for a long time, but as I recall Dunnigan argues that China made a huge and under-appreciated contribution to the Allied war effort by tying down (and inflicting substantial casualties on) the Japanese Army.  The Chinese had in fact been fighting the Japanese continuously since 1937 – four years before the Pacific War started, and two years before the war in Europe started.  And I think Dunnigan says that when Japan started around late 1944 to drain troops away from China and transfer them to the Pacific to bolster its inner line of defense against the advancing Americans, the Chinese were able to start pushing the Japanese occupation lines back to a significant degree.

The G40 map of China is heavily distorted, being about half as wide as it should be relative to its height, and the orange-bordered zones of Japanese control are similarly distorted, and are overly-simplified in the southern portion…so the G40 map gives a very misleading impression of which parts of China were actually controlled by Japan in WWII.  In effect, Japan never managed to conquer comprehensively more than Manchuria, Jehol, the northern half of China’s coastal provinces, and certain territories inland of those provinces.  South of (very roughly) Shanghai, Japan didn’t control the solid block of provinces shown on the map; it only controlled the port cities and some limited areas immediately surrounding them.  (In fairness, this was all they needed to control to cut China off from supply by sea.)  Further inland, Japan concentrated on controlling major cities and the railways linking them…which explains the so-called “dot-and-line” pattern of Japanese occupation you can see on detailed maps of wartime China.  In terms of pure surface area, I think Japan never managed to conquer more than about one-quarter to one-third of China.  So in real life, China was hardly a “speed bump.”

Great thread.  I have been doing some brain storming in this area as well.  How to keep Japan off Russia’s back and encourage more action in the Pacific?  There are two proposals I am toying with either alone or together.

1)  Turn order.  USA goes First.  However, I am thinking of maybe just a production and placement round only.  No movement.  Beefs USA up to make a difference earlier w/out changing opening battles (except SZ 11).  Might also add China to this… not sure.

2)  China production rules.  At the end of China’s turn, China spams 1 infantry in each Chinese Territory (including the ones that start “occupied” (Manchuria, Kiangsu, Kwantung) as follows:  If there are no Japanese units, automatic.  If there are any Japanese units, roll one die.  If the result is higher that the number of Japanese units, place one Chinese Infantry.
If in an occupied space, on Japan’s turn, they must attack or retreat.  Finally, US can always rebuild the flying Tigers for 10 IPC’s if there is any Chinese controlled territory at the end of the US/China turn.

Historically, there were a million or more Japanese troops tied down in China during the war.    With this rule, the China front never quite goes away unless Japan wants to keep 42 units there, they will have to keep dealing with China.

I think this would make attacking Russia, much less tenable without any iron prohibition.  Thoughts?

If we go with the principle (which, as I’ve argued, has a historical basis) that China should be made a tougher opponent, this could solve the Russian problem if we were to have a rule which essentially says that Japan cannot attack Russia until it has fully subdued China.  This is based on the assumption (which I described earlier) that Japan did not have enough forces to go to war against Russia when so much of its army was bogged down in China fighting a war that was going nowhere.  And this was even more the case when Japan added to its workload a campaign against the Americans, the British and the Dutch.  Which raises the prospect of another variation of this rule idea: except in situations where war is declared against Japan by other countries (obviously something which Japan can’t control), Japan can be at war simultaneously with only two out of three of the following countries: China, the USSR and the US.  It starts the game at war with China, and can initiate a second war against either the US or the USSR, but owing to troop limitations it can’t go to war against both the US and the USSR unless it defeats China first.  This would actually open up two ways of handling China.  In option 1, China is unchanged and thus can be conquered in practical terms by Japan, but the “2 but not 3 wars” prohibition would delay a potential attack against the USSR until China is overrun.  In option 2, China would be made tougher so that China and Japan would essentially end up in a perpetual stalemate (which was pretty much what happened).  In that option, the “2 but not 3 wars” prohibition would basically rule out a Japanese DOW against the USSR.  And in both option 1 and option 2, Japan could in principle decide to attack the USSR rather than the US.  Japan, incidentally, could still be allowed to go to war against Britain, ANZAC and the Dutch without violating this “2 but not 3 wars” prohibition, which would allow it to make use of its naval units (which obviously are of little use against Russia).

I don’t think conquering China first is much of a hindrance for Japan under the OOB rules.  They simply mop them up on the way to the Russian border.  That is why I am proposing beefing up China to make it much more of a headache.

I think letting China go first is a great idea for 1942 and even moreso for Global, where getting a turn of consolidation could keep Yunnan in control for an extra turn and mitigate Japan’s huge air advantage a little bit. Letting China have extra income and artillery would make them a lot more interesting.

@Black_Elk:

I even tried to make the case that we’d have a better chance of selling the game in China, where it’s made these days anyway, if we gave them a nod and made that faction into something other than a speed bump for Japanese expansion.

It’s just occured to me that making China stronger might not be enough to increase its appeal in its country of manufacture, the People’s Republic of China, because the Chinese roundel in the game is the one for the Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, not the one for Mao Tse-tung’s Communists.  :-D  Though it might increase the game’s sales in Taiwan.  You’d have to go back to a game set in 1919 to capture both markets, since as far as I know the only thing that Chiang’s side and Mao’s side were ever unanimous about was that Sun Yat-sen was a great man (owing to the fact that he helped overthrow the Manchu dynasty that had ruled China for the past couple of centuries or so).

If you give Japan the option of attacking Russia it will surely always do so as the attraction of the great Moscow Tank Magnet will always pull it in that direction if we bear in mind the ultimate objective of Axis victory.

If you give Japan the option of NOT attacking the USA, it will certainly take that option as it will in effect keep the Americans out of the war altogether.

This leave us with two options:

1. A rigorously enforced NAT at least until one enemy has been eliminated (in effect the 2 of 3 rule suggested above but with the choices already made);

2. The entire game recast as a four block contest in which Japan is not necessarily allied to Germany or opposed to Russia or the Western Allies, freeing it from the obligation to help Germany eliminate Russia. This recognizes that WWII was in fact two major wars (Europe and Pacific) that happened to overlap chronologically and involve some of the same powers. Japan, therefore, would have a separate and distinct victory objective from that of Germany/Italy. Similarly, Russia would have its own victory objectives which would primarily concern dominating Eastern Europe but might very well also include expansion south into Persia and India bringing it into conflict with the Western Powers.

Any two blocks might be free to announce an alliance, but this would be temporary and could be renounced by either member at the end of its own turn.

Co-operation between allies would be strictly limited and not involve sharing territory.

Some interesting questions arise as to the control of neutrals; suppose Russia attacks neutral Finland; the Soviet alliance with Germany/Italy prevents the European Axis from taking control of Finland, so the Westerners could offer military aid to the Finns causing a Western-Soviet conflict. On the other hand they might leave well alone to avoid an unwanted war in Eastern Europe.

Gobbling up neutrals becomes a game of Dare as you challenge other powers to stand up for the little nations.

Regarding China, I’ve always favoured dividing Chinese forces up into the two factions, controlled by the USA & USSR respectively.
In the four power version I describe these forces would be free to attack each other as well as the Japanese, and winning the Chinese “civil war” would become a victory objective for each of the future Superpowers.

I very much like the idea of a United Front rondel for the Chinese – it’s accurate, it’s diplomatic, and it’s fair. I apologize for injecting politics into a discussion about house rules, but I disapprove of using the Communist rondel across all of China. It feels wrong to me, like it’s erasing the Nationalists from history.

I realize the Chinese Nationalists weren’t exactly paragons of ethics and liberalism, but Mao and his followers wound up murdering millions of their own people, often even when those people were trying to mind their own business and stay out of politics. You could be killed for having the wrong occupation, the wrong education, or the wrong relatives. The Chinese have backed off of these policies, obviously, but to my knowledge they still treat Mao as a national hero, and it is illegal on the Chinese mainland for ordinary citizens to criticize Mao in any way.

If the Vichy French regime were still in power, I wouldn’t put a Vichy rondel on Paris to appease the French marketplace, and with respect for anyone who may disagree, I feel the same way about Communist China.