1942.2 New NAP, Soviet Japanese Non Aggression Pact

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.

@Black_Elk:

Well its kind of a tricky issue for the following reason… all the OOB markers are modeled on Airforce Roundels. And the PRC didn’t have an airforce at the time! hehehe.

The “air force roundel” concept isn’t actually a limitation in China’s case because it’s not a hard-and-fast rule in the OOB game.  In fact, G40 deviates quite a bit from the concept of pure air force roundels.  The ANZAC symbol in G40 was, as far as I know, never used as a aircraft roundel in either Australia or New Zealand. I’ve seen film footage of Italian aircraft that used a black-and-white triple-fasces roundel.  The German symbol used in A&A – called the Balkenkreuz, or “beamed cross” – was used not just by the Luftwaffe but by the German armoured forces too.  Soviet planes were marked with a large red star, not the symbol used in A&A.  The American roundel used in the game is only correct for the period prior to the US entry into the war, and for a short time thereafter; the red dot was soon eliminated to avoid any possible confusion with the Japanese red-disk roundel.  And on that subject: the symbol used for the Japanese game roundel is the Japanese naval flag design, not the roundel that was used on Japanese aircraft.

So frankly, given this wide range of practice in the OOB game roundels, I think there are no limitations on what could be used as an alternate Chinese roundel.

Switching all of China in G40 from Republic of China roundels to Chinese Communist Party roundels would be a severe deviation from the political situation that existed in WWII…and I’m not even sure that it would help game sales in China.  For one thing, it would amount to erasing from history the CCP victory over the ROC in the post-WWII Chinese Civil War, and I doubt that the folks who run the People’s Republic of China today would appreciate the erasure of such a defining moment of their history.  Second, it’s possible that the CCP actually sees some value in the fact that China was mostly under ROC control when it was invaded an occupied by Japan, because that way they could plausibly argue “We’re not the ones who lost a third of China to the enemy; it was those incompetent other guys who lost it.”  Giving all of China CCP roundels would therefore shift the blame from Chiang’s people to Mao’s people, which would make things rather awkward for the CCP.

Giving all of China a “unified China” gane roundel of some sort is certainly a viable option, if a plausible design could be worked out.  I have no idea what such a design might be.  Altenately, one option might be to do what I did on my own customized map: keeping most of the map as it is, but giving Shensi to the CCP, as shown in the “Pacific Left Panel.jpg” picture here:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=32700.0

Western Allies should never be permitted on Soviet tt. Why would they bother capturing all those Pacific islands if they can bomb Tokyo from Russian bases?

I admit that the idea of the Americans rushing to fly fighters through Buryatia on the opening turns before the Russian pocket there collapses is dramatic and entertaining – I could see that being a lot of fun.

As Flashman points out, though, having a bombing base in Buryatia kills the American motivation to capture the Pacific islands, and it’s also profoundly weird to have America bombing Japan from Russian territory while Japan dutifully honors a non-aggression pact with Russia.

Worse, guaranteeing the Siberian income to the Russians on R1, R2, and R3 would pretty neatly remove the reason for Russia to leave more than one or two infantry in Asia. Under the OOB rules, there’s something of an interesting tradeoff – you can assign your Siberian infantry to guard your Asian income, generating a total of about 6 IPCs that you can use to buy 2 new infantry in Moscow during R2 and R3, or you can retreat the Siberian infantry to Moscow, resulting in about 5 ‘new’ infantry walking into Moscow on R4 and R5. It’s a classic “get some now or get more later” problem. With the Chinese-triggered Japanese/Russian NAP house rule, leaving your Siberian infantry in Siberia doesn’t generate those extra 6 IPCs until turns R4 and R5, which are the same turns that the infantry could just arrive in Moscow. What used to be an interesting decision now becomes an obvious choice: you should always retreat the Siberian troops immediately, because the troops themselves are twice as valuable as the territory they protect, and they can arrive on the German front at about the same time.

Honestly, I have little enthusiasm for the idea of indirectly simulating the Japanese army’s overcommittment in central China via a house rule that prevents the Japanese from attacking America, China, and Russia simultaneously. I would prefer to just to directly limit the size of the Japanese army so that if they try to make all three of those attacks in the opening rounds, they are likely to be defeated! Japan starts with enough infantry in China to handily eliminate the Allied forces in the region even if the Japanese never send in any reinforcements at all, plus they start with two transports’ worth of reinforcements already sitting in Japan, plus another two transports’ worth of reinforcements conveniently located on nearby islands. That’s just overkill.

An ideal starting setup would give the Japanese enough starting ground troops in east Asia to hold a stalemate (probably something like a total of 6 inf, 1 art, 2 ftr), where neither side can conquer the other’s territory, plus enough reinforcements on Japan and its island territories to launch one major invasion on J1 (probably a total of about 2 inf, 1 tnk, 1 bomber). That way Japan can easily win on one front, and can choose to build additional transport and ground troops that will let it win on a second front, but Japan will be unable to both build and deliver winning strike forces to Russia, China, and India in the opening – not because of an artificial house rule, but just as a natural consequence of the starting setup and the size of Japan’s economy.

To preserve game balance, Japan could be given additional warships that make it harder for the Americans to beat down their door – although I’ve never heard anyone complaining that KJF is too easy! If nerfing the Japanese ground forces tilts the game too heavily in favor of the Allies, then I would prefer to give the Germans additional warships, or to simply give the Axis a flexible bid.

Perhaps a rule could be made where the Soviets don’t allow any Allied forces in its territories unless it finds itself facing a two-front war. So if Japan lays off Russia, then the British and the Americans can’t land fighters in Moscow, making Germany’s life a little easier.

@Black_Elk:

it becomes a full mod and an entirely new game.

Here’s a radical suggestion which you might want to consider – either as a practical project, or just as a way to generate some out-of-the-box lateral thinking.

There are many aspects of the Global 1940 game (and of other A&A games) over which people have expressed dissatisfaction and for which they’ve proposed house rule alternatives.  Some of these proposals have targeted just one or two specific game elements and have involved changes of a very modest nature (such as adjusting the turn order and nothing else).  Other proposals have been more wide-ranging in scope and more intricate in nature.  Generally speaking, however, all of these proposals have operated under an implicit restriction: trying to stick as closely as possible to the OOB game in order to keep things recognizable.  It’s a valid design principle, with the advantage that it makes proposed changes acceptable to a broader base of players, but the downside is that it acts as a straightjacket: it severely limits what you can change.

So here’s an alternative you might want to think about: remove the self-imposed restiction of needing to come up with the same game.  Rather than starting from the premise that the end result of the design process has to be a game which is essentially the same as G40, eliminate this predetermined end result from the equation.  Instead, draw up an inventory of: 1) all the things about the game that you absolutely want to keep; 2) all the things that you’d be flexibily prepared to either keep or modify or discard, depending on what works best; and 3) all the things that you feel don’t work properly in the OOB rules and that you feel absolutely must be improved or replaced, whether by minor tinkering or total reconceptualization.  Then try to come up with a redesigned version of the game that addresses all of your issues and which works well on its own terms, regardless of how closely it adheres to the OOB game or how far it deviates from it.

The thing to keep in mind here is that, in the redesign of any existing system, you can only make so many adjustments to the system while sticking to its original basic architecture.  Beyond a certain point, the original architecture becomes a constaining factor rather than a help, and instead of an improved version you end up with something that’s even clunkier than the unsatisfactory version which you were trying to fix in the first place.  So beyond a certain point, you have to throw out that constraining architecture, start with a clean slate, focus on the specific things you’re trying to achieve, find the solutions which achieve your aims, and then let those solutions dictate the eventual new architecture of the revised system.