G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions)

Good idea to have started a separate thread on this.  I’ll be happy to contribute ideas as the discussion moves along (if there’s the required level of interest from others), though I’ll mainly limit myself to things like general game concepts and historical background, since those are the only parts of the A&A modeling that I feel comfortable with.

Just to clarify what suggestion of mine Black Elk is talking about, he’s referring to my post from today in this thread…

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=36436.45

…which I won’t summarize here, since the original can simply be consulted in full if needed.

Black Elk’s idea to “Retain the Major factory as the main production hub, but replace the Minor Factory with a new type of base unit. This “minor factory” forward Base can be placed in any territory (on islands or zero ipc tiles etc) but it only produces infantry, 2 per turn.” is an interesting one.  I don’t know if the minor IC in its current form should be discarded altogether, but I like the idea of a facility (perhaps an addition to rather than a replacement of the minor IC type) that produces only infantry; an idea along these likes was kicked around on an earlier thread somewhere, and I think it was conceptualized basically as kind of army troop-training camp.  It doesn’t “manufacture” soldiers in the same literal sense that tanks are manufactured’; rather, it serves as the entry point for infantry on the game board, and in real-world terms it essentially represents the staging ground where troops who’ve already received their basic training in boot camp are assembled and given their final training before being deployed in actual combat.  Such camps don’t require the kind of heavy infrastructure that a factory does, so Black Elk’s concept that they could be set up in minor locations like 0-IPC islands would work fine for facilities of this nature.  A variant of (or supplement to) this idea might be to make them alliance-specific rather than nation-specific, so that (let’s say) a country like France which has lost its own capital could deploy new infantrymen from (let’s say) a troop-training camp located in British territory.

I’d play a redesign. Probably don’t want to change too much at once, Sounds like you already got a pretty good list for starters with the soviet/japan nap, turn order, valueless islands, new NOs, new factory unit etc…

Maybe make a hard list and let people comment on that. Kinda like redrum did with the ai. Just for a starting point anyway.

Personally I like the islands being worth a buck. Throw in a couple 3 island group NOs that would double them to 6 bucks or something to that effect. Small enough you might go for them but not so big you say screw it. I give the med guys a buck as well.

IDK if you’d want to totally 86 the minor because I could see a lot of air hevy/ infantry combos out there at the expense of mech. But IDK you’ll obviously have to test all of it. Get something playable and improve it from there. Of course you already know that :)

Sounds like a pretty huge project, I will try to participate in a small way as I am currently taking on a massive customization.

There have been some interesting ideas surrounding the whole Vichy France dynamic, but thats a bit of a Pandora’s box. For now I would like to propose some small changes that might be widely accepted.

1. Bombers only receive the +2 damage bonus to factories if they have departed from an operational airbase (that’s if the whole SBR system is still recognizable after the redesign).

2. Damaged battleships may not conduct shore bombardments, the penalty for keeping an aircraft carrier damaged is that they can’t hold planes, damaged battleships should suffer greater consequences as well (that’s if the whole naval combat system is still recognizable after the redesign).

that’d be a interesting turn order. IDK if having ANZAC canopen for the US would cause Japan some major problems or not

Lots of detailed proposals to read here, which is great.  I’ll go through them today as time permits and post any comments that I might have.

Regarding the proposed new facility that would serve as the entry point for infantry, I’d favour a short, simple, fairly generic term like “army base” or “army camp.”  Something close, in other words, to the existing facility terms of “air base” and “naval base.”  As for this element…

“The only reason I thought maybe to nix the minor factory altogether, is so that these cardboard chips would be available to fill the new spot in the roster. The current minor factory has the numeral 3 clearly marked on it, so if going for a replacement scheme (rather than adding a new piece to the mix) this might recommend up to 3 infantry units mobilized at the ground base.”

…my feeling is that this wouldn’t be optimal for a number of reasons.  First, it gets rid of an existing facility on the grounds that its marker is needed for a different new facility, not on the grounds that the existing facility itself is problematic.  I see the minor IC as being a valid and useful unit, filling a niche between a major IC and no IC at all.  Second, the minor IC marker is conceptually problematic for use as an army camp marker because it conveys the impression that soldiers are manufactured in factories (which they aren’t), because part of the rationale for allowing the army camps to be built in minor locations is that they don’t require as much infrastructure as factories, and because 3 might not necessarily be the best choice for the number of infantry that enter the game through army camps (though it may very well be fine).  My feeling is that it would be better to seek an alternate marker for army camps.  One possibility would be these HBG special forces markers…

http://www.historicalboardgaming.com/Special-Forces_c_301.html

…which are nation-specific in design.  My preference would be for a generic army camp marker (which perhaps HBG might consider producing, preferably as one of its attractive square acrylic markers), but on the other hand purchasing one set of special forces markers for each player power would provide each player with about a dozen army camp markers, which sounds like a convenient number to me.

@Black_Elk:

This seems like a good oppertunity to build some small Russian fleets into the set up. Give those sculpts some use. But where? And of what unit composition? I think it would be nice to see a Russian battleship for once.

Just as background information: in WWII, the USSR basically had two major and two minor fleets.  Its largest numbers of warships, and its most powerful warship types, were allocated to the Baltic (based near Leningrad) and the Black Sea (based in the Crimea).  The USSR had much smaller fleets, consisting mainly of light forces, in the White Sea (based, I think, at Arkhangelsk) and on its Pacific coast (based at Vladivostok).

@Black_Elk:

Or just more generally, some bases of one type or another, on various island territories that don’t otherwise have much gameplay value OOB, such as Sicily, Marshall islands, Marianas, Crete etc. “No more worthless islands”

That’s a good idea, could add air bases to Sicily and Malta to spice up the Mediterranean like Oztea did in his 41 scenario. Would also add a naval base to West Indies. Not terribly useful but represents Vieques as well as our presence in Guantanamo and Culebra.

Also I’m biased since I work for a company with a sister office in Bombay but it would be nice for that side of India to get representation as well, so all is not lost when Calcutta falls. Maybe a minor IC and a naval base, and to compensate the major in India is downgraded to a minor.

@Black_Elk:

Ps. Another idea for a land base that’s been kicked around before, is that they are used to mobilize units from an Industrial complex (units that already exist, during the non combat phase) rather than spawning new units per se.
In that case you might make the base like a suped up transport. It can mobilize 2 infantry units from your Industrial Complexes to your base during non combat.
This could embody whatever historical logistics would have made sense from the IC to the base. Whether an island base in the middle of the sea, or like a rail hub at the end of a long line. The ground base unit could be abstracted to cover both. But it’s a one time movement, IC to Base, moving the units out (not base to base, or base to IC.)

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this one…I guess mainly because I’m not sure what you’re visualizing here, at least in real-world terms.  The deployment of units in WWII from factory to battlefield varied tremendously depending on multiple factors.  For example, a US tank in 1945 might be manufactured in a Detroit factory, shipped by rail to the East Coast, transported by freighter across the Atlantic and shipped by rail to a point near the front, where it would drive by road and ultimately cross-country into combat.  By contrast, some Soviet tanks in 1941 and 1942 drove more or less out the factory doors and straight into battle.  Ships were built on slipways or in drydock, launched, fitted out, sent on builder’s trials, accepted by the navy, commissioned, sent on shake-down and training cruises, and eventually deployed for operations; in all of these operations (except the journey to the fitting-out basin), they were essentially self-propelled.  US-manufactured aircraft with sufficient range would be picked up at the factory by military pilots, ferried across the ocean under their own power using the shortest route possible (such as Newfoundland to Ireland) or multiple hops (stopping to refuel at places like Hawaii) and eventually they’d reach their assigned bases; smaller planes with insufficient range would be delivered fully-functional by aircraft carriers or shipped disassembled in crates.

I’ve been thinking about the issue of victory conditions.  It’s a pretty fundamental aspect of the game because all the actions of the players (if they want to win) ultimately have to take into consideration whether they advance the players towards fulfilling those conditions.  (To express it in circular terms: the way to win the game is to do what it takes to win the game.)

I don’t have any kind of detailed system to propose as an alternate to G40’s current model of using victory cities, but I’ve been trying to think about what kind of other approaches might be worth considering.  My first notion was to try to figure out how Germany and Japan could actually have won WWII, but I quickly dropped that line of inquiry for various reasons.  First, this approach assumed that Germany and Japan could actually have won the war, or at least (and perhaps more achievably) fought the Allies to a sustainable stalemate.  That assumption would have produced some lively debate (including in my own mind).  Second, this approach wouldn’t necessarily have resolved the issue of what the victory conditions for the Allies should be in the game.  So I decided to explore other avenues.

The notion I’m currently looking at is this.  What if the victory conditions for the game somehow (and at this stage I have no idea of how this “somehow” would work) depended on how well the Allies and the Axis were respectively “doing” in various sub-components of the war?  By sub-components, I’m referring to certain specific types of campaigns that were fought in certain specific theatres of WWII.  In my first (and so far only) look at this concept, I deliberately ignored whether any of these campaigns are actually modeled into the existing OOB G40 game; instead, I took a big step back and tried to look at the history of WWII from an extremely broad perspective, so see if I could identify and isolate the most significant regional campaigns of the war.

In doing this analysis, I decided to exclude from consideration the earliest and latest phases of both the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific.  In the early phases of both conflicts, Germany and Japan rolled over their opponents in a seemingly unstoppable way.  In the late phases, both countries were being driven back relentlessly by the Allies.  Both phases were relatively short and highly unbalanced, so in this sense they’re not good representations of the central period of the war when the global fight was at its height and its outcome was still an open question.  So in my analysis, I excluded from the European side the period from the start of the war (September 1939) to the fall of France (June 1940), I excluded on the Pacific side the period from the start of the war (December 1941) to the fall of the Dutch East Indies (March 1942), and I excluded from both sides the period from June 1944 onward (which I picked because that’s when D-Day fundamentally changed the war in western Europe).

I was hoping that I’d end up with an equal number of campaign/theatre pairings for both the Europe and Pacific sides of the G40 map, and I was pleased that I was able to achieve this equal distribution without distorting the war too much – though I did have to be very selective about what to include and what to leave out.  Here’s the list I eventually came up with:

EUROPE MAP

Eastern Europe

• The German-Soviet land war

Western and Central Europe

• The Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany

The Atlantic and the North Sea

• The German naval campaign against Allied merchant shipping

The Mediterranean

• The battles for North Africa and Southern Europe

PACIFIC MAP

The Central Pacific

• The struggle for control of island bases in the Central Pacific

The Southern and Western Pacific

• The battles for the Solomons and New Guinea

Southeast Asia

• The struggle for Burma and the threat to India

China

• The ten-million-man Sino-Japanese stalemate in partially-occupied China

As I said, this isn’t a victory condition system because this list makes no connection at all with any of the A&A game mechanics.  It’s simply something I’m tossing into the discussion in case it’s of any use for the development of an alternative (or supplement) to the current victory city model.

Have recently been play-testing some modified G40 rules/National Objectives with players on TripleA. Mostly, the changes have been an attempt to correct the pro-Axis slant of the game, while also adding some historical interest.

By far the best change has been increasing fighter attack/defense in air-raids to 2.

Here are new national objectives.

1. Western Europe Beach Head: Allied control of at least two of the following gives USA +5 PUs if at war: Normandy, Holland, Western Germany, Denmark.

2. Control of Mediterranean Shipping Lanes: Allied control of Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, and Crete gives UK +5 PUs.

3. Vital Forward Bases: Allied control of all of the following gives USA +5 PUs if at war: Wake Island, Midway, Caroline Islands, Marianas, Marshall Islands.

4. No Enemy-Subs in Atlantic: No enemy subs in the Atlantic (excluding szs 112 and 125-127) gives UK +5 PUs.

5. Revised Russian National Objectives

a. Spread of Communism: Bonus for Russian control of originally Axis/Pro-Axis territories is confined to mainland Europe (excluding Africa, Iraq, mid-east Islands, etc.).

b. Lend Lease: Russia receives +5 PUs, when at war with Germany/Italy, if at least one of three historical Lend-Lease lanes is “open” (i.e., the lane territory is friendly-controlled and there are no enemy warships in the corresponding sz). The Lend-Lease lanes are as follows:

i. Archangel, sz 125
ii. Persia, sz 80
iii. Siberia, sz 5

As in the original version of the NO, the presence of non-Russian allied units in originally Russian territory cancels out the objective.

All of these NOs (along with the revised air-raid values for fighters) have been programmed into a playable TripleA saved game. If any y’all would be interested in play testing, shoot me a message.

My only comments so far relate to adding, subtracting or moving units on the board at the start of the game.

Just keep in mind, and I am sure it is pretty obvious, that each unit on the board represents more than just a single or a few units on a real-life scale. The Soviet cruiser and sub in SZ 115 represent, as of 1940/41, (2) modern cruisers, (2) older battleships, many destroyers and well over two dozen submarines.

Adding an extra fighter in China may not swing the balance of the game, but it may be a case of over-representation. The 1st AVG only had about 60 operational fighters at any one time. Supposedly that one fighter on the G40 board is equivalent to all 60 of those aircraft. While the Eastern US begins with only one fighter to represent even more than that.

So throwing another infantry in Canada for the Yellowknife Native Rifles or a battleship in Hawaii for “battleship row” may not be the best idea.

I am all for seeing more units on the board too; heck that is why I want a the largest practical board possible (whatever that may be…). But you really have to be careful and look at balanced increases around the map so as not to tip the scales. Best way IMO to increase the number of units is to give everyone more IPCs to spend. Well, not give, but increase territory values.

@Black_Elk:

I’m pretty convinced that any victory scheme, whether it be based on Cities, or achievements, probably needs to have some kind of cash incentive/gameplay-driver in order to compete with the “Victory by Capital Capture” structure that most A&A games have adopted in the past. I know YG has experimented with a system that uses tokens for Victory in G40. In AA50 I used to play with rules that granted a cash bonus to capturing a VC.
Perhaps you could create some sort of hybrid system? I think as long as the Victory condition is something that was actually achievable by either side, this would help. The OOB conditions are not like that, it’s an Axis game to loose, and the Allied victory conditions are basically impossible within the timeframe of most games, or the patience of most players.

I’m still only thinking at a very broad conceptual level, but here’s a slightly more developed version of the idea I floated yesterday about an alternate victory condition system.

• The system would revolve around the eight theatre/campaign pairings I described yesterday, or around some variation of it (for instance if it’s considered impractical to model the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign within the A&A game system).  For purposes of convenience I’ll assume in this post that the eight-pairing concept is being used, but the ideas outlined below don’t depend on those particular pairings being used.

• Each theatre/campaign pairing would have its own specific set of victory conditions.  These conditions could vary in nature from one theatre/campaign pairing to the next.  In one theatre, for example, the victory conditions might involve the capture of cities, while in another they might involve the kind of cash incentive that Black Elk mentioned, while in another they might involve economic factors (such as ship tonnage sunk or percentages of bombers shot down or percentages of factories destroyed).  In a given theatre, the winning conditions might be identical for the Axis and the Allies (example: the need for either side to control x number of cities), or they might be reciprocal (the Allies trying to get as many cargo ships across the Atlantic safely as possible, and the Axis trying to sink as many of them as possible), or they might even be completely different in nature (provided that they’re fairly balanced).

• The victory conditions would have to be easily quantifiable, regardless of their nature.  All the players should be able to tell easily how close each side is to achieving its victory conditions in any given theatre.  The concept of “how close” does not mean that players would be required to achieve total victory in any particular theatre; rather, what players would be required to achieve is a position of clear dominance in a particular theatre, based on criteria which are appropriate to the particular type of campaign being fought in that theatre.  To put it in very abstract terms (for purposes of convenience), achieving a “position of clear dominance” (or PCD) in a particular theatre could be defined as “achieving 70% or more of the player’s objectives in that theatre.”  For example, this could equate to controlling at least two-thirds of the islands in the Central Pacific, or controlling at least two out of three victory cities in a theatre, or depriving the opponent of at least two-thirds of his IPC income, or whatever.  (I’m using 70% just as an example, but the figure could be different and it might even vary from theatre to theatre instead of being uniform.)

• The system of individual theatre-based winning conditions would be attached to a system of game-winning conditions.  This could potentially be something very simple such as (to pick some figures out of the air purely as examples): The Axis wins the game if it can achieve and maintain a position of clear dominance (PCD) in at least six of the game’s eight theatres for two back-to-back game rounds.  The Allies win the game if they can [either do the same or fulfill a different set of game-winning conditions, depending on whether we want the two sides to have identical or different criteria for victory].  Different numbers could be used, depending on whether PCD scale is considered more important that PCD duration: let’s say, sustaining a PCD in seven theatres for one round, or in five theatres for three rounds, rather than in six theatres for two rounds.

I’m a big fan of regularkid’s national objectives; they sound promising. I also like the idea of a rail base or army base, although I think the rail base idea needs a little more work. It might make sense to have the rail base give infantry and artillery a movement bonus on non-combat – e.g., up to 3 ground units that start in the territory with the rail base can move up to 3 territories (instead of 1 territory) during non-combat, if and only if the rail base is operational. I don’t like the idea of having army bases cause infantry to be instantly transported, overseas, from factories to the front lines – it’s hard enough to get an effective naval blockade going in A&A without opponents having the option to build bases that magically ignore your submarines.

I agree with BlackElk that a major objective for the redesign has to be improving the ‘fun factor’ of France, China, and ANZAC while making the blitz-to-Moscow-with-mechanized infantry-and-planes less of a dominant/mandatory strategy for Japan. I’d also suggest that Italy’s experience needs to be made less variable – it’s not that Italy is overpowered or underpowered, but some games it sits around doing very little, and other games it takes over the bloody Southern Hemisphere. Often this has little to do with the Italian player’s choices; it’s just a matter of whether Germany wants to attack London and whether the USA wants to reinforce Africa.

So – how to do that? How can France, China, and ANZAC all be given extra strength while nerfing one of Japan’s best strategies and getting Italy to be more ‘average’, without turning the redesign into a hopelessly Allied-friendly map?

For starters, it’s not going to make sense to keep Japan away from Moscow by nerfing Japan – you can’t nerf Japan and buff three of the Allies and still have a balanced game. Instead, I suggest my trusty stand-by of making capitals less tasty: instead of wrecking your whole economy forever, losing a capital should be a noticeable but recoverable defeat. This might mean losing one turn of production, it might mean shifting to a backup capital, it might mean losing half your treasury – but it cannot and should not mean a total loss of your ability to deploy new units. This should free Japan to expand in a variety of directions as called for by the individual game situation, instead of always being drawn to Moscow like some kind of experimental supermagnet.

As far as regulating Italy, I suggest two plans: first, separate the Italian fleet from the British fleet a little bit, so that Britain can’t unilaterally decide that the fleets should wipe each other out on turn 1. Maybe put a blocking Italian destroyer in the way, or even give Italy a spot in the turn order before Britain and give Britain a blocking destroyer. A bit of naval brinksmanship is one thing, but considering how long the British and Italian fleets spent avoiding a direct engagement in the actual war (years), it’s both unfun and ahistorical to have a starting setup that strongly encourages sinking every dang boat in the Mediterranean on turn 1. Second, beef up South Africa – give it both a starting minor industrial complex and a starting garrison of 4-5 units. It’s one thing for Italy to build up some momentum and become a major player in and around the Mediterranean and Red Seas – that was its goal, and if all went well, it could have happened. It’s another thing to have Italy parading around Antarctica like some kind of global superpower. They didn’t have the population, the supply chain, or the ideology to make anything like that happen, and having a strong British base in South Africa should help flatten out the upper end of Italy’s curve without immediately stopping Italy from making early gains in North Africa.

As far as France, China, and ANZAC, I think most of the boost they need is just a chance to go before their respective Axis opponents. France should go before Germany, and China and ANZAC should go before Japan. I’d also support giving China a second fighter. It’s ahistorical, but it’s boring for China to be essentially limited to one weak attack per turn just because they only had 60 operational fighters, or whatever. It’s much more interesting for China to get two fighters and to have to choose between one strong attack or two weaker attacks per turn. That should get us 90% of the way there – we can tweak the national objectives. Finally, as I’ve written on other posts, France really needs a territory that it can use as a backup capital / factory site after Paris falls. It’s ridiculous to model France as an independent player and then lock France out of participating meaningfully in 90% of games after turn 1 or 2. The Free French are a fun, exciting, historical part of World War II, and we’ve gotta make some room for them. If we don’t put the French backup capital in Quebec because of concerns about historical accuracy, then it should go in the West Indies, French West Africa, or French Equatorial Africa. I don’t like the idea of the French backup capital being in London, because it undercuts the idea of the Free French as an independent player. As a disclaimer, neither me nor any of my close friends or family have any French ancestry – I could give two hoots about the French on a personal level, I just think that as a matter of good game design, having an independent French player demands having an independent French backup capital.