G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions)

I agree with Jennifer and Black_Elk, a war bonds idea is a fun way to get more units on the table (who doesn’t want more units?!). Call it Lend Lease for the smaller powers, war bonds, whatever, but I agree that a simple 1d6 is a fun way to add a bit to it. Maybe this can be increased to 2d6 at some “desperate” part of the game? Like when a home territory is taken, Southern Germany for example, the Germans can role a 2d6 to show they are stripping the country bare of resources in a last ditch effort. Or maybe each nation is allowed a 2d6 just three times a game at their discretion.

@Argothair:

Just checking in to ask a couple of project-management questions:

1. How long do we want to spend brainstorming ideas before we start picking a few of them to implement? A week? A month? A year?

2. Once we have a definite list of the features we’re looking for, are we going to try to assign the design of specific features to individual people? To separate threads? Or are we just going to keep hacking away at the overall project as a group in this thread, even if it takes a thousand posts?

I also agree with Argothair, which goes along with what I was saying a few days ago. You can brainstorm all day, but at some point the groundwork needs to be laid with what you definitively want done and tweak from there. That could rule out a bunch of suggestions on here and get more to the point of what you really want input on.

Sounds good to me. I think this thread is putting a number of good and reasonable ideas out there that I would personally incorporate into my games. I don’t play TripleA, but more power to those of you who are and can figure out if some of this stuff will work or not.

I’m good with it in the second round.

A little more concerned with the difference in income for allies vs axis.  That might be scaled down a bit if you limit the technology until a nation is “at war.”

Hey Folks,

my thoughts concerning the capital ships, or the way they are represented in our games are the classic ones: Only our BB (C20, A4, D4, M2) can sustain 2 hits and they are immediately repaired after combat. CV (C14, A1, D2, M2) are sunk after the 1st hit.
I don’t like the game mechanic of moving BBs to the next NB for repair and than back to fighting.
Since (correct me if I’m wrong) WW2 carriers are not as well armored as BBs they get no 2nd hit in our games.

But that’s just the way we feel comfortable with it…

@The:

Since (correct me if I’m wrong) WW2 carriers are not as well armored as BBs they get no 2nd hit in our games.

Carriers were not as well armored as battleships, but many carriers took a great amount of (repeated) punishment before sinking… and many times they were saved to fight on. Minor repairs could be made at sea to get the ship combat ready, but after a major attack you had to get the ship back to drydock.

The repair mechanic is one that I really haven’t thought too much about. In terms of damage taking I have come up with this system as something I am working from:

• Light Carrier:   A0   D1   M2   1 hit, holds 1 fighter/tac   $10

• Fleet Carrier:   A1   D2   M2   2 hits, holds 2 fighters/tac   $15  (Yorktown, Essex, Ark Royal, Shokaku, Kaga, Soryu, Graf Zeppelin, Illustrious, Aquila, etc…)

• Heavy Carrier: A2   D3   M2   2 hits, holds 3 fighters/tac   $20  (Midway, Shinano, etc…)

• Early War BB/Battlecruiser/Heavy Cruiser:   A4   D3   M2   $12   1 hit, Can bombard on 4   (Graf Spee, Alaska, Nagato, Fuso, Nevada, Hood, etc…)

• Battleship:   A4   D4   M2   2 hits, Can bombard on 4   $18   (Iowa, Bismarck, King George V, Dunkerque, Vittorio Veneto, North Carolina, Kongo, etc…)

• Heavy Battleship:   A5   D5   M2   3 hits, Can bombard on 5   $24   (Yamato, Montana, etc…)

Seeing a heavy battleship will strike fear into everyone. They are badass and expensive.

EDIT:   I would love some input on these cost figures since I have never playtested a change like this. My goal is not to assign a arithmetic IPC increase from light to heavy, but to determine a sweet-spot for cost by balancing a number of factors. The factors that play into this for me are:   historical percentage of naval units by type, past costs in Axis&Allies, adjustment for the capabilities of the unit relative to other units, projected ability for a given Power to afford said unit, etc…

Good point LHoffman,
(though it won’t change the way we handle our carriers  :wink:)

What IPC-cost per ship do you have in mind?
Standard price +/- 2IPCs for light/early or heavy version?

I don’t mind the idea of putting a damaged battleship next to an industrial complex or naval base that is “friendly” to repair.  It would mean more if you have to take it as a “hit.”  I am also good with the same for aircraft carriers, but they can carry 1 aircraft token when damaged.

I mean, in a normal game (vs tripleA) you could have “repair ships” (transports with control markers under them) that could be dispatched for 7 IPC and “die” after “healing” the ship at sea so it isn’t damaged anymore (during NCM.)

@The:

What IPC-cost per ship do you have in mind?
Standard price +/- 2IPCs for light/early or heavy version?

Eh, not quite. I haven’t totally figured it out yet. I do have a list at home, but I don’t have access to it at the moment. I will edit my post above and put in what I can remember.

I don’t necessarily plan on doing a +/- 2 IPC offset, because the capabilities between the light/normal/heavy justify a bigger difference in cost. For example, if a heavy battleship was only 2 IPCs more than a normal one… well that is just a no brainer. Spend 2 IPCs more and you get an almost guaranteed roll (@5) plus you get another hit to take, which is basically like having another ship. My intent is to make the “heavy” units (battleships in particular) expensive enough that there are only a few on the board at any given time and they are a hit to your wallet, as they should be. But damn if they are not the biggest, baddest units in the game…  :wink:

@Cmdr:

I mean, in a normal game (vs tripleA) you could have “repair ships” (transports with control markers under them) that could be dispatched for 7 IPC and “die” after “healing” the ship at sea so it isn’t damaged anymore (during NCM.)

This reminds me of something from a real time strategy video game. I wouldn’t use it because there really is no historical basis for a repair ship like that, plus that is a lot of IPCs to spend and then burn (if they “die” after use) just to take a damage marker off your ships. I would rather save the money and get them back to a base and do it for free. Unless of course we are talking about having to spend money to do the repair in the first place.

I kind of like the idea of an anti-aircraft cruiser. I would like to think more about how cruisers are supposed to fit into the rock-paper-scissor dynamic.

Without the cruiser, you have something like this:

CV + Ftr > BB
BB > DD
DD > SS
SS > CV + Ftr

As I understand it, the theory is supposed to be that carrier groups beat battleships, because the planes are cheaper, faster, and more versatile than battleships. Battleships beat destroyers, because they can soak up extra hits for more cost-effective kills. Destroyers beat submarines, because they cancel submarines’ special abilities. Submarines beat carrier groups, because they can sink the carriers and leave planes with nowhere to land.

There are two main holes in this theory: (1) battleships cost too much, so a group of destroyers will beat a similarly-costed group of battleships, and (2) submarines are too cheap, so a group of submarines will beat a similarly-costed group of destroyers, which is obnoxious because destroyers are supposed to be submarine-destroyers but they lose to submarines in a fair fight. I think you could probably fix both of those problems just by dropping the price of a BB and raising the price of an SS. It doesn’t require major surgery.

Then you add in the cruiser, either with or without a specialized anti-aircraft ability. Where do cruisers fit into all of this? Do we expect to see players building fleets with only BB + CA + DD to try to take control of the seas, moving in against carrier groups with impunity? Do we expect to see carrier groups adding in a CA or two for extra defense against enemy carrier groups? The historical role of a cruiser was to help protect merchant vessels near distant colonies / allies where the limited volume of trade didn’t justify dispatching even a single battleship, or where the extra fuel cost of sending an armored ship around the world was too expensive. Do we expect to see some countries (or some factories) building cruisers and other countries building battleships? It’s very hard on the A&A board to get the incentives right so that both ships are potentially optimal, depending on the situation. We also have the problem that we have limited data about what the costs should be, because the OOB cost means you should almost never build a BB and definitely never build a CA.

My philosophy is to reduce cost so you can afford more… but not to change the value of the ship types as it stands.

Carriers (w/planes)>Battleship>Cruiser>Destroyer>Sub

That should remain constant.

I never see fleets of just battleships, subs or destroyers. Even as it stands OOB, and with the addition of other special abilities, fleets are best served with a variety of ship types.

@Black_Elk:

Ok I have another question for you guys to kick around…
What are your thoughts on the damage/repair mechanic for the two capital ships in this game, battleships and carriers?
The 1940 game departs pretty significantly from its predecessors in this area. The OOB rules require that you be adjacent to friendly naval base in order to repair damaged capital ships.
Do you like this system? From a gameplay perspective? How about from a historical accuracy perspective?

Historically, the picture looked roughly like this in WWII – “roughly” because it varied from country to country due to things like differences in ship design, differences in damage control practices, differences in training and differences in how much support infrastructure each navy could count on.  But basically, the answer goes like this.

Generally speaking, battleships could survive a lot more battle damage than carriers.  Battleships had the advantage that they were heavily armoured, and that the forward and aft main gun turrets (their primary weapons) were sufficiently far apart (except in all-forward designs like the Richelieu class) that one group of main guns could keep fighting even while the other ones were disabled.  To use a Timex watch analogy, battleships could take an awful lot of licking and still keep on ticking, as the Musashi and the Yamato demonstrated: each one absorbed an impressive number of bombs and torpedoes before sinking.  (On the other hand, an enemy shell or bomb reaching the main gun ammunition magazines could blow a battleship apart, as happened to the Arizona and the Hood.)

Carriers were much more vulnerable than battleships. Their huge flat decks were a juicy target for enemy dive-bombers, and the area beneath the flight deck was a huge empty space (the hangar deck) through which a bomb blast could propagate.  Most carriers had little armour protection (the major exception being certain British designs).  Carriers were loaded with highly combustible aviation gasoline (fuel for the planes), plus their own fuel oil, plus explosive ordnance for the aircraft (bombs and torpedoes).  Moreover, a single hit on the flight deck – even when it was non-lethal – could make it difficult or impossible for a carrier’s planes (its primary weapons) to operate.

That being said, good damage control protocols – even on carriers – could help enormously when it came to surviving battle damage at the moment when it happened and immediately afterwards.  The US Navy in WWII was particularly rigorous in its D/C training and practices, and this paid handsome dividends in ships (and lives) saved.  For example, US carrier crews in battle situations were trained to flush their fuel hoses with air (or some sort of noncombustible gas; I can’t recall) once they has finished fueling their planes, as a way of reducing the fire hazard posed by these fuel lines.  Another example: the US Navy discovered at one point that the standard cotton uniforms of its enlisted sailors had a considerable degree of resistance to flash fires, so it required American sailors in combat zones to wear full-length pants and shirts at all times (and prohibited them from rolling up their trouser legs and shirt sleeves), no matter how hot the weather was or how much they envied the handsome tans of the Royal Navy guys (who were allowed to wear tropical short uniforms).  The result?  US sailors tended to be burned less severely than their RN counterparts if battle damage caused a flash fire.

Any competent navy would train its men to make sure all watertight hatches and doors were shut when battle stations were sounded, and would train its men in D/C procedures: plugging hull breaches, putting out fires, and so forth.  Like first aid in humans, D/C is intended to address immediate damage as quickly as possible in order to stabilize the situation.  And it’s no laughing matter: Japan’s largest carrier, Shinano, was lost to a torpedo attack by a single US submarine largely due to incompetent damage control by its crew.

Looking beyond immediate damage control, we get into the issue of post-battle repairs.  Speaking in very general terms, battleships and battlecruisers with good crews, decent supplies of spare parts and adequate onboard machine shops could patch up minor damage themselves, and could often deal with more serious stuff to the extent of at least getting the boilers back online and getting under way (even if at slow speed).  The Yorktown – which had been patched up hastily in Hawaii after being heavily damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea – was put out of action at Midway, but managed to get herself back under way; if she hadn’t subsequently been torpedoed by a Japanese sub, the old girl would quite probably have made it all the way back to the ship repair yards at Pearl Harbor.  The most impressive of all carrier damage-survival cases is the story of the USS Franklin (CV 13), which I won’t even summarize here because you have to read it to believe it.

All that being said, however, I think it’s completely unrealistic to picture a heavily damaged carrier or battleships fully repairing itself.  Repairs of such magnitude require a shipyard or a drydock, either at a major port or naval base (or at the very least at an advanced naval base, of which the US Navy established several in the Pacific during WWII).  Realistically, all that’s expected of a warship which has sustained battle damage is that it deal with the immediate harm through good D/C, complete its mission if it can, then repair itself sufficiently to get itself back to a proper repair facility where it can be fixed up properly.

the xeno game used to make you roll 2 dice to repair your BB. I always thought that was cool. You didn’t know how bad it was hurt. Made for more unpredictable situations, which helps realism imo.I could see where their bombard should be suspended or reduced to a 3 anyway as well.

I’d be ok with 1 fighter on a damaged CV. A playtest for sure. That would make for more powerful fleets. The defensive fleet has the advantage now. A little too much imo. It’s a lotta dough to build a fleet and a bad first rd of rolling can devastate it. Makes (me anyway) more conservative in the pacific, which leads to more of a attrition struggle.

@barney:

the xeno game used to make you roll 2 dice to repair your BB.

And what happens after you’ve rolled the dice? Do you had to pay the totalled sum in IPCs to get the BB ready for combat again?

CVs taking 2 hits should be a UK NA only. British carriers had steel decks, and none were ever sunk, even by the Kamikazes.

American carriers were built for speed with wooden decks, hence the high loss rate to air attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_flight_deck

Victory Conditions: Part 1

(Because of its length, I’ll post this message in two parts.  The first part will give background information, and the second will focus on a specific concept for possible application to the game.)

I’m going to take another crack at a subject that I’ve discussed a few times, which is is the subject of victory conditions.  As I’ve argued previously, I think that it’s a fundamental consideration to any game design process because it provides a central reference point for evaluating all the other elements of the game.  My feeling is that without such a reference point, one simply ends up with a collection of cool game mechanics that aren’t held together by anything coherent.  To use a musical analogy: it’s important for a symphony orchestra to include a wide range of instruments played by musicians who each sound great individually, but those individual qualities are meaningless if the individual musicians don’t have a conductor to make sure they play together harmoniously – or, even worse, if the individual musicians aren’t even playing the same symphony.

The idea I’ll be outlining here developed in the following way.  It started out from the premise that, fundamentally, the Axis powers in WWII were optimized for fighting a series of short, decisive campaigns (with breaks in between them to allow them to restock and reorganize for the next campaign), while the Allied powers were in a better position to fight a long-term war of attrition.  This is, or course, an overly simplified description of the status of the two sides during the war, but it’s a useful starting point for thinking about how this model could translate into victory conditions in a redesigned Global 1940 game.

When I started to consider this model, the first idea that came to mind was this one.  If we work from the premise that the Axis has no chance of winning a long war of attrition, then the obvious conclusion is that the Axis has to win early through hard-hitting maneuver warfare, and that the objective of the Allies in this early phase of the game is simply to survive.  It then follows that, if the Axis fails to achieve this early win, then the war can be assumed to be changing from a short-term war of maneuver to a long-term war of attrition, and that in such a context the Allies will almost certainly win, and thus that it’s meaningless to allow the game to continue beyond a certain point.  The victory conditions that emerge from this line of reasoning are therefore something like this: the Axis powers have to achieve such-and-such an objective by such-and-such a round of play; if they succeed, the Axis powers win; if they fail, the Allied powers win.  Ergo, we end up with a game that has a built-in time limit, or more correctly a built-in round limit.

That was my first idea.  I didn’t really like it because although it has the virtue of being simple it has the defect of being simplistic.  It’s based on the premise which I described in the two previous paragraph, and that premise is itself simplistic.  So let’s look at that original premise more closely and try to draw a fuller picture of the situation.  Specifically, we need to look at what “winning the war” would have meant in realistic terms on both the German side and the Japanese side in WWII.

On the German side, the conceptual model of fighting a series of short, decisive campaigns initially went well.  Germany achieved a quick and complete victory on the Eastern Front, conquering the eastern side of Poland, then got a long break (the Phony War) during which it was able to rest, reorganize, plan and train for the next campaign.  It then achieved a quick and complete victory in Denmark and Norway, then another quick and complete victory against the Low Countries and France.  Against Britain, however, the German campaign of May-June 1940 did not produce a victory, but rather a second-best result: what I call a “sustainable stalemate.”  Germany knocked the BEF out of Continental Europe, forcing it to abandon all its equipment in order to evacuate its men, but it proved unable to invade and occupy Britain or to  force it to capitulate.  Britain survived and stayed in the war, but was in no immediate (or even medium-term) position to invade and liberate Western Europe or to force Germany to capitulate.  Hence, the two sides were essentially deadlocked, and were reduced to fighting each other on the ground in fringe territories (like Africa), in the air (in reciprocal bomber offensives) and at sea (the Battle of the Atlantic), with the air and sea campaigns being the start of attritional warfare between the Britain and Germany.  This went on for years, and did not change fundamentally until the mid-1944 D-Day landings in Normandy and Anvil-Dragoon landings in Southern France signaled the resumption of maneuver warfare in Western Europe, and the gradual driving back of the Germans out of France and into Germany.

On the Eastern Front, in 1941, Germany initially tried to win a quick victory over the USSR through maneuver warfare.  The Germans managed to push deeply into Soviet territory, but not deeply enough to achieve either a decisive victory.  (“Deeply enough” would have meant the Urals, or possibly just the A-A line, but my feeling is that it was simply unrealistic for the Germans to get that far.)  Instead, the Germans ran out of steam, then got pushed back part of the way by the Russians…who in turn ran out of steam.  This scenario was repeated in 1942-1943, with the Germans pushing eastward towards Stalingrad and the Russians pushing them back.  In other words, the two sides engaged in a combination of maneuver warfare and attrition warfare for about two years, with the maneuvering component mainly being a back-and-forth see-sawing of the front (similarly to what happened in North Africa) and the attrition component mainly being a huge consumption of manpower on both sides.  The fundamental change on that front occurred in the period following Kursk, when the Russians were able to finally start pushing the Germans back without getting stopped.

How could we define “winning conditions” for Germany in this context?  Physically overrunning Britain proved impossible because of the Channel and physically overrunning Russia proved impossible because of its sheer size, so we can rule out physical conquest as an indicator of victory.  The number two option then becomes getting Britain and Russia to quit.  Germany did make some progress in that direction: Britain’s convoy situation got pretty grim on a couple of occasions, and the USSR supposedly put out some peace feelers to Germany at one point.  All in all, however, Britain and the USSR were too strongly motivated to capitulate unless their resources were exhausted – and neither ever go to that point.  The number three option then becomes achieving a sustainable stalemate on each front.  To “win” in practical terms, Germany would have had to be able to defeat the 1944 Anglo-American landings in France (and any subsequent ones made in 1945 and thereafter) and would have had to be able to keep playing “push me, pull you” with the Soviets on the Eastern Front: falling back from Soviet advances in the winter, and driving forward into Soviet territory in the summer.  So on that basis you could say: if the Germans can achieve this on the game board, and can sustain it for long enough, they can be considered to have won by default because they’re holding on to their gains no matter how hard the Allies try to defeat them.  Conversely, if the Allies manage to regain and hold significant territorial space that the Germans have conquered, they can be considered to have won because the momentum is on their side.  You could call this the “barometer” approach rather than the “thermometer” approach.  With a thermometer, the single reading given at a single moment is meaningful; with a barometer, the meaningful information is the trend shown over time, i.e. whether the pressure is rising or falling.

I’m not going to analyze Japan’s situation in much detail because, frankly, I don’t think Japan ever had much of a chance to win.  It was already wearing itself down in China when it launched (with the bare-bones forces it could spare) its 1941 campaign of conquest in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, so right from the start it was biting off more than it could chew.  In my opinion, Japan’s only realistic chance of achieving sustainable conquests in the Pacific and Southeast Asia would have been if it had done something that can’t be modeled into A&A (because it would distort the game too badly): attacking the British and Dutch colonial territories it wanted, but not going to war against the US.  Japan’s vague strategic hope was that the Americans would get tired of fighting a losing war against Japan, and would eventually sit down to negotiate a treaty that would allow Japan to keep its gains.  This hope would only have worked if Japan had left it up to the US to decide if it wanted to enter WWII, and thus if the US had gone to war without the powerful motivation and the sense of outrage that Pearl Harbor caused.

Victory Conditions: Part 2

The information I gave in the previous post was intended mainly as background to help understand how the actual (or potential) “victory conditions” of the Axis might have worked in WWII.  I mentioned a few concepts that could potentially be turned into actual victory conditions for a redesigned G40 game – but I realize that the concepts are probably too abstract for practical use.  So as a follow-up, here’s a much more concrete proposal that is built around some of the same ideas.

My earlier statement that “the Axis powers in WWII were optimized for fighting a series of short, decisive campaigns, while the Allied powers were in a better position to fight a long-term war of attrition” could be expressed differently by saying that, fundamentally, the Allied powers were fighting space and the Axis powers were fighting time.  The danger faced by the Allied powers was that the Axis would quickly overrun their space early in the war by hard-hitting maneuver warfare.  The danger faced by the Axis was that the Allies, if they survived the initial Axis offensive, would in the long run crush the Axis through attrition with their industrial and manpower superiority.

Attrition and productivity were hugely important to the outcome of WWII, but they’re very inadequately modeled in A&A.  The closest equivalent to these factors is IPC income, but the IPC element is for the most dependent only on space (the conquest of territory) rather than on both space and time.  With one exception, the OOB game does not take into account the fact that the economic and industrial situations of WWII’s combatant nations changed dramatically over time, and that these economic and industrial changes were not exclusively dependent on territorial changes.  The exception is the concept of bonus income, and specifically the concept of the US shifting to a “wartime economy.”

Historically, there were all sorts of factors that affected the economic and industrial situations of the various combatant nations.  To give a couple of examples:

• Japan took an economic hit when the US imposed an oil embargo on it.  Its situation improved when it conquered the Dutch East Indies and Malaya.  This economic situation reached a plateau as the US submarine campaign started to bite, then started to deteriorate as the the sub campaign became more effective, then deteriorated even more when the US got close enough to start its B-29 bombing campaign against the Japanese home islands.

• Germany got a financial boost from its early conquests, but failed to employ them as efficiently as it could have.  Moreover, it did not put its civilian population on a full war footing (from the point of view of factory service) until 1943, whereas the UK and the USSR did so right from the start of the war in each country.  Germany gained industrial capacity from this civilian mobilization, and also from the subsequent program rationalizations introduced by Albert Speer, but at the same time these industrial improvements were “capped” (prevented from growing to their full potential) by the direct destruction caused by the Allied bombing campaign, and indirectly by the inefficiencies caused by the dispersal of industry to which the bombings led.

Some of the factors I’ve mentioned (like the conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya) are already built into the G40 game, but others (like the US submarine campaign against Japan) are not.  So perhaps these time-based factors could be modeled into the game – essentially as IPC modifiers that would affect different countries in different ways in different game rounds, according to predetermined tables.  To give just one very simple example, we could assume that when we get to such-and-such a round of play, Japan’s IPC income would be adjusted downward to represent the effects of the American submarine campaign.  Every power would have its own table of time-based adjustments, representing a combination of two things: the degree to which it improved its industrial productivity at a given moment of the war, and the degree to which that industrial capacity was degraded by enemy action.  The geographic factor (i.e. which territories a power controlled) would not be modeled into these tables because it’s represented by the game map and is under the control of the actual players.  The tables would focus instead on background factors which are currently not modeled (or barely modeled) in the A&A game, the US shift to a wartime economy being the major exception.

These tables would not, in and of themselves, constitute a set of winning conditions.  Rather, their point would be to prevent the game from degenerating into an endless stalemate.  A stalemate, as I’ve argued above, could be designated as a situation which allows the Axis to claim victory.  If, however, such a stalemate-based Axis victory isn’t a satisfactory solution, then the time-based economic adjustment tables might be the answer.  The tables would reflect the fact that long-term attrition warfare favoured the Allied side, so the tables would gradually tilt the balance towards the Allied side.  If there’s no limit placed on this tilting (which is one option), the Allies are guaranteed to win if they hold on long enough.  If there is a limit placed on this tilting, then an Allied victory is not a foregone conclusion but the job of the Axis becomes harder once the game progresses past a certain point – which is an incentive for the Axis to try to win before the equivalent of, let’s say, 1944.

@Hessian

Yea you add the dice and that’s what it costs to fix it.