First time poster here so forgive me if this has already been discussed elsewhere.
I am intrigued by your modified rules regarding research and development. I have been playing the game since 1983 and the one house rule that we used that has remained consistent all these years through various versions of the game is our rule regarding r&d. In the classic version all five powers rolled a die at the beginning of the game to acquire a weapon. After all five had one then Germany and Japan decided between themselves who would get a second weapon to even the number of weapons between the opposing sides and then they would roll a second die (usually Germany). Play would begin at that point and there was little need to purchase dice for r&d since everyone already had a weapon.
The purpose of doing this was to make each game unique. Every game had exactly the same starting point and after a while became quite predictable to experienced players. The only thing that made each game unique before this rule adaptation was the level of experience of the players and how much you could take advantage of that as an experienced player as well as the luck of rolling in key battles.
When you consider the number of combinations you could possibly have in the Global40 edition each and every game would be truly unique to any other game you have ever played. The level of skill that you need to play this way would increase as you would have to develop new strategies each time to both counter the weapons combination you face and utilize the weapons combination that you have to work with. It makes the game more fun as well. When you think back on all the games that you have played over the years the ones that probably stick out the most are the ones in which you had at least one weapon to work with because that game was out of the ordinary for you. With this rule you would have a weapon every single game you play.
In the Global40 game you would roll the die in the established order of play. It would be a waste of time to give France and China a weapon since China wouldn’t be able to use it anyway and lets face it France isn’t much of a factor in the game. Realistically you would think that their ability to develop a weapon would be severely hampered in the political situation of the 1940’s as well. After ANZAC (or Pacific UK as your rule exists) rolls then the axis would get one more roll and must decide which nation gets a second weapon before the roll.
I would recommend that you roll the die and then decide which breakthrough chart you want to choose from based on what your roll is. I can’t tell you how many times that one side would surrender a game before it has even began because of the bad luck when rolling weapons. We would have to re-roll for all weapons again or be stuck with with wasting hours of our time chasing a forgone conclusion. For example if Russia gets super subs and US gets rockets while the axis powers all get weapons that they can actually use then the game would be horribly skewed for the axis. If each country had 2 choices based on their roll then you could avoid this situation.
I do really like your incentive based r&d rule though. I will give it a try on it’s own and then maybe combine both our rules to give each power their initial weapon and provide the incentive to acquire more as the game progresses.
I also want to thank you Young Grasshopper for your videos on YouTube. All of the players that I used to play with have moved away from the city where I live and I haven’t found anyone else to play against yet. I have been trying to learn how to play Global40 on my own and it’s been very helpful to me to have someone explain the rules because, as you know, the rulebook can be hard to follow as you pointed out in your videos. I’ve only been able to play 3 games of G40 against other players to this point (with some confusion between our interpretations) so I’ve had to interpret the rules on my own and I’ve learned an lot over the last week from watching your videos. I’ve also downloaded your map which will be ready from the printer tomorrow. I went with the laminated paper finish. Cheers!
