Balanced Mod [Anniversary 41]

Thanks for writing in! I hope you get a chance to try the game and see what you think of it.

You can turn off tech development fairly easily in the Map Options dialog box, just like for any other map. I also like to play without tech.

Before you declare that a two-ocean USA is impossible, why not give it a try? I’ve playtested this a fair bit, and my experience is that the USA absolutely can build two navies as their income gets up into the 60s and 70s, and that Japan is vulnerable because the navy can pick up 3 IPCs from the central Pacific islands, or 3.5 IPCs from the Philippines, or 5.5 IPCs from Borneo, or 5.5 IPCs from East Indies, all of which are threatened from zones like the Solomon Islands or Wake Island. If you’d like to play the Axis sometime, I can show you what I mean.

There’s also a tricky problem with trying to make A&A maps match up with history. Historically, if the Axis had won the battles of El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Midway, would they have had an economic advantage against the Allies, or would they have knocked any major Ally out of the war? I’d say no to both counts, by a very wide margin. The USA + Britain + USSR + China outnumbered and outgunned and outproduced Germany + Italy + Japan by roughly 3:1, even after the loss of France and Poland and Shanghai and Ukraine. As you say, total Japanese income could never have approached total US income during the war, no matter how well the battles went for Japan. But the same thing is true of Germany! So if you want to be faithful to that historical reality, you have to write a map where the Axis are guaranteed to lose. That’s the route chosen by some hex-and-counter games like Unconditional Surrender, and some innovative semi-wargames like Churchill, but it’s not the way TripleA works, and it’s not part of the philosophy for this map. I have to give both sides a fair chance to win, and that means that sometimes the Axis will have an unrealistically high income.

All that said, it is possible that Germany is still a little too weak and Japan is still a little too strong. If we were going to add a fourth new national objective for Germany, what should it be? Any suggestions? If we were going to weaken or remove one of Japan’s national objectives or make one of them harder to achieve, what should that be?

As far as map changes, I am in broad agreement with your ideas, and I am working on implementing them in my other map, Argo’s Middleweight. Thanks for your comments on that map as well, which I’ll reply to in that thread!

If you want to try balanced mod in the lobby with me, I can make some time this weekend – I’m in California; just let me know when.

I’m not really sure what it would mean to make the UK, Russia, and Japan all weaker at the same time – how would you achieve that? Are you talking about less cash, or fewer starting units, or worse national objectives, or what? I’m not inherently opposed to the idea, but I think you have to be careful about nerfing half the countries in the game, because you might inadvertently make them less fun to play by not giving them enough plausible strategies – part of what it means to be relatively weak is that you might be forced to play defense, or you might be forced to make one limited offensive in one particular theater, because that’s all your economy/forces will support.

Fair point on the tolerance of Allied nations to accept casualties without seeking a separate peace, but, again, you’re talking about a radically different set of victory conditions than is typical on TripleA. We usually play until one side beats the other, not until one side wears out the other’s will to fight and agrees to a draw. You could arrange for a morale system or a clock or something like that, but it would be a much bigger change to the game than just altering the national objectives on a pre-existing map.

Speaking of which, may I ask why you’re even on this thread if you don’t like national objectives? The whole point of this variant is to reinvigorate the WW2v3 map by changing the national objectives. Of course you’re welcome to play whatever you like, but I’m confused about why you’re here if you don’t like NOs.