Balanced Mod [Anniversary 41]

Thanks for checking in, but nothing new to report on this particular set of house rules. :)

I spent the spring studying data science, and much of the summer went to coping with roommate drama. I’m now comfortably ensconced in my own studio, which is refreshing, but it doesn’t really have the space to host Axis & Allies games (table’s way too small) and my schedule has mostly conflicted with the games that other people have been hosting. Karl S has been working pretty hard on some home remodeling, Karl S has been looking after his second newborn, James has been looking after his first newborn…the usual excuses. I’m still studying data science. I played a few games of Global (joined the ladder for about six months and did OK) and a few games of New World Order on TripleA. I’ve been working a little bit on my 1939 Middleweight Map, which is in the Customizations forum, and a little bit on Tiny Battles of World War 2, which might actually get published someday, and I’ve been playing some of the Battlefront: Strategic Command video games, which have that classic hex-and-counter setup from the 1970s grognard style of wargame, but on a PC. I’ll be playing WW2 Deluxe for the first time this weekend with Mike Kelley, which looks promising, but I can already see some of the potential flaws.

I am always happy to play A&A 50 with my house rules, but I’m not sure the locals are as into it; they mostly like Sired Blood’s Global rules, and I think we’re going to try Larry Harris’s new War Room soon.

Update: finally got a live playtest in, with @Corpo24 and Angel taking the Axis against me and Quincy with the Allies. It was a very tense and exciting game – Germany took Egypt on G1 without a single casualty, but lost 2 fighters against Task Force G in the Western Med and failed to sink the Canadian DD + transport. Britain abandoned both India and Africa, used its navy to capture and hold Scandinavia early (saving Leningrad for the Russians), and built a factory in Australia, which was reinforced by the retreating Indians and some American soldiers and planes. Italy got rich off of national objectives and built a large navy, including a fully loaded carrier, and then shucked 2 loaded transports per turn to the Ukraine, where Germany’s main stack of 15 tanks was threatening both Stalingrad and Moscow.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Japan sent a fully loaded carrier with no escort ships down to Queensland as part of an effort to sink the remaining British Pacific boats (I won’t dignify a few stray transports and destroyers with the name of “Pacific Fleet.”) America seized the opportunity to blow it up and establish carrier parity (2 each), and the American and Japanese Pacific fleets mostly played footsie for the rest of the game, with Japan finally wiping Britain out of the East Indies on about J5, and America taking Iwo Jima on US6. Japan slowly expanded on all fronts, making it as far as Yakut in Siberia, cutting China down to one territory, and trading Persia with Russia. Japan also landed a squad in Rhodesia to help the German tank factory in Egypt make sure that the British didn’t get any funny ideas about a factory in South Africa.

Things looked grim for the Allies during turn 6 – the British were trading France with Germany, but were unable to fill their fifth transport (no extra factory in the west and no money to buy one); America was trading Morocco with Italy each turn and looked unlikely to penetrate further than Libya for a long time. Meanwhile, Japan’s slow, steady progress was becoming a real threat – Japan was about ready to break China and break the still-holding-but-slowly-retreating Siberian Guards, which could have created a decisive income swing. Allies were up about 10 IPCs as of turn 6, but that could have disappeared or even been reversed by turn 8 if things continued according to schedule.

Fortunately for the Allies, the back-and-forth trading in France left the Axis stack in Ukraine exposed to a Russian counter-attack. Russia attacked with 75% odds to win, and rolled better-than-expected, taking back the Ukraine with 3 artillery, 6 tanks, and 1 fighter remaining. At the same time, lightly supported Russian infantry rolled out of Leningrad to take the Baltics and Belorussia, rolling the Germans back in the northeast. The Germans and Italians had no forces available to counter the advancing Russian front – they could not both hold eastern Europe and keep trading France, so the Axis surrendered.

One fun gambit that we didn’t get to see the result of was the American bomber attack on the Italian fleet – the Americans built 3 extra bombers in the Eastern US and stacked land forces in Libya with the idea of holding it for a turn using British fighters that were no longer needed to defend Russia. The US bombers (including a couple that flew from Australia to Stalingrad to join the party) would fly 5 spaces to the central Med, and then land in Libya – which would then be permanently secured, because the Italian navy would no longer have the transports to help the Germans take it out. That attack could have gone quite badly for the Americans; the extra turn of setup meant that the Italians got a chance to build, so they could have dropped another 3 destroyers or something in the sea zone, and they might have won that battle, with disastrous results for the Western Allies – but we’ll never know, because Axis morale collapsed in the wake of the Russian victory in Third Battle of Kharkov.

Everybody had a good time, and we don’t feel that any changes are needed to the national objectives – they seemed to give everyone a fair chance to win and to choose their own style. There was a little grumbling about how German got ganged up on, but what do you expect when Egypt, Burma, Pearl Harbor, and the San Diego navy all fall turn 1 without a single Axis casualty, and the Luftwaffe bites the dust on turn 1 without a single Allied transport getting wet? I blame the dice, rather than the NOs, for that particular strategic decision.

Here’s our income chart, if anyone’s enough of a nerd to care about that much detail. Allies had 127 - 115 IPC advantage at end of round 3, and 121 - 108 IPC advantage at end of round 5. In the pictures above, blue chips are 3, and red chips are 5.

I am excited to announce the 1941 Anniversary Balanced Mod is now available as a TripleA map!

I’m still working on the automatic download, but for now, if you’re tech-savvy, you can put the objectives.properties file in world_war_ii_v3-master/map, and put the WW2v3-1941balmod file in world_war_ii_v3-master/map/games, and it should work for you. You will need to manually change the file type of the ‘objectives’ file from “objectives.txt” to “objectives.properties” because TripleA cannot handle the “.properties” file type. It is OK to replace the old objectives.properties file; I have preserved all of its old info for you. You will probably need to unzip the relevant folder (which is in C:/users/[your name]/TripleA/downloadedMaps/) in order to add the files.

WW2v3-1941balmod.xml
objectives.txt

OK, we are live in TripleA! You can download Anniversary Balanced Mod normally, just like any other TripleA map. It’ll be near the bottom of the list of “Good” quality maps. I wrote an Objectives tracker for the mod that will help you keep track of which objectives you’re meeting. If anyone wants to play a game of it with me online, just let me know! :)

Yeah, the Astrakhan-Archangel Line NO is a bit weird in that it’s very difficult to achieve without taking Moscow itself, and if you already have Moscow, do you really care about another 5 IPCs? This isn’t Global, where the Allies can easily fight on after losing Moscow. I could imagine a “Eurasian Wheat” objective that gave you 5 IPCs for 2+ of Karelia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, and then an A-A Line objective that gave you 5 IPCs for 2+ of Archangel, Caucasus, and Kazakh. Another option is to interpret the AA line a bit more literally, and say that you need to hold all 4 of Archangel, Belorussia, Eastern Ukraine, and Caucasus.

It’s tricky to get 3 objectives that are ( a ) based on a similar format, so they’re easy to memorize, ( b ) more or less historically plausible, ( c ) not overlapping too much with each other, and ( d ) giving the player interesting strategic objectives that are different from what any player would do anyway without the NOs. In other words, I see little point in telling Germany that they want to hold France. Of course they want France; it’s right next to 2 Axis capitals and worth a ton of IPCs. You don’t need to further incentivize that with an NO. So, do I really want to tell players to try to hold all the territories next to Moscow? Of course they want to do that; that’s how you bottle the Russians up and cut them off from Lend-Lease.

If it helps you any, imagine the Eastern Ukrainian wheat goes to feed the factory workers in Kharkov and Rostov, so there’s not as much of a surplus in that territory.

I’m interested in alternatives to the “Soft Underbelly” NO for Britain; that’s probably the NO that I’m least happy with. The British were historically very interested in attacking southern Europe via the Med, but there are just not many territories on this map that fit the bill! You could expand the NO to include Romania, I guess, but I feel like the British are more likely to reach Romania via Persia, by land, then they are to actually launch an amphibious assault there.

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.