"East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion

@imperious-leader
I unfortunately am one of the few Imp gamers who never once played a game of The Great War. I think I had a copy of the rules, at one point, but as far as I can tell, I’ve lost them to the sands of time.

Not sure if @jwlbigdog @tacojohn or anyone else might have a copy buried somewhere…?

@tacojohn said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:

I think I may eventually try to recreate the E&W Cold War-era scenario on one of the more recent A&A maps - either the Anniversary map or maybe Siredblood’s or one of its offshoots - and work up the starting set ups, territorial control changes, etc. since finding new copies of the old E&W map seems unlikely. And then I’ll just use existing pieces I already have, plus some new pieces from HBG.

As I’ve touched on previously in the thread, the E&W map looks like it’s a modification of the Xeno Games “World at War” map – some obvious Cold War changes are included, like east/west Germany, Yugoslavia/Greece, and North/South Korea.

Typically those changes are hard to come across in a map expressly meant to run a WWII game, but something like Bloodbath (IIRC? whatever the cool kids are playing these days…) might come close.

On a related topic, I always thought the TGW map would be handy for a WWII or even an E&W scenario. I liked the mechanic of infantry entrenching, that was something I had wanted to borrow and expand on, for a homebrew idea I had.

@jwlbigdog said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:

@the-janus I do still have a PDF copy of the 9.1 rules for TGW, even still have the CD for the map view file. Not sure where my copy of E&W is though…

I have the “2nd Edition rules” doc for E&W.

To make a short story long, I had misplaced my physical book, so I went to order a replacement – back when the Imp Games site was still up. They emailed me saying something like, “here, just take this instead, we don’t really want to have to ship anything.” But suffice it to say I explained that I wanted the physical book, so now I have both the physical and the electronic versions. P.S. to that story: I ended up finding where I had misplaced my original book – so now I actually have two physical copies of the rulebook.

@tacojohn said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:

Yeah, it might be that. But right now, the only TGW map is in MapView, right?

FWIW, I was able to dig this out of archive.org, from the Imp Games website; I probably have it saved somewhere, but it was just quicker to dig it out that way. (Obviously not high-res, but was freely available online, when the site was up.)

“The 2nd Great War”

My idea for using the TGW map for a WWII scenario basically involved breaking the war into phases, starting in 1939 (after the surrender of Poland); in hindsight, 1940 (after the fall of Denmark and Norway, with the USSR annexing the Baltic states) probably makes more sense.

Basically, most countries would be inactive, until certain triggers happen. (I never got deep into the rules/setup, so this is mostly just a thumbnail sketch.)

Phase 1: Germany invades Belgium and Netherlands; once conquered, Italy becomes an active Axis power
Phase 2: Germany invades France; UK becomes an active Allied power; once France is defeated (Axis capture 50% or more of French territories by IPC value, OR capture Paris) Vichy France is established
Phase 3: the minor Axis countries (“Danubian states & Finland”) becomes an Axis power, allowing Axis units to move through their territory; they become an active Axis power after Germany conquers Yugoslavia
Phase 4: After conquering Greece, the Axis can invade the USSR; after the USSR is attacked, the US joins the war (as an active Allied power/contributing full income/etc.)
Phase 5: Once Vichy France is defeated (Allies capture 50% or more of Vichy territories by IPC value) Vichy France is absorbed by Germany
Phase 6: Once Italy is defeated (Allies capture 50% or more of starting Italian territories by IPC value) Italy is absorbed by Germany

Major Neutrals: (all use 8 IPCs for purposes of influence scale?)

• Spain: favours Germany or France(?)
• Yugoslavia: favours Italy or USSR(?)
• Turkey: favours Danubian States or UK(?)

Territorial Changes (to reflect 1940)

• Germany: add Austria, Bohemia, Carinthia, Tirol, Poland, Galicia, Denmark, Norway; remove German Africa Convoy
• UK: add Mesopotamia, Palestine, German Africa Convoy; remove Ireland, British Africa Convoy
• Italy: add Albania, Carniola, British Africa Convoy
• France: add Syria
• USSR: add Armenia; remove Finland, Poland

New nations:

• Danubian States & Finland: Finland, West Hungary, East Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria
• Yugoslavia: Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro
• Turkey: Thrace, Anatolia, Ankara, Kurdistan

On the topic of homebrews, would anyone be interested in my rules for playing an E&W scenario, using the RISK: Reinvention boardgame?
It’s definitely a lot more of an abstraction, but the idea was to keep some of the same feel as the original.

Let me know if you’d like me to share it here; if so, I’ll go look at my notes and clean them up a bit, then do some posts about the scenario.

Minor gameplay adjustments:

Having had the opportunity to start playing E&W regularly again, I would like to share a few observations:

1. I think the Soviets are capable of winning under the standard rules/setup, but they must play a very strict, 100% IPM strategy. Also, using the straits rule and not allowing aerial retreat from amphibious assaults greatly benefits the USSR.
2. The “Operation: Underbelly” India strategy for the Soviets is (at best) a pyrrhic victory; you’re required to dedicate so many resources to the battle, that you cannot possibly win the war.
3. The Soviets are strongly incentivized to start attacking China, if China is not providing income to the USSR – even in a case where the Soviets are still doing well in the game.

To address some of these things, I have a few suggestions for minor gameplay changes which (if not necessarily capable of fixing any perceived imbalance) could at least open up more gameplay options, and thus allow the game to be fun for longer:

• Change the Soviet’s free counter-intelligence roll to be a free spying roll of any kind.
• Start the Arab League at +0 Soviet, instead of neutral; change the Suez rule such that the canal is only closed to your alliance if the Arab League is contributing income to the other alliance.

In concert, these changes address a few issues.
Since the Soviets cannot really afford to invest in spying (while NATO has an easier time of doing so – and I would argue they must invest in it, to some degree) changing the counter-intelligence roll allows the USSR to participate in the diplomacy game. It also makes it so that this roll is usable even if NATO chooses not to purchase spies. Changing the Suez rule also brings it more in line with the general rules for moving through neutral territories; it always seemed like kind of a weird outlier to me.

This also opens up two distinct options for the USSR: focus on influencing China to increase your income (and maintain the other benefits that come with it), or start influencing the Arab League in order to provide a route of attack into Africa.

Typically, if there is any action in this region of the world, it is the USSR invading the Arab League as basically a “game ender” towards the objective of an economic victory. It is difficult to do a complete, successful surprise attack on the Arab League, since the USSR likely has no navy after the first round or two. By making the Arab League easier to bring under Soviet influence, a different Africa strategy now becomes more viable. I think this is important for gameplay variety, knowing what we now know with regards to going after India or attacking China.

Tech/Spying revamp: Breakthroughs

Coming back to this, the 2nd half of my previous house rule thread outlines what I call the “breakthrough” system; this replaces both the spying and technology phases.

Each nation can make a number of free breakthrough rolls equal to:

the number of free tech rolls they get, under the baseline rules + the maximum number of spies they can have on the board at a time, under the baseline rules

This gives us the following numbers:

• USSR: 3
• WE: 1
• UK: 1
• US: 2

Each nation may also purchase a number of additional breakthrough rolls on their turn, up to the number of free breakthroughs roll they can make; the cost of an additional breakthrough roll is equal to the cost of an infantry, for that nation (2 for USSR, or 3 for any of the NATO powers.) Being that E&W is fundamentally still an IPM game, this is intended to make purchasing breakthroughs competitive with purchasing infantry.

Breakthrough results:
on a roll of 1, you may do one of the following:

• gain a diplomatic success at a neutral alliance (OAS, Arab League, or China)
• gain a full step in one technology tree

on a roll of 2, you may do one of the following:

• gain a diplomatic success at any minor/independent neutral
• gain a half-step in one technology tree

You may only apply one breakthrough to any tech tree, per turn.

Optional rules:

• The USSR may use a 2 to influence China
• (revised NATO tech sharing) If a NATO partner uses a 1 to gain a technological advancement, both other NATO partners may each gain a half-step in that same tech tree. This is still not allowed for the nuclear weapons tech tree.
• (revised USSR counter-intelligence) The USSR may make one free counter-intelligence roll on their turn; if the result is a 1 or 2, this roll can be used to foil a matching NATO breakthrough on the same round, only. The USSR may also purchase 1 additional counter-intelligence breakthrough on each of their turns.

These optional rules combined, would in theory make it easier for the USSR to keep China in the fold, since it also encourages NATO to use their 1s on technology rather than diplomacy.

Essentially, I’ve come to the conclusion lately that nuclear tech is supremely important for the USSR, and the only viable NATO counter is diplomacy. The problem is that the USSR gets free tech rolls AND free rolls to foil NATO’s spies (i.e. their attempts at diplomacy.) In my opinion, this is where the late-game imbalance lies, and short of just completely removing tech/spying from the game (or imposing nerfs on the USSR) the only other real fix is to move towards something where all sides can make any type of rolls they want (i.e. in the base game, US having a free tech roll when they really need a free diplomacy roll, IMO.) Allowing for more rolls overall, should also decrease the randomness by flattening the bell curve. It’s also just fun (in my experience) to get to see more techs in play by more countries, and more neutrals getting active – and allowing that to play into your strategies more reliably.

Analysis of the Early Game

So after getting resoundingly thumped by our forums’ very own @The_Good_Captain (in roughly half a dozen games) earlier this year, I find myself having another big think about E&W lately.

(One thing I should mention was that we hadn’t yet dug up the Imp Games E&W FAQ while we were playing; probably the most significant rule clarification in there was that aerial retreats are allowed. So that will have an impact if/when I ever get rolling with an opponent again.)

Anyways, what we learned is that is it is very plausible (with the round 0 bonus of 20 IPCs) to have the USSR capture basically all of the frontline territories on round 1:

• Norway (2)
• West Germany (4)
• Greece (2)
• Turkey (3)
• Pakistan (1)
• South Korea (2)

What you end up with is an income tracker like this:
USSR: 62 (+4 more, from China)
WE: 21
UK: 32
US: 41

Since this is a Classic-style IPM game, we can translate this pretty easily into units:

33 inf for the USSR, vs.

• 7 inf for WE
• 9 inf, 1 arm for UK
• 12 inf, 1 arm for US
  = 30 ground units for NATO

NATO starts out the game with a sizeable advantage in infantry; even taking into account 10 inf being added in round 0, they’re ahead of the Soviets, 92-70. However, this advantage is largely flattened out through combat on the first round, and by the fact that US and UK are typically going to be producing transports on round 1, rather than landing many units in Eurasia.

Where this starts to tip into imbalance is the fact that the USSR can begin attacking neutrals to increase their economy, right away on round 2. Conversely, it is difficult for NATO to be taking territory away from the USSR by round 2, because they are reliant on transports to do so – in both Siberia and Scandinavia.

I’ll qualify this by saying I haven’t attempted a full-blown Scandinavia focus as NATO in these most recent games (although this is what I’m looking into now.) But with that being said, I’m essentially counting on the aerial retreat rule to tip the balance enough in NATO’s favour, that other house-rules won’t be needed; I’m skeptical that this will be the case.

I think that having some reliability in the round 1 outcomes is important, but it’s becoming clear that maybe the USSR shouldn’t get to win all of the battles. My first instinct is to tinker a bit with the initial setup, but possibly a better starting point is to go back to playing the game without any purchases on round 0, and then slowly start adding a “bid” back in, to see where the numbers fall.

Turkey is probably the hardest nut to crack in the starting setup, and the Soviets using control of the straits to defend their backline has been a cornerstone of the game for the longest time. It’ll be interesting to see if the game still “works,” under a paradigm where the USSR isn’t expected to take Turkey right away. The larger problem is that if every battle on round 1 is a 50/50 proposition between clearing the territory and strafing it, NATO can potentially end up with a lot more air power (i.e. South Korea, Greece, and West Germany) – and that would also throw the balance completely out the window. It might just be time to shake up the status quo.

@tacojohn said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:

I think I may eventually try to recreate the E&W Cold War-era scenario on one of the more recent A&A maps - either the Anniversary map or maybe Siredblood’s or one of its offshoots - and work up the starting set ups, territorial control changes, etc.

I’m just looking at the Global 1940 map right now, and I have to ask if maybe doing E&W just using the Europe map would be worthwhile? It sort of begs the wider question of whether a Cold War scenario (particularly with a neutral China) really even lends itself to using a world map.

The Europe side at least already includes a Germany that’s split into east/west/south; the Pacific only has one Korea, and the Dutch islands would be going to waste in an E&W scenario. Really the only intriguing thing (to me) is that you could actually represent Taiwan – which seems like a weird/major oversight from the original E&W. (Particularly when you consider all of the 0-IPC island groups that were included; I have to remind myself that this is likely the result of E&W probably being based directly off of W@W.)

“Floating Bridge” strategy

So I just finished watching this US strategy video for Global 1940, by @GeneralHandGrenade : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHkjC0E42d0

It’s interesting, because I’ve recently been having similar ideas for the UK in E&W – and so the US could probably also do the same type of thing.

First, if you want the UK to be building transports in the Atlantic right out of the gate (and specifically I was thinking of building 2 in Ontario) then you end up with 6 in total. And what I’ve come to realize is that rather than moving your starting transports all across the world, you kind of want to keep them more or less where they are.

The economics are important to consider. If you’re the UK, you can count on a production of 32 IPCs; as I’ve mentioned before, this translates to 9 infantry and 1 armor. You can place 3 of these infantry in India, meaning 6 infantry and 1 armor that potentially need 4 transports to move them from the UK (although you could also place the infantry in Africa.) This leaves you with 2 unused transports out of your 6 (starting with 4, and buying 2 more.)

The reason you want to place 2 transports in Ontario is so that you can be moving all of your units off of Canada and Iceland ideally by rd2. With your ships repositioned to the North Sea or the Barents Sea, the UK can be landing units in Norway every round. If that is not advisable, they can instead land units in France from either the North Sea or the Irish SZ.

If you’re keeping 2 transports in the Mediterranean, this allows you to move units landed in France (from the UK, or Africa) into either Yugoslavia or Greece every round; you can supplement these attacks by putting your bombers into France also. Since WE is likely going to be placing most/all of their infantry in France, they can do a similar move by corralling their 3 transports into the Mediterranean. The US could certainly use this tactic as well, since they can shuck-shuck from Quebec into France quite easily.

If France is well-defended enough by WE’s allies, they can instead place their units in Italy, and go after Turkey; using the WE fighters on the UK carrier is helpful for this. You can also “tag out” WE and UK fighters; if the WE fighters start on the carrier in the Cyprus SZ, they can move 1 space to attack Turkey, and then 3 spaces on non-combat to land in Italy – allowing UK fighters in Italy to attack Turkey and land on the carrier. This is even easier to execute if you’re focusing on Yugoslavia and Greece rather than going for Turkey.

For the UK specifically, the transport you start off with at Italy could easily be moved to the Atlantic (picking up the infantry from Libya and Gibraltar along the way); combined with the transport off Quebec and 2 more purchased in Ontario, this gives you enough transports to fill every round. Alternatively, if you keep this transport in the Mediterranean, that means you would be limited to 3 transports moving units from the UK – but this opens up options on the other side of the map, as I’ll explain below. (Basically, you can place 2 infantry in Singapore, with the remaining 4 infantry and 1 armor placed in UK – enough to fill 3 transports.)

Typically the Australian transport moves 2 inf from NSW to India; it could then be moved towards the Mediterranean. (It’s worth noting that typically WE will transport 2 inf from Indochina to India on rd1 as well, meaning that the WE and UK transports will both be lined up off of India, at the end of rd1 – so they would be moving towards the Mediterranean at the same time.) If you wanted the India transport to be on the same schedule, you can have it pick up the 1 infantry from Singapore and land it in India.

Lately I’ve been considering moving it to Australia instead, so that on rd2 it can pick up the 1 inf from Queensland and the 1 inf from Singapore, to land in Burma. Then, you could place 2 infantry on Singapore every round, and;

• a) move them to India
• b) move them to Korea, then have the transport swing back and land the infantry in Burma on the subsequent turn

However, this assumes you want to be putting more production into the region than just the 3 infantry in India. Even if you don’t keep this transport around Singapore, going down to Australia means it won’t reach the Mediterranean until round 4 at the earliest. This whole play also means that you’re not sending any transports down to pick up units from South Africa (at least not any faster than they can walk their way up to Libya) and you aren’t sending those units to India if/when you do pick them up – they would instead be going to Europe.

More generally, the reason for moving away from an India-centric strategy to more of a Europe focus as the UK is because IMO the new meta is one of the Soviets overrunning all of Scandinavia; a UK with lots of transports in the Atlantic is probably the best counter/deterrence to this. (I should probably mention that this makes it very important early on to decide whether the UK will keep their bombers in Europe, or move them to India – possibly even to Western Canada en route to Japan, to assist in Korea or Siberia.)

This focus also gives more flexibility (doubly so compared with an India IC) since units transported from the UK could land in Komi, Karelia, Norway, West Germany, France, or even Portugal. By contrast, I’ve found that placing in India only serves to create a stalemate, and to “mobility-kill” any units committed there. And the pipeline from South Africa into Pakistan or Iran is a lot less of a sure thing than you would expect.

With a weaker UK presence in India, I think it’s valuable to have the US be able to send more units there – so that’s a topic/tactic I will likely touch on in an upcoming post.