@taamvan said in Game 203 Report: What happens when you do everything right?:
@squirecam I wont convince you, but I disagree. The game works great and AAA has glaring flaws I can’t overcome. Mostly I just want to play with my buddies, y’all.
Im still unclear on the flaws of AAA vs this abomination…
@taamvan said in Game 203 Report: What happens when you do everything right?:
… and AAA has glaring flaws I can’t overcome.
Would you please share those flaws you have identified? Maybe - in order not to hijack this topic here - open a topic in the TripleA Support category, please?
Hmm…“glaring flaws”. I guess it’s good I’m not blind from playing so much triplea. I see no reason to attack/bash triplea to promote an inferior pay program. I hope AnA online succeeds. The more players the better.
Coming out with a flawed game is probably not going to encourage first time users to come back though.
I don’t know about the devs, but I was playing the gencon set up with Julius last night and had a good time via discord. I’m like a complete insomniac and he was in a timezone way off so guess it aligned. I went for a pacific stall plan that panned out after making making a pretty clean sweep with Russia. Went with the blast on Borneo x2 inf/New Guinea x2 inf 1 cruiser bombard, sz61 1 fighter one cruiser (landed in Bury for the pacific press), Australian Submarine immediate dive in sz 37 for the extra attack forward attack pip and carrier forward to block at Philippines. Starting bomber to Kazakh. UK opened damn near flawlessly, placed a new bomber in India and pair of tanks in India, for UK2 crush on IJN from the air, and rush up of British mobile ground support to eastern front.
Some good early headaches thrown at Axis in the Pacific, but even when you nuke the hell out Japan’s starting fleet, Pearl is still on the table and they got a lot of options on defense. Still seemed to come down to getting ahead in the Atlantic, and basically down to trade German air vs Allied main transport group, after UK finally dropped a deck in round 3. Peeled off too many German air in that exchange for Axis to recover position on the center so called it inside of 7 rounds.
The whole defense profile and AAZ rules for carriers definitely changes some key things. But still feels like A&A even if different than the 1942.2 I was playing a few years back. I guess it works, but it would really be nice if more live play features were introduced and just keeping the asynchronous style as a default option, but with the option to enter live play and normal defender chooses casualties. I think that would probably make most people happy. Clean up the movement UI, and finish up with some basic unit editor (so you can fix player mistakes to save an otherwise hosed game, or bid via added units.) They do that and it probably ends up a pretty good platform for casual pick up games. But yeah, roll out was a little rough. I kind of expected it to be in a more complete state, but the last patch and hotfix added some nice stuff. Hopefully they keep going with it.
I probably use A&Aonline just to keep up, and maybe more new players find a way in that way. I’m too deep into Iron War and probably when 1914 Pops off that will eat up all my time in triplea heheh. It’s hard to go back to v5, but I can’t imagine any other way to play the global game than triplea and don’t see that as something very likely to crack off online elsewhere. I think they’d have an easier time adding the Anniversary game online than G40.
I don’t see why we necessarily have to pit AAO and TripleA against each other like you can’t just play both (or just ignore the one you don’t like). AAO is a casual, easy-to-access platform that’s in its infancy whereas TripleA has been built from the ground up over several years and caters to a more hardcore audience.
Obviously pretty much everyone here is going to favor TripleA, seeing as this is literally the community for Competitive A&A.
I think this thread’s gotten pretty off topic though, and it’s partially my fault for bringing up AAO in the first place. Sorry.
A 7-round KJF isn’t representative of how altered carrier rules affect the game.
As to making most people happy - that’s as may be, but when you have stuff like altered transports and carriers, floating fighters, casualties assigned after each sub-group of like-valued dice rolls instead of after all casualty rolls in a sub-phase, defensive profiles changing gameplay because of unresolveable issues - well.
Then there’s things like movement lines covering things up or unit icons covering each other and unit counts up or bugs or visual presentation or such things.
Then too there’s alternatives that offer options to view full game histories at each sub-phase of combat as well as positions before combat, noncombat moves, &c &c.
It’s not that TripleA is completely ideal either mind. Like casualty selection emails can get pretty weird, let’s face it. If you really want to do things “fairly”, you have to send the game state after combat moves completed and ask for casualty assignation after the first round of attacker hits connect. Then you need more back and forth emails for subsequent rounds of combat. So it’s not that TripleA had some ideal solution to asynchronous play either.
But then, you look at 1942 Online and though there’s a lot of nice things to be said for how it looks and thoughtful little things like Map Notes (too limited for my taste but it’s *something) and defensive profiles (better than full auto-assignation) - it is what it is. If it’s not implementing rules properly, it’s not.
If they had made Axis and Allies Zombies, then that would be one thing. If they had made Summer 1942 or something, and made clear it’s not supposed to be based on any extant board game version, that would be another. But supposedly it’s based off Spring 1942 - just with these odd changes that affect gameplay.
I could maybe be a little more forgiving if there were proper mathematical tools for risk assessment, extensive tutorials including in-game AI assists past scripted tutorials, a really great AI, ability to review game state history along with an ability to play back appended notes (not the Map Notes, but more detailed and extensive notes for extended commentary, or even audio files to be played back while viewing the game) - I mean, if there were something that made 1942 Online distinct, stuff that you just can’t find elsewhere.
But as it is, well - it does look nice. And the price tag is low. But I don’t get things just because they look nice and have a low price tag.
Of course I did get 1942 Online. But then, it’s in Early Access. So it could change.
Well it’ll turn out how it turns out.
@aardvarkpepper Yeah I mean not saying it is representative, just that dude was actually playing hehe. Even with an oddball Japan stall opener there were at least 3 occassions where the AAZ carrier rules altered a move I would otherwise have made.
I think what feels a little strange to me is the primacy given to PBEM or asynchronous play over live play. Like I don’t know anyone who is spending time trying to do things asynchronously on the physical board. I guess in the 80s maybe you could set up 2 boards and make a phone call or whatever, but I don’t see anyone trying to pull this off before dice rollers and email. Its novel sure, but not exactly traditional by any stretch. The original game was clearly intended for live play, and a lot of the nuts and bolts assume at least 2 people in the room actually playing at the same time.
TripleA remains pretty ideal for me, but there isn’t much of a playerbase for 1942 over there. If ever there was those peeps have mostly moved on by now to other games. So the draw of A&Aonline is mainly that, the players. I guess steam is just a more popular or convenient way in, or at least many people seem more comfortable playing a steam game version despite its evident shortcomings right now. Even after GTO demonstrated how easily those can go the way of the dinosaur as soon as the publisher pulls the plug. Doesn’t matter how much time or energy or money you put into GTO, there’s no way to access it anymore. Online only means we’re dependent on continued dev support to keep it running. I guess even TripleA and A&Aorg have to run donation drives to keep the servers up, but least once you have the application installed you can always run it locally. I can still play Hasbro in single player even if the cd is kind of scratched hehe. But yeah, the draw I see is the players coming out of the woodwork, many who probably would never have found tripleA or these boards on their own, but who have found their way to A&Aonline. I still think they’d have more pull if the game was live play primarily, by the book, with asynchronous just as an alternative option.
Ive completed about 15 games. Some observations
“stratbombing is a wash without the +2 bonus” - what +2 bonus?
“can’t take Moscow . . . won’t necessarily win you the long game” - yeah, Axis have France, Italy, Berlin, Kiangsu, Phillipine Islands, Tokyo. Then say they grab Karelia, India, and Hawaiian Islands, that’s enough.
But then, I feel if Allies can’t grab Karelia in KGF or maintain control of Hawaiian Islands in KJF, then Allies are probably losing anyways.
in global, SBR has +2 bonus. In the other editions, not. So you do an average of 3.5 damage (5.5 in global) per bomber while taking a $2 risk per attack. Since there is an opportunity cost because the bomber can’t do this and something else, its generally not worth it.
Its more likely that they grab moscow than hawaii, because I typically have a strong us navy in the pac.
and yes, you can kind of stalemate the game by trading karelia back and forth with UK forces, even if you start building up on that side late in the game and have a fairly weak force. But once moscow falls, the money is almost exactly even (85 vs 90) and that’s a loss over time for the allies.
