Axis and Allies Africa - homebrewed.

@Imperious:

Autocad:

Please post the pic like you did at Larry site except in full size.

This is really great work.

You lost me.

Rob.

No, I’m not him. In fact, I’d say his map humbles mine somewhat.  :oops:  But thank you for the kind words.  :-)

The board should be done sometime this coming week.

Rob.

Okay, the board is done. And I’ve updated the notes in reply #3 above.

Here are some pics:

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More:

(My digicam isn’t the greatest…sorry about the quality of some pics. :oops:)

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Some with units on the board:

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More:

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@Imperious:

OK this is inspiring!

Really nice job. Id make some nice cards for to go with this game if i was you.

Thank you for the kind words. :-)

By “cards”, if you mean the Unit Allocation Cards that determine your initial setup, then Yes, they are the next thing on the agenda. I haven’t made them yet because my buddy and co/creator Shane C and I haven’t finalized the initial unit setup. The layout of units in the pics above is a preliminary kind of thing which I did while watching football last night. I think it might be a good basis to start playtesting with, but I want to get my buddy’s feedback on that before I commit anything to paper. Meanwhile, the layout you see in the pics reflects my interpretation of the Theater at the beginning of hostilities, i.e., on the eve of the first Italian cros-border attack. The Italian units are more or less massed on the border, about to invade, and the British placement reflects a disposition better suited to counterattack than to initial defense. Meanwhile, the German forces are a couple of moves away, which I intended to portray their relative late arrival on the scene. Historically speaking, the Italians and the British fought across the border for a while before the Germans found it necessary (dubiously so, IMHO) to send the Italians some help. Hopefully, this will work out just so in actual play.

Where the territories made ( decided upon) by the basis of some map or was it mostly just making them of a certain size?

They were drawn right out of my head, and I tried to keep them of a size that would permit easy chip stacking. The coastline, borders, and geographic features are all drawn to scale and are more or less correctly placed. To make the map I usd some acetate overlay on a map I have to trace it all out, and then I used an overhead projector to blow it all up to game board size, using a 48" x 24" sheet of .090" polycarbonate as my board. I drew the spaces in later over the course of two evenings, starting with the area around the middle of the board, i.e., the area between Benghazi and El Alamein, as I figured it would be the easiest area to fill in. Turns out it wasn’t as easy as I thought….anyone who makes a gameboard map certainly has my respect and admiration because I found the experience to alternate between difficult to tedious and back again.  :-D (Okay, wasn’t really that  bad)

I did think about going hex-based, as many folks seem to like that system better, but I decided not to because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to map out the spaces like I wanted them. If you look closely, the spaces I’ve drawn do have a certain bit of flow to them, especially around the road areas. I thought that was necessary, and hexes wouldn’t have comformed the way I wanted them to without being too small to use. As it is now, some of the spaces might be a bit on the small side, won’t know for sure until we test it out tonight.

also where is the order of battle for what forces are used?

1. Italy
2. England
3. Germany

also please list reinforcements.

See reply #3 above, back on page 1…  :-)

I want to playtest this.

It would be an honor to have someone else playing my variant. I still have to figure out how to make the board available to others. Any suggestions? I have an idea or two, still have to look into them.

Congradulations are in order as you have made something very creative.

Thank you very much again.  :-)

Rob.

Thanks, GG.  :-)

Well, it’s midnight here in PA, and we just finished the first four rounds of playtesting the game. Lots to tell, and a bunch of needed revisions have been identified. I’m whupped, long day, but I’ll post it all tomorrow night.

Rob.

Working on my first playtest notes as you read this. Will have them up shortly.  :-)

Rob.

Okay, sorry for the delay guys.

We played about four rounds, and we discovered a few problems which we have hopefully found working
solutions for. But first:

First impressions:

1. The Italian units, while cheap, are somewhat of a hindrance. Their tanks in particular
certainly look impressive in a big ol’ stack, but one certainly needs to keep in mind that they attack
on a two, not a three. Both myself and my buddy paid a small price for forgetting this. Their infantry
works well enough on attack so long as you send artillery with them, since they get that +1 artillery
modifier. However, as they defend at a 1, their defensive value lies more in soaking up hits to
protect more valuable units as opposed to dishing out hits of their own, which in our game were few in
number. The good thing is that they are cheap, so if one plays the game as I had intended, one will
quickly learn to spend a decent sum on Italian infantry to take the brunt of punishment from the
inevitable counter-attacks. I’m pleased to say that all of this does work well although it does take
some getting used to. And the loss rate can be horrific depending how you play. My buddy and I pretty
much tried to explore all the nuances of the game, and more often than not we threw all the forces we
could get at each other and the losses were pretty staggering in Italian manpower.

2. The Anti-tank element is awesome. It really can act as a deterrent to large tank formations
being used as battering rams because a sizable number of Italian guns can shred a tank formation and
is cheaper to build a force out of than German artillery. Both my buddy and I really had to switch
gears out of our normal strategies and try to find ways to manouver our tanks around large AT gun
formations. This produced alot of casualties at first, and then we really started working on our
outflanking skills. This, I believe, is the key to defeating a massed-gun strategy. Going at your
opponent with a large tank formation is a recipe for trouble if he’s got a sizable AT stack awaiting
you.

3. The Axis needs to be combined into one homogenous force, not two autonomous entities. The Axis
player will be using them together both on attack and defense, and both the Italians and the Germans
draw from the same pool of IPCs, so it makes sense to reduce the order of turns from the original
three to two.

4. In hindsight, I have erred a bit on the turn order. Historically, the British struck first in
Africa, raiding across the border to capture two Italian forts on the Libyan side and striking at
other pbjectives which caught the Italians somewhat unprepared. As such, I’ve amended the turn order
so that the Allies move first, then the Axis.

5. To keep to a more historically accurate timeline which represents the relatively late arrival of
the Germans, I’ve also decided to “freeze” them in ALL phases during the first turn only. This is
intended to keep them from arring on the scene of battle too soon into the game. The reason for this
is that we laid the pcs out in our initial setup and while we had the German units held back a few
spaces from the front lines, we didn’t want to mess with the first setup until we knew if it worked or
not. I wasn’t sure how much strength to give any of the three forces, and while I did have a good idea
where to place the units I wasn’t sure how it would work……one side might have had too big an
advantage in initial placement, so rather than adjust them we decided to play it out and see if we
liked it. As such, we needed to “freeze” the Germans the first turn to keep things balanced and
accurate. This may be thrown out at a a later time once we see how this first game goes. There may be
no need to freeze them if we feel that simply moving the German units a couple more spaces back will
take care of timing issues.

6. There are some small issues with the board itself, mainly in that a couple of the spaces need to be
altered to make the game flow better. This has to do with the Coastal road and two of the impassable
zones. This latter issue stems from the fact that I originally stated that the impenetrable spaces
could be flown over, but we discovered that they were too big for one space (they’d allow airplanes to
move WAY too far if one chose to move into and then out of those spaces. The easy solution was to
divide those two spaces up so that they couldn’t be abused in this manner.

7. The El Alamein area was historically a bottleneck which the Axis simply HAD to defeat in order to
move on to Cairo, and we know they did not succeed in this. IN designing my board, I had this right in
the front of my mind, and knowing that due to the Qattara Depression the Axis had not way of
outflanking the 8th Army, I drew the board accordingly with only one route to Cairo. After having
played a bit, though, we decided it might be necessary to make a path around the southern side of the
QD in order to make the game more playable. The obvious solution is to create a path around it, but
make it longer than the direct route through El Alamein so as to simulate a longer, more difficult
trex across the deeps pf the deseert wastes. This is admittedly NOT historically accurate, but might
improve the gameplay. This one is still just an idea, and I might shelve it. Not sure yet.

Now for some problems and kinks we had to find and then solve:

8.) For one thing, let’s look at Antitank guns. According to the rules as I drew them up, once
they got their shots in on any attacking tanks, they were then withdrawn from that combat. This was
intended to force the defender to choose between taking out tanks and worrying about the rest of the
attacker’s force. The defender would have to decide if, after removing his AT from combat, he still
had enough defensive power to successfuly hold the enemy off. It’s important for the defender to
balance how much AT firepower he needed to take tanks out with the amount of firepower he needed to
fight off the attackers other units. This is very important, as in one case one of us virtually
depleted our defensve strength in order to smash the attacker’s tank force and we lost that space as a
result of this. One must consider whether it is more important to take out his tanks or hold the
space. Who knows, you might want all of his tanks killed, so you might be willing to trade a space of
empty desert for the elimination of his armor.

But here’s the problem we discovered:

After you declare your AT guns and they get their shots
in, they are supposed to play no further part in that combat. Well……then what? What if you lose the
space? What happened to those guns?

We decided to give the defender a choice:

A. Retreat the guns 1 space, thereby saving them for the next turn. This simulates a defensive
“shoot-n-scoot” strategy. This may save your guns to fight another day, but it may hurt your next-turn
counter-attack plans.

B. NO retreat for the guns, and if you lose that space they are captured and can then be used by
the enemy. This works from a historical POV, because there certainly was some amount of re-use of
enemy equipment by both sides. the key here is to correctly ascertain whether or not you think you can
hold the attacker off and retain control of that space. If you got some nasty rolls on defense and
just decimated the attacker, you may not want to retreat your guns out of that space. It’s all up to
the particulars of that situation. Counterattack strategy plays heavily into this.

9.) Those extra move spaces really add a powerful new element to Axis and Allies. Now you have
to consider not only if you can win this battle, but also if you can survive the enemy’s
counterattack. Now it can come from further away, which means you must think ahead several moves at
times as in chess.

Again, there is a problem with the original rules:

If one moves his unit the extra space, it suffers a penalty unless it moves the extra space on a road. BUT……there are two
possibilities here that I am embarrased to say that I didn’t originally consider:.

A. The unit moves it’s extra space from a desert space to a road, or…
B. …it moves from the road to a desert space.

We thought that there must be some kind of provision for this, and the answer was simple enough. If a
unit moves it’s extra space and finishes movement on a road space, it should not be penalized because
the road is the supply lifeline and units that move extra spaces on roads aren’t penalized normally as
per the original rules (unless there is an enemy unit on the road in it’s rear, as originally stated).

Conversly, if the unit moves from the road to the desert and finishes in a desert space, then it
shall be considered penalized because moving away from the road moves it away from supply. Once again,
this produces some interesting results. Flanking again becomes very useful here, as does some
well-thought-out movement strategy.

More coming…

Rob.

So, in summary (so far)…

The Italians are indeed weak, but if used correctly can be very useful; just don’t rely too heavily on them for offensive punch unless you’ve got alot of them.

The Anti-tank element is a great addition which really makes you think a little bit harder about what you want to do and when to do it.

The roads are indeed valuable real-estate, as their no-penalty status can really make the difference in launching crushing counterattacks.

The extra-space movement also works great, but it must be used wisely or you’ll leave yourself hanging. Isolated units are ripe targets for slaughter which can thwart your plans in a brutal fashion.

Long-range strategy is REALLY important, as you will want to plan your moves a couple turns in advance (at least).

Proper planning re: moving and positioning  your reinforcements is crucial. Do it right, and you will have a powerful wave of attacks which can really smash your enemy, and your losses on defense won’t be so debilitating because your counterattacks will really clean up.

The Minefields worked exactly as anticipated. Quite useful in deterrence.

I do believe that it might be necessary to adjust the IPC levels of both sides up somewhat, like maybe  2 or 3 apiece, but no more than that, I think. Our first game turned into a real meat grinder along the Libyan/Egyptian border as we both sought to first smash the other’s defenses, and then to outthink/outflank them. The extra space move really helps with this, but again, you’ve gotta be wise about it. I discovered that it was all too easy for my buddy to drive a wedge right through my forces as I tried to sneak a tank detachment around his southern flank. Lucky for me that I was able to get out of that trap, but had my units be under a penalty, I would’ve been carved up in detail.

As for initial unit dispositions, the one we started with may work  just fine, but that remains to be determined. We probably won’t know for sure until this first game has been decided. One thing that is certain, however, is that airpower didn’t play as much of a deciding role as I thought it would, so I might add more airpower to the initial deployment, as I was a bit conservative this first time. (two fighters, one bomber apiece.)

Anyway, so far, so good. There were some bugs to address, but I think we got those taken care of. This really looks like it works well, and I think we had fun trying it out. It was relatively fast paced….well, it didn’t drag on, anyway. As for the comments above on the BOTB pcs, We’ll have to look at those when they become available, but for right now I think the original concept works well. I think the supply trucks might be useful, but they might upset the balance so we’ll have to see how they could fit in.

Thanks so much for the interest and the insights, guys. It’s really appreciated and gives me much food for thought. I’ll keep updating s we go along.

Rob.

@Rhineland:

I would also like to say that I’m a fan of the Africa A&A idea and the concept that you have created.

Thank you sir.  :-)

I hope you are not annoyed with my suggestions.

Rhineland

No, not at all.  The continued input and support you guys provide is very rewarding.

Rob.