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.
