Updated. Simplified the rules more.
Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?
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@the-janus I fail to see that as an inherently bad thing
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@hengst I mean if you’re building a game where your baseline assumption is that Germany would/should be overpowered, then sure :face_with_rolling_eyes:
Edit: To clarify my point, I think one of the things that works to keep Germany competitive is that the Allies don’t get to attack them together. Even then, their job tends to be “don’t die, until Japan sweeps the board.” If you take that disadvantage and give it to Germany by splitting their economy and units into smaller chunks, it’s not actually a benefit to them. And I think if the only justification for doing it is to have a 3v3, I feel like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
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@the-janus ???
Italy+Germany will always be weaker than only Germany, all other things equal.
If you have a balanced Germany-only game, you’ll need more materiel/economy to keep balance if you change it to Italy+Germany. However, it can add more interesting decisions for the Axis player, which (see my previous post) don’t have to only be pre-Barbarossa.
If you have a balanced Italy+Germany game, you’ll need to reduce materiel/economy if you change it to Germany-only.
What did I say that lead you to think I meant that Germany needs to be overpowered?
I think we are understanding things equally, just communicating poorly.
EDIT: re: your edit: I’m with you. I personally love having Italy as a nation because it means the Axis can & must care about the Mediterranean, without taking resources away from Russia or providing an excess of resources which could be thrown at Russia. For those early years of the war, having the UK be terrified about the Med is essential–and that won’t often play out if the unified Axis player can throw everything at Russia.
If you’re starting later in the war I agree that Italy’s probably not worth it in terms of hassle/handicap just for the 3v3.
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@hengst I guess my point is that you don’t make the Axis more interesting by splitting Germany into a moderate power and a minor power; I think you can do that more effectively by making Germany a proper superpower.
And like I said, any timeframe later than 1940 makes it harder and harder to justify Italy being a separate power, unless your idea is that their main contribution is to be an “also-ran” on the eastern front, as part of a bloc with the other minor powers. It just doesn’t vibe, IMO.
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I like having Italy be a Minor Major Power, because I think it helps one understand how pissed off adolf musta been with them lol
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I tend to agree with most of the points Janus is making about streamlining the game. I think the prob comes from low-balling the money and trying to keep those numbers so low, instead of just amping the production a bit. Like do that on the map, where the information is easy to see and to parse, rather than with objective bonuses that are more complicated and harder to track.
So using Italy as an example, in order to add them into AA50 and Global, we saw stuff taken away from Germany without a real offset there. So G loses their Med fleet and all the income from Africa as well as from Italy itself, but doesn’t really gain anything. G’s starting cash is just lowered and their starting forces weakened. Like their Baltic fleet is still getting nuked immediately and they have fewer TTs under their control, and so for sure overall it feels like a nerf to team Axis. Just to get a weak can opening turn for a nation that only has like 10 ipcs at the base, doesn’t really feel worth it in the trade off.
Same deal trying to carve out Anzac or India from the Brits, or China from USA, while still keeping the overall money the same/super low there.
What they should do instead is change the acronym IPC from meaning Industrial Production to “Income & Progress” so it’s more abstract and flexible. Then raise the values of some contested TTs. It probably doesn’t even need to get juiced all that hard to still work. Add like 5-10 pics on the map to each player nation and you’re probably good to go, without really needing national objective money or anything that complex. Raise the value of some contested tiles by 1 or 2 ipcs to help balance it out and you’re good to go right?
I only mentioned adding a few other Nations/TTs to ‘Italy’ because of the way things tend to work mechanically for them. So if Italy is going to be all up on the Eastern Front anyway, just camping in Karelia or Belarus or whatever, maybe it makes more sense to see those units as Finns or Romanians and such, rather than as ‘Italians.’ Just for the suspension of disbelief hehe.
I think the scale of the map and the economy in Global is pretty decent, it’s just weighed down by other stuff. Like it’s not the extra cash or the extra TTs and SZs that make the game take forever. I can imagine a game on the scale of Global but which plays must faster heheh
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Ps. A couple more thoughts about what I’d like to see from new A&A releases more generally…
For starters, I imagine that any new boards or reissued materials will probably be more expensive, like from inflation or being made in the USA rather than China or whatever, so it’d be cool if we got something more in the trade up there.
A magneto board maybe, like Cyanite’s? That’s something I’d pay more for. How about moving away from folding cardboard gamemaps and give us something with more durability?
If the mapboard was divided into 3 or 4 rigid panels it would be easier to move the game or keep it set for another session. Especially if those panels could be stacked or put back in the box with the pieces still in magneto position. Doing that, the game would require a lot less space to ‘leave out’ at the ready. Design the map panels to stack vertically, on top of each other with raisers at the corners, so the board can remain set but only taking like up like a third of the space - instant win!
Sinking a magnet into a plastic sculpt works well enough, but another potential draw, or a thing that I’d feel pretty good about paying a lot more for, might be metallic sculpts. Or perhaps pre-painted sculpts or microsculpts? Might not be feasible, but still, if we’re going for moonshots right haha.
I’d like to see the paper money, and some nice themed dice too. Perhaps a deck of many things for the playing cards vibe. I love HBG and all the extra materials available there honestly, it’d be cool if they could partner up somehow to make things like that, but more official and more widely available.
A nice legacy manual that doubles as a coffee table art book. Some bells and some whistles basically, so they can upsell it. It’s hard to drop another two or three bills on something I bought a dozen years ago for like half what it will probably cost now. That’s kinda rough no matter how they slice it. But then, if they make it look cool enough and legacy enough, I’m sure I’d show out. I’m the sort who tends to pick up doubles of these games whenever they drop, but that’s more redundancy than I really need. I’d think it would be an easier sell if it was more ‘starter set’ and then ‘expansion’ sets sold separately, or more that sort of situation.
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@black_elk I love the high end, deluxe copy discussion. For magnetic, stackable I could see paying 400. For metal sculps I could see 500 even. Am I wrong?
On the other hand, I grew up poor. So I like piecemeal purchases. Which is why Magic the Gathering is such a money maker.
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I’m not a big fan of the minor powers and would go for black elk’s 3 v 3 concept.
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@black_elk said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
Design the map panels to stack vertically, on top of each other with raisers at the corners
Love it ! The Factories can be the raisers. Let their stacks do the job lol
Yea dress up the rulebook. Throw a little mini History background the way Captain and Company do Global 40 Expansion. Would be way sweet :)
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@black_elk I think the way to do Italy justice is to just have a full-blown “Axis & Allies: North Africa” in the vein of the D-Day game.
You could have German reinforcements come in waves sorta like D-Day, but more or less run the rest of the mechanics like A&A but with a cap on the number of rounds.
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So the first time I ever saw the Axis & Allies boardgame was in elementary school, on a rainy day in the 5th grade.
I believe the rationale was that the game was cool for kids who liked history or math, but I was fairly terrible at math, so the way we used the materials was essentially like very tiny plastic army men with the map as a battlefield.
Like I’m sure it was missing plenty of pieces, and I’m certain I didn’t know the rules. My reading comprehension at that time would not have allowed me to make sense of the rulebook anyway, but it was still eye catching and a good first introduction. The problem of course, was that the game took up a lot of space, so you really couldn’t just leave it out, and recess was what like tops an hour for lunch? Probably less. So even if it came out on a rainy day, it always had to go back in the box hehe.
I tried something like this again, not too long ago, with my ex-gf’s kid. Basically I got him into the A&A 1942 game at age 8.
That’s 4 years younger than the recommended “12 and up” age range, but it completely worked. Again taking the plastic army men approach to the initial gameplay. Axis and Allies plastic army men were actually cheaper pound for pound, than the standard 1:32 plastic army men toys, or rather you could get a lot more stuff with a single purchase at a similar dollar amount. I think I picked up 1942 for like 24.99 on sale at Target, which gave him about 100 more sculpts and a world battleboard, compared to a similarly priced large bucket of 1:32 dudes with the standard issue plastic playmat.
It was a nicer presentation too, with a cool looking box to keep stuff tidy, dice and roundels and other things you wouldn’t get with the bucket. Plus the appeal of “a game” and one that ostensibly teaches a bit of history and math while you’re at it. So I’ve always viewed A&A with that mindset. That it’s basically miniature plastic army men, but with simple rules to decide who wins/loses a battle using dice. Kids can get into that.
I think they could do the same stackable gamemap with raisers idea mentioned on the previous page, without needing to go full magneto board for that. Cardboard works fine actually, too keep it affordable, provided there are no folds.
The key is to divide the map into smaller rigid cardboard panels that can be moved separately one at a time.
Whatever the max size the box allows, make the rigid panels that large. The 1942 gamemap is 26x40" so for that game call it 4 rigid panels at like 13x20" in a box about that large, that can lay out side by side while playing, but also stack into a more compact space with the units still in place when “put away.”
Maybe a game like G40 has 8 rigid panels instead of 4 for the larger gameboard. You get the idea. As long as the mapboard doesn’t have folds it works. Folds are where the wear and tear tends to happen. Kid folds it the wrong direction, the board bends or rips, the game can’t be moved without a large support/backing and masterful balance. Do it in 4 separate smaller panels instead and those probs go away, plus it probably just looks cool. Like “oh yeah, should have been doing that all along!” heheh
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@black_elk said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
I tend to agree with most of the points Janus is making about streamlining the game. I think the prob comes from low-balling the money and trying to keep those numbers so low, instead of just amping the production a bit.
After reading the thread saying “infantry should cost 3.2!” this idea popped into my head: increase the IPC values and unit costs by 10x except for infantry – which would then cost 32.
In that same vein, I think if you want to have a game with more and more unit types, they should look at doing a move to d10 (as was done with Napoleon’s Imperium.) Having infantry at A1|D3 on a d10 might help negate the IPM.
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@the-janus said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
they should look at doing a move to d10
Yea a D 10 or a D12 would really open it up. Would help with Bmbrs being overpowered on their SBR Air Battle as well.
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@black_elk said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
ut also stack into a more compact space with the units still in place when “put away.”
yea could have 3D A&A then. Subs on the bottom. Ships n Dudes on the 2nd and Air on the 3rd lol
I guess you could have cash and charts on the bottom then move on up with 4 ha ha ha
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@barnee said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
@the-janus said in Advice to Renegade! What is on your top 10 for adjustments to G40 3rd edition?:
they should look at doing a move to d10
Yea a D 10 or a D12 would really open it up. Would help with Bmbrs being overpowered on their SBR Air Battle as well.
Hey now your talking my area !
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Bump the price up 10 bucks. Put a set of battle dice in (3 ones, 6 twos, 6 threes, and 3 fours should be enough). Drop the “time to play” by 2-3 hours. Boom.
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Do away with defenseless transports! Bring back sub rules from classic.
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Add new units:
-Battlecruisers
-minor aircraft carriers
-Self-Propelled Artillery (Hummel, Sexton, Katyusha, M7 Priest)
-Heavy Tanks
-Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns
-A&A Europe 1940 French original force units, Richelieu class, Dunkerque battlecruiser, Fantastique destroyer, Suffren class HC. Renault tanks, Heavy tank ARL44 and so on.
-Add 5 French infantry as Foreign Legion model for Africa continent
-Fortifications (Bunkers, Mines, Hedgehogs, Barbwire, coastal guns)
-Resources and Supplies
-Generals with unique abilities
-Battle dices blank with 1/2/3/4 hits
Stuff which will make game faster. -
My only two major suggestions I would like to see in a 3rd addition to the game would be some new unit looks on the game board. Especially when talking about the french. I personally will new say that I have enough units in my collection lol. But I definitely have way more Iowa battleships and wasp ACs that I would ever need. So maybe something different to bring some excitement when making the big purchase. Also maybe overhaul the rules around neutral countries. Maybe find a insensitive to bring larger neutrals into the war as co- belligerence. Ie. Spain, Turkey, and south American Nations. More so as an option to players. Giving them the original rules if they don’t want the complexity. Overall I like the mechanics of the gameplay already. I find it easy to add house rules and new units to the game without breaking gameplay and Overcomplicating it. That’s where I think a lot of us love the game. Because we can customize it our way. Lastly( I know I said only 2 things lol) AAA. Just let them fight ground units while defending after they do their special defense. I just can’t see myself as a commander in combat telling my troop to forget the AAguns because the enemy has no aircraft lol. Hell no, use every gun available to repel the enemy!!!
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