Realism house rule

@hengst This house rules forum is full of ideas. To avoid scripted games you need a varaiety ways to win or lose a game in a reasonable amount of time ,eg 8 to 12 rounds.BBR and 3G40 are rulesets that encourage you to win by achieving various victory objectives.(not just victory cities)
3G40 changes turn order,merges Anzac into UKPacific,and sticks pretty close to oob rules.BBR is more complex than oob and is real popular.Both are designed to play in 1 day and to be able to declare a winner.

@Dashofpepper:

Hey guys -

I see this has been moved into house rules…and that a moderator tagged this as Global 1941.   This is for Global 1940 - I’ve never played Global 1941, so I don’t know if there are differences or if the advice would be the same for Global 1940.

Typo corrected, thanks.

@CWO:

I’d say it depends.  If your various HRs are designed in a modular way, with each one intended to be a “use it at your discretion” optional extra to the game, then posting them separately would be a good approach.  If, however, they’re designed as a system, with all the HRs being intended to work together in a reconceptualized and/or rebalanced version of the game, then posting them together would make more sense.

So, talking about groups of things as a middle ground? I could definitely break these rules into chunks and discuss them that way. One way to do so might be:

Adding Cruisers to A&A Classic

Adding a pair of new ground units to A&A Classic

Adding optional National Advantages to balance differing skill levels to A&A Classic

Adding a new Heavy Artillery unit to A&A, Classic or otherwise

Adding Paratroopers and Cargo Planes to A&A, Classic or otherwise

Adding Special Forces Unites to A&A, Classic or otherwise

Adding optional rule for a Production Infrastructure fee to A&A, Classic or otherwise

A new take on rule for rolling for Technology in A&A Classic, and a new Technology chart

Something like that. I’m not saying that I’m the second coming of Larry Harris, or even the second coming of Max Michael (the credited author of Max’s Advanced Rules for Axis & Allies). I’d just like a second opinion on some house rules I’ve been working on.

-Midnight_Reaper

Mr. Piscolar;

the fortress idea is OK, but it seems OP when you can build them to defend key VC strongholds like Moscow.  Your point about inactivating them is interesting, but that’s not how the rules for Airbases work, you can’t disable them right before the scramble.  It is sort of interesting to imagine a fighter intercept/bomber part of that transaction, but at some point you simply need all your planes in order to overwhelm, you can’t split them off to wrack the forts first, or the defense becomes too favorable (because you have increased defensive power by +1 or reserved the planes for this task, either outcome increases the defense vs offense pretty dramatically).  When you are talking about potentially adding +1 defense to 40+ units, it becomes OP.

Actual fortresses are not realistic in WW2, as they were captured by paratroops, reduced by bombing, surrounded and besieged, or simply bypassed and ignored.

Your ANZAC idea is fun and interesting, but unless ANZAC takes the risk of moving its assets to Brazil, there wont be much coordination there.  Not sure why you would cleave off a second grey team.  Why not just clarify your original idea by making the ANZAC team better (by giving them Canada and 1-2 ships 1-2 units) at the expense of UK Atl.?  UK isn’t really a viable team at that point but neither is a 7 income independent team with split forces…

I like the special NOs from Balanced mod, but I’m not sure why you’ve added NOs that are active based on what teams already pretty much have or go for from the get-go.  NOs should draw the players into an unexpected alignment to incentivize new play, not reward them for doing what they were already going to do.

Adding German Units seems very odd since they are usually getting a bid of 20+ against them, now the required bid would be even higher.  You have offset some of the Axis advantage with other NOs, but I wouldn’t make the Germany start position even more advantageous its extremely powerful as is.

You also added several Axis NOs for just being Axis, these aren’t necessary to bolster their already dominating economic position and they aren’t dependent on what the Axis choose to do.  Giving Japan an NO for attacking allied zero $ islands or for Germany to attack Iceland are some examples of encouraging the player to do something that otherwise he would rarely or never choose to do.

the VC condition is messed up OOB, good effort on trying to change it

Tech/Cruisers/Bombers; these are similar to other suggestions, I think the tech doesn’t need new incentives to go after it, several of them are awesome and the rest are junk.  Unless you nerf the good ones and improve (all) the bad ones, making them easier to get doesn’t really balance anything.  Smart to reshuffle the Charts, but the “Land” one is packed with junk.

Crusiers are OP if they are 10 AND AAA.

Bombers are OP at 12, but if they cost 14, SB isn’t viable and buying them in bulk isn’t either.

These are just a ton of interesting extra rules, which are all fun and creative but they don’t seem to balance Axis vs Allies any better than standard rules.

Good point in the last paragraph, a turn does encompass multiple months and you would expect some sort of naval engagement if both forces were conducting active operations and not sitting in home port. Adding a dice roll to determine if a naval battle occurs adds too many variables for the moment. But I’d certainly like to add a retreating rule in my next home game. I think this would create a much more aggressive game if the risk of losing your entire fleet on one bad round of dice was limited.

Does anyone have any experience with this? How did you do it? What did you do with transports? etc.

Played our first game of 1914 tonight and had a blast. Afterwards, we brainstormed some additional house rules (because gamers, I suppose), and one stuck out. Before I say this, let me note this is a very casual crowd.

Rule: A neutral minor power when attacked by one faction or the other sides with the one that did not attack it. If it is able to repel the invasion, it becomes a fully functioning member of the alliance it joined. It has IPCs, builds units, deploys them, and attacks.

Cause: Almost no reason not to attack some of these nations. Defeat means nothing- the scale of units involved means a small handful of units lost is not a true blow. The potential IPC gain outweighs the risk in all but a few instances. By making neutral powers a bigger threat, hopefully players will only attack those they deem important to a war winning strategy and not just as random acts of violence for IPC gain. This can lead to silliness with Switzerland and the Nordic countries along with Spain among others.

Mechanics: New factions get 6/8 IPCs plus whatever IPC total is on their territories. From this point we had some disagreement:
1- They are a fully active faction with no restrictions.
2- They can only attack the faction that attacked them and their territories.
3- They can only counter attack into the territories that the attack against them was launched

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I posted this in the 1914 forum, then I saw the House Rules forum.  I believe that is the forum suited for the idea. I would message the mods to move this thread but their profiles indicate they’ve been gone for a while. I apologize for my faux paus.

Thanks for your imput.

I included the critical strike on grounded aircraft to give the attacker reason to get involved in a dogfight seeing how deffending aircraft hit @4. The critical strike is @1 and for the first round only, I believe attackers shouldn’t get a disadvantage for being agressive. Without the critical strike, players ask themselves why should I attack with my valuable aircraft and get all the odds against me.

I don’t enjoy changing the attack and defend capabilities of any units, I believe the game is difficult enough without trying to calculate all the different changes for any given senerio. for example: Fighters attack @3 except when escorting and except in dogfights and except on carriers and except….ect.ect.ect. (you get my point).

I am still tweeking the merchant convoy rules when transporting supply chips however, this is a major aspect of my rules and it must be handled with care to balance the game. On one hand, the allies have enough to do, what with keeping up with with the axis agression during the first 4 rounds and on the other hand it is too much of a factor to just ignore the importance of the merchant shipping lanes. For example: if I were the supreame commander for Germany during the war, I would never have shiffted towards bombing London or even think about opperation Sea Lion when they were so close to starving the little Island. Non the less the rule is still a work in progress… any Ideas?

I might think about a rule for the Gibralter however, I don’t want to limit the Italian fleet entering the Black Sea. That would only limit them to Africa and I want the Italian player to have options.

As for my Tech charts, I believe that if your going to have the kind of game ender like a nuke just for historic reasons, I would prefer to limit it to one Nation (U.S) and still leave it to chance of getting that advantage. As for Nations limited to thier own charts, I have found in my games that players really think hard about what Nation they wish to play at the begining of the game because they want to play with some charts but don’t want to be up against others. One aspect that I have found very important is giving each nation one free chance per turn to get a tech, this way techs are always a factor in the game while still rewarding others for buying extra chances.

I have a book where I have cut and pasted the Axis and Allies rules into a word document and have added my own rules to make everything more compleate to the newbies I play with. It took alot of work and I think it looks nice, I could e-mail you a copy if you like and that way you can edit it to your own house rules, the good thing is that most of the work is done for you. Just send me a personal message with your email address… I think you would like it.

Well in his defense i actually have 2 games (using d12 system) that have both a primary and secondary attack ( the primary is pre-emtive)

but the economy of scale is quite different from regular AA