Building analytic tools for Axis and Allies type games, and a game similar to Axis and Allies.
I’m building in what I want. But I want to hear what other players want too.
Particularly, I have three questions.
How important is the setting of the game to you? How would you feel about playing a game themed, not around armed combat, but cute animals doing pizza delivery, supposing the gameplay were identical?
Name some specific data visualizations you’d like to see, including specific examples of actual usage and/or screenshot so I can look them up. E.g. David Skelly’s tool has a visualization of expected unit count surviving over multiple rounds of combat.
How to handle asynchronous play. (more below)
If this sounds familiar, I wrote parts of it up on different forums at different times.
This is a pretty specific case, and I know a lot of players don’t play like this. But nevertheless, just bear with me.
Suppose Japan hits the Hawaiian Islands fleet; Japan has up to submarine, cruiser, two fighters, bomber; US has submarine, destroyer, carrier, one fighter.
Scenario A: Suppose Japan wants to play it risky and only sends 1 sub 2 fighters. Then maybe the US wants to have the US submarine fight.
Scenario B: Suppose Japan hits with the kitchen sink. Then maybe the US wants to have the US submarine submerge.
1942 Online handles this with “defensive profiles”, but defending players can’t switch up their actions depending on what the attacker does. And not to get into the use case too deeply, but digging a bit deeper shows defender may want to change decisions depending on composition of attacking force (not just the count of units), dice roll results from earlier rounds, the outcomes of battles in different territories/seazones conducted earlier (and not just loss/win, but again, the composition.
So this is where I sort of shrugged and said, well, 1942 Online’s implementation, sort of is where it is. It’s not the same as the boardgame, but that’s just how it is.
But suppose it were “fixed”? The way it’s handled in TripleA last I heard, you sort of agree on OOL and conditions before the game, and if someone does a bad OOL for the defender, then the game gets rewound and the “correct” decision made, which can get messy (lot of complications I won’t get into but been there a few times.). Or in TripleA, if a game gets to that point where you know there’s sort of a weird OOL coming up, the upcoming defender could send sealed instructions, or unsealed directions, or even the game could be paused until both players could go live. You get the idea. It’s messy.
So I wrote elsewhere, you CAN make a really detailed UI where the defender can pre-specify exhaustive conditions, but that’s super cumbersome.
The idea I’m working with right now is, instead of having a static “defensive profile” like 1942 Online, instead have an AI that makes decisions round to round, with some additional input decisions by defender.
So for example, if UK hit a German fleet in the Baltic, the AI might by default land a fighter on Berlin. But a human player COULD specify that the fighter land on Norway or Finland instead (because maybe US / USSR didn’t have a followthrough to destroy the German fighter cheaply), and the German fighter range has better to some targets. Etc.
