AA50: House Rules

IL - where’s Okinawa and the Caroline Islands?  If you are going to include Midway you should include these too.  Also I’d like to see a version without the roundels, they seem to clutter up the map and are redundant as the controling nation is the same color.

As for the Phase 2 map - why not include some kind of text  as to the value of a convoy route.  You could use a roundel here to denote the origional control possibly in a dashed lined box of some other feature to set it off from the seazone?

-Keep up the good work.

brilliant what about a special thing saying like round 6 that germany gets like 5 free tanks since thats when they really made tanks super good.  (while this happens usa or gb gets 1 free fighter and russia gets 2 inf and 2 artillery. 30-28 mmm i like this

did you forget to update the time stamp in the filename?
the link still says 110908…

@Marquis:

Also I’d like to see a version without the roundels, they seem to clutter up the map and are redundant as the controling nation is the same color.

I hope IL has learnt from his AARHE map project, and remembered to use layers this time in his Illustrator source file

in which case he can turn features (like setup icons, income icons, terrain etc) on/turn in 5 seconds

so why can’t you use layers again?

by the way think the file because larger and larger when you keep adding groups of stuff to the icons tray

@Imperious:

yes thats true, but the icons are needed. I can remove duplicates

not sure if you are doing this
but this is what you did before (instead of using layers)
you selected all items of a particular type (eg. setup icons) and drag it into the icon tray

explain how to do layers that does not load up memory in .ai files?

does using layers add to extra .ai file size .ai?
I wasn’t aware
I just loved how I can toggle on/off a particular layer
*for releasing versions with/without setup icons, income icons, etc
*for ease of editing, you only unlock the layers you are editing, very easy to select items
*display correctly, since you choose the order the layers…you never have the wrong thing going over another thing,  like setup icons going over territory names or something

@Imperious:

It makes no sence whatsoever to have a technology the better coordinates Artillery fire for Infantry at double the efficiency, unless we are talking modern warfare with guided missile/projectile technology. Its really like they made this Technology out of thin air with no correspondence to the actual war. It would be a much better thing to allow tanks a boost with planes present in battle and acknowledge that battlefield doctrine of warfare, than to assign this bogus mystery technology that didn’t exist.

Twice the effectinvess does seem quite a bit, but then if you compare American artillery and German artillery - it could be said to be twice as effective. Forgetting that US artillery was mobilsed and German guns were mostly horse drawn, the US introduced forward observers - better co-ordinating their batteries to front-line units. Guns could respond to fire missions much quicker than German batteries, and generally the US were pretty much using a modern system of combining guns and infantry - look at the number of germans killed by artillery compared to other means in the Bulge and you get an idea of just how advanced the US was at this system. The calibre of the guns was not strictly relevant, what matters is rate of fire, accuracy and speed of response - how much weight of fire you can dump on an area in a five minute interval is key.

The Soviets also took a similar approach, and by the end of WW2, almost half the Red army combat strength was artillery - one could argue that the MRLS system they had constitutues that combined fire-power. Certainly the Germans couldn’t match that level of fire power. Now, whether in the Russian case this is better represented by simply buying more guns or adding a new tech to represent doctrine changes is a debate.

But I did see sense in the technoglogy itself, and I recommend an article in the ‘Bitter Woods’ rule book which compares German and American artillery fire control systems.

But then this is Axis and Allies, so in a way it doesn’t have to be so tied to history - you have to invest in technology boosts, so it could represent all that funky stuff the Germans were developign such as SAMs and guided anti-ship missiles.

That said - your idea of boosting tanks and planes is a better way forward, and more in the character of Axis and Allies.

@Imperious:

and sacrificed realism.

:-D  Which can be said for much of Axis and Allies!!!

But then that is where AARHE comes in - I’ve just been ploughing through your rules and really like them. I much prefer the idea of pre-battle air-fights like in GMT’s AWAW, so there is no longer the possibility to hid precious planes.

They constitute a nice bridge between more complex wargames and A&A.

@Imperious:

Ideas from elsewhere under consideration:

Bonus: When defending a victory city (that has never fallen), you can choose one round (per battle) where your infantry defend on a three. (dig in and hold to the last man).
-or-
When defending a victory (that has never fallen), on each round of battle after the first, you may add a virtual infantry to the fight (If you control at least one infantry and not a virtual infantry already). This one makes them much harder to kill if you don’t bring in a significant force. I really like the Stalingrad effect on this one.

Penalty: When you lose a victory city that has never fallen, for your next turn, all your units have an attack factor one lower than usual (ones still hit). This one seems brutal, but really interesting. Talk about codifying national despondency.

How about an idea stolen from some other games where you have some sort of national morale? When you lose a victory city that you start the game with you lose 2 national morale points, lets say. When you capture one back you gain 1 morale point (the city has been devastated). You also get 1 national morale point for capturing an enemy objective and lose 1 if you lose it again. Each nation has a track and when their morale drops below a certain point their nation sues for peace and leaves the war.

The point is over time your national morale would drop if you weren’t defending your home territory very well, and eventually your nation would withdraw from the war. This is more or less what happened historically, after all we never did invade Japan. Given the ahistorical balanced setup of the game, if the real war had been more like that severe war weariness would have been much more likely to set in and the war would have been more likely to end in a settled peace. Even many of the Allied economies were shattered by the end of the war, let alone the Axis powers.

This would force players to defend victory cities “to the death” because they can’t afford the drop in national morale. If you wanted to flesh out the system further you could add addtional effects after morale has dropped below certain points but before a nation has left the war, similar to the situation with Italy at the start of 1943 where its troops had virtually no motiviation to fight anymore.

I love this one    +1