I know this is a very old thread, but I’ve actually been working on something like this for a couple years now.
Basically, the gist of my thinking was that because the Second World War was basically a war of resources; both natural resource and the land they reside in. I took many concepts from both War Room, Axis & Allies, and Global war to begin my attempt at an ultimate crossover between the three. The goal was for the game to encompass the grander scale of Axis and Allies Global 1940 whilst incorporating the resource management of War Room, and implementing the more unique design choices of Global War but also eliminating the excesses that cause so much headache and delay (terrain and combat, for example).
I want to preempt this by saying the game was nowhere near being completed or even play tested, but I thought I’d share what I have so far here.
The game used 12 sided die for combat, but it also incorporated War Rooms color rolling. For example, while a unit might hit at a 4 or lower, it might not be able to apply that hit to a Plane because, well, it’s just an Infantry Squad. The general idea was that a 1 would correspond to Black in War Room, and could hit anything, where as 11 and 12 were Whites: misses. My plan is that you could always “round down” if you wanted to apply hits to weaker units for any particular reason, but you could only round up to a higher color if there were no possible units to hit of the color that you rolled.
The Die was planned to be:
1: Black — Choice of Hit
2: Yellow — Infantry/Submarines
3-4 Blue — Artillery/Screen Ships
5-6: Green — Vehicles/Aircraft Carriers
7-10: Red — Planes/Capital Ships
11-12: White — Miss
Of course, there were the usual special rules applied to units. So if you’re thinking “Damn, planes seem almost impossible to hit” well with Anti-Air Guns in that they would fire before each round of combat (similar to the 50th Anniversary Edition), which would actually make them extremely vital in combat against large air forces, whereas in 1940 they’re nice to have but rarely would I actually buy them unless I’m the Soviets facing Germany or the Pacific Allies facing Japan. Below is the WIP table detailing the Build Cost and Stats of each unit, as well as any special rules that unit may have.
Again, I would like to reiterate that this table was still very, very work in progress and has not been play tested at all.
This list also includes tech-only units marked with an asterisk (includes Supercarriers as well, but I seemingly forgot to mark them)
There was still a lot of bloat that I was planning to get rid of. In addition to those marked, it was likely that at least one of the Carrier and one of the Tank types was going to go. I was always on the fence about CV Aircraft, and I planned them to be interchangeable with non CV Air unites at Airbases, but this was mostly me going insane with creating plane models in Unity (I was building the game in Tabletop Simulator).
There’s also a lot to be said about Seaplanes and their role in actually detecting navies in certain parts of the world. In my game, it wasn’t a guarantee that two fleets meeting in open waters would result in a battle. A 6-sided die would be rolled depending on what Sea Zone the encounter took place in. Critically important areas, like the Sea of Japan, or the North Sea/English Channel would have a high probability of Combat, but more open areas like the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean might result in two navies completely avoiding each other. If a fleet had Seaplanes docked on their Capital Ships, the Seaplane would increase the odds of detecting an enemy fleet in open waters. An important note is that Naval invasions would always result in combat.
Here is the WIP map. The plan was for a 1939 start. Apologies for the artifacts as the original map I used was a JPG before I started editing it and I simply never got around to fixing those areas since I was only using MS Paint. I eventually planned to hire someone to draw a map from scratch if it was ever feasible to actually create physical copies of the game.
Turn Order is basically the same as Global 1940 with some tweaks:
- Germany
- Soviet Union & Communist China
- Japan
- United States & Nationalist China
- United Kingdom + Canada & South Africa
- Italy
- British Raj & ANZAC
- France, Poland & Benelux
Germany begins at war with Poland, France, and the UK.
Japan is at war with China and Communist China, and occupies large portions of Eastern and Northern China.
In my game, the Soviets—while nominally part of the Allies—were actually their own separate faction that had their own goals and objectives that would involve potentially harming the Western Allies efforts. For example, Communist China adopts the Global 1940 rules for China (can only build Infantry, but can place them anywhere). What’s different here is that unless USSR chooses to invest resources for them to produce artillery, they can never produce anything but. While this is feasible in the early game, it’s not so much when the Germans are kicking down the front door. This would come into play if Communist China were to retake a Nationalist territory from the Japanese, it wouldn’t go back to the Nationalists, but instead would go to the Communists, robbing the Nationalists of vital resources that they can use to produce things like Artillery and Tanks freely.
There’s lots of other little things I don’t have time to describe here as this post is already getting rather long. But if you have any questions or ideas I’d love to hear them! For example, I noticed Oztea mentioning contested territory and resources being used to extend a limited number of combat rounds and now he has me rethinking portions of my entire design concept!