Right on!

Here are a couple screens…

To change the national ownership colors, you can open the map.properties and adjust the Hex color codes there to suit your taste for the overall color palette. Like if you prefer more pastel colors and such. UHD basically just means that it’s an upscale to support larger displays. If playing at 1080p probably map view zoom 50%-80% is the optimal range.

The unit folder contains a sub with some extra 54px graphics, some flipped orientation alts for the Frostion unit set, tech expansion type units etc. as well as the older standard 48px unit graphics. Should be compatible for the standard global mods and v3 with a little tinkering. Unit viewsize is at 120% by default for the 54px units (it’s the largest we can go right now) so for the older graphics might make sense to upscale them if you want to use, but hopefully the new ones look cool hehe.

Labels and most of the decorative stuff are upscales from the current global from Veq and Bung. Unit/flag artwork is mostly Frostion’s with a few adjustments/additions to round em out for tech and such. Hepster helped me to dial the map projection for the baseline. Some stuff there is abstracted to service the gameplay. There are some cosmetic additions to incorporate extra island groupings and smaller tts as well, these were assigned to neighboring tiles so those connections are purely cosmetic (ex N. Sakhalin=Amur, S. Sakhalin=Japan with no connection along that border). Similarly Aden=Br. Somaliland, Trucial States/Basra were assigned to E. Persia (no actual connections to Iraq/Saudi). Falklands to Brazil, along with any other stuff in Caribbean to USA aegis there. Basically just for the visual. Sierra Leone was included as British. If you want to turn that off you can Edit mode> and assign the TT to neutral, but it’s Brit by default here. If you want to replace any labels these can be found in the Misc folder. For ex you can change “United Kingdom” to read England and Wales, or “Scotland” to read Scotland and N. Ireland, or make other labelling tweaks of that sort by substituting those graphics. You can also blank all the labels by changing the name of the Misc folder. The under terrain image and baseline map are included too, in case people want to mod em, or generate new reliefs using those materials.

Hopefully it’s fun!
Enjoy

Yeah I really like the idea of the whole med too, honestly. I noticed when trying to find a closer crop, that anytime I tried to zoom in further, it felt pretty claustrophobic and I wanted to scroll beyond the edge, like ‘wait - why stop here?’ Lol

I think I’m too used to seeing maps of the full Med to really get past that. Also it’d be a nice touch for new Roman empire ambitions, even if that ship had already sailed by the likely start date. This would be the board where Italy really makes sense as a player nation to me, like the reason to justify the existence of all those sculpts. Whereas in AA50 and Global, it’s more of a stretch to get them in the mix in a satisfying way. I think a somewhat larger board than the previous tactical games, so they could do the full stretch from Casablanca to Beirut would be pretty cool!

This one shows a fair bit of distortion. Europe was already warped/enlarged, so you can see Spain is a bit beefy from trying to make France/Normandy larger lol, which wouldn’t really be needed for a board with the Med focus. The other side of the Med is more compressed than it’d need to be here. But basically taking the rough G40 divisions for the TTs and SZs, and then subdividing some of those again, like 2, 3, maybe 4 times? Just to get a sufficient number of tiles and a dynamic playpattern going. Stretch-rotate or crop in tighter at the top, like right at Marseille/Milan/Istria, with an transalpine cut at the Po, but aiming to get the whole med in there somehow, with a lot more Sea Zones than shown below, clearly… hehe.

Sneakily foreshadowing a Stalingrad follow up by showing a bit of the Balkans? The theme could still be Torch, but something with a theater wide view on the Med would offer a lot of options if it crept on the margins a bit.

I dig the anti tank and sp artillery idea too! I played a D10 game that had them in the roster and they were fun. This scenario would be a cool one to see a jeep, and an infantry gun, and self propelled artillery. Perhaps an Armor advance towards the end where some even more boss tank types first come online. An apt scenario to do a heavy armor unlock or something.

This one has a lot of promise! More than the reprints/re-issues, with the ‘North Africa’ game we’ll really get to see what Renegade’s bringing to the table. I’m excited to check it out!

Ps. Random aside, but there were something like what, 10 million horses deployed in WW2 just by Germany and the USSR alone? I don’t know that we ever get that in our WW2 set piece sweeps. Except for the opening of the film Fury I guess lol. Might be cool to see one for some kind of general/logistics type bonus sculpt, where we can imagine him headed up the mountains towing a big gun in the endgame hehe.

pps.

Basically just blowing out the regional theaters of the Europe 1940 board, and doing each with a bunch more TT/SZ tiles. Maybe you put them all together like Voltron for the ultimate A&AE advanced board.

If they did the stretch on Europe a little different so you could make one larger board from the smaller theater scale maps.

Here’s an example using Turner’s, but imagining the stretch/warp so that center dividing line is more like the Rome Berlin Axis, doing the squish and pull for a nice spread.

Also, I’m curious, if they’re targeting a 2024 release date, if they already have the game basically roughed out in concept form? Like if they’re already alpha testing and play balancing something? I wish they’d use tripleA for that, like at least for an informal in-house testing type thing for their design team peeps. It could be done with a fairly quick turn around I’d imagine. Digital playtesting is pretty fast. They could probably clock triple the number of test games during the same period, even if it was closed playtesting for just their employees or whatever. It’s a cool tool, and something the A&A community sorta organically willed into existence with just the heart and love of the game, but it hasn’t really been used before for a real alpha test of a new game I don’t think. Although that would be kinda rad. Like it’s basically the role the thing was designed to play, as a map/game creator’s resource to trial the rough drafts. They could use the map creator tools to create a quickie templet, then use that to iterate in alpha. They don’t need to publish it that way, but they could test it like that. Since they can alter board states via edit and save stuff out locally.

Have Beamdog do the polished version with the UI that peeps are used to from A&AO with all the branding for the competitive digital play, after the honeymoon launch/CON FtF period, but by holding a digital AP run before the physical product goes to the actual printers, they could see if there are any big issues and shore em up way early. Like long before it hits the presses, after which point revisions have to be issued via errata. Just do the FtF and digital testing concurrently in-house to catch the breakers and shore it up. They could do that basically soon as they got their map ideas and unit roster ideas dialed. Like just pick someone on the team and have em learn the quickie creator tools to do the xml stuff hehe. Wouldn’t look as pretty, but it would work for the alpha drafting at least, presumably with rules similar to what we’ve seen up to the G40 level. Probably a pipe dream, like normal trend seems to be the opposite direction, but still, maybe Renegade will go renegade, and actually lean into it for a change? That would be so cool! Worth mentioning at least :)

So the Q was for Global 3rd Ed, but while we’re at it… I just got 3 to add

1. A legacy version of the base game (midscale board), that is simply called “Axis and Allies” ie don’t include a start date year or an edition number in the name for that one. It should present as the basic starter set. Provide unit set ups for a couple dates like AA50 did, but do that in the manual instead. The idea being that it’s easier to re-print or revise or download material for unit set ups in a manual than on cards/boxes. So you could do 1942 as the default, but also 1941 or 1943 say, just by referencing a page in the rulebook.

2. Axis and Allies Global - Sell it as a single complete game, rather than 2 separate theater games. For packaging maybe have 1 box be for the maps the cards and all the paper stuff, and then have units sold separately? I think the players that are most interested in the more advanced game just want G40, rather than Europe and Pacific 1940. By selling the sculpts separately there is less need to divide the boards by theater, and then it can build on the starter unit set included with the base “Axis and Allies” game mentioned above.

3. Include a small Art book/History of the Axis and Allies game and it’s creator, including the images from all the cover boxes and such. Legacy style! I just think that would be a nice touch and cool to see.

So you just bought the Axis and Allies game 1942 second edition, the latest 5 man world theater game… Congratulations, good call!  :-D

Perhaps you’re returning to A&A from one of the older games, or maybe this is your first time. Either way, now that you’ve studied the map, got the pieces all laid out, and have finally puzzled your way through the rulebook, its time to dive in and start thinking about the Russian opening! Maybe you’re pre-gaming it, looking to get a match with one of your friends face to face, or are playing WW2 v5 in tripleA vs the HardAI, to get a feel for the map. We’ve all been here at one point, looking at those Russian units and those 24 ipcs and trying to figure out the best way to make use of them. Right about now, you might be thinking to yourself that the Soviet starting position looks kind of ugly, what should you buy? and what is it you’re supposed to do with these Russians units anyway? ha!

Well, here are some ideas about various openings that you might find helpful for the 1942 sec edition game when playing as the Soviets. What follows assumes OOB conditions, (if you know what a bid is and how to play with bids these conditions can be changed), but often times, if you’re starting up a new game with newer players in your group, explaining what a bid is can take more time than its worth, and this is already a fairly involved game. Instead, you, as the more experienced A&A strategist and the one who bought the board, can just let your buddy play Axis while you take the Russians. Sure it’s a challenge, but you’re up to it right! ;)

But what to buy in the first round? This Russian planned economy gives you 24 ipcs out the gate, and this doesn’t allow a whole lot of room for error. Maybe infantry is best? Lets consider it for a moment…

At a cost of 3 ipcs a pop, 24 ipcs gets you 8 infantry, and we know that boots on the ground are always important for the Russians right? I mean just throw more bodies at the problem, that’s one ready solution isn’t it? And surely infantry have the best defensive value for the cost of any unit, and provide the most hitpoints for the least amount of money. Another way to think about it is the total power that your purchased force can project: the cumulative attack value and defense value of the units in the force and how far it can move.  We often call these attack or defense ‘points’, or ‘pips’ for the purposes of fast calculation, and try to think about how much attack or defense power the units can bring to bear.

24 ipcs in infantry = 8 hit points, with a total attack value of 8 points, total defense value of 16 points, and it can move 1 space.

In two out of four dimensions, the 8 infantry buy does pretty well. 8 hit points, or hits that you can absorb, in terms of “fodder” with cheap infantry to protect your more expensive attacking/defending units. On defense 16 points, since each individual infantry unit hits at 2 on defense. Taken together, that’s a solid 2 hits on defense reliably, and probably 3 hits or more if the infantry is grouped together and all “dug in.” Rolling a lucky deuce or two, and that kind of infantry stacked together can be quite potent!

But in the other two out of four dimensions, the 8 infantry buy is somewhat lacking. 8 attack points doesn’t sound all that bad at first, but when you start to crunch the numbers, you find that this only gives you a reliable 1 hit, and a “long shot” (1/3 chance) to grab a second hit on attack. And this only when the whole force is attacking at once. Sure there’s always a chance you might roll a bunch of ones, but its not a great chance, and there is of course a chance that you could completely “dud” in your attack. A lucky “one” is just harder to come by than the “lucky deuce” when you’re playing a game with six sided dice. This sort of thinking and logic has given rise to a style of play called “Low Luck” which you may want to familiarize yourself with at some point, just for reference, but similar principles apply in a normal dice game, when you’re trying to figure out what the likely chances are that you’ll get “X number of hits” in a given round of combat. Basically what you’re doing is adding up all the “hits at” values for each unit, the number you end up with shows you how many hits you’re likely to achieve with these units when rolling the six sided dice, by dividing that number by 1/6. This gives you the likely number of hits on average in a dice game, or the auto hits in an LL game, and any remainder left over can likewise give you a sense of how likely it is to pick up an “extra hit.” For a regular dice game these are just rough averages but they’re helpful when thinking about the attack/defense value of the force you’re buying.

Finally there is the aspect that involves movement or range, which for infantry is just 1 space from where they are placed. Now when you look at the map and the production spread for Russia, you’ll see that with an 8 infantry buy, some of these units won’t be able to get into the fight immediately, because the factory in Caucasus can only produce 4 units at a time, and the factory in Karelia is indefensible in the first round, and inf units placed in Moscow will be two moves from the front during the second round. So having surveyed the situation on the ground, for the purposes of attack, buying 8 infantry doesn’t really get you the full 8 attack points the very next round. Instead you end up with just 4 attack points “at the ready”, from the infantry out of Caucasus, and the other 4 infantry units placed in Moscow will take at least one more round to move out “into position.” To defend against German counter attacks in the second round you still get 16 on defense, but from the perspective of an early Russian offensive, the 8 infantry buy nets you just 4 attack points and 4 attack fodder hitpoints “at the ready” in the second round.

Now lets look at some other ways you could spend that same amount of money for different units beyond just “all infantry.” These are all max placement buys, where you spend every ipc with no remainder left over. Listed below with the total hitpoints, total attack points and total defense points for each buy, and finally the number of units with effective range to the front, for immediate counter attack, and the max attack power they can project the following round (during the opening salvo of the combat phase).

Potential Builds:

Buy: 4 infantry and 3 artillery =
Total: 7 hitpoints, 13 attack, 14 defense
Range: 4 units to the front (1 inf, 3 artillery from Caucasus).
Projected Power: +8 counter attack points against Ukraine.

Buy: 6 infantry and 1 tank =
Total: 7 hitpoints, 9 attack, 15 defense
Range: 5 units to the front (4 inf from Caucasus + 1 tank from Moscow).
Projected Power: +7 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 3 against Karelia/Belo.

Buy: 2 infantry, 3 artillery, and 1 tank=
Total: 6 hitpoints, 13 attack, 13 defense
Range: 5 units to the front (1 inf and 3 art from Caucasus + 1 tank from Moscow).
Projected Power: + 11 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 3 against Karelia/Belo.

Buy: 6 artillery
Total: 6 hitpoints, 12 attack, 12 defense.
Range: 4 units to the front (4 artillery from Caucasus).
Projected power: +8 counter attack against Ukraine. But this build is sometimes more about the +12 against Caucasus itself, when you plan to give up the factory and then re-take it the next round.

Buy: 4 infantry and 2 tanks =
Total: 6 hitpoints, 10 attack, 15 defense,
Range: 6 units to the front (4 inf from Caucasus +2 tanks from Moscow).
Projected power: + 10 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 6 against Karelia/Belo.

Buy: 3 artillery and 2 tanks =
Total: 5 hitpoints, 12 attack, 12 defense
Range: 5 units to the front (3 art and 1 tank from Caucasus + 1 tank from Moscow).
Projected power: + 12 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 6 against Karelia/Belo

Buy: 2 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 fighter
Total: 5 hitpoints, 11 attack, 12 defense
Range 5 units to the front (2 inf and 2 art in Caucasus + 1 fighter in Moscow).
Projected power: +11 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 3 against Karelia/Belo *extra advantage in light trading of territories/total unit value over time, provided by the third fighter.

Buy: 2 infantry, 3 tanks
Total: 5 hitpoints, 11 attack, 13 defense
Range: 5 units to the front (2 infantry and 2 tanks in Caucasus + 1 tank in Moscow).
Projected power: +11 counter attack points against Ukraine, or + 9 against Karelia/Belo.

Now that’s a lot of numbers I’ve thrown around, but when you see them all laid out, you’ll notice that when you opt to buy more expensive units, what you’re doing is trading Russian hit points and defense points, for Russian attack points and a greater effective range on counter attack. There is some flexibility here and a little room to pick and choose, depending on how aggressive you want to be with the Soviets, but there is a point at which it’s simply no longer worth it to exchange hit points/defense, for power projection on counter attack. I would suggest that if you go lower than 5 hit points in the opening round purchase with Russia, its likely that you will lose control of Moscow to the Axis during the endgame (if your opponent is fairly competent.) Even 5 hit points is rather low, and what I would consider a “gambit,” meaning that you’re counting on a fairly lucky roll with your Russian openings and counter attacks to make up the difference on hitpoints by killing German units and just losing a couple pawns.

A 6 hitpoint purchase will allow you to project some power with counter attacks in the second round, without giving up too much defense later on. This is what I would consider an aggressive Russian purchase, meaning that you will have a decent offensive capacity if the rolls go your way, but still retain an alright defensive capacity if the rolls go poorly. The 6 hitpoint purchases are all about threatening counter attacks against an early German stack in Karelia or Belo. Trying to buy yourself one more round of trading territories, before you have give them up to the Germans.

A 7 or 8 hitpoint purchase is what I would consider fairly conservative, meaning that you plan to play a primarily defensive game with the Russians, giving up ground early in exchange for a slightly better defense later on, and relying heavily on the Western Allies to make up the difference for you.

Why does all this matter? You might rightly ask.
Well basically, because what you buy with Russia will determine how many attacks you can realistically run in the first round, with decent odds of success, and how quickly your friends the Anglo-Americans will have to send you assistance to prevent your capital from being captured by the Axis.

–--------

Now that we’ve thought about purchases for a minute, lets look at the Russian production spread, and see how the starting factories factor into things.

Karelia: Forget about it!  :-D There’s just no way you’re going to keep the Germans from taking this territory in the first round. Seriously, its a lost cause. Even if you took Belo and Baltic states, even if you somehow managed to sink the German  transport in sz5 with a risky double fighter attack, even if you took W. Russia light, and then blitzed all your tanks to Lengingrad on Non Combat, even if you bought 2 fighters and placed them in Karelia… its just not going to happen. Sadly the Germans will still have you beat, and the Total Unit Value (TUV) trade is terrible, not to mention costing you the whole Eastern front in the process. So just resolve in your mind right now, that Karelia is toast for the time being. Eventually you might be able to liberate it, but holding this factory at the outset is hopeless. The best you can do is trade the territory back and forth for a couple rounds, and keep the Germans from using your own factory against you! And that’s the real key, because what you’d really like to avoid here, is Germany stacking the territory on the first round. In addition to all the German units in the neighborhood, the Japanese can even reach Karelia with their Tokyo Bomber (6 moves) to put an extra defensive pip on the territory. That’s a lot of Axis units for the Russians to overcome!

It means that you either need enough units of your own stacked against it, or you have to shave off some of those German units in your opening attacks to prevent them from going north. The latter option is particularly risky, since its hard to predict how many hits the German defender might put up in W. Russia itself, let alone Belo, or Baltic States. There’s also Caucasus, that other all important factory territory you have to consider in your opening…

Caucasus: Don’t forget about it! :-D
Now that Karelia is off the table, and you’re firmly resolved to just grin and bear the loss of that northern factory for a while, its time to look at that other factory down south! Caucasus is arguably the most important Russian territory after Moscow and W. Russia, not because you need the production per se, but because its very important to deny this production to the Axis. Letting the Axis gain control of a factory that boarders your Capital is just an all around nightmare for the Allied war effort, so you should do everything you can to avoid this for as long as possible. Fortunately, unlike Karelia, it is possible to defend Caucasus in the first round. Its also possible to trade this territory and recover it quickly, owing to the fact that the British are in the area and can lend a hand with their tanks/fighters if need be, but its still a good idea to keep Caucasus under your thumb. Even if you can’t hold it forever, you at least want to threaten it on counter attack with enough force to prevent the Germans from stacking there and then flying in Japanese fighter cover. Once that happens, it becomes very hard to control the center of the gamemap and your Russians will be more or less pigeon holed into an entirely defensive “turtle up” posture. This is something you might be able to manage during the endgame, once the Western Allies have some units nearby to help prop you up, but its a disaster to let happen in early rounds. Caucasus is the main objective of most Axis drives early on, and what they will try to do is force you out of this territory (often by making you choose between Caucasus and the Capital Moscow.) For your part, you’ll want to push this decision out as far as possible. The best way you can do this is to either stack Caucasus itself, or stack W. Russia and Moscow with enough troops, that any German units that move into Caucasus will be immediately destroyed the following round on counter.

Finally, Moscow: the Center must hold!  :-D
Losing Moscow early on, is basically losing the whole game. During the endgame it is possible to trade Moscow for an Axis capital, but in order to even get to the point where something like that is possible, you need to hold Moscow for a pretty long time. Lets put it this way, if you give the Axis a shot on the Russian capital anytime before round 7, things are probably going to end badly for Allies. So what does this mean? Well basically it means keeping Axis units more than 1 move away from Moscow, while at the same time keeping Allied units close enough that they can reach Moscow in 1 move if they have to. And frequently, it means sending US/UK units (esp. aircraft, but also ground) into Russian territories to ensure this.

OK, that was all background and a fairly long winded way to arrive at…

All the Russian Openings!

The rest of this thread below will be for descriptions of specific Russian openings, from basic/general stuff to the more complex, and I invite anyone else here who has thoughts on the subject to post those here as well. TripleA saves would be nice if you want to share examples. I’ll start us off with one of the more popular…

If I had to make a wish and just get one flagship A&A scenario, I’d like to see a map on the scale of G40, but set in 1941 with only 6 factions.

I think the big 6 is better than the big 5, if only because it allows for parity by sides Axis vs Allies and to alternate by sides each turn.

I don’t really want to see Italy get nixed, because Axis is in the name after all, but I think it makes more sense to have Germany and then a faction called ‘European Axis.’ This set could provide some unique sculpts and roundels that could be used for basically all the smaller Axis aligned countries, Italy at the head maybe, though not just Italy, but Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania whatever. Basically you do some purely decorative design elements like mini flags, and then a more generic sculpt set with specialized flavor, like say a couple alt infantry or air types, stuff like that to cover the bases. Then have this player ‘nation’ catch-all faction come between the turn blocks on the Allied side. Basically removing the piggy back into the next round for team Allies, so both sides are more even that way.

On the Allied side you could obviously do the same with China, but it might be interesting to just see the Allies framed in the same way, again where the material for the smaller factions is done up with the decorative map elements with specialized flavor but folded back into one of the big 3 turns. So basically Anzac folds back into Britain, China folds back into USA. Or France into USA, or either of those into the Soviet turn block to maybe make it more interesting? I guess whatever makes the most sense from a “game seat” position might be good there. I can see advantages to maybe randomizing it too, like which of the Big 3 gets which of the Little 3 might be a thing that is determined by a roll or something on team Allies, just for flavor? But anyway, main idea being to keep the turn blocks down to a 3v3 exchange and no more. Basically 3 outs per game round. I just think that’s a good way to go.

The reason I like 1941 over the high water mark 1942 opener, is that mechanically the game always has the Axis side expanding early as the way to get a rough parity by sides going into the second and third round. That just feels more appropriate to 41 for me. Like if you have it open with a bang and the Axis side achieving that high water mark in the early rounds it feels more like the march of history, rather than starting from that high water mark and then vaulting like Shamu even higher, expanding massively into uncharted territory right at the start. You know where like Italy rules Egypt and Japan crushes into Siberia and India or whatever, because that’s how far they need to go to get into break even territory hehe. Like it’s all well and good if the game gets there after many rounds, but just not to have the balance tip too hard like that right away. Better, if the Allies are going to be on their heels in the opener, to pick a date where that vibe hums. Also helps I think with the sense of progression of game-time in the player’s imagination. Early enough for a total war start with some space to operate, but not so early that you have players waiting on the sidelines forever before it gets interesting.

I like a big map, with more unit types, cause it’s hard to go backwards there at this point. I’m used to Artillery and Mech and such and they’re fun units, but trying to keep everything else as simple as possible so that has some room to breathe and isn’t eclipsed by too much other stuff going on at the same time. More starter set focus. It can always morph from there into Expansion territory with add-on materials and more nuanced rules. I think I’d be a little bummed if it was just a bunch of re-releases without any revisions. Like I could imagine a vintage 1984 reissue, but that’s not really what I want. Basically I want “Classic, but Global” if that can just somehow be a thing heheh

Like a Xvart catching a fireball, I didn’t see that one coming hehe, but I gotta say its pretty exciting!

If you’re like me and your bookmark takes you straight to the forums, you might not have caught the announcement on the front page, but lools like we’re getting a digital version of this one.

I’ll be especially interested to see how the Axis advantage is handled, whether through some formalization of the bidding process (which would be nice) or some kind of set up tweak along the lines of a tournament variant.

I gotta think we’ll get something not too dissimilar from what Hasbro did with the classic cd way back when. That one helped to establish certain balancing mechanisms that weren’t really present in the box, so maybe we get something kind of like that. The Russian restricted opening in Classic comes to mind as something that game probably helped to establish.

I’ll also be interested to see how the new system of casualty selection and restriction on friendly carriers/transports will effect the playbalance for 1942.2. Not too concerned about transports, but the carrier thing could definitely have an impact for fighter transits and the British naval game in particular. From what I just read I’d think the proposed changes will be mainly influencing the Allied game. Really curious to see how having a fixed order of loss based on unit cost will effect multi-national stacks or strafing. Like if you have an Anglo-American joint stack that is attacked by G, it could make a big difference if you have to split casualties in a close battle based on cost, instead of choosing to take all the hits for one nations stuff to preserve the other nation’s counter attack power. Also there’s always those questions about how subs will be handled. But all in all, I can see the advantages of doing an asynchronous approach, since it will definitely simplify the back and forth in a given round, in terms of necessary exchanges between players who are doing their thing remotely.

Will be fun to see also what kind of options there are in terms of modification or edits to the standard game that the engine will allow. I think a lot of long time players would be looking for things of that sort to drive it into the future, since we’re a group that likes to tweak stuff. But yeah, I think it could be a major thing in terms of setting standards, if the base game has some options built-in to help with balancing or offering new takes after some time has elapsed.

Anyhow, I think its a pretty cool announcement. Look forward to learning more about it.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/category/68/axis-allies-online

@Argothair

Point 3 is major. I remember bringing it up on the Larry boards and trying to explain the merits of that approach back before AA50 came out, since we had tried it with Midway and a couple other spots in Pact of Steel and I thought it made things a lot more interesting. But he seemed pretty committed to his definition of an island being entirely contained within a sz (despite UK breaking with that definition all along.) Anyhow, I think the gameplay is more dynamic for island hoping and naval cat and mouse when they straddle the sz borders.

For colors I don’t have a strong opinion when it comes to individual nations, but I guess I do have strong opinions when it comes to the overall color scheme for the whole, which I’ll elaborate on here in a sec. In tripleA its easy to edit the territory colors in the gamefile hex code on the player’s end, though much harder to adjust the color for the unit graphics themselves, so I guess that is something to keep in mind. One thing I’ve found helpful in the past is to differentiate the various national colors on 2 out of the 3 color dimensions. Color pedantics to follow hehe…

So for any color you have Hue, Value, and Saturation.

Hue just means ‘color’ in old english, which isn’t very helpful, but it basically refers to position in the rainbow, roygbiv.

Value is often described as the position along a grayscale, from white to black or tint to shade.

Saturation or Vibrancy is the intensity of the color, or how much light it kicks off. They are basically synonymous but sometimes vibrancy is an easier tool to work with in a graphics editor since it usually isolates the totals at one end and leaves the mids, whereas a saturation tool usually moves everything at once.

Even people who may have trouble distinguishing Hue (red/green colorblind is the most common), will usually still be able to distinguish Value or Saturation pretty easily. I think Value is the most recognizable and easiest to work with. The quickest way to determine what Values you have is to desaturate everything and make the map grayscale. If you can still differentiate the various nations in grayscale then you are usually solid. Just note that the defaults for most nations in tripleA do a really poor job of this. Some nation’s territories are almost identical in value/saturation. Many people have a strong aesthetic preference for colors at a certain value/saturation threshold and end up just changing the hue, which can lead to everything being more similar than one might realize at first.

In the WW2 tripleA games the color values for many nations are very similar Germany/USA almost identical, Japan/Neutral the same, Russia/Britain the same. Here with Argos draft it is divided more by side Allies are lighter, Axis darker, which I like.

Also one last thought on color, when I made the original baselines for AA50 and the World Projection Map, parts of which have been used for various other tripleA maps, I put the ocean at a pretty light value intentionally. I honestly think I could have gone even lighter, so that nothing competed with it on the high end, and the ocean was always lighter than land. But for whatever reason someone changed the ocean to a mid-range value almost 50% gray, which was a weird call in my view. In the standard WWII maps it creates these strange visual ‘pops’, where some land territory colors are significantly higher value (closer to white), than other land tiles or than the sea (i.e. impassible neutrals, or lighter nations like Japan.) I think it is better to go way light or way dark on the Ocean color value. Below are examples of those same baseline maps I posted before, but totally desaturated to show how far you can push the value and still be blue just with hue/saturation adjustment. The last set shows an extremely light ocean color, probably about as far as I’d go before it gets obnoxiously light for me, but which would definitely allow all the darks/mids of the land tiles to be easily distinguished from the sea zone tiles, and make the overall ‘world’ of the world map feel more visually cohesive.

I’m not 100% percent, but I don’t think the ocean color for the standard WWII tripleA maps is something that can be quickly edited in the map file (its not listed with the hex codes for everything else), and the mapmaker will take any color other than pure black/white as a sz, so its kind of a pet peeve that all those standard A&A maps use a blue that is so close in value to true gray. Basically you need to turn on map details and provide a skin to make it look better after the fact, but yeah, the default ocean color is pretty far from what I had originally envisioned before they cut up the baseline. Alas. Logan’s color choice for the ocean tiles in the tripleA Classic map was better in my view, though still a little “neon glow” for my taste, but everything recent follows the standard color choices made for tripleA Revised, which is a little unfortunate. Anyhow, I think sea zone color is an important first choice, since it carries through after you color the baseline.

Totally on board with points 5-8. I really believe that its possible to have a more complex map (in terms of total territories/sz, or number of player nations, even the unit roster) without upending the learning curve, provided the basic rules are universal and other stuff isn’t too wild like with objectives and whatnot.

Anyhow, just wanted to offer some encouragement. Looks cool so far

ps. curious historical aside, in western painting blue pigment was rare and so many famous painters used clever tricks to limit its use. With a limited pallet of Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ocher (red mud, brown mud, yellow mud) + Black and White, you can create the illusion of blue in your grays. Rembrandt was pretty slick at it. The storm on the sea of Galilee is a fun example. Almost all the blues you see in the sky/ocean there are actually grays, but they appear blue when viewed next to the colors that surround them. I think its cool. Anyhow point being, probably way too much thought can go into choosing the blues and the grays lol, but I think its important hehe.

Ukraine Offensive:

There are two basic versions of the Ukraine opener, we can call them Ukraine “Alpha and Beta.” Or Ukraine “Heavy and Light”, or whatever you want, but it comes down to whether you bring 3 tanks or just 2 tanks into the Ukraine fight. In previous games, this opener was often described as “the Summer offensive” but whatever the season, it is a fairly standard issue Russian opener in A&A, and a good one to be familiar with. Here is the move…

Alpha: Hit Ukraine “Heavy” with everything in range, then send everything else to attack W. Russia!
3 infantry, 1 artillery, 3 tanks and 2 fighters to Ukraine.
9 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 tank to W. Russia.

In Ukraine retreat after the first round of the combat phase. This is what we call a “Strafe” in A&A. With any luck this will allow you to peel off a good portion of the German ground forces in Ukraine, but still allow you to retreat your tanks safely to Caucasus where they can defend the Russian factory, while simultaneously threatening Karelia on the blitz, and supporting the British position in India (both 2 moves from Caucasus.) Note that attacking beyond the first wave is a little dangerous, it runs the risk that you will “sweep” Ukraine entirely and be forced to occupy the territory. Its also possible with 3 tanks that you might get a strong opening roll and take the territory outright. This is rather less desirable than a solid strafe, since it leaves your tanks exposed to German counter attack, but its still workable. If that happens be prepared to send UK assistance to Russia immediately, in the form of UK fighters and Persian infantry. Otherwise, if the strafe succeeds as planned, what you want to do is continuously stack W. Russia with infantry and artillery, and use the Tanks in Caucasus to threaten larger scale attacks against the Germans. In other words, you don’t want to use these tanks in minor combats, but instead save them for the really large engagements. They can also be used to defend or liberate India in a pinch, should the UK find itself in trouble and desperate for Stalin to sacrifice a tank or two on their behalf.

Beta: The same as above except here you hit Ukraine “Light” with just 2 tanks, and send the other tank to W. Russia.
3 infantry, 1 artillery, 2 tanks and 2 fighters to Ukraine.
9 infantry, 2 artillery, 2 tanks to W. Russia.

If you have a brilliant first round of combat in Ukraine, or a catastrophic first round of combat, it is still possible to strafe/retreat your tanks at advantage, but ideally what you want to do is take Ukraine and destroy that German fighter. The advantage to this approach over going heavy, is that you are only putting 2 tanks at risk to the German counter attack in Ukraine, and the second tank in W. Russia increases the likelihood that you will take the territory in fewer rounds of combat (e.g. taking less hits from the German defender in the process) and a stronger defense in W. Russia, should the Germans go crazy and attempt to counter attack here.

The Non-Combat move for both these openings is essentially the same, with a couple important options depending on the results of the battles, especially in W. Russia.

1 Sub from sz 4 to sz 7 (remember to take as the first casualty if possible)
1 AAAgun from Moscow to W. Russia
2 fighters land in Caucasus
2 inf from Evenki to Archangel
1 inf from Novosibirsk to Moscow.
1 inf from Yakut to Evenki
2 inf each from Bury and Far East to Yakut

Then, if the battles went poorly consider sending the Caucasus AA gun to W. Russia, and1 Kazakh infantry to Caucasus.

Otherwise you can send the 1 Kazakh infantry forward to Szech (optimal) to save the Chinese Flying Tiger, which can then be used to support W. Russia on defense.

This opening supports most of the Russian purchases I highlighted in the post above, though I definitely prefer the 6 and 5 hitpoint builds that include some additional Russian tanks to maximize the armor advantage, especially in the case of a strong strafe.

Follow up: expect to receive immediate British air support in W. Russia, Archangel, or Caucasus depending on how the British wish to respond to Germany’s opening moves. Ideally you want the British bomber to be in Caucasus or Kazakh to provide the maximum threat against Japan, and you want to get the two British spitfires from UK into a position where they can fly to India if they have to which means either W. Russia or Archangel. The US fighter and infantry in Szech should pull back to protect the center. I consider a sz 61 attack on the second Japanese transport fairly critical, though it is possible to focus on Egypt instead if you wish, in the later case be prepared to evacuate/trade India somewhat earlier and as the Russians you may have to use your armor to liberate India for the British.

There is a third Ukraine opener worth mentioning, which we might call Ukraine Gamma, or the Soviet fighter rescue. This looks exactly like the heavy opening with 3 tanks to Ukraine, except rather than sending the Moscow fighter into the Ukraine attack, you send it to Egypt instead (4 moves) to defend the British position from a G1 attack. This puts the fighter out of commission for an entire round, but some will go this route under OOB conditions for fear of a losing Egypt and the British fighter stationed there to German amphibious. I think this Soviet fighter to Egypt strategy works somewhat better in Russian games that don’t involve a Ukraine attack, but that’s a discussion for another post.

Next time, we can look at some other Russian openers. Such as moves and placement strategies that involve tank trapping Caucasus, and just stacking West Russia with everything (or almost everything). Or the merits of other strategies like the Belo Blast with the northern focus. Or the Baltic gambits. Or hardcore KJF positioning. But I’ve been typing for a while now and this at least gets us started. Hopefully some of this stuff will help the newer players to 42 sec Ed. I know many of us have been through this stuff before, but the threads get buried and can be hard for new people to locate, or they spiral into endless digressions and die off. So here’s a new thread, where we can just discuss Russian opening tutorial stuff again ad nauseam  
:-D

Have fun and good gaming all!
Catch you next time
-Elk

(Edit: I removed the outdated saved game attachments. If I get a chance I’ll update them with a current build of triplea.)

Cool thread! I haven’t kicked around here in ages, but I like the concepts above.

Haha yeah, I’d say Iron War’s scheme would be tough for a physical board. The Fuel=Unit Movement concept works ok in game with the aid of the computer, machine doing all the counting and such, but tracking it as a separate movement related resource is more than I’d want to try in my head or on pen and paper.

I think the idea of fuel as infrastructure or fuel=money, or even the stuff where the fuel is a moveable unit itself. I think that would be easier to execute ftf than the mech naval and air units all consuming fuel to move around idea present in Iron War. But then again it might work, if it was simplified quite a bit. Fewer units involved, or maybe a more basic scheme for how its consumed during gameplay? I do like that it gives oil rules a try, some emphasis and value on certain territories that might not otherwise be reflected in A&A style games. Beyond just an extra ipc or two built into the TT I guess, which is what we usually get hehe. Giving the oil thing special consideration on the map, since it was such a major factor in the actual war. Seems apt and cool!

best Elk

For a long time now I’ve been hoping to see an official digital platform for A&A (one with at least some kind of connection to the designers and publishers) that could be used for alpha testing a new game before its actually released in print. I mean like a tandem release, where the new physical game follows the online drop.

Analog playtesting the way A&A has been handled in the past is pretty laborious and time intensive, as a cursory look back at the larry boards will reveal. Even with an open alpha and tons of feedback on forums and such for each proposal, its still a challenge to aggregate everything and to rely on anecdotal after action reports. I get the impression that there is never really enough time to hold the kind of informal FtF tournaments that would be required, or to get enough people all going gangbusters at the same time to actually get enough data beforehand to determine whether its fully cooked before running it to the printers in china and pushing it out on the shelves.

With a digital alpha you could speed up the whole process considerably and have gamesaves to use as evidence, to help parse the overall play-pattern and player experience in each iteration.

I think A&A online could provide a real opportunity, if ever we got a shot on a re-issue of 1942. Even a re-release using the same base map could be fun. I admit new maps get me more excited than the existing ones (there were a couple changes from Spring to 2nd Ed so least there’s a precedent), but even using the same map as 2nd ed, with set up changes or a rules change or two there are a lot of ways to get at a new take on things.

I guess what I’m hoping for is that A&Aonline goes beyond just offering a way to play 1942.2 or any of the existing A&A games digitally, and might eventually serve as a hub for developing the next A&A games. A place where the players could actually be more involved with that process, and provide feedback on things when it might still make a difference, e.g. before its shrink wrapped and sent off to stores.

I know there are some core table toppers who would probably never really play A&A on a computer, but who might reconsider doing so, if hopping online also meant possible glimpses at the next upcoming board. Or having other ways to get involved, provide feedback while it might still influence the basic set up/balance design, or otherwise engage with something that they eventually get to put on an actual table. I think we could see a pretty strong 3rd edition going at it that way.

Anyhow, just a few thoughts. To me the real longer term promise of an online A&A project would be something like that. And why I get exicted about things like possible toolsets or map/scenario editors.

@VictoryFirst

I hacked together a quick fix for you guys for sz 64/65. Posted it to the thread. Let me know if she does the trick. Just need to replaced the BaseTiles and ReliefTiles folders with those updated ones and add in the Polygon txt for the new shapes.

I can copy over the changes to the expansion boxes map when I get back to my house in a couple days.

Thanks again for hunting these down! Tough one to spot right there for sure. Appreciate the extra sets of eyes hehe

All the best

Elk

@barnee @VictoryFirst

Here is the update for sz 64/65. Probably gave me the slip cause it’s harder to see the map wrap in GIMP. I just hacked in a couple lines, hopefully passes muster.

Looks like so

Here is a zip folder with a BaseTiles and ReliefTiles folders updated (already run through the tile breaker.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nqernvZtD8MYOstgAblw8DDZ4Hrk4JLb/view?usp=sharing

Here are the Base and Relief as single images

Base
https://drive.google.com/file/d/134oogwEtlLW1kkHR_zvvXJCpDtUxiDzH/view?usp=sharing

Relief
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zRi0q7AqTQrHfCikDEnW1aAw5J5QRe0Y/view?usp=sharing

Here is the Polygon txt attached below

polygons.txt

Let me know if that works for ya. I’m pinballing around at the moment, but I can update the other boxes map/polys on Friday. Or you can just copy/paste that section over from the UHD if you need it before then.

Thanks again for helping me catch all these damned connection goofs lol. Hopefully we nailed em all! Good work gang

@VictoryFirst

Good catch! Probably easiest is to angle and drop the line off Peru to comes down. Should be a simple enough fix to the baseline, I just need to cutout the new line in the relief. I’ll try to get it sorted by the weekend

@barnee

Here’s a quick edit that should be serviceable for now. Just needs a little touch up for the blur.

zip with the BaseTiles and ReliefTiles for the map folder

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZkhnF2Dzwx-9K2vUFWLqI-rE1WwDLafA/view?usp=sharing

Here is the txt file for the polys for the shift

polygons.txt

Should look like this when you fire it up. I can clean the border fade a bit later. This was just to strong arm the line into place. I tried to leave a little bit on the Afghanistan side just to suggest the shape. Just like pretending the frontier there is sorta disputed. Makes sense hopefully.

ps. I was looking at this image when I made it initially. Well not this image exactly, now for some reason I can only find that map on Etsy, or at one of those image clearing-house sites that seem to have scooped everything and put it behind a paywall in the past couple years. But anyway you can see off there to the righthand side the Wakhjir Pass that leads to China. Like since ancient times Silk road style, but it’s pretty tiny so I think OOB it just gets clipped or abstracted into the Mountains next door. Just a holdover from the larger map probably. We’ll nix it to avoid the confusion.

The sea zone Geometry is harder, just cause so much is already in place. If I had it to do again I’d probably rework the warp of the entire globe to make it a bit more G40 OOB-esque. I imagine the OOB may have been drawn by hand or using the warps and such, like in Photoshop to stretch and morph stuff. But because tripleA needs the baseline at 1px and 100% black it means retracing the entire thing to do a big warp change like that. Otherwise the lines will have interpolation applied and go fuzzy when using the transformation tools. Plus it would nix whatever is already going on with the coordinates in the polygons files or the place files. OOB is basically 2:1 aspect ratio, like where each theater board is a square. Here it’s more rectangular like with the whole thing targeting more 16:9-ish. That’s like before the compression for the Global south that you’d see on the OOB map, I just mean the overall dimensions. Also how North America is stitched in/re-sized. It means the horizontal lines will strike at different spots when trying to match the Sea Zone shapes exactly. Kinda tough, I wasn’t able to find an awesome solution, but I also didn’t really start with the G40 in mind, which made it unnecessarily complex there probably. Like if I’d just started from the G40 might have been easier to move a couple islands around or stretch Asia and North America to fit just so. Maybe for a 2.0 if I ever get around to it hehe

Good catch!

I’ll fix it up over the weekend

I think that part of the board gets a little tricky just cause it’s where the two sides of the map meet OOB. Looking at the cardboard version, I think basically that portion of Afghanistan east of Kunduz with the little strip was sorta folded into the neighboring impassible tile there. I think we can just carve into the tip a little bit to remove the errant connection.

Yeah I agree the geometry for the Sea Zones in the Central Pacific can be a bit awkward in translation. I think I spent many many hours just looking at the board on my carpet, and then on the laptop to compare and see if I was managing the connections alright, and still had a bunch of stuff giving me the slip.

For OOB you got that situation where the naval sculpts are pretty large, so the sea zones need to be extra beefy to hold them all. I drew the landmap first for that other board, then collapsed a bunch of the boundaries to get back to the G40 playscale. Sea Zones were the last thing added. If I was going the other way, I could bend the land territories to fit the more familiar sea zone shapes, but I started with the warp for the continents first. Here I basically tried to preserve the contours of the land, and then bent the sea zones to match, if that makes sense.

It’s sorta hit or miss in some spots just because of the overall shape of the continents. Like if prepping for the tournaments there’d be an advantage to using Bung’s, just cause those sz shapes fit the OOB and the land is more abstract. To me it felt somehow more believable to keep the land territory shapes and those contours a little truer to reality and just adjust the abstract sea zone shapes where I had to. I mean there’s still hella distortion all over the place, but just that idea that I could try to make the shapes a bit more familiar in South Asia or Coastal China, or a bit less compression going on for Africa and such. But then where the horizontal lines strike into the coastal TTs, had to make some adjustments along the way. Part of it was just trying to get some of those lines to hit the right coastal territories, when the stretches weren’t quite as extreme.

I didn’t even notice this sub-section till just now lol

13 team games!? That’s pretty rad

I don’t suppose anyone wants to tool around with the map? I upscaled the old baseline I had using same method as the other jumbo maps, but I’m kinda spent. There’s a fair bit of tedium in re-assigning the centers for the enlarged map. Once the centers are assigned it’s much faster to re-run the polygrabber in the map tools to enlarge everything.

https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3803/uhd-domination-nml-upscaled-baseline

Sorry only just saw this

So step one would be finding the right image editing program for what you’re trying to achieve. TripleA uses raster graphics images (basically png) and is not suitable for printing. Upscaling the largest relief I’ve made in tripleA and trying to print it at 600 dpi the filesize gets quite beefy. Basically an image that’s like 50mb for use in tripleA is going to climb way up by orders of magnitude into the many gigabytes. It will also tax the RAM pretty hard if you’re trying to edit an image that large (in actual dimensions) like trying to use multiple layers at once. I have a pretty high end gaming laptop and I topped out around 8000p before GIMP started giving me headaches and slowing to a crawl.

What you probably want is an image that you can manipulate as SVG rather than PNG. A vector so you can upscale the image to any dimensions that way (basically the same way font works.) I would try Inkscape or Adobe, and try to get a pull of the image as a vector graphic.

You can start the same as you would in tripleA by creating a baseline image of the basic world map, the continent contours or world warp you want and the territory or sea zone divisions, showing just the basic borderlines in 100% black at 1px width at the desired dimensions for the digital thing.

A physical print would be much larger, so imagine that on your screen you got 72p per inch, on paper that needs to be 600 dpi. You can go lower say 300 dots per inch if it’s very graphic, but a photo quality print is basically like 600p, which is pretty hefty. In a program like inkscape or illustrator etc you can translate a raster image into something that works for stuff like signage, you know, so like making a giant banner image to put on the side of a truck or hang outside a building - same sorta deal here for the scale of the image you’d want to make. Probably the size of a 6 or 8 foot banquet table, possibly larger depending, on what you’re trying to pull off.

If you have the map drawn out at scale, you can scan in sections at A3 or A4 size with a flat scanner and then reassemble the image, to pull it at the highest resolution you can before bringing that image into inkscape to create a vector of it.

ps. here are some youtube tutorial videos on inkscape just to see what sort of stuff I mean. You can probably find more just pulling at those threads. Once you have a map design you can put in tripleA to playtest it by creating a baseline from your svg, exporting the image as a bitmap or png where the borderlines are just solid black ideally at 1px width for those lines, or as close as you can get. For a map image something that’s like 2000-4000p tall and about twice as wide or larger works well for digital sculpts which are png images at 48-54px tall up to 125% currently in tripleA. The map size in tripleA is sorta limited by the unit graphics sizes and the windows in the UI. In inkscape you can make it larger, like for whatever makes sense to have the print look decent. Anyhow, just a quick example you can skip around to see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ns028ihACs&list=PL_NagE_y_IhIBNAzw3nFBiF01OKnaltmJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqtnSTe6qM

https://youtu.be/kS2nrXuR128?t=2611

for tripleA you can use GIMP to make the relief images in png. Here’s an example of similar videos in that program

https://youtu.be/HLmOpEETjEo?t=646

ps. @barnee Amusingly, I didn’t even realize this was a separate thread until right now lol. I just clicked the little notification to bring me here, thought it was the other UHD thread, so apologies if the above/below sounded sorted confusing. I thought it had just kicked on to a new page. I actually forgot there even was a General forum down at the bottom of the tree lol.

@Panzerstahl-Helm Yeah this is like the main thing that appeals to me about tripleA, the fact that you can go under the hood and tinker. Sorta like painting sculpts or using pennies on the physical boards to do whatever. Some of the original graphics have been adjusted many times to change the tint colors, add drop shadows or things of that sort. The main thing that sorta organized most graphics is that they were 48px squares. Though tripleA can go up to 96x54 px. The extra 8px tall isn’t the most massive ever, but the extra width is pretty significant, since that’s almost double if you use a graphic that is say 2:1 rather or 4:3 aspect rather than 1:1 aspect. For stuff like tanks, aircraft, ships, bases etc this is pretty huge. But when I wanted to try and do an upscale for global the only set of tripleA WW2 units that attempted to go jumbo were Frostion’s, so I asked him if I could use those to create a national tinted set. In his game the presentation was more fully painted with a roundel at the feet and a 3/4 drop shadow on everything.

Mainly I just removed the roundels and shadows and colorized the units for a monotone tint in the same color family, then went back in and painted on some faces or a safety color. Essentially to make it looks more like the standard World War II sculpts (which are totally monotone) but just larger and with some flare to spice it up. I added basically main infantry units and whatever tech stuff was missing, so mostly aircraft to fill in the gaps there. Basically substituting the graphics in the standard folder for the newer stuff at the larger size. Most games don’t really work like that, like where you can just open a subfolder and see hundreds of tiny png image files of like everything used in the display the way you can in tripleA. To browse around see what’s there, replace stuff by using a different file with the same label etc. Typically that stuff would all be just encoded I’d guess. But tripleA is so oldschool that you can just see all the tiny rasters for everything and get a sense of how they come together in-game.

This is great for stuff like customizing and house rules, but then there’s also a dilemma of uniformity or standardizing stuff so that it looks cohesive and doesn’t depart too much from the basis. That’s what I meant about the whole pg13 thing and sorta separating off the main materials from whatever additional stuff. Because one can go in and and explore other aspects in more detail via mods and such, but when it’s all in the standard folder kinda gets confusing potentially.

Current Global package is very much like that, where there are additional graphics to support all the mods and whatnot inside the main map folder. This is why it was challenging initially to know which stuff actually needed to be replaced or which graphics where just like holdovers from other iterations or only used in a mod say. Initially I just copied everything I was using into my UHD global folder to keep it all together somewhere, but now I think it’s probably a bit easier to have inside the UHD only the stuff that is actually used for standard Global, and everything else can live alongside that in some separate customizers/mod folder, or basically separate maps for separate mods to keep the main one lighter footprint. I don’t know that we’re going to do much better than like 80mb, even if removing all the extraneous graphics, so it’d be more just to keep it orderly. Most of the filesize is coming from the reliefTiles themselves, since the single image is quite large.

TripleA can’t use svg really, like for anything other than font, and even that if displayed in the UI is treated as a raster graphic, so the main map image we see in-game, the relief is just a giant ass PNG. It get’s pretty hefty the more pixels that have to be displayed, especially if in color. At first I tried to do this UHD thing at like 16000px the same as the other big map, but I had a lot of difficulty there since the image becomes so large and it’s a challenge to say create an image off it in GIMP with a dozen layers. At 11000px I was able to get maybe 6 layers going at once before GIMP would just devour my ram and start locking up, like any sort of filter or copy/paste action taking many seconds and the whole map to take a few minutes to export. And that for an image not particularly crazy, like these reliefs are sorta basic and bare bones in the grand scheme, but then the unit graphics sorta carry it, just cause they’re all jumbo and have a bit more detail.

Anyhow, to the earlier point, if looking for some familiar faces I’d restrict it just these figures… Not these box cover illustrations but perhaps the photographs they painted from, or just the same figure in a different photograph, or stuff like that. Basically for the stuff that is in print

the 1941 starter board just uses the same box cover art as the Anniversary.

1942 Spring, and 1942 second edition, A&AO all use the same illustration.

I think probably any historical figure depicted on a box cover since AA50 came out would be ok to use for a visual, but probably comes down to how it’s purposed. Like if you go to the source image, not the painted illustrations I mean, but the dudes depicted. So like you see on the boards for Japan like Genda and Yamamoto, I think maybe Hara? Like usually IJN seems to be the theme there. Basically the films Tora Tora Tora or Midway. The theater boards tend to show more like the regular GI Joes, but I think Guadalcanal has like Nimitz and some other dude who’s face I can’t recall right now. The Pacific board 2000 didn’t have figures just painted aircraft and ships. Europe 1999 had sorta the generic soldiers in a photomontage. I think the more recent boards post AH aegis are sorta more in the ballpark.

It’s hard for me to remember who painted what or when, but Jim Butcher, Beasley, Sansaver etc the gang there all kinda set the art direction over the years so that it’s fairly consistent from board to board even decades on. I think the stuff from the 80s and early aughts still looks pretty cool, but for figures I’d stick to the more recent boards for the changing times. Anyhow, massive digression there. Glad you like it though! Have fun out there!

For sure!

Yeah, there’s like some sort of weird uncanny valley aspect too, like when the game becomes a bit too realistic that way visually, sorta loses an element there which I kinda dig. So in Iron Blitz for example, it was just a name and some stars, sorta at the level of Looney Tunes cartoon, but not fully visualized in any way.

I think what might be more interesting is some sort of caricature of a General, or probably even better would be just some Officer Corps thing, or an advisor who could maybe grimace when the dice go bad, but without going much beyond that. Then one could give it the flavor, but without going out in the weeds. I think the little gif style video clips or newspapers clippings, or even the cool end game stats graphs could probably do a similar type of visual flare but I don’t know how to do that stuff really. Like the sound or animation stuff. But yeah sorta cartoons and penny flyers, I just feel like that fits the plastic army men vibe of the thing somewhat better somehow hehe.

You can do whatever makes the most sense, but to me it’s sorta not necessary for a global style game, but then I didn’t really know what all might be useful for an expansion really. I found for myself that, as it starts to look more realistic in the vibe, the uncanny valley starts to open up. Even with the map I see the same, like if you magnify in too close on a topo it sorta starts coming apart at the seams a bit in that way, but then the cartoon aspect kinda compensates with map colors or whatever. Kinda trippy how that works

ps. Anyway I’m kinda rambling, the short of it would be something like just trying to keep Global more general audience or pg13 in the vibe. I think there’s probably room for other takes on it as well, but for the regular game probably anything not assigned could get nixed? Then whatever else just lives in some sort of customizer thing where peeps can riff and do variants, in the same ways they do on the home board. At first I was thinking just put a bunch of stuff in so it’s easier to play around with, but then that could get confusing if trying to figure out which stuff the game actually uses, like for tech say or default options of that sort, as opposed to just like random HR idea I had once hehe. Basically so that when they open the Global folder or the UHD analogy the player would sorta see the same stuff in the same place, like even if the graphics are different, same folders and such, just so they’d know what’s what like that when browsing. Anyway, just let me know, whatever seems best or easiest for you. I’m playing Dragons again, so just hit me up if ya need anything dude. Catch ya next round!

pps. oh and just one other thought, so for the commander dude graphics, if any, I would probably follow the cues from the Box cover art of the OOBs, but like post AA50. Meaning I probably wouldn’t highlight any figures that aren’t making those more recent covers. The old MB box art blue box from 1984 and even the Revised box from 2002 features figures and flags that I would just avoid in 2024. Like if the they weren’t in Tora Tora Tora or the film Patton as an already semi iconographic figure, but even the poster type art for a box cover or manual art feels different than say a piece that moves on the gameboard. For that it’s almost like you’d rather see something off brand, than big name historical figures, since it’s always kinda dicey. Faces are somehow charming though, and I think there is something to be said for providing something to RP against. You know so like instead of pretending to be anyone specific it’s more like some other name or just Commander 1, 2, 3 etc. I think if it was more like random non commissioned officers who pop up in some news reel at the end of the year, or in a battle screen, you could sorta capture that. Like those old Might & Magic games where dudes look upset and scowl cause the battle is going south lol. Maybe like an operator who patches in the news from the front at round’s end, ticker tape style. For a general or admiral type unit that plays on the field, I’d consider just some extra jumbo Tank or Ships or Sculpt-look inf type, an abstract Chevron maybe? Not sure though, I’m not familiar enough with those house rules.