@KurtGodel7 Yeah, players are relentless optimizers, so min-maxing is always a tough problem to try and get rid of. The one thing you really want to prevent is players feeling too railroaded, where it feels like there is only one possible strategy you can use if you want to win. If the Soviets can only survive by playing a very specific build order, people are not going to have as much fun playing them as they do with another nation that gets more choices.

One more idea... have you tried testing what happens if you reverse the order on your air turns? What if everyone does a blind allocation on their fighters first, you reveal those, and then you commit your bombers once you've seen where the fighters are? That would allow players of a weak air force to do some misdirection (send your fighters one way but your bombers another) , or take advantage of vulnerabilities where your opponent didn't send enough fighters.

Or, since you've included heavy fighters alongside normal fighters, you could further differentiate their roles by having one type get allocated in the first round, and the other type in the second round - the fighter is an aggressive unit you commit blindly, the heavy fighter is a reactive unit you send after you've seen where some of the enemy air force is going.

You could also split the different bomber types between the two rounds - medium bombers and strategic bombers go in the first round so that strategic bombing raids are telegraphed and easier to respond to, but dive bombers and torpedo bombers get to sneak in on the second round and become harder to defend against.

Not sure which particular combination would be best, but shaking up which types go in which order seems like a good approach to investigate.

@Vendetta said:

@KurtGodel7 said:

The system sounds elegant in theory, but one issue that stands out even before any play testing is that if you’re the weaker power, there is zero incentive to build anything but fighters - bombers of any sort seem useless if you don’t have air superiority. And while there was eventually a point in the historical WW2 where Germany became desperate enough to adopt that as official production policy, that wasn’t the case for most of it - most powers were still trying to field both offensive and defensive capabilities simultaneously.

The Soviets never parked their Il-2 fleet out in Siberia to wait until the VVS had won air superiority - they used it, constantly, accepting the heavy losses that entailed. So a system that encourages players to do that is rewarding unrealistic behavior.

A few ideas on ways to address that:

A) Shrink your air theaters. Instead of one for the entire Eastern Front, imagine having about three different air zones there (north, center, south). More zones means fighter coverage is spread thinner, creating opportunities for the weaker side to gain local superiority - the Germans might prevail in two of the zones, but the Soviets could concentrate their forces to win control over the third one.

B) Allow fighters on escort missions to take hits meant for the bombers they’re protecting, and allow those bombers to carry out their strafing missions if they make it through even if their side has lost the battle for air superiority overall. Systems with all or nothing results (only the side that wins the air battle gets to bomb) naturally encourage unrealistic min-maxing style gameplay.

C) Use your unique tech system to give the Soviets some advantages that encourage a mixed air strategy instead of just spamming fighters - you could make their dive bomb bombers harder to shoot down, or you could make them cheap enough to be worth using aggressively even if the losses are heavy. You would also have to do that for any other cases where the system is optimizing for less interesting play.

A is probably the easiest route to test since it doesn’t involve any other changes to the system, you just play out a few test games and redraw the air zone boundaries between each to see which results in the most interesting game dynamics. B is the next most promising, it also changes up just one element, but that element is one of your system’s core attributes. C is probably a development trap where you’d end up having to constantly fiddle around with a bunch of different bespoke elements you’ve come up with to patch different issues.

Originally the game had more air theaters. I'm in favor of more air theaters in theory. In practice the larger number of air theaters created a GUI problem. Everything about the air phase is new, including the GUI. Without a clear, simple GUI literally nothing else matters. I think I'm up to 24 engine change requests or something, many of which are intended to make that GUI simpler to understand and easier to use. Making each individual air theater larger, so that there would be fewer theaters overall, helped with the GUI. But there's still GUI progress to be made there. One could say that the perfect GUI would allow me to have a larger number of theaters without creating a GUI problem.

As to your point, I agree that if the Soviet player is the weaker participant in the air battle on the Eastern Front, he will buy air superiority aircraft only. Fighters, heavy fighters, etc. I also agree that this is ahistorical, and that in the real war the Soviets built dive bombers or ground attack aircraft, and threw them in to the fray regardless of the losses.

I don't know if you've played Domination 1914 No Man's Land. If you haven't, I'd recommend it. The reason I bring it up is because it makes a clearer distinction between offensively oriented units and defensively oriented units than you would normally see for a TripleA map. If you're on defense your unit mix should be trenches, conscripts, infantry, and heavy guns. Plus some air for your back-and-forth battles. If you're on offense your unit mix should be conscripts, infantry, field guns, cavalry, gass, and tanks. A player who's purely on defense will never buy a tank, a player who's purely on offense will never buy a heavy gun.

I believe the problem of min-maxing game play is baked into TripleA rules sets in general. While I know that my own game is a departure from the usual TripleA game in many ways, the underlying logic which causes min-maxing still remains. I've tried pushing back against this where I can, but I still feel like I'm just nibbling at the edges of the problem.

To take your option A: under my current system bombers are allocated first, then revealed to all players, and only then are fighters allocated. If for example the Soviet player were to send dive bombers to the southern portion of the German/Soviet front, the German player would be able to see this in air allocation, before he'd allocated his fighters. He'd then adjust by moving more air to the southern portion of the Soviet front.

You could say that I could make air allocation more blind. Okay, granted. I could. The weaker party could take advantage of this by getting some strafing runs through that would otherwise have been intercepted. But the stronger party could take advantage of this as well, and could use bomber-type aircraft to do enormous damage while the opponent's fighters were out of place to defend.

I hear what you're saying about Soviet dive bombers, and I realize my simulation of air combat is in some ways less rich than the actual history deserves. But the min maxing problem is a very tough nut to crack. My map was intended to do some things well: air combat, research, special units, a distinct flavor for each nation. It was not intended to solve the min max problem. Don't get me wrong: I'd very much welcome a solution!

As for idea B: I will grant that this could gently encourage the Soviets to buy dive bombers. Assume that a Soviet dive bombing mission will generally kill an anti-tank gun, doing 3 PUs of benefit for the USSR. If the fighter takes the interception hit instead of the dive bomber, that creates a 3 PU reward for the Soviets which would not otherwise have existed. But this would work both ways. Germany would do the same thing, allowing its dive bombers to get through as well. At some point the Soviet player starts to care more about protecting his own armies from the major losses inflicted by German dive bombers, as opposed to inflicting smaller losses on German armies with Soviet dive bombers.

Idea C--use the tech system--could be a way to encourage Soviet dive bombers. Historically Soviet ground attack aircraft were heavily armored. So I could justify giving Soviet dive bombers +1 to hitpoints if they research the appropriate tech. This doesn't necessarily solve the min maxing problem, but it could help somewhat.

One idea I'd come up with to push back against min maxing was to give nations unit-specific production centers. A nation gets one free dive bomber a turn, for example, from its dive bomber production center. I have not incorporated this idea into my map, however.

@KurtGodel7 said:

The system sounds elegant in theory, but one issue that stands out even before any play testing is that if you’re the weaker power, there is zero incentive to build anything but fighters - bombers of any sort seem useless if you don’t have air superiority. And while there was eventually a point in the historical WW2 where Germany became desperate enough to adopt that as official production policy, that wasn’t the case for most of it - most powers were still trying to field both offensive and defensive capabilities simultaneously.

The Soviets never parked their Il-2 fleet out in Siberia to wait until the VVS had won air superiority - they used it, constantly, accepting the heavy losses that entailed. So a system that encourages players to do that is rewarding unrealistic behavior.

A few ideas on ways to address that:

A) Shrink your air theaters. Instead of one for the entire Eastern Front, imagine having about three different air zones there (north, center, south). More zones means fighter coverage is spread thinner, creating opportunities for the weaker side to gain local superiority - the Germans might prevail in two of the zones, but the Soviets could concentrate their forces to win control over the third one.

B) Allow fighters on escort missions to take hits meant for the bombers they’re protecting, and allow those bombers to carry out their strafing missions if they make it through even if their side has lost the battle for air superiority overall. Systems with all or nothing results (only the side that wins the air battle gets to bomb) naturally encourage unrealistic min-maxing style gameplay.

C) Use your unique tech system to give the Soviets some advantages that encourage a mixed air strategy instead of just spamming fighters - you could make their dive bomb bombers harder to shoot down, or you could make them cheap enough to be worth using aggressively even if the losses are heavy. You would also have to do that for any other cases where the system is optimizing for less interesting play.

A is probably the easiest route to test since it doesn’t involve any other changes to the system, you just play out a few test games and redraw the air zone boundaries between each to see which results in the most interesting game dynamics. B is the next most promising, it also changes up just one element, but that element is one of your system’s core attributes. C is probably a development trap where you’d end up having to constantly fiddle around with a bunch of different bespoke elements you’ve come up with to patch different issues.

i think that aura is also very important, which swan knights used to have.
the spiders are too cheap and very good in defense.
These two units now require some adjustments.