Name World at War
Description World War II in 1940 on a large map
https://axisandallies.fandom.com/wiki/World_At_War

Good Points

Reasonably balanced A wide variety of units

Bad Points

Japan divided into 2 powers Ahistorical territory values

@rogercooper

Those are cool!

Yeah that cartoon! total Inception lol

Oh it's this dude's work...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Edes_Harrison

The challenge he faced was that most Americans, like many people at the time I guess and still today, they were so familiar and ingrained with the Mercator from schooldays and the era of the sail/naval navigation going back several centuries, that they really struggled to understand how the advent of aviation had changed the game. Or like why these faraway points were so key to the war effort. So they basically hired on a technical artist (rather than a cartagropher) to reimagine how these distances and war situations could be depicted in popular media. The maps were in mags and periodicals, so I think they're sorta Duckburg style, like fighting the war of ideas, with that sort of jingoism baked in, but it definitely anticipates stuff like GPS Satellite maps or the UI's from video games. Like I can just see it morph from that into Hearts of Iron after a couple more decades floating around.

I just think it's cool, since it sorta takes root during that period and comes to define the new look, along with commercial advertisements and pulp illustration (pin ups and such) the fonts and whatever, which is why I think it looks cool for window dressing type thing, but I'm not sure it works so well as a main map campaign view.

It would work maybe for a mini map though, or an endgame stats view thing, or just alternative style view from a hotkey. But then I have no idea how something like that could be translated into tripleA without like a total UI overhaul that can somehow use two baselines at once hehe. Hence the pipe dream.

It's to me interesting cause for Classic, the world projection there was clearly Mercator style, but then every A&A board since Revised and then later War Room, they riff more like some of those Harrison maps from the 1940s to me. Like the way some of the continents are compressed and such, or the crops that were chosen. Almost like it was a crop and swap, where the maps were tilted up from there to hammer home the idea. But then the north pole view sorta doesn't really do the telescoping on Europe and the Pacific the way the dual Theater Atlases usual show the war in the books, like with a double inset with room for many sculpts. To me the G40 is more like those, but then when I think back to Iron Blitz, it totally reminds me of those Harrison map vibes. Almost as if the one is a call back of the other. Even down to the names there, it's like a whole harris thing haha

@black_elk During WW2, use of the Mercator projection was more common.

I am not sure what projection this is.

I did not find the polar projection used in War Room easy to use.

Any discussion of map projection should reference this cartoon https://xkcd.com/977/

Just in case we ever get a UI wizard on the dev team, I think it would be interesting to try for something like this in a display...

I mean like the Harrison/Harris approach,==there's just a whole vibe there going from something like this in the 1940s... to A&A in the 80s or something like War Room more recently heheh

The tripleA default has Mercator/Equidistant etc familiar North is up maps, because that's what works well on a flat table, but a digital table top we have more options. When I look at the war room layout from kickstarter it has a whole sweep to it like that's what a UI should look like, some digital version of that.

Prob with the current tripleA presentation for that is the map zoom, since that is all keyed up for rectangular maps, moreso than the circles/squares or riffs on the Azimuthal projection. But then I was thinking maybe if it had a double view, like two hemispheres, so say that the map on the left or the mini might look like world projection we see here, and the one on the right might be more like a rectangular crop within a circular/oval which is more like a theater view?

Idea would be to have two maps that display simultaneously with redundant information but displayed differently for vibes or impact, or something like a playable mini map at say 50% and the 100% on the same board, Iron Blitz view meets G40 panned out say? So maybe one side has that pulled out global view, the other the zoomed in battle view on the curve, and the player can switch between them with a hotkey, or zoom out and see them both at once.

Like imagining the Azimuth/War Room style view would be the left square, and the square on the right would be some theater zoom view of the same with larger unit displays and such, but all on that 2:1 overall map dimension for the survey view where both show together.

I'm certain this can't really be achieved right now in tripleA, since it'd need at least 2 maps working together, but I mean like for the moonshot, would be cool if the Harrison atlas from 44 had like a grab and drag wheel for the global survey view, but then we end up with something more like a regular A&A map from the table top for the campaign/battle/tactical view. That would be fun!