Proposed Map: Domination 1941

[Black_Elk]

Word! heheh

Here it is with a quick G40 paintjob. Borders should be closed up proper now

[Cernel]

@black_elk Am I understanding correctly this is supposed to be a map-skin of WWII Global? Meaning that it gives the same game as the original, just with a different visual.

If so, the non-Dutch part of New Guinea should be a single territory.

[Black_Elk]

@cernel Ah thanks! I'll fix it in the baseline right now

Yeah that was the idea. First get one that looks aces for Global.

Then we can make another version with subdivisions once we know that G40 one looks correct. At least in terms of the connections and such!

Ok got it, fixed the bitmap image in the dropbox link and the painted reference post above. Let me know if there's anything else you see that I missed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j7omf0s69t1r3k/TripleA_4k_G40.png?dl=0

Catch you guys tomorrow!

Best Elk

ps. here's a more 40-into-41-ish vibe on ownership, but with the 'regular' G40 TTs.

[Schulz]

@black_elk

If there will be another version with subdivisions;

Japan is shown to close to Vancouver as much as it is to Vietnam. Northern Pacific can be shrinked for gameplay reason. But if realism is the top priority, Japan should be closer to Vietnam than Vancouver.

Also you might want to divide Southwestern Dutch Guinea because Japan never captured southern part of the island.

[Black_Elk]

@schulz Here it is with those earlier tiles overlaid with the White/Black switch again.

For the Pacific, my impression was that by shrinking the Americas in A&A, the idea is that all those coastal sz tiles represent much larger distances than the tiles in say the South Pacific.

The warp on this area of the OOB board is even more extreme than in Europe, with the North Pacific compressed by almost 50% and the South Pacific enlarged by almost 50%, and obviously many of those smaller islands and sz are made fairly gigantic along the way OOB hehe.

I'm not sure of the best solution if what you want is just to have Japan even further from Vancouver, beyond expanding the width of the entire board in that area. It's possible to insert more ocean, east of Hawaii if one wanted. It's also possible to slide the Americas down a bit, which might create a similar effect. My main goal was to minimize unnecessary dead space in the oceans by focusing the warp on the areas of major activity.

I guess I was definitely prioritizing gameplay over realism there, or at least trying to find some sort of happy medium between the OOB gameboard and the real world.

I'd think maybe the best approach would be to create the impression of more distance by inserting more sz tiles. Or else to increase the width of the map slightly, which kinda throws off the 16:9 aspect, but then maybe maybe that's not super important anyway. I'm not sure how much of the Antarctic region in the far south one wants to retain either. I don't like scrolling past too much deadspace on the map myself, especially when you're right on top of it. So if the distances feel more abstract anyway, and it's more important to just be able to see what's happening at a glance, I kind feel like we can get away with it, provided the Pac is at least still wider than the Atlantic at a glance. That might just be me though and more the way I play. I think OOB and Bung's version both show a ton of compression on the West Coast of North America. Since I didn't distort the shape of North America as much, it's probably reading a fair bit larger and contributing to that sense of the shorter distance. They're not that far off actually, this map compared to Bung's, but the rest of the West Coast is shaped pretty differently here than in OOB, you know where Mexico displays like North of Japan lol.

I'd say for every large sz or sz with an island, we could try to do some splits and see how it starts shaking out.

If ya got any thoughts on fun splits for the sz divisions, bang out the red marker and we'll go to town hehe

[TheDog]

@black_elk
Im not a A&A player, but my 2p, your aim of gameplay over real distance is a winner for me. There is enough SZ and islands to make for a very interesting island hopping pacific game.

Japan is sitting in one large SZ, should it be split along the axis of NNE to SSW to make it a West SZ & East SZ ?

[Schulz]

@black_elk If the main goal is playability and eliminating useless sea zones then the current distances are fine.

[Black_Elk]

@thedog

Yeah those are the definitely good Qs. I mean it would make sense to me to have some SZ coming off Japan sorta like rays of a sunburst and then to give them a protected drop back spot or just more variety in the approaches there. And then for basically all the major island chains to have a SZ that bisects the islands, so the chain become more strategically usefully for aircraft movement around the map. That'd be my thought.

Here's the biggie with those land subdivisions again, I still think any of those could get tweaked, they're just roughs from the earlier draft... I find that if I open the map and look at it at 100% like that, really cozy up, it feels like there could be many more sz arranged around the board.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6d719ncdzub7lli/TripleA_4k_Domination_1941_painted.png?dl=0

Here it is back in black line... needs some clean up from the G40 tweaks, but gives an impression.

white lines

Here is one of Hepp's concepts that shows many of the tiny islands bisected and of course the convoy lanes that he had for 1914...

Perhaps something more in keeping with that style would be fun. And more Domination-esque than the G40 style blocks. But I just wanted to get us off to a good start

Hehehe

Catch ya next round

[beelee]

@black_elk sweet makes me wanna roll a tippy top cigarette now lol

[Black_Elk]

Always! lol

So I started laying down some lines for further SZ divisions in ways that struck me as potentially interesting...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tugjcvsb5y106rl/TripleA_4k_Domination_1941_painted_more_sz.png?dl=0

The goal wasn't necessarily to increase the distances by inserting more tiles, but more to create a few different ways of getting from point A to point B, and to highlight some of the islands, and generally just to give ships more places to go. I figure if money is attached to sz either directly to all or with specific convoy type zones, then it's good to have some that are more for the cat and mouse or like naval blitz/picket type dynamics. For islands, usually it comes down to making them more interesting as landing pads, whether for ground units being transported or aircraft. Obviously we could insert more tiles than this or try to do it in different ways, but just wanted to start laying down some lines. Some sz are more strategically useful, some are more like transits, but I thought that idea of randomized sub spawning in the Atlantic had promise, so I put a few spots down with that in mind. Let me know what you think or if you have ideas for the layout. I tried to maintain some visual interest in the shapes, so it wouldn't be just a series of rectangles, but clearly there are still quite a few of those haha.

[Schulz]

@black_elk

I've found the map visually very appealing. Especially white borders and national colours look very nice. Except Japan. Bright yellow looks not very eye-friendly to me.

• I think Turkey and Saudi Arabia can be impassable. But probably it is better to keep their territories because this map has also potential to be a WW1 mod.

• Does English Channel touch the German coastline? I think it shouldn't.

• Northern Tyrol was part of Germany.

• I would really suggest not making Germany-Belgium-Paris route longer than Germany-Lorraine-Paris route. Alsace-Lorraine should be separated.

• Italy had Italian East Afrca until November 1941.

• Montenegro and Southern Slovenia were part of Italy. I am not sure if Croatio and Bosnia should be part of Italy. @Cernel ?

[Black_Elk]

@schulz said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

@black_elk

I've found the map visually very appealing. Especially white borders and national colours look very nice. Except Japan. Bright yellow looks not very eye-friendly to me.

• I think Turkey and Saudi Arabia can be impassable. But probably it is better to keep their territories because this map has also potential to be a WW1 mod.

• Does English Channel touch the German coastline? I think it shouldn't.

• Northern Tyrol was part of Germany.

• I would really suggest not making Germany-Belgium-Paris route longer than Germany-Lorraine-Paris route. Alsace-Lorraine should be separated.

• Italy had Italian East Afrca until November 1941.

• Montenegro and Southern Slovenia were part of Italy. I am not sure if Croatio and Bosnia should be part of Italy. @Cernel ?

@schulz Sounds good!

Sorry I detoured a fair bit from the ground game just thinking about sz lol. Didn't get around to the channel yet.

If I goofed the paint bucket we can fix it on the next run. Here I blocked it in a few lines real quick so I wouldn't forget for next time, but we can fix em up tomorrow.

The line in France probably got erased when I was redrawing Germany. We can add back in. Whatever works. I figure we just keep chipping away at it till it feels good all around, then cook something up for Turkey day maybe? hehe

There I tossed the Americans in there on the Celebs detail just so you could get a sense of scale with units.

[TheDog]

@black_elk
Be careful in the English Channel London-Berlin is 4, return 8, Bombers move 8.
It could be move 10, but that puts a strain on the AI and could make Bombers even more powerful.

[TheDog]

Updated feature list

https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3326/1941-command-decision-domination-1941-code/3

Thought I would keep it seperate as this is a very busy thread.

[Cernel]

@thedog said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

@black_elk
Be careful in the English Channel London-Berlin is 4, return 8, Bombers move 8.
It could be move 10, but that puts a strain on the AI and could make Bombers even more powerful.

You may as well say that bombers should move 12, because the English were also bombing Genoa (and a few other cities in northern Italy), which, from England and back, is a 12 zones movement.

Also, I think it's not clear where Milan is in the map. It seems to be about at the tripoint where the boundaries of the three northern Italy territories meet.

As I said, I would get rid of the very small territories: merging north Tyrol with Carinthia, merging south Slovenia with Italian Croatia and merging north Slovenia with German Croatia.

Whereas all Greece can be shown as German as a matter of who is getting its production value (since it was the Germans which were robbing it blind, leaving the scraps to the Italians), if the Peloponnese is Italian, I would show also middle Greece as Italian, thus getting close to the actual occupation zones. I believe Athens itself was under the combined occupation of Germany and Italy, and I agree with not representing it separately.

@Schulz A lot of Italian Croatia was factually in the hands of the communists. Croatia itself was a failed state in civil war between Croatian nationalists and Croatian communists, with the communists clearly getting the upper hand because of popular support, so this rump state was divided between the Italians and the Germans (because the Croatian nationalists proved unable to control the territory on their own as it was hoped they would be able to) but never formally liquidated.

[Black_Elk]

@TheDog @cernel Sounds good!

For bombers, I'd hesitate to design too much of the map just around the single unit, as I think there are other ways we could simulate bombing that would probably be about as satisfying from a gameplay perspective, if somewhat gamey. For example, perhaps in the early game Britain/America can bomb the Ruhr and such, but to really start carpeting Berlin and central Europe they have to actually start making some inroads first, beyond just holding England. You know, to have that as part of the incentive to invade Normandy and take the Low Countries or Norway and whatnot. Or same deal vs Italy in the Med, where to hit their marks they'd need to actually do a little Torching first. Early on Kurt mentioned trying to do something with air superiority, so that could perhaps be another factor that plays into it, beyond just max reach on fuel vs distance, there'd be the consideration of air defense too. Though I'll admit, I'm a bit fuzzy on all that stuff right now lol.

I agree we should shift some of those Italian lines up north, that line in the west is probably extraneous, now that I'm not stretching the landmasses around, we can dial that section of the med next. The Milan tile should be beefier, more like the heartland tiles for the other factions, indicating it as like their main spot for production. I think it'd be fun to have Sicily/Sardinia/Malta/Crete etc riding a line on a smaller sz division, just so they're more interesting. Might make sense to shift the G40 borders around slightly in southern Italy, just so we have a bit more room to divide sz while still having the connections be clear. Like I could shift Malta a bit too if it makes sense. All that stuff is easy to tweak.

I was kinda dancing around the North Sea and the Med, cause it's a little tight to start, and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with it haha. We can clean it up now and do Greece and the Balkans a bit better. I've just been winging it thus far, so the notes are all helpful hehe

Keep em coming!

Ps. Oh also, @schulz the colors are just what was simplest for me to grab in the web palette. I prefer a more Orange/Gold or Ochre color scheme for Japan myself, like as long as it isn't bordering on Canary or Yellow/Green Chartreuse. I'm not the biggest fan of the Chinese purple people eater either lol, but I just sorta went with a G40-ish scheme so it would be more recognizable. I can try a different color for Japan on the next pass. I'd probably keep the same range on the hue/value, but just tamp down the vibrancy there, so it doesn't pop quite so much.

Depending on how the relief is executed the colors may change from that as well, though for the most part what I did above suits my tastes pretty well. We can settle on the exact HEX colors once we got a better picture of how many actual factions there are supposed to be. Wasting a nice orange on Dutch TTs that will disappear almost immediately, we might tweak that a bit too. I mean sure, orange would be traditional there, but we could do a different shade right haha.

Thinking again about the Germany to Paris via Belgium thing, it seems like something we'd want to fix just so the big map can work for other scenarios like 1940 or earlier for sure. Although if the game begins after the fall of Paris it's probably less relevant to the overall gameplay dynamic here until the Allies land. Hepps had Belgium divided, but I'm not sure it's necessary. There are lot of tiny tiles still, which seem a bit slim to me, even for the relatively smallish display on the units/centers.

I think the Dog is probably right that a given spot needs to accommodate like 9 units, unless it's a little island or whatever. For those little islands we can also expand the coastal blue in a lighter shade, so the units don't always look like they're walking on water, but more like hitting the beach! heheh I think that's the best way to define the various chains as well. Like for spots that have many islands, say grouped nearby, the Caroline Islands/Truk chains and such. Or similarly if it's a hanger-on type spot, the possession could be attached to a larger nearby tile. So instead of leaving something blank we could still assign it that way in some cases with the labeling to clarify.

Pps. Oh and one last thought, just on the overall economy. By attaching cash to every sz we're probably doubling the amount of money in play here. So that might factor into the ultimate pricing of some stuff just to keep the playscale manageable. Once we get all the lines laid down I can come up with a numbering scheme for the sz and the totals there. But it's better to have them all in place before that happens.

[TheDog]

@black_elk said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

By attaching cash to every sz we're probably doubling the amount of money in play here.

Maybe true, but remember that each unit consumes 1pu in upkeep/maintenance per turn, so this will easily offset the SZ pu values.

[Cernel]

@black_elk said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

@TheDog @cernel Sounds good!

For bombers, I'd hesitate to design too much of the map just around the single unit, as I think there are other ways we could simulate bombing that would probably be about as satisfying from a gameplay perspective, if somewhat gamey. For example, perhaps in the early game Britain/America can bomb the Ruhr and such, but to really start carpeting Berlin and central Europe they have to actually start making some inroads first, beyond just holding England. You know, to have that as part of the incentive to invade Normandy and take the Low Countries or Norway and whatnot. Or same deal vs Italy in the Med, where to hit their marks they'd need to actually do a little Torching first.

Torch and following was needed for bombing Rome, but not for bombing the economically more important Milan. Nothing was needed for Berlin (beside the fact that the British lacked a fighter able to escort their bombers to that distance and their bombers were ridiculously defenceless with their puny machine guns). Overall, the British heavy bombers were (and will always be) dumb-conceived garbage: it was only with the the Americans that you would start seeing decent (B-24) and good (B-17) heavy bombers.

Berlin is 817 km from Norwich and Milan is 937 km from Carterbury if you don't fly over Switzerland.
I guess the maximum operative range of heavy bombers early in the war was surely at least 1,000 km and likely a few hundred km more taking some risks and reducing the bomb-load. For a game in which you cannot easily have a trade-off between distance and bomb-load, I think 1,000 km is a good assumption for the safe bombing radius of heavy bombers early in the war.
About this, one of the putative reasons Hitler decided to take Crete in 1941, was that English bombers from Crete were able to target the Ploest oilfieds of Roumania, whereas they were unable to do so from anywhere in North Africa or Cyprus. Crete to Ploiesti is a distance of about 1,100 km, whereas from North Africa it is about 1,400 km. This would imply a radius of at least 1,100 km but less than 1,400 km.
With the arrival of the American B-24 heavy bombers, only in August of 1943 the Allies conducted a massive (and almost useless) bombing of the Ploiesti oilfields, flying for a range of about 1,600 km forth and back (so about 3,200 km in total) from Cyrenaica.
Assuming you are not flying through the Turkish straits (as that would be violating Turkish neutrality and would realistically make the vojage longer), in your map it takes 4 movements to go from Crete to Ploiesti, which would imply that heavy bombers should have at least movement 8 early in the war.

Generally speaking, what the "bomber" really is in the basic games is quite unclear, but it can be assumed it is a mix of medium and heavy bombers, which would explain its main tactical role. We can exclude the "bomber" is representing light or dive bombers (like the German Stuka) because of the fact that it cannot stay on carriers and the fact that in-game fighters are the only units which can stay on carriers which can sink battleships (which implies that the fighter unit is also representing dive bombers and other light bombers). Pratically, the unit called fighter could be better called as "light aircraft" and the unit called bomber could be better called as "medium and heavy aircraft". As for Global, the bomber of that game is not necessarily a heavy bomber. For what is worth, both the British and the German bombers of that game are visually represeted by two-engine bombers (talking about the unit images of the map). However, the British Vickers Wellington two-engines medium bombers were longer ranged than most early four-engines heavy bombers.

Either way, the fact that in the Global game you cannot bomb Berlin from London and fly back to Great Britain is stupid. The simplest fix is to have airports giving +2 bonus (instead of +1). A better fix would be getting rid of the airport unit from the set-up and the rules (besides, no airports in Germany and Northern Italy what the fuck) and adding some air only connections like making air units able to go to and from United Kingdom and Holland Belgium in one movement (so that you can get to Berlin in 3 movements).

[Black_Elk]

@cernel Yeah I'll admit to be being kinda disappointed with the bases in G40. Almost everything about them seemed confusing/weird to me the first time I read the rules lol. The fact that they are basically permanent infrastructure added to the Tile that then can't be removed either, also seems problematic, along with a pretty high cost and strange placements in the starting unit set up. Like if they were conceived more as a cheaper AAgun type unit that could be destroyed, then you could maybe pull off a bomber command type thing based on where those were located and just let the player make runs at whatever distance made sense, without having to fly around along certain paths as part of all that. You know where 'strategic bombing' is just a thing that can happen during the 'combat phase' if the player made an 'SBR purchase' that round, without necessitating big bomber sculpts to actually fly around during the Combat/Non Com Movement phases.

Seems like that would be a lot simpler, no takeoffs and landings, have the escort/intercept handled abstractly, stuff like that maybe, cause then you could put movement at 10 or 12 or whatever range, and it wouldn't break the rest of the game lol.

Submarines could probably have been treated in a similar way, as essentially sea strat bombers of that sort, with more mobility, but a focus purely on economic damage rather than regular combat. But instead the game has all these extra phases and specialized rules/interactions and dual role units, to try to simulate stuff that could probably have been handled more simply somehow, with less tracking and rules overhead lol.

Movement is so key to this game, but to me it's just kinda wild that they built the whole thing (the whole basic game) around the idea of combat units that move 1 or move 2, at most move 4 (like fighters), but then they got a combat unit that comes in with 6 movement all of a sudden, as if that wouldn't upend everything? lol Or those bases that add +1 to movement, which I guess works for ships, but feels way wonky for aircraft.

I feel like highly mobile units should probably not be combat units. You know, like if you want the transport to move 3, in order to accommodate shucks on a larger G40 mapboard, that sorta works, cause the v3 transport doesn't have a hitpoint right, so it's not like you can spam em as fodder and then rush across the board to jack up a combat balance. Probably strat bombers and submarines could work more like that, and it wouldn't feel quite as goofy to me heheh. Maybe even mech could work like that, though that might be a bit weird on the ground. But yeah, using the normal A&A model, I feel like we're bound to hit some snags, cause M6 bombers are just kinda nuts already, so you know 8 or more would be kinda insane without changing how they work heheh

Not sure, but I'd think treating the Strat Bomber as an abstract "economic attack" unit, rather than an actual combat unit, would make it a lot easier for the HardAI to handle right? Like if the machine didn't have to parse all the various places that the 1 hitpoint might end up across half a dozen or more tiles?

ps. On that last point, I think the HardAI could probably serve as a proxy for the human player on some of this stuff. Meaning that if the AI has issues parsing and crunching the numbers for combat units with very high movement rates, that probably means the regular human player will also find that challenging. I mean without the benefit of a machine brain, but still having to figure out where a given unit in a given position might be able to reach in a given round. If the movement during combat is just 1 or 2, or 3 (in the case of fighters that have to land after attacking) that's one thing. But take that up to move 6 or more, and the player (just like the HardAI) has a lot of possibilities to puzzle out hehe. I definitely take Schulz earlier point about unit versatility though. I mean at the end of the day it has to be fun as a game too. If all we wanted was an exact WW2 simulator, I mean at that point we can just go read a book or something right lol. So not trying to buzzkill the strat bomber as a super fun combat unit, but I do think it puts a lot of strain on the game to accommodate them. Same deal with Submarines and the issues they have, trying to straddle two pretty different roles, as a combat unit vs an economic damage type unit.

[beelee]

@black_elk yea i guess i could give A0C5 Bmbr a +2 from AB so it can hit Berlin from London. Might have to give the Luftwaffe an extra Ftr to protect Berlin.

I can't remember why they didn't get M8, I think it was so you couldn't take off from E US and hit Europe. Could make a different AB for E US that wouldn't give that extra range.

for OOB map