Request: Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures
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There exists a game called Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures. I would love to see this game brought to TripleA.
It is a two player game.
Setup
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The two players agree on the number of points. For a small scale scenario, maybe 100 points. For a grand fleet battle, you could do 500 points.
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You use your points to construct a fleet. A relatively weak unit, such as a destroyer, might cost only 8 points. A very strong unit, like a battleship, could be 50 or even 70 points. You can also build submarines, aircraft carriers, and aircraft. Neither player sees the fleet the other is constructing.
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The players allocate their fleets on the board.
The object of the game is to outscore the other player. Points are gained by destroying enemy units, as well as by capturing the three objective markers on the map. Only surface ships can capture objectives.
Game Play
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Both players move their air units, to any desired location on the map.
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Dogfight. In this step, you are trying to destroy as many enemy air units as possible. (Just as they are trying to destroy yours.) Failing that, you at least want to "abort" the enemy air units in question. An aborted unit is still alive, but it cannot launch its attack.
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Air attacks. Any air unit which wasn't destroyed or aborted gets to attack a surface ship or sub.
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Surface ships move.
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Surface ships attack.
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Subs move.
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Subs attack.
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Air units fly home.
Unit Specialization
- Fighters are specialized for shooting down or aborting enemy air units.
- Dive bombers are good at sinking enemy surface ships; especially surface ships with lesser armor.
- Torpedo bombers can sink surface ships or subs. Useful against heavily armored ships.
- Battleships are great against surface ships, useless against subs.
- Destroyers are good against subs. In large numbers they can be useful against battleships.
- Planes based on carriers fight every turn. Land-based planes fight only every other turn.
- Subs are useful due to being difficult to destroy. Most units cannot target subs. Subs are good against surface ships.
Individual units may also have additional strengths or weaknesses. For example, a carrier might give a bonus to the planes stationed on it. Most units have special traits which provide bonuses, weaknesses, or a mix of both.
The most important part of this game is fleet construction. If you gain an advantage over your opponent there, you are well on your way to winning.
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Axis & Allies MIniatures has nothing in common with Axis & Allies except the name. TripleA can't support.it.
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@rogercooper said in Request: Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures:
Axis & Allies MIniatures has nothing in common with Axis & Allies except the name. TripleA can't support.it.
The TripleA engine, as it currently exists, cannot support it. There are some here with the necessary skill set to modify the engine.
Would doing so be a good use of their time? That's for them to decide. That said, I believe that adding Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures to the TripleA community would have the following effects.
- Naval Miniatures is an outstanding game, and would be enjoyed by members of the TripleA community.
- Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures has its own following. If the game was added to TripleA, you'd bring a lot of those people here.
- There are other naval miniatures games also. By doing this, you're creating a very compelling option for the type of person who likes naval miniatures games.
- The functionality necessary to support this project could be useful for new, player-designed maps.
I want to expand a little on that last point. For a game like Revised or Global, all units have attack values and defense values. For land battles that makes sense. Defending infantry have the benefit of trenches, and so fight better than attacking infantry. For naval battles this does not make sense. In a naval battle there is no "attacker" or "defender"--just a bunch of ships and planes fighting each other.
Given that Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures is focused on naval combat, it's logical that they would do away with "attack" and "defense" values. Instead you have anti-air attacks, for shooting down enemy aircraft. Surface ships can be damaged or destroyed with gunnery attacks, dive bombs, or torpedoes. Subs can be destroyed with either depth charges or (in some instances) torpedoes.
All that is fine for a naval miniatures game, but it might not be exactly what you want for a global map WWII game. For the latter, units could have anti-land, anti-naval, anti-sub, anti-air, and strategic bombing combat values.
This would allow for more depth and richness of units. For example, fighters would be specialized at shooting down enemy aircraft. Torpedo bombers would be better at sinking ships than at destroying land targets. Medium bombers could give you a reasonably good anti-sub unit. When units have 4 - 5 combat values, there's so much more room for unit specialization (and therefore strategic choice) than is the case when units have just attack and defense values.
Improving the TripleA engine would achieve two things.
- Expand the TripleA community, by bringing in a lot of naval miniatures people.
- Allow people to create strategically deeper, better global map WWII games.
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@kurtgodel7 As it has nothing in common with TripleA, it would make more sense to create a dedicated program from scratch.
For naval computer games, I would suggest Carrier Battles for Guadacanal.
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@rogercooper said in Request: Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures:
@kurtgodel7 As it has nothing in common with TripleA, it would make more sense to create a dedicated program from scratch.
For naval computer games, I would suggest Carrier Battles for Guadacanal.
The defining feature of Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures is that you're using points to build a fleet. Carrier Battles for Guadalcanal does not have that characteristic. That means the two games are in different genres. It could be worth checking out, but the two games are unlike each other.
I'm friends with a software developer. When beginning a project, he'd start by hard coding things. He'd want to get something up and running. Then he'd go back and rewrite a lot of code, to make it broader and more generic in applicability.
How hard coded is the TripleA engine? I don't know. How easy or difficult would it be to expand its capabilities, to include a game like Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures? I don't know that either.
That being said, my personal preference would be to have everything under one roof. That way you're bringing in players who enjoy miniatures, as well as a different group of players who enjoy global WWII maps. You want the WWII maps people to be exposed to naval miniatures, and you want the naval miniatures people to be exposed to WWII maps. Also, if someone is creating a new WWII map, there's a lot of functionality within naval miniatures which could add considerable strategic depth and richness.
But anything is better than nothing, and I'll be grateful for whatever improvements developers are able to achieve.
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An Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures tournament
The Akagi. The number in the upper right means it would cost 27 points to build. It can hold a maximum of 3 planes. Each plane might cost 10 points or so to build. In the lower half of the card, you can see it provides a bonus to one fighter, one dive bomber, and one torpedo bomber.
The HMS Hood. 48 points to build. Note that its armor, vital armor, and hull points are all higher than the Akagi's, making it harder to kill. At range 3, its main gunnery attack is 12, versus just 5 for the Akagi. Larger, more heavily armored ships are immune to the main gunnery attacks from the Akagi, but can take damage from the Hood's main gunnery attacks.
The U.S.S. Iowa. 68 points to build. The most expensive and the most powerful Allied battleship in the game.
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Hi kurt
Triplea can do some of what is needed currently. The 'isAA" and "hitPoints" could do some of it.
As Roger stated though, triplea can't do it all. Is your computer buddy interested in working on triplea to make it happen ?
A lot of people have contributed over the years and my impression is, that while Dan has been cleaning things up code wise, along with others, especially frigoref lately, it's still not as clean as developers would like.
So, he might need to look at it as more of a challenge
But hey, these guys have done it Myrd, RoiEXLab, redrum, wc_sumpton ... well the list goes on and on.
Anyway, that probably your best bet to make it happen.
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@KurtGodel7
If you have not already download, Battle of Jutland, yes its WW1, but it is probably the best naval game for TripleA currently. -
Somebody has already implemented some of this, without AI, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2123236912
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American fleet versus Japanese fleet.
British fleet versus Italian fleet.
Notice that a Kate costs over twice as much as a Betty. Why? The Betty is a patrol bomber. That means land-based. Which means it can only be used every other turn. The Kate is a torpedo bomber, and can be based on a carrier. Carrier-based planes can fight every turn. Also, the Kate has higher armor and vital armor, making it more resistant to being aborted or destroyed. The Kate fires three torpedoes, versus two for the Betty.
A tale of two battleships. At 35 points, the Kongo is among the weaker and less expensive battleships. The Yamato costs 70 points, and is the most expensive and most powerful Axis battleship.
At 56 points to build, the Washington is a strong American battleship. The Enterprise takes 25 points to build. Up to 3 planes can be based on it, and it provides a combat bonus to a fighter and a dive bomber. Note that the Enterprise's armor, vital armor, and main gun are all much weaker than the Washington's. Carriers generally try to avoid combat themselves, allowing their aircraft to do the fighting for them.
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@kurtgodel7 TripleA is an engine designed to play games where units are moved by territories and conduct combat when they are in the same area. Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures is game where the units can occupy any position on the map and conduct combat from a distance. There is nothing in common. You can't modify TripleA to play it.
I would like to see a good turn-based naval combat game. There where a number during DOS times, but I don't know of any now.
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@rogercooper said in Request: Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures:
@kurtgodel7 TripleA is an engine designed to play games where units are moved by territories and conduct combat when they are in the same area. Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures is game where the units can occupy any position on the map and conduct combat from a distance. There is nothing in common. You can't modify TripleA to play it.
I would like to see a good turn-based naval combat game. There where a number during DOS times, but I don't know of any now.
I don't know if you're a computer programmer. I've taken a few classes in computer programming, but I don't know Java. This being said, you keep saying things can't be done. You are wrong. They absolutely, 100% can be done.
Combat works differently between Axis and Allies/world maps versus Axis and Allies/naval miniatures. Fine. Solving that problem is trivial. Below is some code in BASIC (one of the languages I do know).
Let X = Number_of_Die_Rolls
Let hits = 0
For B = 1 to X
Let Y = rnd()
If Y < 0.5, then let hits = hits + 0
If Y > 0.5, and if Y < 0.833333, then let hits = hits + 1
If Y => 0.833333, then let hits = hits + 2
Next B
If hits >= Vital_armor_value, then target = destroyed
Elseif hits >= armor_value, then -1 to target_hull_points
If target_hull_points = 1, then target = crippled
If target_hull_points = 0, then target = destroyedClean up that code a little, translate it into Java rather than BASIC, and that's enough to make gunnery attacks and dive bombs work. You'd need two other blocks of code also: one for torpedoes, the other for depth charges.
What about the problem you mentioned, of firing from a distance? TripleA very obviously has an object of some sort for detecting range.
Step 1. Determine max_range of selected unit
Step 2. List enemy units within that max range
Step 3. Player selects an enemy unit from the list
Step 4. Determine range to the target the player selected
Step 5. Use the range and the attacker's unit stats to determine the number of die rolls.
Step 6. Feed the number of die rolls into the above-described combat engine, as well as the target's armor value and vital armor value.None of this should be all that hard. You are making a mountain out of a molehill.
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One way you might be able to deal with the one TTy that everybody is in thing, Is to still divide the map but give everybody a buncha movement.
Idk, I never played it, but you might be able to get close to it.
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@kurtgodel7 It is possible to write a program to play Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures. The program would have almost no commonality with TripleA. Even Axis & Allies 1914 has not been fully implemented in TripleA.
In addition to the link I showed you before, there is a Vassal module available.
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@rogercooper said in Request: Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures:
@kurtgodel7 It is possible to write a program to play Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures. The program would have almost no commonality with TripleA. Even Axis & Allies 1914 has not been fully implemented in TripleA.
In addition to the link I showed you before, there is a Vassal module available.
In coding, some tasks are trivial, others non-trivial.
The code I wrote in my earlier post is trivial. It's the sort of thing they teach you to write in computer science 101. Trivial code along those lines is all or most of what's necessary to get Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures to work in the TripleA engine.
A lot of what the TripleA engine does is non-trivial.
Incorporating Naval Miniatures into the TripleA engine has two advantages.
- It would allow software developers to glom off of the non-trivial tasks already achieved in the TripleA engine, instead of having to start from scratch.
- It would bring the naval miniatures people into the TripleA community, instead of separating them off into their own community.
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you may want to make a Feature Request at github and link to the discussion here. https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues
Hit "New Issue" then "Feature Request"
Edit
Well they don't want Feature Requests there anymore
