Flames and Steel (official thread)

KurtGodel7

KurtGodel7 said:

I agree that I should not add coastal guns. I'm at the point where I need to not add more complexity to the map. The sample games I've been playing flow smoothly, and are not bogged down by complexity.

If I did want to add more complexity--which I don't--but if I did, one way to achieve that would be the Battle of the Atlantic. The Battle of the Atlantic would exist as an abstraction. Each turn, Germany could send subs into the Battle of the Atlantic. Britain and America Atlantic could send destroyers in. Any units sent to the Battle of the Atlantic are there permanently. They cannot return to the main map. At the beginning of each game round, the German subs in the Battle of the Atlantic would fight the Allied destroyers. Combat would last for two rounds. Destroyed units would be removed from play. Any German subs that survived that combat would impose an economic penalty on Britain and America Atlantic. There would be a cap as to how much of a penalty each nation would receive. If, say, Britain's cap is 15 and America Atlantic's penalty cap is 20, then the first 15 PUs of economic damage done would hit Britain, and the next 20 Pus of economic damage would hit America Atlantic.

Later on, Germany gains the ability to have Type XXI U-boats as a special unit. Sending those to the Battle of the Atlantic would be very cool. Maybe each normal sub would impose a penalty of 2 PUs, and each Type XXI would impose a penalty of 5 PUs. Something like that.

But, I have no plans to actually implement this idea, because it would be added complexity.

Okay, a modified version of the Battle of the Atlantic idea. Don't worry--I'm not going to add this to Flames and Steel. There needs to be a lock on adding additional complexity.

That said . . . the Battle of the Atlantic could be an abstraction, as I wrote in my earlier post.

There would be about ten sea zones within this abstraction.
Each individual sea zone would have its own economic damage cap.
PU reductions would be applied to either Britain or America Atlantic, depending on which sea zone the subs were in. German subs in the Caribbean, for example, would cause economic damage to America Atlantic.
Blind allocation. Germany would move its subs around these sea zones without knowing where Allied destroyers were going. Britain and America Atlantic would move their destroyers around these sea zones without knowing where German subs were going.
After the blind allocation, there would be a two round naval battle for each sea zone with both Axis subs and Allied destroyers. Any subs surviving the naval battle would apply a PU reduction to British or American Atlantic income, depending on the sea zone they were in.
Germany would have a choice: "Do I spread my subs out in an effort to maximize economic damage? Or do I concentrate them in an effort to win the naval battle in whatever sea zone I am in?" Likewise, Britain and America Atlantic would have this same choice with respect to their destroyers.

This could be really cool. A game within a game, as it were. Germany could unlock technologies to increase the damage cap of each sea zone. Britain and America Atlantic could unlock technologies to help with this also. But I feel like I've already added the right amount of complexity to Flames and Steel, and I don't want to add this additional thing, however cool it might be.

KurtGodel7

@Schulz said:

Or, you can scrap the coastal battery idea entirely and make the air units more cost effective against the ships.

In a normal TripleA type map, it would be, "I have more air than he has ships. Therefore I will kill his navy on my next turn!"

With Flames and Steel it's not quite so simple. There are two flavors of air unit: fighters and bombers. Several different types of fighters: fighters, heavy fighters, advanced fighters, early jets, and jets. Several different types of bombers: dive bombers, torpedo bombers, medium bombers, strategic bombers, flying wings, and Superfortresses.

Suppose that Germany had an idea of using air to sink the British fleet in the English Channel. During the "allocate bombers" phase it sends in torpedo bombers (the best choice for anti-naval), dive bombers, and even a couple medium bombers. This bomber allocation is revealed to the Allies before the "allocate fighters" phase. During "allocate fighters," all three of Germany, Britain, and America Atlantic allocate fighters to the upcoming battle.

Then there is a two round dogfight, where Axis and Allied fighters shoot at each other. After the dogfight, any Allied fighters which survived are now able to shoot at German bombers, using their interception value. German bombers shoot back, using their air defense value. Destroyed units are removed from play. Damaged bombers are considered aborted and do not get to fire at surface targets. But, any German bombers which weren't destroyed or aborted then get to fire at Britain's ships. British ships actually hit by bombers get to fire back. Those which weren't hit are considered too far away from the combat to participate. This lasts two combat rounds.

The Pearl Harbor attack consists of eight Japanese torpedo bombers attacking five American Pacific battleships, plus some other ships. America Pacific has little or no air defense against this. Those eight torpedo bombers hammer the Pearl Harbor fleet hard. Remember that battleships take five hits to kill! Japan loses 0 - 1 torpedo bomber in the attack. The fleet at Pearl gets hammered hard during the air phase, and then on Japan's turn the IJN comes in to finish it off.

In my play test games, Germany would sometimes build fighter type aircraft for its western front. But it stopped short of building bomber-type aircraft for that front, because the money for that was needed elsewhere. The fighters gave it reasonable defense against Allied strafing or strategic bombing raids. Germany would also need to defend Italy's West Mediterranean transports against Allied air. For that it had fighters in Madrid. Probably having a single battleship in that sea zone would have made sense also, in case any Allied bombers got past Germany's fighters. Germany should also have built a heavy fighter or two, because those have a better interception value than normal fighters.

Vendetta

Giving the rest of the world map a quick lookover

Morocco/Spanish Morocco is a little too pointy
Canary Islands being at the junction of three sea zones is good, but it could be shifted left a bit to put more space between itself and the African coast
Algeria is well divided but French West Africa is pretty off - Dakar extends across much of Mauritania, while Dahomey is covering what should be Upper Volta
Cairo is a poor label for southern Egypt since it lies in the northeast - Upper Egypt would probably be the best name for the southern region, or Aswan if you wanted another city name
Rhodes has a distorted shape, that whole lobe on the left shouldn’t be there - and what if Rhodes were shifted east to lie on that junction point between the sea zones instead of floating within the same one as Crete?
The east half of Lebanon should be part of Damascus instead
Using the capital city Taihoku as a label for the whole island seems odd if you’re not subdividing it further - why not just Taiwan or Formosa?
North Korea and Keijo are a mismatched pair - either North Korea and South Korea, or Keijo and Heijo
China’s got a weird mix going on where half the country is labeled with provinces and the other half are cities

Schulz

@KurtGodel7 said:

In a normal TripleA type map, it would be, "I have more air than he has ships. Therefore I will kill his navy on my next turn!"

And what makes you think your game will be any better, other than throwing in 'win more' stuff and endless superficial complexity, all while pretending to avoid it?

KurtGodel7

@Schulz said:

@KurtGodel7 said:

In a normal TripleA type map, it would be, "I have more air than he has ships. Therefore I will kill his navy on my next turn!"

And what makes you think your game will be any better, other than throwing in 'win more' stuff and endless superficial complexity, all while pretending to avoid it?

First off, I will acknowledge that Flames and Steel hasn't proven itself yet.

In my test games, a game round took less long than would have been the case for a round of Domination 1914 No Man's Land or World at War. I've spent the last few weeks redlining my Claude usage, in large part so that players wouldn't feel bogged down by complexity, the GUI, or anything else which might slow or confuse the game.

I've found that research strategy and military strategy are intertwined. A player researches now for the military strategy he intends to implement later.

Air units are specialized for different roles. It's no longer just, "build a fighter, use it against whatever." Now it's, "build fighters to shoot down enemy air. Build torpedo bombers to sink enemy navy. Build dive bombers to strafe enemy land units. Build strategic bombers to wage a strategic bombing campaign."

Will the game work as intended? I hope so, but I haven't gotten past round 7 in any of my test games. In my round 7 test game things seemed like they were off to a good start. But, a lot of what I'd envisioned for the game hadn't yet started happening, or else was only starting to happen. A better test of the map would be a round 15 game or so, with two humans playing against each other. (As opposed to me playing the map against myself.)

KurtGodel7

@Vendetta said:

Giving the rest of the world map a quick lookover

Morocco/Spanish Morocco is a little too pointy

Canary Islands being at the junction of three sea zones is good, but it could be shifted left a bit to put more space between itself and the African coast

Algeria is well divided but French West Africa is pretty off - Dakar extends across much of Mauritania, while Dahomey is covering what should be Upper Volta

Cairo is a poor label for southern Egypt since it lies in the northeast - Upper Egypt would probably be the best name for the southern region, or Aswan if you wanted another city name

Rhodes has a distorted shape, that whole lobe on the left shouldn’t be there - and what if Rhodes were shifted east to lie on that junction point between the sea zones instead of floating within the same one as Crete?

The east half of Lebanon should be part of Damascus instead

Using the capital city Taihoku as a label for the whole island seems odd if you’re not subdividing it further - why not just Taiwan or Formosa?

North Korea and Keijo are a mismatched pair - either North Korea and South Korea, or Keijo and Heijo

China’s got a weird mix going on where half the country is labeled with provinces and the other half are cities

Okay here are some map changes.

Vendetta

@KurtGodel7 Rhodes and the Canaries look a lot better now, and most of the naming issues got fixed.

The Philippines are kind of hideous, should see if Claude can try to focus on getting the shape of the islands down better.

The Gibraltar box is another problem spot where the name is floating outside of it. As a magnified blowup area, the square will probably look better if it has a lines or arrow at the corner that connects it with the land enclave.

Lebanon still cuts too far inland. Damascus should share a border with Palestine/Transjordan, and Lebanon should not touch Nejd at all.

One other issue I can see is that neutral and French territories are indistinguishable in color. Even if Vichy France is treated as a neutral power for gameplay purposes, it probably still ought to have its own distinct color to tell it apart from genuine nonbelligerents.

Cernel

Gibraltar was only 6.8 square kilometres and certainly not plain.

This means that, depending on roughly how much your infantry is supposed to be in terms of infantrymen and stuff, and assuming that artillery, armour and so on are similarly limited, you can have a very low units limit.

This would be both realistic and helping with keeping low the needed area of Gibraltar for showing units in there.

I asked the "AI Mode" of Google "What is the maximum number of infantrymen which could have been defensively deployed in Gibraltar during 1941?"

This was the answer:

During 1941, the maximum number of infantrymen defensively deployed in Gibraltar was approximately 7,000 soldiers, organized into two brigades.
This infantry element formed the backbone of the overall 16,000-man total defensive garrison stationed on the Rock at the time, which also included large numbers of artillerymen, anti-aircraft crews, and Royal Engineers.

If the question is framed around structural capacity rather than actual troop counts, the British military dramatically expanded the Rock's underlying infrastructure during this period. Royal Engineers and Canadian engineers excavated an extensive 25-mile network of underground tunnels, living spaces, and hidden fortresses.
Upon its completion, this massive subterranean complex was designed with a maximum theoretical capacity to fully house, protect, and sustain a force of 30,000 men for up to 16 months without external resupply.

Cernel

I would say that this means that every game for which 1 infantry is representing 20,000 men or more and in which every land unit takes no less capacity on transports than the infantry unit should have a maximum stacking limit of 1 land unit in Gibraltar. (This would mean practically every TripleA basic game.)

Vendetta

@Cernel Well, that gets into the whole issue of units in Axis & Allies not actually corresponding to a specific number of anything. They’re an artistic abstraction of capabilities.

Putting a stacking limit in Gibraltar alone would be arbitrary - why not in Malta too then, and Rhodes, and most of the Pacific Islands? And doesn’t that beg the question of the larger land territories getting their own limits? And how high should those be, how much would they vary, and how that would information be conveyed easily to the players?

I think it opens the door to a lot of extra complication and opportunities to run into balancing headaches without really adding much to the quality of the playing experience.

Cernel

@Vendetta First of all, even though the AI mentioned that (and I just copy-pasted it for completess): this is not meant to be any kind of time-related limit: if you can put up to 1 land unit in a specific territory, those land units can stay there forever without any need to be resupplied. Anything which is able to stay in a territory for 1 day, can stay there forever. (Yes, obviously this is not realistic, but it is coherent with the fact that units loaded onto transports can stay loaded forever: you have the same loading limits for a 1 day vojage as well as for a 1 year vojage.) This is not about adding supply limit or starvation dynamics at all, nor adding attacking/defending limits based on frontlines wideness. (It is sort of like ships and loaded transports being able to stay forever in the open sea.)

It was meant to be only an area limit (not front-line, actually total area), meaning the fact that you cannot have more than a quantity of military men and stuff in Gibraltar because there is not enough space to deploy them in there literally anywhere.

You can think at Gibraltar like a transport and a carrier: the limit is akin to the limit by which the game does not allow you to load infinite units onto a transport or land infinite aircraft on a carrier. These are (space-only based) limits that the game has (I assume) for transports and carriers already.

Albeit the AI response added supply considerations (16 months limit for 30,000 men), my suggested limit has NOTHING to do with that, nor with any other kind of limits beside space limits only.

To answer your per se sensible objection (but touching something I did not meant to touch), Malta, Rhodes and most of the Pacific islands would have no limit because, as a matter of space, you could fit more than enough number of men and stuff in there. For example, the area of Malta (only the main island) is 36 times that of Gibraltar. Yes, if we set a limit at 2 for Gibraltar, we could set a limit at 72 (or whatever) for Malta and not have limits for whatever other territory having bigger limits: this would keep the number of territories needing this special rule fairly low (practically only islands as big as Malta or smaller).

Obviously, this does not mean that you can pack Malta of men and stuff so long as you have space for them: there are other limits (mainly resupply limits - living necessities over time), but I was totally not considering those also for Malta itself (for example, under my suggestion, those maximum units in Gibraltar would be able to stay there forever without needing to be resupplied, like I assume it works everywhere else).

I hope this clarifies that I was not opening for stacking limits per territory in general but just expanding the space limits (like in case of transports and carriers) to only a few very marginal situations on land of only extremely small territories like Gibraltar and such. Of course, this is meant to be an arbitrary approximation.

This said, once added such space-only-based stack limits to Gibraltar, only a few other similar realities would need similar limits, for example Midway (but not Hawaii or most other islands, even most small ones).

I hope this clarifies that this was meant to be a marginal case of adding space-only limits to one or at most a few cases of very small territories, not a systematic proposal for stacking limits in general. (Yes, it is limited and arbitrary, but the question would be if the game would be more realistic with or without, everything else being the same, and there is no more to it than that.)

If you then would still prefer no stacking limits at all over a very limited and arbitrary stacking limit system for a very few extremely small territories, that is fine. It's your preference.