Proposed Map: Domination 1941

[Black_Elk]

Ok here ya go...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnvwl23sf092dia/Domination_1941_baseline.png?dl=0

Let me know if you want to ditch anything else on the baseline. I'll just pull a new relief from that, since I wanted to fix the blur anyway hehe

[TheDog]

@Cernel
what SZ would you change for this new map.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnvwl23sf092dia/Domination_1941_baseline.png?dl=0

Transports, Battleships, Subs will move 2
Fleet units Destroyers, Cruisers, Fleet Carriers will move 3
Harbours do not add +1 move

[Black_Elk]

For what it's worth, I think Sea Zones are pretty abstract in A&A, and naval movement/combat is really kinda hard to make sense of as anything other than just sort of gamey. Whatever you decide on probably the starting unit distribution and the TT values will be the key factor in making it all hum together. I think players will generally tend to shuck along the shortest path available for their transports and usually you end up with just a few very large combat fleets converging on the main chokepoints on either side of the board to face each other down. Sorta playing chicken or cat and mouse till one side offers a gambit or a goof. The balance typically tilts on aircraft and spamming fodder every round for the big naval stand offs, till one side breaks and either has to withdraw or just gets smoked in a decisive blow out. Or at least that seems to be the standard A&A naval dynamic.

I think on the Pacific side, it's good for the gameplay to inflate the values of the TTs in the Central Pacific, like if you want Japan to have some reason to face off against the US there rather than just making the B line for India, or slamming into Russia, as tends to happen in most A&A games, I think that's a reasonable method. In A&A there's just not really enough production contested there to give Japan much reason to sprawl vs the US or ANZAC, but I think you could fix that by juicing the TT values a bit. Then the IJN ships would have more reason to stay forward to guard the contested tiles and shore up their lines there.

Anyhow, let me know what you come up with, and I'll try to get it dialed. Many of those sz subdivisions I made kinda on the fly just based on the what was flying at me from the requests earlier, but people can always just go back and mess with that earlier base if they want. I saved the new one with 41 in the title, so I'll just make it however you want into the next phase heheh

[Cernel]

@thedog said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

@Cernel
what SZ would you change for this new map.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnvwl23sf092dia/Domination_1941_baseline.png?dl=0

Transports, Battleships, Subs will move 2
Fleet units Destroyers, Cruisers, Fleet Carriers will move 3
Harbours do not add +1 move

This is really a weirdly vague question, but, shortly after opening the map, I've been struck by the nonsense that going from Gibraltar to Malta by moving north of Majorca and Sicily takes 3 movements, whereas going to it via would would be the shorter sea route takes 4 movements. Moreover, on the realistically shorter route, there are (as said) 5 sea zones between Gibraltar and Malta and only 2 sea zones between Malta and Palestine, whereas in reality Palestine is farther away from Malta than Gibraltar is.

And I guess you fogot to add a sea zone border somewhere in the Turkish straits?

[TheDog]

@cernel
Yes, a deliberately vague question, as I wanted your opinion.

Thanks for spotting the Med area SZ.

Are they any more SZ that leap out at you that are wrong?

[Black_Elk]

@Cernel good eye, must have forgot a break for the Bosporus. That needs to go in for sure!

Hahah yeah, well, I'd only point out that a realistic distance with an unrealistic scale is a bit of a challenge lol. I mean given that Europe is considerably larger and quite contorted, and Africa is considerably smaller and quite contorted, this creates a situation where the Mediterranean is going to become somewhat weird somewhere right? Like there's just more space in the Western Med than the Eastern Med to insert additional tiles given the Global warp.

Probably it would be better for sense of distance from Gibraltar if sz 94 just didn't exist OOB, but of course it does, so that's a bit of a kink lol.

I'd say the ready solution here is to shift Malta back, so that it's as far left in sz 96 as possible, rather than riding the line of that inserted SZ tile in the central/eastern Med. This probably makes the Malta TT rather less useful as a fighter transit, but it's whatever I guess, like I'm not wedded to having it ride a line.

The idea for inserting more sea zones into the Med was basically to push the air routes and give ships a few more tiles to maneuver around each other somehow, esp. along the North African coast, without inflating the other distances too hard. Hence trying to keep at least one route a bit tighter. I guess it could have been the reverse, like an extra Zone out of sz 93, rather than out of 92 or 94, but that seemed less interesting to me than doing it along the Algerian or Tunisian coast, which was a more active warfront. But I guess just remove those breaks? Like I only added them and shifted Malta initially to see how many might fit before it got too ridiculous, but we might have hit that point and passed it. We can just ditch em hehe.

Another option is to do the extra sz breaks horizontally rather than vertically, but you'd get the exact same issue doing that, except then we'd be talking about North/South distances rather than East/West distances, while still basically arriving at the same conclusion that the relative distance between one given point and another is kinda nonsensical sometimes. Either way you're going to get distortion and places where there's just not a whole lot of room to add new zones from the existing G40 ones. Also in A&A there's another factor, beyond just how many tiles are between point A and point B for true distance in gameplay terms, since presumably there are actual naval forces in play too, blocking ready movement along certain paths. My default is to consider distance as the crow flies too, ie 'can a fighter still land there in one movement? Or not?' cause that's a bit more binary with a pretty clear cutoff. Also cause the effects of fighter transits on the gameplay are usually a lot more pronounced than ship movement per se. Naval engagements generally hinging on aircraft in range. But I agree, it's all rather weird, if you sit with it for very long there's going to be cracks haha. NBs and ABs can complicate the distance vibe too, just by adding extra movement if starting the move off a base. The Med has 4 NBs across 5 sz tiles OOB, which makes it more of a lake there I guess. Like Gibraltar to Suez is only 1 move off the NBs OOB, provided there's not a giant fleet parked in your way, to turn that move 1 distance into a move Zero situation lol.

Probably the entire Med could be collapsed into just 3 sea zone tiles, like v3, and that would be more realistic - basically the same movement situation you get with the NBs in play in G40, but then that wouldn't exactly accommodate the other gameplay needs of a G40.

Overall, the med situation is similar to the distortion in the western USSR around "Russia", since the map has to give somewhere. If there's no morph, then Europe will simply appear as an enlarged inset that doesn't align with anything around it, or else it can be realistic in scale, but too small to service the OOB game. Meds got the same thing going on. That is the general situation we get on many WW2 maps, the ones that aren't also trying fit a G40 mold I mean and can just use Mercator or something similar for the warp, like your Big Worlds, or Ultimate Worlds etc, or similar WW2 maps that we see from time to time. Like Iron War has the same thing going on, despite being a fairly gigantic map, so it's a bit of a bind. I'm not sure if Larry or Kevin had a totally specific idea that sz sizes or the number of divisions needed to be consistent from region to region?

Clearly there was some acknowledgement of keeping the distances somehow the same, while somehow further too, just with the inclusion of the NB as a unit there to keep with the playscale. I tend to see that stuff in the same way I view the OOB production values over various editions, where perhaps the initial conceptual model is a bit off from the gameplay now. Like for Production it's really clear that Larry had an idea about what IPC was supposed to reflect and kinda static, but I think that must have had to bend a fair bit over the course of successive editions to accommodate new added tiles and such. For the midscale games you can see that going down a bit for sure I'd say. Perhaps the SZ conception was similar? Like where it started pretty solid and clear, then got hazier over time. I mean you look at the Baltic and see it split from 1 tile into 3 sz going from V3 to G40, and have to kinda wonder about it all, like it maybe gave them some headaches too if they really sat with it for too long hehe.

My quick take here would be to nix the extra zones around Algeria sz 92/94, keep the extra zone carved out of sz 96, but move Malta off that line to be a true island again. At least then you'd have an equal distance between Malta and Gibraltar compared to Malta and Suez by sea, basically 2 spaces from each. If that works for ya, I'll just bang out the eraser and do a quick copy paste hehe

ps. Here's a quick look at how Hepster did his Med in that 1914 game. That seemed kinda interesting to me, though the basic sz splits don't follow G40 there. Like where the sz hits at Tunisia and across Libya, OOB has different lines. Perhaps something like that might still work though, like with rectangular inserts rather than circles or something? Honestly it's one of those things, where I'll just do whatever you guys think best for the ideas you got in mind. As long as G40 looks OK, I'll be pretty happy. For that I think I just need to shift Malta back for the visual right? I remember sliding it a bit right to try and add that sz similar to the way Hepps broke it across a line, but that was a while ago and it really doesn't work for the G40 sz divisions with Malta the way it's positioned there. The Med has been made relatively larger since then as well. So we can change it to whatever you guys think looks cool.

[Cernel]

@black_elk said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

@Cernel good eye, must have forgot a break for the Bosporus. That needs to go in for sure!

With your drawing, however, there is the problem that having that sea zone border on the Bosphorus implies you can load and/or offload between the Aegean sea and your territory in north-western Anatolia, despite the fact that ships which cannot move through the Bosphorus cannot move through the Dardanelles either. Having the border on the Dardanelles, on the other hand, would fix this problem but cause the same problem for the Black sea and your Smyrna territory, instead.

In Europe/Global 1940 there is not this issue because Turkey is one single territory, which is an egregious distortion if you consider that the real Turkey is actually bigger than France and Great Britain combined (yet nothing compared to Brazil being one single territory...).

By the way, in Europe/Global 1940 it appears that the Turkish straits are indeed only the Bosphorus, whereas the official optional rules of V3 mention the Dardanelles (and not the Bosphorus), instead.

[Black_Elk]

Yeah the big board is a trip on that one hehe. I'd just put the borderline on either side I guess. Maybe change the color of the water there, to indicate the whole thing is closed from the Dardanelles to the golden horn and grinding rocks. No Argonauts allowed? lol

Frostion has this graphic we can use to help clarify the location of the straits. He has the image titled Bosphorus as well, but the way it's shaped, I'd just stick on the Dardanelles. Probably fits a bit better there, with the focus more on the Med side than the Black Sea side, since that's where most of the starting ships are located.

[Black_Elk]

Here is the Med again... I used the double line like Bung did for Straits/Canals, with a slightly lighter shade of blue. OOB and the current tripleA G40 have the break at Skagerrak for the Danish Straits, though I'd probably hang the little graphic pointing more Kattegat, just because of the angle it's at. Basically looks like the Bosphorus graphic above just at a slightly different angle in Frostion's set. He has half a dozen at different angles I think, but nothing quite that vertical.

I'm not sure if you want to add any more?

Singapore comes to mind, but the way the OOB sz divisions are set up, it's not very convenient to do a choke point there. Same deal with Malacca. Basically G40 has SZ lines already riding the narrows, so the split just doesn't really work, cause the existing SZ lines are running parallel rather than perpendicular for a clean break. Like it'd have to cut across more than 2 sz to actually block movement effectively, and the control would probably feel a bit off. Frostion had both in Iron War and it was kinda cool, but he also had a totally different geometry for the Sea Zones in that area than G40 does. They work better with the splits in Iron War, but here not so much.

Messina might work if inserting another SZ tile I guess, but it seemed sorta pointless, since you guys wanted fewer sea zones rather than more in the Med from what I'm gathering hehe. Plus the Med already had 3 weird waterways in neighborhood. So I don't know, just seemed like overkill lol.

If there's something else you can think of let me know and I'll make the adjustments.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4740bj0l87sbb57/World_War_II_Global_1940_baseline.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnvwl23sf092dia/Domination_1941_baseline.png?dl=0

ps. One last quick thought on Singapore...

So if we used this one... or that one, or a flipped version...

Then we could set up a choke between sz 37 and sz 41, and that might carry better as a visual controlled from the Singapore TT.

I guess it could just block sz41 and sz36 from sz 37 simultaneously?

I feel like you'd need to reinforce the idea with the visual if doing that, cause usually Straits only cut across a single border between only 2 sz, but from the tangent of the graphic (if we placed it right and then did a little double line with the blue) maybe we could get that to work? Just so it's not too hard to parse.

Or it could just block at sz 36 I suppose, and that would still be mechanically kind of interesting, even if sort of Alice in Wonderland level suspension of disbelief hehe. Either way it'd be kinda nice if we could get something going. Having a Strait there would be cool as a way to make that pearl a bit more valuable to the gameplay and maybe get the dynamic bouncing between Japan and India to be a bit more engaging. Also it would be nice just for parity with the Europe side of the board. I mean to have at least one in the Pacific, since the other side of the map has 5 OOB.

[beelee]

@black_elk Frostion's Frontier Icon is way sweet Reminds me of James Bond lol

I think you got it dialed in pretty good. People can just erase stuff right ? I guess adding is different ?

Anyway Rock On !

Hmm Heppster's Rock On Image is gone.

Well anyway Rock On ! lol

Edit
Here he is. Was kinda bummed for a minute lol

[Black_Elk]

Haha the rocker!

Yeah I've been giving the units another pass to see if I missed anything. I found one factory-it tech unit that was off and a couple shadows, but otherwise I think it looks pretty good. I was going to put all the current 48px graphics into a sub folder so nothing gets overwritten even if they got the same names or whatever, cause there's quite a few nice graphics in there. Maybe we can upscale more of them as time allows.

[TheDog]

@Black_Elk
For the canal lines Gibraltar, Danish Straights etc I don't think they should go on the baseTiles png. (As it will mess with the polygon grabber). They are better represented on the reliefTiles or as Frostion has done, they are in the decorations.txt file.

@Cernel
Any more SZ that pop out at you and look wrong?

[Black_Elk]

Sounds good. That would be preferable, because I think with white borders in the relief the straits would slip too far into the background and not be quite noticeable enough anyway. Those subtle changes in color information or the double line, they just kinda recede a bit when the lines are all thicker and white that way, so decorations would be better. The Graphic will convey what's going on with more impact hopefully.

I updated both base files in the dropbox links. Just let me know what further tweaks you'd like to make and I'll bang them out. At this point it kinda feels like whackamole could set in if we linger overmuch lol. Like we could probably hang at this phase till the New Year and split the hairs till we're balder than Lobot, but I would suggest just kinda doing what you think would work well for whatever distribution of starting forces you're vibing on hehe. The stuff we put in the zones and the production values assigned are what will determine the playpattern more than anything else, so it's hard to see it clearly until we start tooling around with more of that stuff. For what it's worth think it's possible to justify many things in this kind of game. Like provided the resulting gameplay delivers the appropriate feel for the start date. Although I definitely like having a consistent conceptual framework to build on for the sense of realism, the OOB game often isn't terribly consistent or realistic either, so that colors it a bit. The shorthand on some of this stuff for me is 'can we make it more fun for the WW2 gameplay if we do X or Y or Z?" Cause if we can, that smooths over many things that might otherwise stick in the craw haha.

Anyway, hope your Tuesday is entertaining! I rewatched Andor for a second time and just hung the Xmas lights! If we can somehow have the troops home for the Holidays, that would kick ass! Maybe it's a target we could actually pull off for G40? The new one will surely take a while to suss out and playbalance, but I'm itching to dive in. I will even try to learn these damn utilities I guess, if it helps things along lol. Though I know myself - flying solo I'd burn out on it for sure and it'll never get finished, so going to need a G40 wingman and a cobra commander to keep it pushing, no doubt! haha

Catch ya in a few!

ps. @Cernel, did you follow along with Hepps' naming conventions for the main tiles in that 1914 map? I have all his labelling for that map which is somewhat similar, cause we started there for the Dom one, but there are a few tile names that wouldn't make sense to me in a 1940/41 context. Also the shifting between urban centers and regional labels feels a little problematic sometimes. Unlike the Alpha Numeric approach of the building off the G40 SZ divisions, the Dom TTs sorta require the names hehe. Once we have the divisions settled, I want to do label key for it, so we have a point of reference for that, but I could definitely use an eye. I think there are spots where it could do with a name change or two, for sure. Also I never trust myself as a typist. These clumsy thumbs lol. I'll post it when I'm finished, but I'm only like a tenth of the way there, cause there's a ton of tiles.

[TheDog]

@black_elk
For my part I'm done with TT & SZ. I would merge a few more SZ, but like you I wish to keep backwards compatibility with G40.

So I'm waiting on @Cernel critical eye for any last comments.

Black_Elk when we have finished with the TT/SZ, for 1941 Command Decision (detailed G40) do you fancy numbering the TT and SZ and putting the numbers & name of the TT/SZ in a text file?

Then for 1941 Command Decision (detailed G40) I will be doing the boring bit, making the centers, polygon, place text files. The xml, bar the TT/SZ and unit positioning is almost ready for testing.

[Cernel]

@black_elk said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

ps. @Cernel, did you follow along with Hepps' naming conventions for the main tiles in that 1914 map?

Absolutely not. Didn't even know about that until I read this post.

[Cernel]

@thedog said in Proposed Map: Domination 1941:

So I'm waiting on @Cernel critical eye for any last comments.

What map image?

[TheDog]

@cernel
If you would be so kind, to give this file your critical eye/opinion.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnvwl23sf092dia/Domination_1941_baseline.png?dl=0

[Black_Elk]

@cernel Right on I was trying to remember who was following along on that one, cause I wasn't quite sure. Like I remember reading some thoughts from Schulz, but I wasn't there for that part and was just curious if you were. Guess not

@TheDog
Yeah, I figured that would be a necessary final step for contributing the map materials. I have the working files for 1914, so basically I was just going to give it a pass and rename anything that jumped out to me. Many tiles just follow conventions similar to the ones laid out in that first domination 1900 map, many others were adjusted by Hepps. I think there's maybe a quarter altogether that would need adjustment just to fit the timeline, but for others it's a bit like whether you want to keep with a concept of alternating between urban and regional type designations or just to find something that is more generic/consistent?

You know, like whether you want a TT to be called something like Berlin or Paris, instead of say Brandenburg or Île-de-France, or something yet more generic like Central Germany or Central France etc. Just to give a quick example from my neighborhood of the world, so Hepps has a TT in California called "San Francisco" which is clearly a labelling abstraction. I mean the TT extends from the Bay Area to LA over like 500 miles and doesn't correspond to anything particularly real as a local region, it's clearly a blob/zoom. In the 1914 game this happens quite a few places, though it's pretty consistent in inflating the scale of these spots relative to the surrounding TTs, giving them Urban/City designations, and using different visual patterns and production rules to set them apart. I'm not sure if that same approach is desirable here?

Most of the work I did over the past month involved removing many of these spots particularly in some of the more familiar regions of the board like say Europe and the Mid-East, often following requests to make the borders or TT shapes look "more accurate" for whatever region. But mostly it was coming down to that stuff, that Hepps had inserted a more abstract TT somewhere and that in turn made some other border feel a bit wonky to peeps at a glance. Some fit with a regional re-designation better than others, so I didn't nix everything, but anyway there's a fair bit left to parse and modify I think.

Just for an example of the number of entries we're probably looking at, below is a centers txt from the 1914 gamemap... The coordinates would be meaningless and the sz designations too (since we blew up the map and changed all those sz divisions), all the political/inset stuff as well, but otherwise it gives a rough indication of the number of land entries we're likely to see. In the WIP files I have for the 1914 game, nothing in that list appeared to be in order, so I ran it through an alphabetizer real quick and this is what I got... You can see just from reading the list of names, the sort of things I'll likely have to deal with over the next few days to find suitable replacements lol.

1914_centers_alphabetized.txt

Anyhow, that's the txt list I mentioned. I will just produce something along those lines as I fill out my label key rough draft, though again, I think at least a quarter or these will need changing to fit the timeline and the changes we already made in various spots. I'm not sure fancy is the word for my level enthusiasm with the the txt slog, but I'll get it done one way or another, just might take a little bit heheh

[TheDog]

@black_elk
I know you dont fancy doing it, but someone got to shovel it.

Thanks for volunteering.

[Black_Elk]

Sounds good, I was going to follow 2 quick rules of thumb...

First rule would be to avoid redundant labelling out of G40, meaning that if the TT is named in G40 but split into multiple TTs here, those smaller TTs need different names. Basically so we could do a graphic that displays the G40 designation regionally if we wanted, but then the names written in wouldn't add to confusion or be repeated on top of each other. For example G40 has a capital TT called "United Kingdom" and then Scotland. In the subdivided map we've got Scotland, Wales, Northern England, England. So a regional graphic display might still say United Kingdom or Great Britain or whatever over those and it'd still look decent and make sense. Like ideally you'd like the G40 map to kinda make more sense as a result.

Second rule, add some hyphens or go generic for anything that's overly abstract. So for that example earlier of the San Francisco TT in Hepster's, with the right designation that blob can still work. You know, just calling it Coastal California or whatever, which is a made up name, but gives an impression like 'OK everything from there to there' kinda swept into one thing. That can be done in most places I'd say and you could make something work that otherwise might be weird.

Random aside, but in thinking of ways to switch from the G40 vibe to the Domination one, the way the Pacific is handled will be fun to explore when we get into unit distribution and PU values and such. I think the dynamic in G40 for Japan vs China and Japan vs USA/ANZAC in the central Pacific kinda suffers from not having enough going on compared to say Europe. Like obviously one theater was more important, but given the nature of the game and the way things tend to work, you'd like both sides of the board to be engaging. Or you know, how Japan is set up to go so monster, in like every version of A&A, and USA is always like 'pick a direction and don't look back!' lol. I think it'll be fun to see how that can be addressed in other ways. I'd like to see a game where China was maybe not so nerfed or quite so strange in terms of their production rules. Like I get the idea that they weren't punching at the same weight in the same way, but why not just give em a Minor production hub, an Air-base in Chengdu or whatever and call it abstraction of US/British aid. Maybe a cool Tac B unit they can use along with their Flying tiger on D, and just pretend it's an extension of the USA a bit more like classic did things?

Just something to make the threat in that theater a bit more credible, so it's not merely a speed bump lol. Wouldn't take too much I don't think. Then for Japan vs the USA try to get the same thing going for the islands that mattered and were contested, to try and encourage play there. You know, like making bombing out of the Marianas more important to the endgame with a Tinian twist or whatever, and all those earlier contests over the spots like Midway, and Guadalcanal and whatnot. Trying to hit the Hollywood high notes basically lol. Like we know what it is, you just want to get that playpattern flow. Once we free up the production/pus or find a cool way to get the AB/Carrier overall naval dynamic to pur I think it could open up the game quite a bit.