Hello everyone! I've been off the forum for a long time, but I'm glad to be back and announce and finally release a new map.

It takes place on a highly detailed map of Europe I originally made for a WW1 game (still in progress, I need to study the new trains code a bit and update the XML).

Its a pretty simple map, the goal was to have some rarely seen nations fight in a few unusual areas. This time period (1600's) also doesn't get much representation from other maps.

The Habsburg Alliance includes Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, Venice, and of course the Habsburgs: including Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, and parts of Italy and France.

The other alliance is France, Russia, The Ottoman Empire, and Denmark. The map does not represent any one particular conflict, the alliances are simply drawn to create a dynamic conflict.

More coming this week.

Its historical-ish. The borders on based on a map I found on wikipedia. Sweden and Denmark are in a bloody war, and Sweden controls St. Petersburg. You have this massive land war between Russia and Poland-Lithuania. The Ottomans are sieging Budapest at the start, and France is positioned to start taking land from the Habsburgs. Venice pretty much had to be a Habsburg ally, so it didn't just die everygame

@General_Zod
You can set support attachments to give additional dice, rather than rolling a better dice. I just did that, a castle gives -1 dice to 5 enemy units

@Hepps
Its not uploaded yet, I'm still cleaning up the XML and making sure no units are missing from the folders. Its the same map image that I intend for the WW1 scenario

@wc_sumpton
Yea I'm turning it on and off every turn using a trigger. Its the simplest way that I found.

The other way would be to make FrenchPikemen and OttomanPikemen different units (like in TWW), but the other method seemed like less work.

I wanted to make it so that a land unit which fights this turn doesn't get to move again, and givesMovement does that.

@beelee
I think the lines appears wherever the last unit placement is. So it takes the coordinate of the last unit in line (in this case its the dock) and then places to the right.

So if you reo-rder the coordinates in the place file, it might do something. I would try that

@Cernel
I'll go ahead and share my secret.

You need the unit to be able to move onto both land and sea, so you make it an airunit. You purchase it and place it on land like any other air unit.

Then you give it carrierCost=0, which lets it land in empty sea zones as if there was a carrier there. So on the next you move your hull into the sea zone and it should land just fine (isKamikaze could work as well but this seems cleaner). Then you buy the battleship, and it should consume the hull just like it would consume a sea unit version.

In version 1.8 I had an XML with this working, life got in the way before I could share it though.

I think I can re-use centers then auto fill polygons and place (I can do a better place at a later date). After that I can reuse most of the XML, I only need to add or delete a few options.

Its also possible I'll scrap the whole thing and spend all night angrily recreating it.

I really don't this map is a good starting point. The only reason this game has any popularity whatsoever in my opinion is that is has the name Larry Harris attached to it. I've played the board game many times and its boring. Once you solve the quesiton of what ratio of infantry/artillery to build its basically just move and roll dice.

The map itself is just awful. The way the territories are drawn deny any kind of a dynamic conflict from happening. Germany and Austria just have an incredible lack of options, the sea zones make naval superiority grossly too strong and flexible compared to land. Even with tons of revisions and house rule ideas tried, the map just doesn't work. Domination, No Man's Land, Great War, or even NWO provide a much better starting point for a WW1 game.

Here is a sneak peak of a very delayed update. I found some missing connections, and I'm adding technologies to the map. These should help speed the game up (especially March). See below

March~ pikemen and muskets have 2 movement in the noncombat move phase only
Horseshoes~ knights have 3 movement in NC only
Horsedrawn Artillery~ artillery have 2 movement in NC only

AccurateCannons~ cannons have +1 attack
HeavyCannons~ cannons roll 3 dice but have -1 attack
Hussars~ knights have +1 attack

Sailing~ navies get +1 movement in NC only
Naval Cannons~ Navies have +1 attack
Ship of the Line~ Navies have +1 defense

Quick question in case anyone else has tried this, what is the easiest way to give units +1 movement only in the noncombat move phase in a way that can be activated by tech?

@wc_sumpton
I tried this way, but it doesn't seem to work for land units (it does work for air). If changing the movement of land units, it just doesn't change the movement. I found a way to do it by having the units give themselves bonus movement

  <option name="givesMovement" value="1:Pikemen"/>

Update is on github

I don't think the AI is able to realize that because all units have an AA feature, fighters effectively cost 1/6th more than they do. It's analysis of almost no navy and pure fighters in that situation makes sense.

Also I don't build much if any navy as Germany in this scenario.

Just at a glance, the allied conditions are much harder to achieve than the axis conditions.

I actually saw the axis take roughly that much income several times in games that were still undecided. I could easily imagine the allies win in the first picture if something was going well (say the USA was beating Japan at sea).

If the axis hold only Germany, Italy and Hungary. that doesn't sound like a tie, it's a pretty clear loss. I can see Germany technically holding in that situation (with it's plus 2 defense) but if I achieved a tie that way (so technically not a loss) it would feel pretty hollow.

I've had a few games that go for a really long time (like 20+ rounds) due to being extremely evenly matched. Win or lose those are probably my favorite games ever and I'd be quite disappointment if the rules declared them a tie.

@Schulz
That fighter idea was just an idea for hypotheticals, if fighters aren't doing well in land.

I think tanks are a much better choice for land heavy combat because they can help defend. But a few fighters can be a decent buy just because it forces the enemy to build more ships while also being okay.

I tried bombing more seriously. One thing is that Germany can ignore about 15 points (so 150 PUs) of bombing damage just because the territory has such a high value.

It is really nice that the damage from AA guns is less swingy (I lose 1 artillery of PUs, instead of 3-4 artillery worth). That is a big improvement.

I haven't tried bombing anywhere else: Germany often loses it's bomber in El Alamein on turn 1 and no other Axis start with bombers.

Those changes look like a good direction. Japan has some actual competition.

You could consider giving fighters artillery support to infantry, so they effectively get 3 attack on land but still only 2 at sea.

IDK about bombers. Their only advantage right now is high movement, bombing raids don't hurt the factories much.

There is a missing connection between Queensland and Sea Zone 55.

I think this approach to fighters is really interesting, in most games fighters are a super premium unit which generally speaking you want to to the entire game without ever losing. Here they are somewhat cheap.

I think giving fighters some support to land units is a good move. I would rather build a tank which doesn't get hurt by AA fire and has stronger stats.

At sea the starting fighters are valuable, but they compare poorly to the ships (due to dying to AA fire). Carriers are too expensive at 60.

In another test game, the Axis have far more income than the allies by turns 2 and 3 when you consider convoy raiding. The UK loses so many resources to it every turn. Right now this feels very favorable to the Axis. It's really easy to knock out the UK factories around the world (if Japan gets a huge army to Australia, South Africa is just 1 turn away).

I played 2 games today. A few thoughts:

Cairo currently can build 10 units a turn. It's probably supposed to be just 1, right? (that's how we played)

At 1 unit per turn you can't hold Cairo on turn 2 unless you abandon India, even if you buy trenches every chance. Africa gets swarmed by all 3 axis pretty quickly.

You can kill all trenches in a territory by suiciding a single unit into the territory. Not sure if that's intentional, it's a good move for Germany in Leningrad for example.

Fighters taking so much AA fire takes a while to get used to. They aren't great for land combat but still decent at sea. It felt weird that subs shoot air units and don't submerge.

Japan can really threaten India quickly. It's possible (but only barely) to hold both the factories on turn 2 but you'll lose one of them quickly.

The units are really heavily biased towards defense so the second Indian factory can last for a while at least. I didn't try sending Russians to India.

China being all cavalry is interesting. China is actually difficult to conquer which is a nice feature. In both games Japan just skipped them and hit India/Australia. He has the option to hit South Africa too (and it's not far from Australia).

The US won the pacific naval battle once, and Japan won it in the second game. Germany won the Russian war both times. England takes a while to organize and didn't do much in Europe either game.

The Russia-Japan front isn't too active which is nice. The shape of Siberia as an impassible territory is interesting.

Like others said, I think that a limit to combat rounds is a pretty good way to get this effect. It seems to me that most of the time it will either be in the attackers interest to retreat, or the defenders, and somewhat rare that both players agree to keep fighting.

I don't think it would be game-breaking, it would probably be a nice feature to have. But I'd be aware that adding decisions for a defender to make during an attackers turn can significantly increase the time it takes to play, especially for play by email.

I think random start delegate assigns all territories without owners, right? I think it was designed to make the game risk.

You could make the territories with values of 0,1,2 owned by a neutral player without a turn. Only the other territories would be distributed initially.

@SilverBullet
Yes I can play offline games but it won't connect to the lobby, nor will the download maps feature work