A Slim Victory

[AGRICOLA]

Originally posted by Boco
Agricola, Case what did you think of the hotseat idea in Nemo's Second Front? I know you didn't like the funneling of the scenario, but what of this specific trick? Remember that Western Allies and Chinese did not have good intelligence of each other's daily operations.

I more than agree with Case's comment that

It bugged me - it was very frustrating to have to send out aircraft to spot targets which the ground units had already spotted and vice-versa and it was anoying that friendly planes could block vital roads it you weren't careful.

However, it would work much better in a CBI scenario as the Burma and Chinese campaigns were effectively seperate and there was little coordination between the two. Any conflicts caused by China theatre units getting in the way of Burma theatre units would also be a plus as this was historically one of the problems the British faced. In short, I like the idea for this scenario.

The whole thing was a case (no pun intended ) of closely intermixed Allied air and ground units stumbling around in the dark not knowing what the other service was doing. Having to use separate bases in Britain didn't help matters.

If you can keep the forces from intermixing, it should work.

Also, depite Normandy being among the most photographed places in the world in 1944, neither the Allied ground nor air forces could see the whole map. This struck me as sheer nonsense, so a very long range aircraft had to be flown and refueled in the air to provide complete game maps for both Allied civs.

[Boco]

Thanks for the input. Although I can perhaps segregate the civs by map, I don't think I can escape the blindness factor.

Originally posted by techumseh
The problem is that you can't see the enemy moves. You get a message at the start of your turn telling you how many units you've lost.

My pendulum is shifting away from hotseat.
Tech, thanks for the PM. I'll reply at my sadly snail-like pace, but I can meet your conditions easily.

One benefit of the Chinese under control of the AI–even if you give the civ lots of units via event-triggered unit creation, you can't be sure it'll use them well enough to save his cities. That is a very good simulation of what did transpire.

[Case]

I don't see why blindness is a problem - I doubt that the British and Chinese shared much intelligence with each other, and the British regarded the entire China Theatre as being a total waste of time anyway so they didn't really care what was going on there as long as it didn't absorb too many US transport aircraft. The British basically humoured the American obsession with China as a means of furthering their own obsession with liberating Burma.

Originally posted by Boco
So what about victory conditions? Recovering Burma is easy to measure. What's a way to combine that with keeping the Japanese at bay in China? The British and Americans defined victory differently, especially in 42-44. Maybe I'll just use the sum cities under Western Allied and Chinese control as the criterion.

That works. Can you add in points from the loss of Japanese units? While the Allies were mainly interested in controlling territory, they also saw the theatre as being a very useful drain on Japanese resources (which was fully justified - the Japanese maintained massive ground forces in China and Burma throughout the war, and the Army's best units tended to be sent to fight the Commonwealth in Burma rather than the US and Australians in the Central and South West Pacific).

[techumseh]

It's been over a year since we heard anything. I'm contemplating a theatre-level scenario, including Malaya, as soon as I upload Red October 2.0 and Prince of Darkness ToT. Has anyone heard from Boco?

[fairline]

Haven't heard from him in a while.....

[Boco]

Still alive

It seems with wife, Bocoette, and new demands at work, I have virtually no time for playing, much less designing scenarios. Feel free to go ahead Tech. You would do a better job. I had already gone in the opposite direction and narrowed mine down to CBI '44-45 anyway.

[techumseh]

Glad you're doing well and keeping busy.

My idea is a fairly simple scenario of the entire theatre, perhaps broken into sub-scenarios. I hope you'll finish yours as well, I'm looking forward to playing it. Cheers.

[curtsibling]

Boco!

Good to see you, man!
Hope life is going fine for you...