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Shannon V. OKeets -> RE: Play Balance in China (9/13/2011 9:27:52 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Centuur
The balance of the US entry can be calculated, that isn't my concern here. The boardgame has a delicate balance concerning the Chinese front. This is reflected by two things. The first are the early war years, where Japan could try to conquer China, or make it so small, it isn't going to be a concern for the rest of the war. The second are the late war years, when China should be able to grab some territories back and perhaps even drive the Japanese out of Manchuria, if he is very lucky or the Japanese didn't push the Chinese to hard in the early war years.
The CWIF map has, according to the players here, the disadvantage of making the defence of China very difficult, if not impossible due to supply problems and the large gaps in the frontlines...
The MWIF map now has, according to one here, the disadvantage of making it to easy for the Chinese to punish the Japanese in the later war years, due to more supply sources for the Chinese troops and the large gaps in the frontline... Don't forget that the Chinese will take only land impulses, which gives the opportunity to tactically exploit the gaps in the Japanese lines (since Japan has to take a lot of naval impulses against Uncle Sam...). Gaps are almost never there on the boardgame map, so there is less need for the Japanese to move land units in the boardgame.
Question is: how many playtesting has been done, using the new cities? Is this enough to come to the conclusion that the cities are doing a proper job, not only in making it more difficult for the Japanese to conquer China, compared to CWIF but also not giving the Chinese to much opportunities in the later war to crush the Japanese to early, compared to the boardgame?
If the conclusion is that there is a problem with the new cities in the late war years, shouldn't it be fixed somehow before MWIF goes on the market?
No. In the lifetime of WIF, the designers have always made an honest effort to gets things balanced correctly but inevitably have had to make changes later to "fine tune" game play.
There are too many interacting systems and subsystems to hope to exhaustively test all cases. Even trying to cover all the primary cases is beyond feasible. Who declares war on whom when, who builds what units when, which optional rules are in effect, and how the die rolls go on certain critical attacks are just a few of the variables with which we have all seen have dramatic effects on the tide of war.
Indeed, no one wants to know in advance that doing A-B-C will produce result X. That is what playing the game is all about.
So, let me phrase your concern as being that you do not want doing A-B-C to always produce result X. Rather, there should be sufficient alternatives in the opponent's tool kit to maybe cause result Y, when you do A-B-C. What is presently unknown is whether there are enough alternative strategies and tactics available to both the Chinese and the Japanese when playing MWIF. Ideally, either side should be able to find responses to counter their opponent's game play (and luck).
We'll really only know that after hundreds of games have been played to completion by a wide variety of players using different rules, and strategies, and tactics, and die rolls, and, ...
But I can say we have made a serious effort to play balance the war in China and the Pacific for MWIF. So far we haven't found any obvious egregious flaws. They might be there[&:], they might not be there.[&:] More than that I don't think is possible. In the short term, the numerous optional rules let players 'adjust' the play balance rather significantly.
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