ORIGINAL: mike scholl 1
It easily can ruin the game by encouraging the Japanese player to throw caution to the wind and try crazy things to achieve it. Then if it doesn't work, he quits on January 2nd, 1943. That ruins the game. [8|]
So the nation so incautious as to start a war with another that had seven times its economic muscle could actually win by being cautious? News to me!
ORIGINAL: HansBolter
Axis players start indebted to the Allied player. The Allied player has a right to expect to collect on that debt. Auto victory conditions encourage Axis players to weasel out on their debt repayment. They are the bane of any grand strategic game.
How regrettable it is that you can't have a nice WW2 wargame without having to engage one of those nasty Axis weasels as an opponent! Hans, for all I know you're a lovely man with whom I would be delighted to down a pint or two. However, if you invite me to join you in a game in which you
require me to prostrate myself to your two-year long bombardment I'm going to decline, thanks all the same. Owe you a debt? Seldom heard such nonsense in my life!
From an Axis player's perspective, the real problem I have with Hans and Mike's posts is that they reveal the viewpoint that every game representing the Pacific War has to follow a script that is, more or less, pre-ordained. The insistence that in every respect all aspects of the opposing forces must be reproduced to the minutest degree of accuracy is but a short step from a call to re-enact the war that actually took place, blow by blow. No doubt the Allied player may derive satisfaction from such vicarious participation in 'the way it was', but he is likely to find himself short of candidates to play the Axis role.
Several times I have seen comments along the lines of 'We don't need no stinkin' victory conditions: both sides knew who really won.' However, I imagine that in most games that reach the point at which the Allies become preponderant the scores in terms of destroyed LCU's, ships and planes make it look as though the Japanese have been crushed, and that supplies a context in which the Axis player does desire an objective measure of whether he won or lost – as Moose says, 'most want the screen to say "You Won."' For that reason it is particularly refreshing to see Mike, who I usually associate with the Allied cause, displaying a readiness to lay out a range of weighting factors that might be used to help determine victory, even though he then returns to disparaging such an exercise because he KNOWS when he won!
Alfred makes the excellent point that no Allied player could object to a Japanese opponent shooting for and securing a 3:1 auto victory in 1944, so perhaps the simple way forward would be to implement a switch that excludes a 4:1 victory on 1 January 1943. Although that might allay the concerns of those Allied players who fear their opponent may only be in it for the short haul, I suspect there would still be Japanese players who, as Alfred suggests, bail out once the opportunity for easy tactical victories has passed – but that's something no set of victory conditions is ever going to cure.