Brian Train - 10:39am Sep 21, 1999 PST (#23 of 43) "He was wont so to speak plain and to the purpose, as an honest man and a soldier." Hello Chris, here is some more info on Battle for China. B4C is basically another adaptation of the Arriba Espana system, done for the various wars in China that were fought from 1937 to 1949. I designed this game because no one has yet done an acceptable, cheap Micro-size game on this war. The basic game will be on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-41. It will have an 11x17" map and 280 counters. I also plan on releasing an expansion kit shortly afterwards: details below. The time scale is 3 months per turn, so it’s back to areas at about 150 miles to the inch in order to get through 4 years of war over half of China in a long evening. The troop scale is division/corps for the Japanese, and corps/army for the Chinese. The game is 2-3 players, with one player controlling both the Nationalist and Communist Chinese, but easily (and perhaps preferably) playable with three. Again, the core concepts are Political Support Levels and maneuver by battlegroups. What I like in a game is a certain amount of asymmetry: the sides in a game should not have identical goals or methods to achieve victory, nor should their armies be based on the same assumptions or compositions, etc. Each side should have its own strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise you might as well be playing Tactics II. So some of these asymmetries I’ve worked into the 1937-41 game are: Nationalist Chinese: 4 different factions that have to be fed and placated, plus Jiang Jieshi’s Central Army - their Political Support (PS) index measures the firmness of this coalition of former warlords more than true popular support. Large numbers of slow-moving, indifferent quality troops. From time to time they will be skirmishing with the Communists as well. Communist Chinese: their PS index measures true popular support. Their main strength is guerrillas - lots of them - but they can raise numbers of regular troops too. Japanese: High quality troops but they can't be everywhere at once. They have the ability to do breakthrough attacks, amphibious invasions and reaction moves, and other fun stuff. Some "puppet troops" are present, to account for the one million collaborator soldiers that defected to the Japanese or were drafted by one or another of the puppet regimes. The Japanese PS index is something like a measure of the Emperor's favor (sending resources to the land war in China vs. the campaigns in the Pacific). Plus loads of wacky random events, political intrigue and instability, Anti-Guerrilla Operations, currying of foreign support, ETC. ETC. ETC. So you see there are quite a few similarities to Arriba Espana - the much larger geographical scale and differences in the situation forced a few changes, but if you know the old AE system there will be no problem. MORE BATTLE FOR CHINA I worked on this expansion kit simultaneously. It will have two 8.5x11" half-maps (one of Manchuria, one of the approaches to India and Indo-China) and 140 more counters which would allow play of the game from 1942-45, and 1946-49. There are Allied counters for both the CBI campaign and possible landings in China in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands (as was planned historically, and all sides expected to happen before the atomic bomb was dropped) and Soviet counters abounding. Finally, of course there would be the 1945-49 Civil War as the Nationalists and Communists face off. Since this amounts to three different games, there will also be a second rules folder to allow for the changing nature and considerations of each war. Hardcore players could probably fight the whole twelve years of conflict (42 turns) in a weekend. The expansion kit will be offered later in the year or early in 2000, for FREE over the Internet. Kerry just has to get the graphics straight and we're away, though he has a lot of other things to square away first. You will be able to download GIF and RTF format files for the maps, counters and rules and print/colour them yourself. We figured there would not have been any real economies in offering a double-size game, and it would have been a headache to do up a separate expansion kit and keep copies on hand - so we thought it best to leave the decision up to the customer. How can you lose? It's FREE, I tell you, FREE! Thanks for your interest.