Territory expansion and crunching

One thing I thought is to separate unit production from unit deployment. Roles would only allow to pick units from the reserve and place them in to play, but the production will remain steady.

In World war 2, germans seems to have a head start in production so this seems what allowed them to do their initial expansion. Same thing for the japanese, but in the pacific there was a serious lack of resistance.

As for the crush back: For the japanese theater it was pretty easy because the ammericans had much more superior production, so it was just a matter of time. For the european theater, I am not really sure, I think lack of fuel was a good reason for both theaters.

So this is why I was maybe thinking in giving lot of units on start and use a lighter defense by default to allow initial expansion and hope the "allies" can build enough units to counter the expansion unles the players expand too fast.

I know axis and allies, I am more interested in knowing the elements that makes empires grow and get crunched.

My game takes place in 1871, I know that in WW2 lack of fuel was a major issue for the axis downfall, but it does not applies for my game.

Also since there is only 8 territories, I cannot make certain territory really more valuable or worth keeping than others since they cover a large amount of space, they all have an equal value.

One thing I realised, is that off board territories could increase the amount of cube income in favor of the allies, so that even if the players conquer many territories, there is still some "power" left outside europe to help crunch back the players. That could prevent having lower resistance as the empire expands. It's worth exploring.

Since there is only 8 territories, no supply lines can really be traced. The only thing close is that once a player lose a territory they conquered, they lose any production capabilities from it for the rest of the game.

The thematic reason behind it is once the players conquer an area, they open a node in the area to gather power. Now the the node is open, the humans knows where to attack so if they take back the territory, they destroy the node forever.

Your perspective is interesting, but I would have to reduce the scale of map, make it more detailed. Unfortunately, I cannot do that, so I have no choice to stick with something very abstract and high level.

For now I separated deployment from production, so you can emulate a form of supply chain since there is a possibility of having a large reserve of undeployed units, or the opposite, having no units in reserve to deploy. Then there is restrictions when units can be deployed.

I think the key element here is to make sure the players does not have an unbreakable defense but produce enough troops to expand. I also thought that when a territory is captured, it now behaves differently, like spawning resistance troops. But I could procede other wise and maybe sabotage the reserve or do other resistance operation than just spawning cubes.

I could make each of the 8 territories have a unique effect for additional re-playability and depth. Another thing worth exploring.

I did wanted to have various regions, but for now it does not really affect production, but mostly combat.

For example, in Italy, since there is the vatican and a lot of holy stuff, you lose a dracula cube (black cube) each battle round automatically. Probably in Russia, I will have a special effect related to the fact that there is a lot of territory with little population density (Maybe easier to rally units).

Else the second unique element was that when the capital in a territory falls, the outcome of a captured territory could be different. Russia and the ottoman empire have off board territories that will send units or ships. France might send ships from Algeria. Another might spawn resistance troops, another might sabotage reserve, etc.

Like explained in the previous post, it would be a method for the Humans to get additional resistance power even if territories are lost to avoid the issue of less territories making it easier for the players and thus making the game easier as the game progress.

Again it does not affect production, and there is only 1 resource available which is cubes. In fact there could be 2 resource because there are cubes of your color and black cubes ( the shared color) which represents dracula's units. So far, the player who captured a territory put a disk of his color on the node to indicate ownership, thus producing cubes of his color.

I could put 2 different value for production for colored cubes vs black cubes. Since the current production is currently around 3 cubes per territories, it does not leave much permutations: 3-0, 2-1, 1-2, 0-3. Since I would like all territories to produce at least 1 colored cube, I would remove 0-3.