by Fuchsia tude on Mon Oct 16, 2023 11:25 am
There are: WWII Western Front, WWII Eastern Front, and WWII Europe, which cover all of the above. There's also WWII Australia, which covers some of the war in the Pacific.
I think part of the problem is that, as the name suggests, it was a truly world war, so the plausible areas that the game board could cover would resemble the Classic world maps which already exist. As it was such a big war, there were a bunch of major theaters: the Western Front, mainly France; the Eastern Front, spanning huge swathes of the USSR including well into Russia proper; the War in the Pacific, covering most of that ocean, from the US to Japan to China and mainland Asia to as far as Australia; the Balkans as mentioned; and North Africa. Each of those could easily be its own map (and several of them already are).
The map designer would need to implement all of those regions to do the war justice. They would either end up with either hundreds of territories like Hive and a ton of conditional rules, making the map incredibly complex to play and confusing to learn, or just stick with a few dozen territories, with limited linkages between the various theatres, which hardly captures the scope and feel of the war at all. Making something comprehensible and playable, let alone fun and balanced, from the first option would be an incredibly difficult design challenge, and the latter Classic-style approach hardly seems worth the effort.
As a side note, you can't really design a "triples map" like you say. AFAIK, there's no way to ensure via XML that everybody on Team 1 gets assigned to all Axis territories, and Team 2 gets all assigned to Allies territories, for example. Starting positions, and any other territories not defined as initially neutral, are all simply randomly distributed among all players in equal number. There's no way to set up a map like Diplomacy with pre-assigned alliances.
There would be two main options, as I see it: a Classic-style map, with all territories divided up evenly among all the players; or something like Dark Continent or King's Court, where most territories are neutral but various national capitals are designated starting positions and divided among the players at the outset. But, again, they wouldn't be assigned to teams in any way like all Axis on one side and all Allies on the other.
$t0kA
