WeeWar mapmaker Stirling (interview ) has recently released an update to his popular Europe World War II map. This is a fun and complicated board and the recent updates play like an entirely new map. Stirling answered a few questions I had about the map and also added some great information in his interview which I will include here as well. If you haven’t played on the new version then I highly suggest you start a game, and don’t forget to add it to your favorite maps!
- What inspired you to make the Europe Map?
I found this map: http://weewar.com/map/19116 and immediately liked it.
- Can you give us a brief description of the factions and what color represents them?
Russians are red. Americans are blue. Purple is royalty and hence Britain. That leaves green yellow and white. I suppose I could have made White Russians, but I wasn’t drinking that night. I guess I could have gone with white for Turkey, yellow for Germany and green for Italy to match the flags a bit more.
- What are the major changes in the 4.x versions of the map?
Red and yellow can get at each other more easily since they can now walk around both sides of the Black Sea. America has been returned to the invasion force it once was in the original and in the first couple versions of the Stirling’s maps. Vehicles are not blocked on the mainland by mountains (Spain and Athens), but it is slow going for vehicles in those areas because of forest And the starting positions and units changed a fair amount.
- Stirling had this to say about the Europe map when we were talking about map making and what makes a good, balanced map
Let’s look at the WWII setup and BRP vs YGW. It isn’t exactly WWII, but it works. Purple has lots of income early, but can find it difficult to land an invasion force and sustain it, so there is the challenge for purple of attacking through france or Scandanavia. White has the challenge of the two front war, but has the income or should have the income to handle it. White also needs to use every unit in the game to do well. Moving around the board, red also has a two front war but with enough infantry neither yellow nor white will be able to make progress against red and since red is Russia, having lots of infantry is "natural" for the Russian style of play. Add in heavy infantry and a couple raiders and aa guns and aircraft won’t be able to penetrate Russia’s defenses so easily, making them fairly useless purchases. Eventually red can put up a DFA to secure bases from a distance and a minimum of effort. Russia can make progress against white. The red yellow front is generally a stalemate unless the red player doesn’t think like a Russian. Yellow has options, lots of options, more than most players realize. Yellow can try to dig into the Ukraine, which is easier to do in early moves, or provoke and challenge red while sending units to Tunis to help green attack blue. Yellow will have more success against red with each increase in the number of infantry sent to Ukraine per turn. Green vs Blue was always a great matchup although I’ve shifted that war considerably in version 4.02. The entire battle of green vs blue used to come down to who controlled the southern French harbor at 11,17. Green and blue have to decide how to fight each other and blue also has to decide if and how it can support the war against white in France. What it boils down to is options. Each position has a lot of options in how to go about accomplishing their missions and add in luck and every game ends up being different, although most games follow standard patterns.
For FFA it all changes. White and green usually understand that they can’t attack each other and still hold off the other positions. The play also becomes more opportunistic and there still aren’t a lot of quick kills. Based on terrain and typical player dynamics the map lends itself to a self balancing situation. As soon as one player grows strong in a given region, the others attack it and the weaker players recover. If the weaker players get attacked, then eventually the stronger players attack each other to fight for future dominance. But there is enough income on the map that allows the weaker player to recover and survive.
There are a lot of different ways to win, the terrain is diverse and creates restrictions, dominance isn’t easy to gain, recovery from errors or bad luck or too many attackers is possible, it’s Europe after all and who doesn’t want to fight for Europe and the map allows every play style including the Russia infantry forces and the British naval forces. Players who like land vehicles should probably play as Germany, not Russia.
