Antarctica; Race to the South Pole

[OliverFA]

An idea I had while commenting on another thread. I don't plan to develop anytime soon because I want to work on my idea for the Research concept, but I am puting it here just in case someone is looking for ideas to make his own map.

The idea is to make a map about the race that took part at the begining of the XX century to be the first one to reach the South Pole. It would be a map of Antarctica, with the different camp bases for the expeditions set as starting points (The Captain Scott expedition, the Nowegian expedition, an US expedition, etc). Each player would represent one expedition, and the objective would be to arrive to the central territory of the map, the South Pole. Which of course, would be guarded by a lot of neutrals.

Expeditions could try to rush to the Pole, or kill each other to ensure that their oponents don't arrive. But in the way that I see it, there would be at least two different ways to win the map.

[gdeangel]

Well, not to be glib, but this is basically AoR: II without the continent bonus / resource pair structure, where Sanctuary is the South Pole. But if you refined it a bit more and got the history right to make an accurate map, you could have something here.

One this that would be really cool would be if there were lots of paths to get to the pole, but from game to game the places where there are big chunks of neutrals would change so you would get dead ended (like mushing into a big storm).

And rather than a simple race with a strategic objective, you could make it so that the only continent bonus on the map is a pair: hold both the continent and the base camp, and you start getting a small continent bonus advantage. But, you should have a rule that if there is less than N on the base camp, it turns neutral. (Can someone explain to me how that "Hold / Get" think works on Ardennes... I think this would be the same idea...?) And all along the path between the camp and the pole, you get the negative bonus there - i.e., lose 1 for frostbite. And icebreakers that are directly connected to the base camps but which have killer neutrals added to them every turn at a rate just slightly lower than the auto-deploy to base camp, and can one way attack some fraction of the other ice breakers.

I would have a go at making that map with someone who knows what they are doing with the graphics and isn't going to lose interest and blow it off.

[OliverFA]

Well, I am not trying to criticize AOR-II. Is a very good and entertaining map, but most of the times you forget there is an objective in that map. The goal would be to make the objective a bit more important.

About your question, I just took a look at the Ardennes map, judging by the XML, they are continents with a <required> tag saying how many of the territories in that continent you need to hold to get the bonus.

If you finally decide to make the map, good luck!

[benny profane]

e_i_pi is currently working on this:

viewtopic.php?f=241&t=59458

obviously it's different...but kinda the same.

[reggie_mac]

e_i_pi is currently working on this:

viewtopic.php?f=241&t=59458

obviously it's different...but kinda the same.

damit, i read the title and was going to post that.

Although e_i_pi's is set in the future maybe this could be made as historical?

[e_i_pi]

e_i_pi is currently working on this:

viewtopic.php?f=241&t=59458

obviously it's different...but kinda the same.

damit, i read the title and was going to post that.

Although e_i_pi's is set in the future maybe this could be made as historical?

There's definitely room for two variants. Someone suggested in an earlier thread (much earlier than mine) to make camps leading to the south pole. I guess it would look kind of like the Rail maps. You'd have trails going to the south pole, crossing over at various points, and have camps dotted along them. Anywhere that isn't a camp suffers -1 armies per turn. I'd like to see a historic take on Antarctica. Honestly, I went for my version after seeing a map of the land lying underneath the ice of Antarctica, and thought it would make for a nice map.

I say go for it