Arc 10597: Axis and Allies

Arc Name: Axis and Allies
Arc ID: 1379
Faction: 5th Column, Allies, Red Army, US Army, Paragon Police
Creator Global/Forum Name: @PW / PoliceWoman
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Synopsis: Travel back in time to take over the 5th Column, and lead the Axis powers to win WW2 and conquer the World!
Note: (Yeah, this is a villainous arc. But the system lets heroes play it too.)
Estimated Time to Play: 1-2 hours

I'm playing this arc right now, and i'm wondering about the general you save in the 3rd mission i think. Is he suppose to help you? I ask this because at the moment he is on follow, but non-combat.

Ally boss in mish in atlas park, does not attack either, but besides those two things, I love this arc.

*edit* also patton is not spawning for me for some reason.

General Paulus IS supposed to help you in the Stalingrad mission, as is Schadenfreude in the Atlas mission. I'll definitely look and see if I can figure out why that's not happening.

Thanks for trying it out!

NP, I'll try and play this arc again this week to see the changes. Good luck

I tinkered with the story arc settings a bit and think I fixed the thing with the allies not helping. The two you mentioned were set to "noncombat", now I set Paulus to "Aggressive" and Schadenfreude to "Defensive" and they seem to help fight now.

I'm not sure why Patton wouldn't spawn for you. I just ran through a run of the story arc and both MacArthur and Patton did spawn for me successfully, and I was able to finish the mission and get the souvenir.

One thing I did find tough was finding the bosses in missions (especially on the Dunkirk and Stalingrad maps); most "in game" mission bosses have some dialog they speak if you get near them, but I simply didn't have enough room in my story arc file to add dialog for this.

I totally wish I had more space to play with. My original concept had British heroes from the Dawn Patrol fighting you at Dunkirk, some Soviet heroes on the Stalingrad map, an assassination attempt from Nemesis (who is ticked off that you are messing up his plan to become Emperor of America), secret service agents protecting President Truman, and Statesman and other American heroes in Atlas Park.

Sadly I just didn't have enough room to fit all that!

Hehe, I will really have to run this arc again sometime this week to see the changes as i've said, but the patton thing I think I figured out. I think he might have just fallen through the map, it has a chance of happening on any map in the game or any scenario so it is not your fault, just bad luck on my part.

Hmm maybe in the future you can find a way to put all those mobs in the story arc, but for now I loved it the way it was. It is one of the few instances of playing this game where I was thinking to myself "man...i'm actually being a super villain, not some lackey".

I updated this story arc again tonight.

"Patch notes" (heheh):
* Fixed problems caused by today's patch.
* Deleted the French and British lieutenants from the Dunkirk mission. This mission alone was using 6 custom models, which I decided was using up too much of my space, and these lieutenants weren't really that different than the minions.
* This gave me enough room to add a new Secret Service Bodyguard model for President Truman in the final mission.
* This also gave me enough space to generally add more pretty-text and dialog all over the story arc. All the named bosses should say something when you get close to them now, and there's a few more "clues" (they aren't plot-important, just fun stuff like "British surrender").

Enjoy!

I can't wait to test this tommorrow morning.

-Both of the ally pets helped me, so I love that improvement.

-I was able to find both of the generals, so I don't think that will be a problem for anyone else.

-With the removal of the Lts. from the 2nd mish, the game added more minions. When I fough the British general, I looked down at the text and then looked up and I was dead lol. They are easy enough if you pay attention, but if you don't they can weaken you enough to kill you , I like them alot.

- The final missions map I like alot, but I wish there was some way to either remove the meteor or make it non-attackable. My ally started attacking it, we killed it quickly but it does kind of break the flow of the arc, a little bit.

-Also when I captured the President he stood there for a second then ran off faster then I have ever seen a mob do with out speed boost lol.

- I don't know if you should change anything about the last map, I love it the way it is, but i hope you can get more feed back on what other people think of the Arc.

-I also liked the speech text I think you added

-Wonderful arc, one of the few true evil arcs in the game, 5/5.

-*edit* Also the title of your arc is being messed up. Right now I can read ally and axis, but there is alot of garbled mess inside the title. I think I read somewhere that it is a bug, but I just wanted to give you a heads up.

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-With the removal of the Lts. from the 2nd mish, the game added more minions. When I fough the British general, I looked down at the text and then looked up and I was dead lol. They are easy enough if you pay attention, but if you don't they can weaken you enough to kill you , I like them alot.

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Cool, I kind of like the sound of that. I don't mean for them to be too hard, but also don't want them to be too easy, so that sounds great.


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- The final missions map I like alot, but I wish there was some way to either remove the meteor or make it non-attackable. My ally started attacking it, we killed it quickly but it does kind of break the flow of the arc, a little bit.

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Yeah, I'd rather not have that big meteor there, but I think the final battle needs to be in Atlas Park, to make it really feel like you're invading America and the home of apple pie and stuff. Ideally, I'd like to use the same version of Atlas Park as in the last mission of the Recluse Strike Force, or even the Atlas Park Beauty Pageant map; but it seems like the only choices I could find were this map (Atlas Park as in the intro to Ouroboros story arc) or another version of Atlas Park that doesn't seem to have enough spawn points. Maybe there's something in one of the unlockable map packs, I'll have to check.


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-Also when I captured the President he stood there for a second then ran off faster then I have ever seen a mob do with out speed boost lol.

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Hmm, I'm not sure how to adjust that. One thing I tried briefly was to make the President an "escort" mission, forcing you to escort him to the exit while under heavy attack, but I couldn't get this to work out and I'm not sure if walking him out makes it more fun.

I also kind of wanted to have Statesman swoop in and try to rescue the President while you were kidnapping him, but I couldn't get this to work either; Statesman is level 40-54 only, and Mission Architect generated some errors for me trying to incorporate him. Also I think I'd like my arc to be playable before level 40, anyway.

I had similar problems when I tried to add Spetznaz Commandos to the Stalingrad map; they're only level 10-16 and the level difference seems to bug things out. Kind of a shame, as the original idea for this story arc came from seeing 5th Column and Spetznaz Commandos and thinking they belonged in a WW2 story arc together.


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-*edit* Also the title of your arc is being messed up. Right now I can read ally and axis, but there is alot of garbled mess inside the title. I think I read somewhere that it is a bug, but I just wanted to give you a heads up.

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I noticed this too, it seems to be a bug in the latest patch. I've seen people complaining that spaces in their mission arc names were getting messed up. I tried renaming my story arc and republishing it, but the spaces still were messed up. I saw some people were suggesting putting underscores ("_") in place of spaces, but this is a little awkward, so I'm hoping this just gets fixed in a future patch.


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-Wonderful arc, one of the few true evil arcs in the game, 5/5.

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Thanks a ton for looking at it! Glad you liked it!

I had another player run through this story arc and PM me that one of the generals failed to spawn, although for him it was MacArthur who didn't spawn.

But in 4 test runs I wasn't able to get this problem to happen at all.

Looking at the I14 forums it looks like this may be a known bug that they aren't sure how to reproduce yet; I posted a problem report on this thread.

I think it has something to do with the meteroite, i'm not even close to 50% sure about that, but it is a weird object on the map and mobs could be spawning through it. Not sure at the moment. Good luck on finding a solution

Someone suggested that Statesman should really be in the final mission where you conquer Paragon City, and this actually kind of makes sense dramatically for a big final battle.

So I unlocked the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators enemy packs and inserted a Statesman AV and a Ms Liberty AV (renamed to Maiden Justice, who I think is the equivalent hero for this time period).

I was really afraid that adding two AVs may make it too hard though, so I deleted 2 ambushes from this mission and added 3 additional allies (for a total of 4 allies). Solo on Heroic difficulty this means you face a Statesman EB and a Maiden Justice EB, and you can recruit up to 4 lieutenants as allies, one of which is a healer. I kind of like the effect that this has, where you have a bunch of 5th Column guys following you around beating up good guys...it makes it feel more like the "Invasion America" scenario that is depicted here.

I still found this was pretty hard so I made both Statesman and Maiden Justice optional goals instead of required ones. I was a little reluctant to do that since I figure you REALLY should kill Statesman if you're going to crush America beneath your boots and conquer the world and all that. But I still want the story arc to be completable even by a solo character of a non-soloing archetype.

I've gotten tons of good feedback so far would appreciate any comments on whether this is now too difficult. One thing I possibly could do is downgrade Maiden Justice to use the EB level Ms Liberty, or maybe downgrade both to use the "pet" version from the Ouro TF.

Hey, I just finished this arc and it was great. I didn't see Statesman on the final mission, but maybe I wasn't looking.

The other suggestion I would have is to change the Atlas Park map so you're not using the Shivan one. My allies kept attacking the meteor instead of Maiden Justice, and that seemed out of place. It also teleports you in with the Ourborus crystal.

Anyway, I have 5-starred ya. Good work!

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The other suggestion I would have is to change the Atlas Park map so you're not using the Shivan one. My allies kept attacking the meteor instead of Maiden Justice, and that seemed out of place. It also teleports you in with the Ourborus crystal.

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Thanks for trying my story arc out!

That meteorite has been bugging me too, and I've had another person comment about it as well, so I finally tried changing the final map. I want it to be Atlas Park to be recognizable as a CoH location, but that meteorite is just too annoying. The Atlas Park 1 map won't work for me because it doesn't seem to allow Rescue or Ally objectives; so for now I've switched the final mission to be on the Atlas Park (Ruined) map, which is the trashed version of Atlas Park that you normally see Lord Recluse hanging out on. I kinda liked the bright colors of the main Atlas Park map, but this map kinda works too since it has giant Council robots and blown up tanks all over the place, so it looks a lot like a war zone. I added some flavor text mentioning that Atlas Park was bombarded by V-2 rockets to try and help explain the damage. This map also seems much larger than Atlas Park 2 (the map I was using before), but hopefully that is OK.

I also switched Statesman and Maiden Justice to the weaker versions that appear in the Ouro TF, so that they'd be more doable for a non-optimal solo character; this let me feel like I could make them into required objectives. I like the idea that crushing Statesman and the WW2 Ms Liberty should be a necessary requirement for conquering the United States.

Comments welcome!

Not to sound like a bucket of cold water, but wasn't there a game called Axis and Allies back in like the 80s? Using said name as a title for your arc might not be a good idea, copyright-wise, much like I can't make a THE INCREDIBLE HULK" toon.

I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps you might PM a dev.

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Not to sound like a bucket of cold water, but wasn't there a game called Axis and Allies back in like the 80s? Using said name as a title for your arc might not be a good idea, copyright-wise, much like I can't make a THE INCREDIBLE HULK" toon.

I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps you might PM a dev.

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Wonder if the makers of Axis & Allies the boardgame bought the rights to the name from WWII?

I'm pretty sure PW is safe as long as no where in the mission a board pops out with little plastic pieces and a couple of six sided dice.

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Wonder if the makers of Axis & Allies the boardgame bought the rights to the name from WWII?

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I'm pretty sure "Axis&Allies" is a registered property, much like "hulk" is a real English term and yet also a registered character's name.

Axis & Allies the boardgame yeah, Axis & Allies the Arc for a series of missions in CoH....probably not so much. Different medium.
Axis & Allies the computer game...maybe. Probably not worth the effort though.
If we are stuck using names and terms that are not trademarked in some form or another.... we'd be using arc names like "The", "And", "!"... and probably every character in this game would be "Generichero??????".

Well, I checked into this and the official name of the Milton Bradley game is "Axis & Allies" (note ampersand), and my mission arc doesn't involve rolling any dice, the A&A game board or battle board, or toy soldiers. So I'm *thinking* I should be safe from a legal complaint from Hasbro's lawyers. But I'm open to suggestions for an alternate name, since I'll need to republish on live servers anyway.

"World War II" would be an obvious name but I'd be shocked if someone hasn't copyrighted that, too. (WWII, tm)

I made sure not to ever use the word N a z i, either, since I know that is a registered trademark of TSR (and probably WotC now). (Seriously, they trademarked it for their Indiana Jones roleplaying game...)

This story arc has been republished on the live servers as arc #1379.

Thanks for the input, everyone!

I ran through this with a 5-player team, and Statesman and Maiden Justice (using the "pet" version from the Mender Silos TF) were disappointingly easy with a team. Consequently, I upgraded them both to AVs, but to make sure this is still doable by a soloer, I changed them to non-required objectives.

Based on player feedback I am lowering Statesman and Maiden Justice back to the pet level enemies; the AV versions, even downgraded to EBs, were too harsh on soloers.

I switched them back to required objectives as a result.

Also, fixed a text problem with MacArthur's dialog, and changed French Officers to use kinetics (to run away faster) as a result of a suggestion.

One thing I noticed when playing through this arc was that there are repeated references to "the furor." I didn't know if this was a deliberate attempt to end-run around a possible trademark or copyright or what have you, but the traditional German spelling (absent the availability of an umlaut) would be "Fuehrer," which translates to "leader."