That Black_Elk guy always seems to have some of the most level-headed reasonable responses!  Well put.

I think the KJF strategy ranks right up there for the Allies as much as the KBF strategy for the Axis.  Its just not really the preferred strategy, but usually gets done more out of trying to “mix things up” or “target of opportunity” more than the best sound strategy.

@NuclearFusion:

How does Combat involving 2-hit battleships work? If you have 5 battle ships bombarding 5 infantry, and the infantry get all 5 hits, can you spread the hits out over all 5 of your battleships. If you can do that, couldn’t you just retreat and your battleships get repaired?

In a sea battle your example would work. Imagine 5 battleships attacking 5 destroyers. The attacker fails to hit and the defending destroyers score 5 hits.
The attacker can now assign the five hits to just damage all of the five battleships. After that round of combat the attacker may retreat - and the battleships are repaired.

HTH :-)

Hello, Baron Munchhausen. Nice to hear from you!

You raise many interesting points, and I’ll try to respond to two of them. First, can a Southern Pacific strategy work for Japan even without assigning thematically ridiculous IPC values to tiny island chains? I think so. I agree that it would be off-putting to play a game where, e.g., the Solomon Islands plus the Caroline Islands were treated as more economically valuable than France. There are limits to how much you can edit the map without breaking the suspension of disbelief and ruining the theme.

That said, I don’t think the 1942.2 map would take all that much tweaking. On the 1942.2 board, players will occasionally send a transport to take Australia even though it’s not worth much, and there’s little or nothing to use as an encore. If you valued Australia at 4 IPCs, New Zealand at 2 IPCs, the Solomons and Carolines at 1 IPC each, and Hawaii at 2 IPCs, that’s 10 IPCs right there. It’s not hard to find another 8 IPCs in South America: 2 IPCs in Chile/Peru/Bolivia, 2 IPCs in Argentina, 3 IPCs in Brazil, and 1 IPC in Colombia/Venezuela. All together you’ve got 18 IPCs, which I think is very respectable.

You could compare that total to a Western Pacific strategy (India, Persia, Burma, Italian East Africa, Egypt, Transjordan, Kazakh, Yunnan, and Szechuan add up to only 13 IPCs) or to a Northern Asia strategy (Soviet Far East, Buryatia, Sinkiang, etc. all the way west to Archangelsk, Vologda, and Novosibirsk is worth about 13 IPCs). Either strategy plus Moscow is still only 21 IPCs. So the Southern Pacific strategy doesn’t strike me as hopelessly inefficient from an economic point of view.

Second, is a Southern Pacific campaign inherently too slow to be fun? I’ll readily admit that it’s less direct; if you head off toward southern Argentina, you are obviously not heading for the global epicenter of military power. You can’t force a British surrender by crushing Buenos Aires; that’s just not how that works. On the other hand, if the Axis controlled the entire southern hemisphere, with a sphere of influence stretching from Tokyo through Singapore, Basra, Addis Ababa, Capetown, Buenos Aires, and Sydney, isn’t that a kind of win for the Axis? I understand there used to be an “economic win condition” for the Axis where they could win by controlling 100 IPCs or so worth of territory, and although the victory city mechanic has never been well-executed, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be improved to the point where people actually prefer using a victory city win condition.

I think the whole “race to the capital” mechanic is unrealistic and less-than-fun anyway; if you sack one capital without wrecking the empire it rules, the people who live in the capital will just relocate the capital and keep ruling their empire. You’ll get some bragging rights and a few million barrels of oil, but nobody surrenders an intact superpower just because you squeeze into their capital – look at Napoleon in Moscow, or Robert Ross in Washington, or for that matter the British in World War II, who laid down supplies and trained secret army units in Worcester to protect Parliament, the royal family, and the BBC, with plans to continue retreating to Liverpool and then Canada if necessary.

So, yeah, if Japan just blitzes straight for San Francisco, then that’s foolish and the Axis will lose. Similarly, if the designers allow you to drive tanks straight over the Himalayas with no movement penalty, and you pass up that opportunity, then that’s foolish, and you deserve to lose. But if the designers tweak the map so that the trackless Himalayan Mountains and barren Gobi Desert and frozen Siberian tundra are harder to cross than the balmy, oil-rich South Pacific ocean – and if the Axis seize that opportunity to invade South America – then I think you’d get a really interesting game, where the players had to make gut-wrenching choices about what resources to invest in what theaters.

Hey MGustav - welcome to the forum.

I think you are talking about a string of static transports allowing land units to jump from one to the next?

In which case - that is not how it works. In a single turn a nation can load land units on to a transport. The transport can move up 2 sea zones. Then the land units can disembark into a coastal territory.

The tanks having two moves is therefore irrelevant. The transport has two moves which it can use for land units of any type regardless of the movement value of each land unit type.

Of course if the transport does not need to move for a land unit to load and unload, for example from the UK to Western Europe, you have a static transport effecting a “bridge”.

Otherwise you might have transport(s) at each end of a sea journey moving backwards and forwards to deliver a constant stream of reinforcements.

Cheers
PP

Thanks.

Thank you panther, its all cleared up now.

@Krieghund:

AAA units defend only against attacks on combat units.  They do not participate in SBRs.

Ok thanks… thats what I thought, just wanted to make sure.

Happy to take part too. We can compete on who is the easiest pickings!

Agreed…  using bombers to industrial raid can be devastating…  Especially when the opponent gets a 50% hit ratio on your bombers.  I think using bombers to threaten navy or trade territories makes much more sense.  There’s nothing like going in with four bombers, losing two of them and getting a total of 3 damage to an opponent to see the futility of industrial raids.

of course, your mileage may vary…

Kirk S.

I still like the idea of the Russia bomber to help even things out.  It hasn’t helped me in my games however it does give Russia a chance to actually win in Ukraine and pose a threat to Japanese transports.

Ps. Couple thoughts on the Polar Express concept as an endgame play rather than an opener…

A version of this strat can be made to work in the final rounds, provided that Japan is no longer needed at the center, and has sufficiently outpaced the Americans on income. It’s also helpful if the Allied player is a good sport, or just wants to play out a few more rounds before calling it a night.  :-D

An example might be, if Germany is poised to take Moscow alone, such that Japan has a free hand to redirect early against North America, instead of Africa. Or if it seems like the Allies might be able to trade Moscow for Berlin in the same round, and Japan wants to keep going.

It requires that you have a large number ground units at the ready preferably in Yakut and Munchuria. The basic idea is to spam transports at the last minute before the planned invasion. So say you have 5 or 6 transports with 12 or more units ready to transport out of sz 60 to Alaska, and several more ground units in Yakut or Manchuria, that can move to Bury at the same time so that they can be shucked the following round. Then you spam 5 more transports to set up the double shuck, from Japan and Manchuria to Buryatia with one transport group, and from Buryatia  to Alaska with the other transport group.

To pull this off, you have to be able to match US production a full round ahead of their ability to equal your forces from their production centers, and this with already existing Japanese units, which is why you need the Yakut stack at the ready. If you can rapidly amass a large stack of ground in Alaska by using existing Japanese units, it may be possible to walk them to Western Canada without fear of a crushing counter attack from the US, and then you can use your transports to threaten W. US on amphibious, while you attempt to can open Central or Eastern Canada with German bombers for a blitz on DC. Although not a particularly likely deep endgame, it can sometimes be a more direct route to the ultimate Axis smackdown, than taking London.

Again, I don’t think its something that you can really plan for from the outset, but more of a redirect at the last possible second, where you make as if to threaten Moscow from Yakut, but then rapidly double back for the Alaskan crossing. It’s also pretty simple for the US to cover against this play, if they see it coming, so you really have to catch them with their guard down.

I think there are only two times I’ve seen it work. Once was in a KGF game, where the Russian player made a strategic withdrawal from Moscow in an attempt to triple team G. And another game where Germany got lucky on their tank drive and smoked Moscow earlier than anyone expected. In both instances the Allies were playing a masochist’s game, fighting on rather than conceding haha

This is complicated stuff SC, but I believe I have this right:

In your example, if the US initiates combat in a sz in which the US has no destroyers, then J decides whether its subs submerge or surprise strike, not the US.

If the US had a destroyer present, then any subs in a sz in which combat is initiated would be involved. The US cannot decide to ignore them.

If the US placed units in a sz which contained only J subs, then the US can decide whether to initiate combat or ignore those subs. If that US movement occurs during non-combat then combat cannot be initiated.

A sub can move through a sz that contains enemy units, in either combat or non-combat. It treats a hostile sz as a friendly one.

However, if that sz contains an enemy destroyer then the sub must end its movement there. If ending movement in a sz with an enemy destroyer during the combat phase then a battle will occur. If in non-combat then no battle.

Thank you so very much for these NO’s. I will try and incorporate them into my groups next game. I’m forever looking to expand on this edition as I feel Global is just too much game to be played besides online where if I play against AI I can save and continue on when I have other things to do. If we enjoy playing with these NO’s I will have them printed and laminated. Will go nicely with the new mega map of IL’s my group has.

I ordered 16xWhite infantry, 5xWhite Stuart Light Tanks, 4xWhite P-40s from HBG to represent possible neutral countries with varying setups… I’ll toss them in an organizer and have them handy for when/if I decide to implement some Neutral nation rules for 1942 SE.  I wanted a color that didn’t look remotely close to any other nation for neutrals.

EDIT:
and then I went back and realized they had a “neutral nation set” and I ordered a couple of those… ugh… some things aren’t listed on every page they should be! lolz

@Wolfshanze:

Sad to say, my daughter defeated me in Risk this week… her eye for strategy is in her genes.  I might have to introduce the kids to 1941 soon!

She sounds like she has the potential to rise through the ranks very quickly.  I’m reminded of a quote from the WWII-era movie Air Force, in which the enlisted crew chief of a B-17 proudly announces that his son (a fighter pilot) has just received his commission as a Lieutenant: “Can you imagine me saluting my own kid?”

@simon33:

So you’re saying an attacking fighter has moved 4 spaces to attack and the attack includes a CV which is its only landing spot, but the CV is taken as a hit and you then retreat? The fighter would be lost. So you wouldn’t do that. Take the fighter as a hit first and the CV lives to fight another day. Even if its only value is a 1/3 chance of hitting something.

Thank you very much! It is all clear now.

There usually is a fairly safe spot to land the bomber.

Assuming the US gets one hit and you lose your 4 move ftr you can end up with a sub/cru left there, and the cru blocks some moves, but even if US wants to go after your bomber that exposes their battleship.  It’s not usually a trade they’ll want to make that early, especially if they were planning on bringing the BB to the Atlantic to help with a KGF.  The surviving cru also becomes the “easier” 12 ipc target to hit with potentially less risk of a counter depending on where the J ACs are.

I’ll typically plan on landing my surviving J ftr with the bom so I have the freedom to move my two carriers where ever I want, then I gauge the results of Pearl and figure out if I really need the ftr with the bomber or do I need it elsewhere.

I watched your video to! Good job! Looking forward to more!

Good video along with the turn 1 video in HJ’s thread. One thing I do have to comment on is there must be some horrible, horrible rolls for the Germans in turn 1. Getting Egypt in turn 1 is usually dicey so not getting it is possible, I tend to take Trans-Jordan to make blocking  the canal a sure thing. But not getting Karelia is a definate blow to the Axis, especially with the 2 Russian Fighters there waiting to be picked off. When I play as Germany I love it when Russia packs Karelia at the end of their turn with Tanks and especially their Fighters. At least the Axis got into the precious Russian Tanks though. Also Japan taking their SZ 37 fleet into a blocked Suez Canal was a move I never seen before, but might be deadly for them as it seems USA is going all out Pacific in this one. As it stands with USA looking to dominate the Pacific and UK having an Atlantic fleet at the end of turn 2 with no US help, looks like an Allied victory is almost certain.

Good videos though, looking forward to seeing how it plays out.