Units, Mechanics, etc.

[The Janus]

@SuperbattleshipYamato said in Units, Mechanics, etc.:

. I’ll also mention though that when I say the UK is “cash-strapped”, I don’t mean because they spent a lot of money on industrial complexes but because having so many complexes incentivizes you to use them to the max

This makes me think of a game I had recently, where the UK got bombed a lot, early on.
Honestly, I just spent a few rounds building up navy in Canada (2 subs and 1 destroyer at a time, after a carrier buy on the 1st round) while keeping my South Africa factory humming along as usual. I often don’t end up building much in the UK until the US has a presence in the war, or at least until the Germans swing all their air power over to the USSR.

Is the Taranto raid still “in fashion” or has the conventional wisdom changed on that? I honestly find it’s better as the UK to conserve your planes and ships in the early game, and then just overwhelm the Italians through weight of numbers.

Edit: (to add)
As the UK, I find that keeping 3 transport loads full around the home island is about the most you can expect to do. Later in the game, you could maybe bump that up to 4, but with your factory output only being 10 (unlike the US having 20) you’re probably not going to put out more than 8 land units, anyway. I tend to like having “space” in my budget for a bomber, here and there – so 6-8 infantry suits me just fine.

[SuperbattleshipYamato]

@The-Janus

This is what AndrewAAGamer, one of the best Global 1940 players, said about the Taranto Raid (I think it mostly applies to Europe 1940 as well):

@AndrewAAGamer said in Let's talk the Taranto raid.:

I used to be a big proponent of the Taranto raid, but I am leaning against it recently as I’ve had two games where the German didn’t lose any planes on the counter attack, which was a disaster for the allies. Probably better to do Gibastion as you don’t have to worry that the dice will screw you.

(https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/41082/let-s-talk-the-taranto-raid/2)

Here’s what he said about strict neutrals (while this is about Global 1940, 90% of strict neutrals are located on the Europe map, so it mostly applies):

@AndrewAAGamer said in Violate a true neutrals?:

Both sides should be consistently paying careful attention to “Should I go for the Neutrals?” as the game progresses. Looking for the key indicators that show the Player that “Yes, now is the time to attack the Neutrals.”

Typically, there are three reasons to go for the Neutrals:

Axis #1: The Allies have left their SZ91 fleet exposed if the Neutrals are attacked by Italy, specifically Spain, and that allows the Germans to annihilate a large Allied fleet on the cheap.
Allies #1: The game has come to a standstill and neither side may improve their position as the board is deadlocked. By accepting a short-term disadvantage, the Allies will gain a long-term advantage that may swing the game in the Allied favor.
Allies #2: As you mentioned, the Allies are not making sufficient progress in landings on the European coast so they revert to the simpler strategy of landing in Spain.
Normally, it is the Allies who are attacking the Neutrals and typically they will set up such an attack by being prepared to hit Spain (USA), Portugal (USA), Venezuela (USA), Saudi Arabia (UK) and Turkey (UK) all on the same Turn. In later Turns Chile plus Argentina (USA) and Angola plus Mozambique (UK) are taken. Typically, killing these 28 infantries results in about 11-13 Allied losses or about $36 worth of troops.

The gain in income for the Allies is $15 a Turn. The Axis will usually gain 8 infantries from Switzerland and Sweden, or $24 worth of troops, and $3 a Turn in income from Sweden. That means the total initial loss for the Allies is 60 TUV. (36 troops killed plus 24 infantries gained Axis). Compare this to the $12 swing in income and you can see it take about 5 Turns for the Allies to recoup their initial losses and start making gains from their strategic decision.

As long as the Allies can last those 5 Turns then making the attack makes sense.

BTW, you will notice I did not include Afghanistan as usually the Axis are not able to gain those 4 troops because either they can never liberate them or the Allies kill them at a loss of usually 1 ground unit.

So to specifically answer your question… YES it makes sense depending on the circumstances.

(https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/41838/violate-a-true-neutrals/2)

[The Janus]

@SuperbattleshipYamato said in Units, Mechanics, etc.:

Axis #1: The Allies have left their SZ91 fleet exposed if the Neutrals are attacked by Italy, specifically Spain, and that allows the Germans to annihilate a large Allied fleet on the cheap.

This is the circumstance I had experienced in one of my games (sort of/kind of) that I mentioned, where the Axis are basically attacking Spain as part of a broader strategy to disrupt the shuck-shuck into SZ91.

[The Janus]

@SuperbattleshipYamato re: Taranto

My general ethos is that I’d rather the British keep their fleet intact, and back them up behind the canal. Even if the Italians take it by land, you can keep them from expanding into the Indian Ocean by sea.

The other side of it is like… I think air power is great, while navies are sort of “the cost of doing business” – so trading my planes to take out your navy is a bad exchange. I’m fine with taking the cheap/easy win of sniping the fleet at Malta, because in the grand scheme of things, I think the transport will cause more damage to me than the battleships and cruisers and whatnot.

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I’ve seen some weird things, like 2 subs being sent against the British cruiser at Gibraltar and both subs being sunk. Generally I assume there will be a sub there, and a sub up near Canada; I tend to send the SZ109 fleet to Canada, along with a couple of fighters, and place a new carrier there on rd1. If there’s a damaged battleship (and sub/s) in SZ111, I’m usually inclined to attack it with the fighter from Scotland and/or the UK bomber.

Do German players usually prioritize the UK transports? The Ai always seems to leave those 2 sea zones alone; granted we’re talking subs attacking destroyers, and their planes are out of range (except the strat. bombers, but landing in Belgium would be pretty undesirable…)

To me, it also seems like it stands to reason that the Germans should prioritize hunting destroyers, just because I tend to assume that the great strength of the western allies is their air power; if you have no transports, your battleships and cruisers can’t influence land combat, and if you have no destroyers, your planes can’t target subs – it paints a picture that as “guy who has subs,” the German player should be targeting things a certain way, to play into that. Honestly though, it seems kind of moot, given how relatively short the battle of the Atlantic ends up being.

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I’ve run a handful of test games recently where I’m using battleships as my main surface unit, with the US. I think it’s a strat that pays off later/in the long run, when you’re stacking landings over multiple rounds (usually in the Mediterranean.) If your floating bridge consists of 4 transport loads and you can pile on 4+ shore bombardments, it starts to add up. But honestly, on the Atlantic side, I’ve seen a British strategy of just stacking bombers and fighters and strafing down the French coast – the number of casualties inflicted is staggering compared to what the battleships are able to do. Not an unexpected result, but I think to me this just cements the utility of destroyers, in that convoy-escort role.

I’ve found that when I’m too aggressive with pushing the allied fleets east too early, the Germans still tend to kamikaze their planes into my ships – but this actually only serves to speed up their own demise. As long as I’m not losing a huge amount of transports all in one go…? I can afford to lose a loaded carrier and 2-3 surface ships, as long as I take enough of their planes down with me. In these instances (for the cost) I’d rather be defending with the extra shots I’d be getting from buying destroyers, as opposed to the higher attack rating of a battleship.

But I think it’s generally best to be cagey with your allied fleets, and build them up to a point where the Axis can’t afford to attack them. This feeds into why I generally don’t like the idea behind the Taranto raid; I know I can outspend the Italians, so it’s actually in my interest to keep my fleets strong while I do that, rather than do a move that at best amounts to “mutually assured destruction” in my estimation.

[SuperbattleshipYamato]

@The-Janus

1 reason why I, at least, usually avoid 109 on turn 1 is that the fighters in both London and Scotland can scramble. So you could end up committing a ton of units to take down a single destroyer and transport. Better for the Germans to take on the tougher ships before they consolidate and become invincible.

[The Janus]

@SuperbattleshipYamato said in Units, Mechanics, etc.:

1 reason why I, at least, usually avoid 109 on turn 1 is that the fighters in both London and Scotland can scramble.

Fair enough, and I wasn’t even thinking of that to be honest.
What about 106, though?

Let me write this all out, so I can gather my thoughts…

Subs:
124. can hit 111 or 109
118. can hit 106 or 109 or 111
117. can hit 106 or 109
108. can hit 106 or 109 or 110 or 91
103. can hit 106 or 109 or 110 or 91

…and then you’ve got your battleship that can hit 110 or 111

Now, from that, the obvious tactic would seem to be:

• 103 and 108 to 91
• 117 and 118 to 106
  …leaving you 1 sub + 1 battleship and whatever air power you choose, to take out 3 ships (DD, CRZ, BB) in SZ111

So that’s just me ballparking it without even hammering everything into a battle calculator; run 10,000 times, 2 sub vs. 1 crz, 1 trn has the defender winning 14%, whereas 2 sub vs. 1 DD, 1 trn has the defender winning 12% of the time.

The thing I think people don’t often do (in lieu of using a calculator) is just look at the number of hits you can afford to take vs. the number of dice the opponent is chucking. So in this SZ111 battle, the Brits can defend with 4 units (3 if they don’t scramble) – so it’s possible that they could hit you as many as 4 times, given 1 round of combat. If they don’t scramble, there is a 100% chance that your sub and battleship can absorb the hits from 1 round of combat, and your planes will be at 0% risk of getting hit. So, if you think they will scramble, then you need to include another sub in this attack, just to be 100% sure you’re able to retreat all of your planes after 1 round.

Including the scrambled fighter, if you calculate this battle as “retreat after 1 round” it’s like a 55%-45% (even if you send like 6 planes) but if you do it as “retreat when only air left” it’s like 5-to-1 (83%-17%); if you add another sub into the attack, it becomes 97%

So to add another sub to SZ111, we’d be pulling it out of the battle I had proposed (in 106) from SZ118
Since the 3 remaining subs can all hit SZ106 (Canada) and because I, as the British, tend to want to form up my navy in that SZ this seems like the way to go. (This is a 98% win)

This leaves the British wide open to just pile everything into “Gibastion” but it (hopefully) would disrupt the move I do, of building a carrier (or really, any navy) in Canada on UK1

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Ultimately it’s a question of whether it’s better to run 2 battles that go in your favour >95% of the time, or to run 3 battles where 1/6 of the time, you lose more units than you wanted; if the losses only come in the form of your submarines, that might be worth the gamble. It’s when you start losing planes that it becomes not worth the risk. How that first round of combat goes in SZ111 determines a lot, including whether or not the scramble is used.

In East & West there’s a strategy for attacking Italy as the USSR on the first round, but it involves sending (at least) a bomber against a territory with an AA gun; so there’s always that 1/6 chance that the AA gun hits and the whole calculus is thrown out the window. I know that these are not the odds that @AndrewAAGamer would tell you to roll on, but sometimes the riskier option pays off more in the grand scheme than the safe option – sometimes the safe options still lead to inevitable failure (i.e. in an unbalanced game.) I also think it’s interesting that all of the battles I’ve calculated here fall into that roughly 1/6 failure chance, because as A&A gamers, that’s very easy for us to contextualize.

[The Janus]

Re: US navy

I’ve recently keyed in on just spamming out a bunch of planes, as the allies.
One interesting thing with the US, if you’re going for a “floating bridge” to take and reinforce Greece: once you get a carrier set up in SZ92, you can move fighters from that SZ to Greece, while also having fighters from the Eastern US (with the airfield) able to reach SZ92. In this way, your carrier is always loaded, while also moving new fighters to Greece every round (once you control the territory) – taking 2 rounds to get from the Eastern US all the way to Greece.

I should also say more generally, my initial assumption about the US navy build was just to dump carriers with aircraft into SZ101, however:

1. With the airfield and the scrambling ability, fighters placed in the Eastern US can effectively defend the territory and the SZ
2. With the airfield allowing planes to move 1 extra space, this makes it effectively the same distance as moving from the SZ
3. Even with the harbor in play, the planes can still move 1 space further than the carriers, so it’s helpful to have carriers that are already launched and further up the pipeline, to catch planes – even when/if you are putting out new carriers.

The other thing is while I feel a loaded carrier is a strong defensive/deterrent piece of any naval group, it doesn’t really serve much purpose in SZ91 once the Atlantic is cleared of Axis subs/ships (and especially if there aren’t any bombers close by.) You also need a good number of destroyers for defense of any naval group, but I’m not sure a carrier is necessary for SZ97, if the idea is to be landing fighters in Greece all of the time (and maybe laying down an airfield?)

I recently tried an early battleship buy, pairing that with the starting cruiser and adding destroyers, to use as the tip of the spear going into the Mediterranean. Since you’re likely to need a few landings in Yugoslavia to wear down the Axis, the shore bombardment is nice to have – and it feels like more value than just parking a carrier there to passively defend.

So, I’ve said before that you probably want at least 2 destroyers and a loaded carrier as part of any naval group; now I’m trying to see if I can pare that down and be more efficient with how I spend and set things up. I can pretty easily get a “global domination” win as the Allies by about round 20, but I feel like I should be able to speed that up.

[The Janus]

@SuperbattleshipYamato said in Units, Mechanics, etc.:

Here’s what he said about strict neutrals (while this is about Global 1940, 90% of strict neutrals are located on the Europe map, so it mostly applies):

@AndrewAAGamer said in Violate a true neutrals?:

I ran a game recently, where I ended up declaring on the neutrals, as the Allies. The circumstances were as such:

1. The UK had just captured Greece the turn before, and their blob of units coming through North Africa towards the USSR had just reached Iraq – right next to Turkey.
2. The US had transports on either side of Gibraltar, with infantry already landed in Morocco – meaning they could ship one load from there and another load from the US to all hit Spain at the same time.
3. USSR had just taken Finland, and UK had a fleet in place that could easily clear Norway.

The German counter-attack in Spain got “diced” (only managing to clear the territory but not take it) and they managed to wipe out the UK navy that took Norway – but rather than rebuild it, I had the UK put down factories in Greece, Turkey, Iraq, and (ultimately, the least-needed) Norway. Combined with shipping guys from South Africa directly to Iraq, the constant pipeline was too much, in the end.

It’s interesting how Iraq + Turkey forms a wall, insulating Africa and essentially steering any Axis attack towards India – a dead end in the corner of the board. But I had been funneling enough units into Kazakhstan, that the push into the Caucasus by the Axis never made it into the middle east.

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Source: Zero loss British opener - F18 .tsvg

As the file name suggests, I also had no losses on my UK1 turn – which was mostly my standard moves, particularly in Africa and the Med.
(By the end, I was just screwing around and trying to give France territory, as I usually do.)

[SuperbattleshipYamato]

@The-Janus

Some thoughts (sorry it took so long, I’ve been busy over the past month:

1. I like to go for 106. If I’m playing to completely destroy 110 and 111, those submarines and needed though to provide enough firepower in case of a scramble. Even though 2 subs on 1 destroyer only gives an 86% chance of winning, the transport in 106 is worth it. It’s the opening battle I’m most certain of doing.
2. I personally find the 84% chance of winning with 2 German submarines against a British cruiser too low, especially since there isn’t a transport as a reward for victory.
3. The rest of your first turn air-sea moves operate with the mindset of simply strafing the 111 fleet rather than destroying it, like I usually do. Since you value aircraft more than ships (even beyond their inherent IPC value), it’s an understandable move. I’ll try it out sometime.

[SuperbattleshipYamato]

@The-Janus

I generally agree about the superiority of battleships versus carriers in Europe.

[SuperbattleshipYamato]

@The-Janus

I looked through the game. While your situation was certainly ideal for attacking the strict neutrals, I think you probably would’ve won without it (I’m not saying you implied that, I’m just adding on).