How many boxes?

@FranceNeedsMorePower

Sounds about right.

@surfer thanks for that clarification

@tmartin Yes they can.

@Shadowdoom286

As the Russian player, continue to stack infantry on Russia and Novgorod. Also, a nice compliment of mobile (ie: tanks and mechanized infantry with movement 2) stationed at Bryansk with your air corp at Novgorod makes a nice counter-attack force that can hit nearly every territory along the Eastern front.

For Germany, by turn 4, that player may have wanted to consider buying more mechanized infantry earlier, and more consistently, as it allows fresh troops to catch up with the asualt eastward, preserving your high value tanks up to the gates of Moscow. It also allows you to capitalize on gaps in soviet defenses to blitz through (tanks + mech inf) in order to unbalance and pose new threats to the Soviets.

Enjoy!

@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

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.

This is an issue that has cropped up in numerous A&A games.  The box board photos are often taken by marketing department people who simply want to make the picture look pretty and who aren’t overly concerned about depicting things accurately.

Thank you, that actually helped a lot. We had a general idea of the subs ability to submerge unless facing destroyers, but that got a little confusing when it came to combined arms.  Your comment about dice actually sorted that out. Thanks a bunch, I’m sure I’ll be back with questions about convoys, bombing, and scrambling once we play again.