THE OBSOLETE TANK

@Gargantua:

People are forgetting a temporal component here.

Look at a transport for instance.  1 inf 1 art have the save attack value as 1 inf 1 arm.  But when the 1 inf dies…  the tank is superior to the artillery everytime, because your punch survives deeper into the ensuing combat rounds.

The truth is, no one unit mass produced alone is ever going to win you the game.  The best approach is to have a strong mixture of units, so you have a strong mixture of capabilities.

People also aren’t calculating threat factors properly.  Your wad of 30 infantry can only strike whats next to it.  But a wad of 15 tanks can strike twice as many targets, and has much better oppurtunity and threat factor, based on what you “could” do with it.

This gives you an “invisible” unit factor (like scrambling), where i have to calculate for something that may not occur.  These raw calculations are giving absolutely 0 bearing on these types of factors.

Except your only good point is that you should have combined arms. tanks are not going to be worth your time if you’re too stupid to give it infantry to take hits, which is why mech infantry are great for this because they can blitz with tanks.

Troll = VANN DAM

@Gargantua:

People are forgetting a temporal component here.

Look at a transport for instance.  1 inf 1 art have the save attack value as 1 inf 1 arm.  But when the 1 inf dies…  the tank is superior to the artillery everytime, because your punch survives deeper into the ensuing combat rounds.

The truth is, no one unit mass produced alone is ever going to win you the game.  The best approach is to have a strong mixture of units, so you have a strong mixture of capabilities.

People also aren’t calculating threat factors properly.  Your wad of 30 infantry can only strike whats next to it.  But a wad of 15 tanks can strike twice as many targets, and has much better oppurtunity and threat factor, based on what you “could” do with it.

This gives you an “invisible” unit factor (like scrambling), where i have to calculate for something that may not occur.  These raw calculations are giving absolutely 0 bearing on these types of factors.

Amen

Run your calculations vs Bomber builds.

On paper you are going to think infantry are value gods, and that bomber builds are insane.

Then play a game vs an axis dark skies strategy, and the calculations will blow your mind, because the bombers have the ability to hit multiple stacks at the same time. Where as your infantry are limited in threat.

For the record, if there’s a broken unit in the game - it’s the disposable $12 bomber

@SS:

Troll = VANN DAM

I dismissed him as a troll too after his initial Vann Formulas post, but I think his subsequent threads have sparked some decent discussion. He’s a little full of himself, and his “game changing” formulas seem to be nothing more than the standard cost-per-hit ratios that any experienced player should already know, but I don’t think he’s deliberately trolling. Also, I think this discussion has brought up some useful points that other players simply may not have considered or have always taken for granted, such as the importance of additional movement that higher cost units can provide and just how strongly that should be weighed against straight cost-per-hit ratios in certain situations. Interrupting that discussion to make sure everyone knows he’s a troll quite frankly does not contribute positively to the conversation.

So I  guess you haven’t gotten an unsolicited PM from him telling you how you don’t know what you’re talking about yet? I have no problem with hearing everyone else’s opinions that’s how we learn more. I do have a problem with someone who only shows up here to tell everyone else they don’t know how to play the game. From what i can tell he bases all of his opinions on Classic A&A and really has no idea on how his precious formula works on more modern versions of the game. Apparently he hasn’t taken the time to count up the number of spaces on a Global map and compared it to the number of spaces on the Classic map. Assuming that an infantry would be just as effective on both maps is foolish and quite frankly just plain lazy. I didn’t label him a troll because his opinion differs from mine, I did so because he is trolling people. If he doesn’t know what that means maybe he should learn how to use Google and look up “internet troll.”

@GeneralHandGrenade:

So I  guess you haven’t gotten an unsolicited PM from him telling you how you don’t know what you’re talking about yet? I have no problem with hearing everyone else’s opinions that’s how we learn more. I do have a problem with someone who only shows up here to tell everyone else they don’t know how to play the game. From what i can tell he bases all of his opinions on Classic A&A and really has no idea on how his precious formula works on more modern versions of the game. Apparently he hasn’t taken the time to count up the number of spaces on a Global map and compared it to the number of spaces on the Classic map. Assuming that an infantry would be just as effective on both maps is foolish and quite frankly just plain lazy. I didn’t label him a troll because his opinion differs from mine, I did so because he is trolling people. If he doesn’t know what that means maybe he should learn how to use Google and look up “internet troll.”

No, I haven’t and didn’t know that was going on. I did receive a PM from him, but it was a legitimate question about a comment I made on one of his threads and was very polite. It was a forum etiquette question (which forum is appropriate for which thread topic) and didn’t have anything to do with the game itself, so I guess that’s why I was spared that particular experience.

This whole thread’s notion is ridiculous to me. Tanks are not obsolete.

Sometimes a G2 build of mine is 10 tanks and a destroyer. That’s says to Russia, Germany is serious and is advancing some hard hitting pieces forward which catch up to my G1 slow mover purchase.

Anyone playing this game with battle calcs or many table top games of G40 under their belt know that an infantry stack slow marching it’s long way from Germany most likely will not be enough to force Russia back from Bryansk. Without a huge complimentary stack of tanks and some tac. bombers/s. bombers; two things will occur.

A. Russia will run a battle calc and realize it can defend in place and therefore not retreat:

B. Russia will run a battle calc, decide to retreat to Moscow because their huge stack will join with their next build of 10 artillery, Germany moves into Bryansk, then Russia counter attacks and wins because the German stack doesn’t have enough @3 dice to swing the defense in time to their favor.

I see a particular guy who buys tons of mech. He gets to W. Ukarine and that’s it. Russia never has to retreat for a very long time. He advances a lot of defense strength @2 dice, but no teeth @3 dice (tanks).

This is my PM from VANN.

“No I’m not a troll, but the VANN FORMULAS does work. The armored car is not based on the VANN FORMULAS.”

Left me wondering why post that if it was not based on the “formula?”

Also, am I supposed to beg for his formula and then forsake my 75+ games of triplea and 10-12 table top games if it shows me stuff I already know; like for instance, that at 6 IPCs a tank is expensive. However, I still find it a very valuable purchase because I value building the strength to do stuff like sack Moscow.

I just ignore him every time he says something about his vaunted Vann Formulas. So far it sounds like nothing we didn’t already know, so there’s no sense in getting upset about him keeping such useless information from the community.

He’s right that his proposed Armored Car unit doesn’t have anything to do his so-called Vann Formulas. It’s just a fun idea for a custom unit, which is a perfectly legitimate topic for the House Rules forum.

Here’s the way I see it. Imagine that you meet someone who goes around wearing a chicken on his head. He tells you and everyone else that your lives would be better if you all wore chickens on your heads but then says he won’t tell you where he got the chicken. How would you handle this person? Would you be polite and tolerate his presence as long as he and his chicken behave themselves? Would you get upset that he won’t tell you where to get your own chicken? Do you publicly berate him for his ludicrous life improvement through poultry headgear theory?

Personally, prefer to be polite and tolerant as long as he’s not being overly disruptive. I have no interest in his head-chicken formulas, but he can wear them all he wants as far as I’m concerned.

We should see the VANN formula’s put to the test in some games.

I bet this guy can’t play his way out of a wet paper bag.

Why would I want to ignore him if he keeps posting about the VANN Dam Formulas? He just posted earlier in the forumns thread that Larry Harris doesn’t know what he’s doing.

That should not be ignored and also don’t come on site telling everybody we are playing all the AA games wrong.

Either you post the VANN dam stuff and prove it or other wise keep your mouth shut and stop posting telling everybody it’s wrong. WT$

Mr. Tricorder,

Noted. Your right. I should be nice and polite. It’s in keeping with my beliefs as to how I should act towards a fellow human.
Sorry Vann.

On the flip side, your chicken head analogy could easily be deemed non-polite. If I had an idea which I thought would be a eureka moment and named it something most compelling like the “ICHABOD SYSTEM,” and you compared it to a guy wearing “poultry headgear,” I might think you were under handedly saying I was silly. By the way, someone told me to not feed the troll, but that comment has since been deleted.

Lastly, on a side note to your chicken hat reference, I wouldn’t want Michael Bolton’s software because he wouldn’t know how to install it. He could keep that formula to himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7tVvx4Vv3M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I80QQ1gbpX8

@Ichabod:

On the flip side, your chicken head analogy could easily be deemed non-polite. If I had an idea which I thought would be a eureka moment and named it something most compelling like the “ICHABOD SYSTEM,” and you compared it to a guy wearing “poultry headgear,” I might think you were under handedly saying I was silly. By the way, someone told me to not feed the troll, but that comment has since been deleted.

You make a good point. To Mr. Vann, I apologize. If I have offended you, please understand that was not my intention. I was trying to make a point by making a joke at your expense, and that was wrong of me.

Mr. Tricorder,

The other posters are right to call out the VANN Formula. In the axis and allies arena of ideas, if you say something, or put something up for debate, and it’s found to be silly or make no sense than either you put up or admit your wrong. Usually it leads to a private or public message challenging the other player to a PBEM game.

But in this case, the end state might just be fun banter about chicken heads or Office Space references. (Office Space, best comedy from the 1990s…brings back memories of my college days).

The problem I have with this guy and his VANN FORMULAS is that it’s the ONLY thing he’s talking about… and that speaks volumes.

To cite a couple of possibly relevant analogies:

• The United States Patent and Trademark Office has an official policy stating that they won’t grant patents for perpetual motion machines unless the inventor claiming that he’s created such a device provides a working model.  Mere blueprints and written descriptions aren’t considered adequate proofs that the inventor has actually created such a device, for the good reason that perpetual motion machines violate the laws of thermodynamics and are thus considered to be a scientific impossibility.

• I once attended a public lecture by a university professor who, among his interests and activities, debunks fake science and pseudo-science (notably through such lectures as the one I attended).  As part of his methodology, he demonstrates some of the stage-magic tricks which, in their proper applications, are used to entertain people, but which are sometimes misapplied by fraudsters to make people think that they have genuine psychic powers.  He told us that, during one such lecture he’d given in the past, a woman in the audience stood up and claimed that she could project herself in spirit to any part of the world and see what was going on there.  She offered to prove her claim by projecting herself right away to any city of the professor’s choice and describing to him and to the audience what was going on there.  The professor answered, “Well, that’s very nice of you, but I really don’t want to put you to the trouble of going as far away as that.  Here’s something much easier: I have a deck of cards here, so what I’ll do is shuffle it, I’ll pull out a card without looking at it, and I’ll put it face up on top of his cabinet over here, and then you can project yourself above the cabinet and tell all of us what the card is.”  The woman replied scornfully that she wasn’t going to waste her talents on an obvious “unbeliever” like him, and she marched out of the lecture hall.

Fake news