League General Discussion Thread

crockett36

Might I also suggest an in-person Axis & Allies gathering to bring us all together? It could be exotic or in Dan’s Jensen’s hometown. Or perhaps mostly based around the person who can or is able to host it? Or just swarm onto a local, smaller con like Totalcon up here in New England? We can invite Larry and make it a thing.

crockett36

@crockett36

To broaden the post, why not take January to adjust any of the various game?

Daaras

@crockett36 Stucifer is actually coming to visit my brother and I in february and we are going to be rolling many many dice.

I would love an in person get together. The question is where?

crockett36

@Daaras and again, I’m aiming for less tournaments more gathering so the games would be fun not necessarily Extremely competitive walk away with a trophy.

crockett36

@crockett36 we could just do a Saturday that way you don’t have to take vacation fly in on a Friday night. Hang on Saturday. Make your way back home on Sunday. or make it a three day extravagant my church would fit the bell for a one day event. I think we’d have to rent a hall for three days.

Daaras

@crockett36 I’m totally fine with no trophies. I do enjoy some casual play. It would be fun to actually put faces to all the forum names. I also just miss actually rolling dice. I rarely actually bust out my boards anymore. I can’t wait for the kids to be old enough to battle lol

gamerman01

@Daaras said in League General Discussion Thread:

@crockett36 It would be fun to actually put faces to all the forum names.

Easiest way is to watch @crockett36 youtube interviews. If the guys you play with in PTV haven’t done interviews, ask them or do one yourself, more is better

I also just miss actually rolling dice. I rarely actually bust out my boards anymore. I can’t wait for the kids to be old enough to battle lol

Ah, the swansong of the modern A&A player!
Good luck! My kids are grown now and are both capable. My son loves WWII so much he watches World at War documentaries with me (and is much, much wiser for it). Got him to play Zombies with me twice, even helped him win, and have Classic set up in the basement.

He pondered R1, got stressed out, and quit. Yes I told him not to worry about winning, yes I told him I’d hold back.

You do want someone you see all the time, obviously. 🤜🤛

gamerman01

@crockett36

Thank you for the suggestions you put thought into. January is the time for league rule changes, yes.
It is intriguing to consider different “flavors of the year”, but

“No” to standard bids set.
Individual player game by game bids are preferred because of individual and unique player strategies, it changes up the game, sometimes a LOT (you mentioned stale). It would actually be more stale if the starting set up was largely dictated to everyone for a year. Guard rail not needed, inexperienced player can just look at what the successful players bid

Players can agree to almost any modification for their game, so all kinds of customization and fun is allowed, and this is true even in the playoffs. But this is game by game so that everyone can count on the standard, out of the box experience without having them altered uninvited by others

If you have some consensus with multiple other league members on a change, or depending on the nature of your change, it is certainly possible to effect a change in rules. I give the people what they want, and I don’t think your suggestions so far will be welcomed by the majority. I reconsider if some of you start to coagulate

axis-dominion

where is the league standings topic, can’t find it anymore

simon33

@axis-dominion said in League General Discussion Thread:

where is the league standings topic, can’t find it anymore

New standings are the ELO ones: https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/40302/the-new-elo-based-ranking-system/223

I think the old standings has been unstickied. I had bookmarked it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pYDcR_d27qG312v_rq2q35wYEEfO6mjrX-Co1nvKrlI/edit#gid=818885946

Maybe we should keep it stickied but just change the title.

axis-dominion

yes plz keep it stickied

axis-dominion

ok, i have officially seen it all…

AndrewAAGamer

That happened to me TODAY in a face to face game of D-Day. My opponent went 5 for 5 with 1’s (infantry) attacking 4 tanks and I went 1 for 4 at 3. Sheesh…

Still won…

gamerman01

@axis-dominion said in League General Discussion Thread:

yes plz keep it stickied

Just the ol’ switcheroo…

The link to the old rankings is in the League Rules, under #3 “Scoring/Playoffs”
As is the link to the current ELO

gamerman01

I am excited to tell you we may have an influx of Axis & Allies players to the league in coming days. There is a group who really like playing Classic, and they are welcome in the league.

Yes, that’s right, for the first time probably ever, A&A.org league will have a section for Classic. They are looking forward to having ELO ratings, league rules and moderation, and playoffs. There is an 8 man tournament starting right now, and those game results will be recorded for them, of course in their own tab. Hopefully several will start playing in the league and some more momentum come with them.

Or the whole thing may not get as far off the ground as the Jan 1986 Challenger, but I wanted to tell you the news. A couple of the guys @Martin @elche are already league regulars.

And of course, it gives you all the opportunity to return to the roots. If you ever had the classic board game, you will love how it looks in Triple A, it is fantastic. And @The_Good_Captain is an absolute ace with the Classic rules and all its versions and variants. If you ever play Classic in any capacity online or with your friends/family, you have a resource.

I played a couple games of classic a year ago at @elche 's nudging and I’m glad I did. I am participating in the tournament (in the tournament section) so will be involved a bit with these guys.

Please prepare to welcome some new blood, even if none of them touch G40

crockett36

@gamerman01 said in League General Discussion Thread:

“No” to standard bids set.
Individual player game by game bids are preferred because of individual and unique player strategies, it changes up the game, sometimes a LOT (you mentioned stale). It would actually be more stale if the starting set up was largely dictated to everyone for a year. Guard rail not needed, inexperienced player can just look at what the successful players bid

My purpose is to help out of box be the version people want to play. I get the impression it is the least played version on a site called Axis & Allies.org. I consider BM and PTV to be too different from the original.

Ten or twenty years ago, people were talking about the death of board games. Apparently not! Instead, we have an extraordinary breadth of options in the World War 2 category. I want to eliminate as many obstacles as possible for Axis & Allies global 1940 to be the game they settle on as their hobby.

So, when they buy the reprint and make it through the rule book and play a game or two on board or migrate to this new platform for lack of local competition, I’d like there to be

optional simple, elegant intuitive fixes to the glaring problems with the game.
an optional bid number and an optional bid placement for those who don’t have the time to study games.

I was literally that guy in 2009. I came here to have a little fun between having a heavy work schedule at UPS, seven kids and a wife and outside responsibilities and was told by someone “you gotta want it.” 6 years later I came back in preparation for grasshopper’s tournament.

Maybe when or if out of box dwindles down to a handful of league players, people will see the need to eliminate the small nagging skintags that push people to the hybrids.

gamerman01

Objection sustained, and thanks for another thoughtful post.

So I think I understand your sentiments, and it’s difficult to respond really well to all that so I’ll do it in summary of the history through my eyes.

We played Out of the Box to death when it came out. G40 was a very, very hot Axis and Allies product. Many more territories and zones, more playable powers, new units, airbases and naval bases, dual victory conditions. Mind blowing.
Many of us certainly couldn’t wait until the game was polished up. Larry wanted us all to go ahead and play earlier iterations and give feedback. So we played a lot of games before it was even done.
When the game was finished and done tinkering, we had yet another “new” version of the game. Like there was a major complex in Berlin now, and a minor in Ukraine that wasn’t there before. Exciting changes, but coming from the source, not from us, so it was global (pardon the pun).
In 2013 league players completed 619 games of G40
2014 was 550
2015 was 444
2016 was 487, and this was the first year BM was played.
2017 was 403
2018 was 451
2019 was 367
2020 was 365 - COVID bump
2021 I started tracked each version separately

OOB was down to 51
PTV 87
BM 201
Total 339 COVID still a factor

2022
OOB 30
PTV 38
BM 153
Total 221 Back to work LOL

2023
OOB 53
PTV 49
BM 118
Total 220

2024
OOB 53
PTV 83
BM 85
Total 221

So it is very clear that all of us big boys love “new, shiny” and enjoy it very much for a time, and it starts to get too familiar, or… stale.

Each of the versions started out very exciting because it was a significant twist on the much loved G40 game, and a mod that was widely loved and accepted as having

To your last statement,
Eliminating the small nagging skin tags is what started Balanced mod, for the most part, but I agree with you that the BM team went ahead and added a bunch of stuff to modify the game to be what they thought people would love most.

You are saying do a modification of OOB that is much smaller in scope that doesn’t add a bunch of features, it stops after fixing a few problems.

OK, that makes sense. And are you asking the league to come up with that fix, and maybe change it every year to mix it up? That does sound really cool and I would do it except then we’ve departed from actual out of the box as soon as we change one thing.

I’m not intending to make a closing argument, I’m putting facts and thoughts out there for discussion.

gamerman01

My point in showing the statistics since the beginning of G40 is to show

Dwindling marginal returns no matter what game it is
BM breathing a lot of new life into G40 as a whole
PTV doing similar after BM had been out awhile.

My view is this is what happens when the world does not receive a new global Axis and Allies game in 13 years ( a child’s entire lifetime LOL). After a few years, the masses crave a new and improved, and a few years after that, the throngs cry out for a different way of taking over the world.

AndrewAAGamer

This, I think, is a great discussion so I would like to throw in my two cents.

I think two very important points have been made… 1) People get tired of the same game over time. 2) There are some things people don’t like about OOB so they play other games.

Now, for me, the main reason I like OOB is because a) it is the official game, b) there are so many various strategies that can be used to win and 3) it is a different game every time after about Round 4; especially due to the Bid.

I guess the first question is what is it that people do not like about the current state of OOB? One thing that I have heard is the large Bid. To digress, the first time I ever played OOB we played with no Bid in our face-to-face group. Pretty soon it was a $6 Bid to take the Allies that grew over time to $12, $18, mid-twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and finally after about 5 years all the way up to $60! We had people who could not believe the Axis could win at $60, yet it did win more than it lost. Now here online there have been some very unique Bid placements that I think is going to drive that $60 down to about $50-$52. The reason I point that out is currently BM seems to be about $20-$22 so even after all the changes BM4 made OOB is only about $30 more to the Bid.

Now, again, for me I like the Bid because how the Allies choose to place their Bid makes it a different game every time. But, assuming most people do not like the large Bid, how do we decrease it without radically changing the game like BM did?

See, for me, I don’t play BM4 because it is really a different game due to all the changes. Same goes for PTV. While both may be fun and fine games there are lots of games that match that criteria on TripleA and we don’t play those.

So, back to how to clean up OOB to make it more acceptable for everyone to play without radically changing it? What is it that, besides the large Bid, people don’t like?

I think one thing is the Russia gets money from the Middle East and Africa and that seems kind of cheesy. Okay, we remove that. But that is one way Russia gets extra money so we have to make up for that or the Bid would grow even more.

The fact Germany can steamroll Russia if Russia does not get assistance from UK? Okay, so again, we need more for Russia. So, what I would suggest is something that does not radically change the game but cleans up those two points if the general feeling is Russia is too weak.

So how much does Russia need? Well, about $50 or so to match the Bid plus another $10-$15 for the loss of the Middle East and Africa. Okay — so we add 10 infantries to Russia ($30) to start the game and then give them a National Objective that as long as they hold it gives them $5 more a Turn; such as “Must hold Caucasus and Volgograd”. This would make it more worthwhile for Russia to fight for the south and even if they fail should get them at least 6-7 turns of collection for $30-$35 — Bingo plus $60-$65!

I am not saying this would eliminate any Bid, but I bet it would drive it significantly under the current BM4 Bid. For those people who are just tired of the old game I am not sure this would bring them back however, it may bring in more Players who don’t like these three issues (Large Bid, cheesy Russia NO in Africa and weak Russia.)

What are other things people don’t like about OOB???

Arthur Bomber Harris

@AndrewAAGamer my problem with Axis and Allies League matches is either 1) I am playing against inferior opponents and I know by turn 4 that it will be an easy win for me but I have to wait ten turns for them to inevitably concede, or 2) I am playing against superior opponents like you and I have to play through the next full turn every round to make sure I am not making a dumb mistake and also have to take a 40/60 odds battle to have a chance of winning since you will inevitably grind me into the dirt if I don’t take any risks. I spend a month to get to that huge attack on Moscow or massive battle in the Pacific, get either good or bad dice, and then either win or lose based on the outcome.

I could play low-luck matches, but then I am guaranteed to win against inferior opponents and lose against people who have better gameplay so the outcome is essentially determined from the start of the game. There probably is no solution to this general situation in 2-player matches.

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