We need an allied playbook.

We could argue all week about what the exactly right balance is, but I imagine most of us agree in principle that you need to slightly adjust your British opening based off of the G1 attack and purchase. Like, if Germany buys 2 bombers and sinks both British home fleets and the Canadian transport without losing any planes, well, yeah, buy 8 or 9 inf for London and leave the Egypt factory for UK2; it can wait. Conversely, if Germany declares war on Russia G1 or loses half its air force, well, maybe you don’t even need the 2 inf, 1 ftr for London on UK1 and you can buy the Egypt factory plus a destroyer or whatever else you want for the Atlantic, instead. In the vast majority of games, though, you wind up with an average result that justifies an average buy to defend London: 3 inf if you’re feeling aggressive, or 2 inf, 1 ftr for a moderate position, or 6 inf if you’re feeling conservative.

Class, class! Attention please. Put these five cities in order of strategic importance to an Allied victory: Cairo, Calcutta, Moscow, London and Honolulu. Let it be Chronological and magnitude of importance.

1-5) Moscow. That is all

You answer wisely, yet an examination of most of our strategies reveals that most practically place Calcutta and Egypt and even Honolulu above Moscow.

Now class, can any one explain what an argumentum ad absurdum, also known as reductio ad absurdum?

@crockett36

In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity”), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin for “argument to absurdity”), apagogical arguments or the appeal to extremes, is a form of argument that attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.

Satis est!

Let’s be absurd!

Suspending disbelief for a moment, say we all agreed with Taamvan, what would your strategy be? We might call this imaginary game save Moscow! or the Great patriotic war. That is your sole responsibility for 5 turns. Would Germany be able to take Moscow by turn 5 or 6?

@crockett36 I would argue the complete opposite. Attack where the enemy is not is what the art of war recommends no? If you’re playing for victory cities then ignore fortress Moscow.

@crockett36 said in We need an allied playbook.:

Let’s be absurd!

Suspending disbelief for a moment, say we all agreed with Taamvan, what would your strategy be? We might call this imaginary game save Moscow! or the Great patriotic war. That is your sole responsibility for 5 turns. Would Germany be able to take Moscow by turn 5 or 6?

Not a chance. If the allies put everything into Moscow, the Axis can’t take it that soon by any stretch.

@simon33 I was gonna say… all the opening Allied Air Force can reach, so 5+ UK fighters, 1 French, 3-5 U.S., and some tacticals, plus some more built after that would put quite a hurt on Germany’s Moscow dreams.

The question gets a little weird because if you send the entire starting Allied air force directly to Moscow, then you could wind up losing some of London, Gibraltar, Cairo, etc. in ways that make it harder to build more fighters or get them to Moscow before G5 / G6.

You can also lose the game on victory cities with Germany controlling London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Cairo, Leningrad, and Stalingrad – no Moscow conquest required.

I still think it’s an interesting question, but the answer isn’t as simple as just saying “fly every fighter on the map to Moscow and then Moscow won’t fall and then the Allies win.”

@Argothair Precisely my point earlier. If UK commits every plane to Moscow immediately then the Germans have a leg up taking London and the Italians can take Cairo.

@M36 Well, while I was accepting the absurd premise, its actually not as ridiculous as all that.

UK’s planes don’t need to head to Russia til UK2 or UK3. So if UK puts its fighters on Scotland on UK1 they can reach Novgorod UK2 after the Sea Lion threat is gone. Similarly, the planes in the Med don’t have to head up until UK3 (if they were in Cairo) to be in place in Moscow for G5 and they can bring 1 U.S. fighter along (via Gibraltor, Malta, then Cairo).

On the other side, the U.S. can land 3 planes and troops in Soviet Far East US1.

That gives the Allies 6-12 fighters/tacticals that can reach by G5 without committing until round 2 when initial Axis threats like Sea Lion are done. Of course, UK might prefer its planes in the Med head to India. Japan might keep the U.S. out of things until US3… etc, etc.

@weddingsinger Okay, so In practice you can do something useful with your aircraft before parking them in Moscow.

Good discussion. Well done. We have established that Moscow could theoretically always be saved if we were willing to sacrifice the other cities.

For your next assignment, pick two of the five cities to save. Which other one is it, making sure, of course, that you can still save Moscow with a certainty of 75 percent. Go!

Remember to suspend disbelief for the sake of the discussion. It is my firm belief that we must consider the crazy, the dream or the absurd and then dial it back one notch at a time until we find that we’re on the other side of a problem.

So the problem I’m having with this “pick x of 5 cities to save” discussion is that it matters a lot when the cities fall. London falls on turn 3? Not a problem if you’ve done the Taranto raid and killed some German planes; Russia can just swoop in and occupy eastern Europe, America can liberate London at its leisure, and you’re looking at an Allied win.

London falls on turn 7? You’re pretty much screwed in most cases.

Flipping that around, if Calcutta falls on turn 3? That’s pretty bad; the Japanese have enough time to pivot over to Australia or Honolulu and force America to ignore the Atlantic, or they might even be able to build a factory in West India and crank out 6 fast movers a turn (9 if they get Persia, 12 if they get Iraq, etc.) to seize the middle east and mess up moscow’s southern front.

On the other hand, if Calcutta falls on turn 7? That’s totally fine; in most cases, if Japan is only reaching Calcutta by turn 7 that means Japan is more-or-less contained, and by the time Japan can use the Indian bases to seriously threaten Cairo or Moscow, the game will be over.

So, taking the question as seriously as I can:

In the opening, hold Moscow and Calcutta.
From the middlegame on, hold Moscow and London.

@Argothair A very good point, so we should put time tables on victory cities. London can fall before turn three but not after, Moscow after turn 7 but not before etc. etc.

Of course this is a WAR game so objectives and scenarios are constantly evolving. It would have been silly for the Russians to reinforce Stalingrad in November of 41 when Moscow was the clear objective.

BTW, I choose Egypt. (based on timetables) That doesn’t kick us back to pages of debate, does it?