🎲😢 PRNG dice support group — and ranting

@TheDude-0 Thanks for excellent reply. Noted and agreed on all points.

Having played the classic edition back in the day, the wild swingyness of the dice mechanic was always a bone of contention. A lot of board wargamers dismissed it as a kids game because luck was such a big factor, I always appreciated the unpredictability.

There are basically two types of wargamer, or two ends of an axis we all lie on. Some treat these games as puzzles to solve, to find the ‘right’ tactic or the perfects strategy. Then there are those that like having to think on their feet and adapt to the situation as it unfolds.

A&A in all its forms has always been a game for the latter group. Yes you need to strategise, but you need to hedge your bets, have a backup plan, adapt creatively to unexpected reverses. That’s the fun of it.

As for randomness, if you randomly generate points on an x/y graph, you’ll quickly notice that the points tent to form clumps and little chains. Truly random distributions are not smooth or evenly distributed. Humans are hard wired to see and create patterns. We’re truly awful at generating random numbers ‘by hand’ and also terrible and judging whether a range of numbers are random or not. There’s been bags of research on this. I play role-playing games so Ive rolled huge numbers of dice and seen some amazing runs of luck, disastrous bad luck and just numerically weird looking results. That’s just randomness for you. I’ve had this argument with gamers ‘proving’ that particular outcomes were almost impossible. Yes. All the possible outcomes are almost impossible, when you roll enough dice. They’re all equally unlikely. That’s the point.

@Brian-Cannon Shocked response by the Devs

@Brian-Cannon I’m a bit late getting to this but as @aardvarkpepper suggested, the battle calculator (hosted by this very site at http://calc.axisandallies.org/) is your friend here. Basically, before committing to your moves, take a look at what your opponent’s possible moves are going to be and run battle calculations on what would happen if your opponent played a certain way (IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember to set the “rounds of combat” setting to “all” and “10,000X” (more simulated battles = more accurate prediction) and to also set the “luck” setting to “1942” and “Pure Luck” to be accurate to AAO.

I’m not going to speak to your specific game example because that’s not what this thread was about, but I’ll give you the same advice other people gave when faced faced the “Dark Skies” strategy. Basically, a large intimidating air stack can only attack one large stack (be it a land stack of ~10 INF or greater or a naval stack of ~5 Destroyers or greater) in one round. Because of this, you need to be a bit greedy and push forward with all of your large stacks simultaneously, creating potentially-game-winning threats in multiple regions of the board. This puts the Allies in a bad spot because they’ll be forced to choose between solidly destroying one of your threats (and letting the other ones get off scott-free to accomplish its objective) and taking multiple risky fights trying to stop all of your threats (which will probably result in the air stack getting severely reduced/destroyed, making it your victory). I’ve been talking in abstracts here but I can give a rough-ish approximation based on your game. Don’t take this as a one-to-one guide on what you should’ve done in that game, I have no idea what the board looked like:

Scenario: USA is ferrying air stacks from W. USA -> Yakut -> Center Map (Moscow). USA is using said stack to wipe out anything that moves (i.e. Japanese navy, Germany trading attempts in Russia, etc.).

Threat #1 - Get Germany’s entire army (or at least a good chunk of it) in Caucasus, threatening Moscow and demanding that USA keep the air stack in or around Moscow.

Threat #2 - Move out with Japan’s fleet and either threaten taking Hawaii+India for the last VCs (you said you had Karelia earlier and I’m assuming with a strategy like this the Allies weren’t taking Philippines/Rome/Paris anytime soon) OR threaten challenging/destroying the US fleet off of Alaska. If taking the first option here you’d just need to spend a turn or two spamming land units on Japan proper to avoid a landing in Japan. Japan is really easy to defend because of it’s 8 production.

With a large-enough Japanese Navy threatening game-over in one part of the board (by either sinking the USN (thus shutting off the stream of air units into Russia) and the German Army threatening game-over in another (Moscow), the USA in this hypothetical scenario is forced to use their air stack to either sink the IJN or wipe out the German Army. If they sink the IJN the Nazis grab Moscow and win the game, and if they wipe out the Caucasus stack the IJN accomplishes its objective and you win the game. If the USA tries for both they’ll probably fail unless the AAO RNG screws you, in which case you do what the rest of us good folks do and make a thread/post complaining about it.

tl;dr Use the Battle Calculator. Make multiple threats so the Allies need to pick one to deal with and the other(s) can prevail without issue. Don’t fear the reaper, as the song goes.

Hope this helps at least somewhat.

I know its an online game with “Online” in the name, but I still think not having really any focus on the single player experience is a bit of a missed opportunity. Its the lowest barrier to entry, low-pressure first introduction, that A&A really needs from a product like this. like at least as much as it needs solid online matchmaking. I know I probably played a hundred solitaires or games against goofy computer opponents with the old Hasbro CD before I ever put up an even remotely decent game in a head-to-head match.

Axis and Allies is a kinda wonky game to learn how to play, and one that would be well served by a robust computer tutorial. Even a middling computer opponent would be great to have for learning the basic mechanics of A&A, to say nothing of learning the UI. I think this one is serviceable for people who already know what they’re doing, and just want an official way to play, but I worry its not the most spectacular thing ever if what you’re using it for is just getting your head around the nuts and bolts. Or if the way you’re trying to learn how to play A&A is by running through the tutorial and then playing against the computer, before into a pvp match lol. The Hasbro CD attempt even with the limits of mid 90s gameplay still managed to find ways to engage the Single Player, with like AI generals, splashy stats/graphs/newsflashes stuff of that sort, and a lot of game mode options to mess about with.

This one really does need an editor though or at least a time machine.
Would be cool if there were more built-in communication features too and a way to share histories and gamesaves and such.

I wish I had more time to play lately. I missed the second season entirely. Might check it out again in the third. Things tend to open up for me in the Fall for A&A time sinks heheh. Hope all’s been well!

@salocinx The factory’s air defense is not affected by damage.

@JuliusBorisovBeamdog Thank you for doing the analysis. My curiosity has been answered and it just turns out that my observations were simply anecdotal and coincidental.

Please pass along my thanks to the team for taking the time to do the analysis. I think a future request will be for low-luck style rolling. :wink: