News flash: AXIS & ALLIES ANNIVERSARY EDITION due out oct 23 08

@Taewakan

I have moved the topic to the Anniversary-category. @barnee is correct.
This question is part of the official FAQ:

Q. Are sea zone 1 and Western Canada adjacent?
A. No. The gold map border obscures the fact that the Hudson Bay area of sea zone 1 doesn’t quite
reach all the way to the western edge of Eastern Canada.

I had planned on making it to Gen Con this year but I wasn’t able to get the time off work on the relatively short notice. Definitely going to try making it to Origins/Gencon next year though. I live on the US East Coast so the CA Tournaments, Young Grasshopper’s Tournaments, etc. are probably out of the question though, just as a logistics thing.

Hello everyone,

I want to notify everyone that the 2010 Leagues for both 41 & 42 has started. This year, at the end of the season, the top players will vie for the title in a playoff format elimination!

If you are ready to test your luck & skill feel free to jump right in.

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?board=54.0

The main Problem is, the game isn’t fun for every player, if you can only win as allies by almoust complete neglection of Japan. The Japanese Player will have a poor gaming experience. On the other hand, you won’t win the war in the pacific.
I recently invested loads of Russian troops, a UK factory in India and the US heavy into the pacific (1941 scenario) and didn’t come close to a win in the pacific and lost to europe. Eventough the Japanese player made a major mistake and i got lucky when he attackt some groundforces with mainly planes. The best I could achieve was a stall with Japan earning somewhat 50 IPC a turn (playing with NO).
While Germany on the other hand was playing extremely conservative, but finally crushed the USSR (rolling really good dice), so the US Invasion froce stationed in the atlantic.

Whats missing in this game?
I guess a industrial complex in India to start with could slow the japanese advance, while still saveing IPC for UK (doesn’t have to build one). This would make the game more challanging for the Japanese Player (otherwise there is no opponent on the continent) and gives the UK player more action on the pacific side of the board, while still able to build up some fleet to fight the Germans/Italians.

Clever thread title… +1 karma.

Edit (title is completely relevant to your post - sorry, was reading very late at night)

I second Dondolee’s thoughts.  When starting out bear in mind how the game is ultimately won - for the axis, by taking Moscow before the allies can take either Rome or Berlin.  It’s a race to see who holds out longer.

Japan should efficiently grab land in the first two or so turns, build up factories in South Asia (rounds 1-4) and then ply tanks and infantry through India > Persia > Caucasus > Moscow.  Send enough troops through China and Siberia that you’ll have enough to punch through, but sending the bulk of your force on the southern route.  As you play more games, take note of which strategies allowed you to occupy territories faster and get a better flow of troops to russia.

Italy and germany’s role is to stay rich and keep russia poor.  They generally don’t have enough power to crack russia without some early luck, so you just need to treat 'em rough and keep 'em honest.  Never let russia get their 10 IPC objective - this is a death knell.  While you want to deny and pressure russia as much as possible, your main task is to not let UK/US kill you - a tough balancing act of agression/defence.  There are many ways to skin this cat, but piles of infantry and scattering of tanks are the best place to start from a learning perspective.  You’ll soon find the limitation of infantry - while extremely cost effective, they can only be in one place at a time.  It’s hard fighting two wars that are 5 spaces apart. While boats and planes pack less punch for the money, they can threaten a much larger area.  Once you get a handle of the flow of the game, you’ll find many ways that german planes and boats can improve your effectiveness.  As dondoelee points out, this is playing with fire and you expect to get burnt a few times while you figure it out - start simple.

Cheers

This thread appears to be long dead, but I never get tired of math questions!  :-)

To answer the original question: The statistics of when a bomber gets shot down are determined by something called the geometric distribution, which you can find plenty of info about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution.  The geometric distribution describes the first occurrence of an event when you make repeated, independent trials.  For example, the number of times you have to flip a coin before getting heads; the number of times you have to be dealt a poker hand before getting a royal flush; and the number of times you have to roll a die before getting a 1 are all described by geometric distributions.  Once you know the probability of success in a single event, the geometric distribution tells you how long you have to wait before seeing the first success.

Some of the information for the geometric distribution:
–-The probability of getting your first success (in our example “success” is the bomber getting shot down!) on the nth turn is (1/6)*(5/6)^(n-1).  This is because, in order to be shot down on the nth turn, the bomber must first survive the preceding n-1 turns, which has a probability of (5/6)^(n-1), and must then be shot down on turn n, which has a probability of 1/6.
–-The probability of getting your first success by the nth turn is 1 - (5/6)^n.  This is just 1 minus the probability of the bomber surviving the first n turns.  (It’s also the sum of the probabilities of getting shot down on turn 1, 2, …, up to n, but that’s the long way to do it!)

Given this, a number of other facts can be calculated (I’ll spare you the details…)  The question “When will the bomber, statistically speaking, be shot down?” has three different answers: the mean, median, and mode.  Here’s what each of those is:
—The mode is the single turn on which the bomber is most likely to be shot down.  This may be surprising, but it’s the very first turn!  The probability of getting shot down is the same (1/6) on all turns, provided the bomber makes it to that turn , but first it must survive all the turns before it.  Hence, the first turn is the most likely turn-of-death since the bomber doesn’t have to survive any prior turns in order to reach it.
–-The median is the first turn for which the bomber has a 50% chance of getting shot down before it.  This is the fourth turn, because the probability of getting shot down on one of the first four turns is 52% whereas the probability of surviving the first four turns is 48%.  So it’s about 50-50 whether the bomber survives at least 4 turns.
–-The mean , also known as the expected value, is the average number of turns that the bomber will survive.  This is 6 turns.  It turns out that you can actually calculate this by taking the reciprocal of the 1/6 probability of getting shot down on a given turn, although the reason why that works is slightly less obvious than it might seem.

So, which of the mean, median, and mode is the most useful?  When should we expect to lose the bomber?  Well, the mode is the least useful for answering this sort of question.  One can make a case for either the mean or the median, but for the types of calculation that people usually have in mind, the mean is the way to go.  For example, if you’re trying to figure out the average amount of economic damage inflicted minus damage received from each bombing raid, then the statistic you want is the average, aka the mean.

Of course, the question of whether bombing raids are worth doing involves a lot more than calculating the average IPC’s lost and destroyed.  My test: If you want to decide whether bombing a given country with your country is useful, ask yourself, “Would I destroy $10 of mine if I also got to destroy $10 of theirs?”  If the answer is “Heck yes!” then SBR’s are useful.  For example, Japan bombing Russia generally makes sense, as does US or UK bombing Germany.  A weaker power bombing a stronger power is usually not so smart.

Ooops!!! Thanx, Craig. This will be corrected in future games, and not a bad buzzer. I believe I got this confused w/Kwangtung, which can be liberated for Great Britian by the chinese.

@Hobbes:

There are a few interesting differences from the map pictures:

Japan is now surrounded by a single SZ, instead of the 2 in Revised. This allows for US bombers to attack any ships there and land on that new Russian territory adjacent to SFE and Bur. Japan has a lot of hard choices to make: to take out the 7 inf Russian stack on Buryatia (after moves on R1) or to prevent Manchuria from falling to the Russians; to take Borneo/E. Indies/Phillipines; to hit Pearl; plus Burma/HK/China Egypt is tougher to crack for G1: running a calc gives G 73% odds of conquering it, where before 2 inf 2 arm 1 bmr gave it 95% odds. The Italians seem to have 2 choices: either reinforce Egypt or try to retake it in the case of a UK counterattack, or do the same for the Ukraine. Which would open the way for a German tank rush on Caucasus…i guess that’s why there’s no German INF on Austria, otherwise they could be moved to Rom/Bulg and the G transport on the Med could be used to lift INF for that attack on the Caucasus. G has the option of making an attack on Kar on G1 using the Finnish INF and the transport, plus all of the Luftwaffe, but the AA makes it risky. It can really pay off though because it secures the Baltic countries from any Russian counterattack.

The single seazone around Japan deters even more invading Russia and trying to achieve its historical objectives.