My take on LL versus Dice

Based on my short time around these boards, I haven’t gotten the impression that LL players have an elitist attitude.  Perhaps you are referring to people you know personally?

I think both ways of playing have their merits.  I personally enjoy dice more simply because it’s more fun.  The jubilation and frustration that comes from rolling the dice is a large part of why I enjoy AA.

LL is a quick and easy way to calculate how you think the battle will most likely go, and also how many casualties you expect to take.  It can help in making decisions, but I don’t think it ought to take the place throwing dice anymore than card counting should replace cards in black jack.

One last thing, LL does not mean no luck, a die is still rolled and small battles can still go either way, ie 4 inf attacking 1 inf and loosing.  It makes the big battles go the way they should, but still has risk management for deciding ‘do i send the DD and fig, or the DD and bomb vs that german sub that can sink 2 trannies next turn’ as with the first option, you could roll a 6 and him a 1 (has happened to me).

But I do see the merit in dice, it is annoying how powerful planes become in low luck, in how static naval and air builds become (just skirting the odds), and how you can perfectly strafe.  But I’ll take that over getting diced any day in Moscow.

I think Turtle hits the nail on the head. I doubt Patton told von Rundstedt that he would be taking the Siegfried line because he was attacking with 5 infantry and armored divisions to von Runstedts 2. The battle had to be fought and thats what rolling dice is all about.

Thats the problem with the dice in A&A, the dice does not simulate real battles, although it is meant to do this.

If the Vietnam war was fought with ADS, you could have up to 500.000 dead American soldiers (worst case) instead of 60.000. 200.000 causalities is what you could risk if you were playing regular dice (war) game. This is the extreme variation which happens in dice games.

The nam war was lost mainly b/c political factors, not military failures. In A&A there is (still) no option for political factors, just plain simple military units, land sea and air forces fighting against each other. Or in the Gulf war, we could have 50.000 dead allied soldiers instead of 1000(?). In the Iraq war, coalition forces could very well loose 10.000 troops instad of 1000-2000. If NATO was playing with ADS setting in Afghanistan, the political risk would be too high to send ground troops at all. As some battles in real life goes horribly wrong, you don’t loose the whole war b/c of bad luck, which happens in A&A from 1% to 40% of all games played with ADS setting.

I know how people can feel about dice. But I mean, when we play the board game with friends, we have to accept the luck (and it can turn one side or another). If we start playing with simulators, we lose the fun of throwing the Dices, of insulting each other’s luck.

This is my opinion.

Robert

I do not believe that dice is intended to simulate real battles.  This is a board game first and foremost, not a war simulation.

Dice adds an element of unpredictability.  Some see that as being fun and exciting.  Others find it frustrating and detracts from their enjoyment.  That’s basically what it boils down to.  I don’t think the merits of dice play should be weigh based on how well it simulates real life war.  That’s a totally different context.

@rockrobinoff:

just one more time before i bow out of this discussion:

determining the better player more accurately, or getting closer to average results in battles to make certain strats ‘work out’ more often, or having the superior player win more regularly as the result of less variance, is completely beside the point.

so you are playing dice, you outplay your opponent, you achieve 85% odds in a decisive battle, and lose. as the result, you lose the game. so what? you played better, made better decisions, took your shot, and then lost. the only thing you have been denied in all of this is the satisfaction of winning.

take LL. now, you have a game system where certain strategical concepts have been nerfed considerably. what have you lost? a rich tapestry of ideas.

fine, play LL. it is a very good game in its own right. just don’t call it A&A.

If you play Texas hold’em you know if other players can have a stronger hand than you. In A&A ADS games you don’t know how lucky you or your opponent gets until after the dice are rolled. In poker, one game is one rnd, one evening can be 20-50-80 deals/rnds. In poker, you can see your winning chances before you bet, in dice games you see the chances after you attacked. In poker, if you have bad luck, you can just leave the table and not waste any money. In A&A, you concede a whole game.

Whats the point of playing if dice is what decides the outcome, and not the decisions of the players? Why spend many hours, perhaps 2-9 hours on a game, and then you loose b/c of bad luck not bad play? The difference between LL and ADS is that you have to play many more games to be sure to determine the better player, maybe 10, or maybe 20-30 games. Some LL games are also decided by luck, but not so many as in ADS. My guess is that luck decides 1%-49% of all ADS games, and 1%-10% of all LL games. The reason why I prefer LL is b/c a strategy game should be won by the better player, not by the luckiest player.
The reason why I play A&A instead of chess is that A&A is more war-like, and it’s a modern strategy game, while chess is an old strategy game.
The whole point of playing A&A is to play a strategy game in which the better play wins as often as possible, just like chess. If not, then you might as well play yahtzee or even better, Ludo. If you didn’t try Ludo yet, you’re gonna love it. Dice plays a huge role in Ludo  :evil:

If you use bids in classic or revised, don’t call it A&A. If you play w/o tech in classic or revised, don’t call it A&A. None of this are official rules.

@Craig:

Playing with dice gives the game that certain “edge” that comes from the unknown.

(snipped…)

For me, the fog of war is very present and very dense, also in LL games. In my LL games, the whoops and groans comes from bad decisions, horrible mistakes, bad overview, not seeing 1-2 punch etc.

In my LL games, I am never certain of anything, until I see the opponent types gg  :-D
And when I’m conceding, the process is usually just as slow in ADS games as in LL games, although LL games always makes it past the first rnd.

When we “take out the dice”, we don’t remove the dice altogether, we reduce the randomness. Players who have never tried LL would be amazed on how much randomness there can be in some LL games.

As for computation, not even Deep Blue, or Hydra can compute A&A, it’s much too complex. Human brains can’t even compute chess, and A&A is much more complex in possible number of movements, than chess.

The TripleA weak AI, and the AI in the GTO version is the “best number-crunching supercomputer” today…  :roll:

I couldn’t agree more. These are my sentiments but I didn’t have the time to articulate them as eloquently as you on my first post. I’d throw some karma your way if I could.

It looks like someone got in before me …. my last post was in response to Craig’s.

Thats what 25+ years of AA and SOM baseball ftf tell me

jeez!  strat-o-matic baseball?!?!  i used to play that all the time!!  do they even still make it?

Yep strato is still going strong. You can now get the seasons on cards or cd-rom

wow i may have to look into getting into it again.  do you know where i can find it?

You can order online at strat-o-matic.com  They also have capability for online play. I think they are still located in Glen Head,  Long Island NY. When we were younger our league always made the Strato Review as we always purchased the first set of cards on their opening day in January

I am used to play LL in PBEM games, because playing dice rollers “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” … Also palying f2f “extreme” results happens sometimes. I am able to survive to that however.

The problem is, IMHO, that LL do not resolve all problems. The opening move are still influenced by the dice. There are many small battles involving few units. As many said before small battles are less “scripted”, also with LL the single die has still a big impact on the game. LL is great in “stabilizing” big battles but less effective with few units involved. Strafing shines with LL.

The problem of the big battles however is not the principal problem, IMHO. I often hear people that speak of a match ruined by the dice. They say: I played a good game, victory was in my hands, I deserve to win, but he attacked Moscow (Berlin) with only 10% chanche to win and… he won! What a pity that no one was there to see those event to witness the defeat of a superior strategist to a inferior one in a single battle thanks to dice, after an uncountable number of defeats.

First of all how is it possible to lose to a single battle, in a decisive but single spot, if someone is winning all over the map? If one has a superior strategy/position/force balance and leave an opening to a 10% attack at least he has made one error. If that 10% defeat happens …that the error was a decisive one… Better was to sacrifice a little bit of materiel or position to avoid the possibility of that attack. An Error. Which error? Maybe all that superiority should have been used for ending the game before defeat. Or maybe all that supriority was only our opinion? It is more simple to whine for dice than to analyze our own errors. I am also a chess player, and usually when I play tournament, I take note of my moves and after the match I analyze critically my moves to understood why I have won or lost the match. With TripleA I analyze the game history: the moves, the attacks and the statistics of each round to identify my errors, looking at them critically. Often I have found bugs in my moves and I try to learn from my own errors.

Second: 10% is not 0%. There is a thing that many people do not consider of statistic. It is not like a vote in parliament where the majority is obtained with 50% + 1 votes and the motion is approved or rejected. Statistic have to do with “a priori” possibility (probability) and “a posteriori” observation of results (frequency). Playing A&A by 10 years is not substitute of a book of statistic. Having 10% probability of winning for my opponent, meaning 90% of probability of victory for me, does not mean that victory is the sure event (100% probability) but only that “it is really more likely to happen a victory”. Speaking of frequencies: repeating the same battle 100 times it will be won by me in about the 90 of the attempts end won by my opponent in only 10 cases. What a pity that statistic say nothing about the “order” in wich defeats and victory will happen. No one can grant that the first 90 attempts will be, or should be, my victories.

So where I see the utility of LL? In the ordinary battles. Trading of the frontline territories. In ordinary dicing you may lose a counter attack. With LL if you want to be sure of a winning then you can be sure of winning. Using the best allocation of attacking unit it is possible to have 100% win (sure event) if you want.

There is a problem also here, however, this may “consume” more materiel sometime, materiel that will be washed away in the enemy counter attack that will be done using LL and in wich our remaining units will be smashed without hope (to be themselves destroyed in my next turn). Usually I react to that palying as it was not LL: I trade frontline zones with minimal forces using about the same units used in ordinary dice. For example I use 2 inf and 1 fig againist a lonely inf and not 2 inf and 2 fig or 3 inf and 1 fig to achieve 100% victory chanches.

Concluding my opinion is that we have problem also with LL, that solves many issues but leave others open. The game with LL is different, is still A&A, but it is different, and sometimes requires different skills to be mastered. And requires also different skills to be accepted… Some weeks ago I was accused of being too much lucky in a TripleA LL games becuse my dice hits more than the expected average…

@Subotai:

Thats the problem with the dice in A&A, the dice does not simulate real battles, although it is meant to do this.

If the Vietnam war was fought with ADS, you could have up to 500.000 dead American soldiers (worst case) instead of 60.000. 200.000 causalities is what you could risk if you were playing regular dice (war) game. This is the extreme variation which happens in dice games.

The nam war was lost mainly b/c political factors, not military failures. In A&A there is (still) no option for political factors, just plain simple military units, land sea and air forces fighting against each other. Or in the Gulf war, we could have 50.000 dead allied soldiers instead of 1000(?). In the Iraq war, coalition forces could very well loose 10.000 troops instad of 1000-2000. If NATO was playing with ADS setting in Afghanistan, the political risk would be too high to send ground troops at all. As some battles in real life goes horribly wrong, you don’t loose the whole war b/c of bad luck, which happens in A&A from 1% to 40% of all games played with ADS setting.

No, they aren’t real battles, because they are little plastic battles, but they do abstractly simulate the war.  where 1 INF division could defeat 4 enemy INF divisions, or 300 Spartans could defeat thousands of Persians, or like in the Nam war, where Mel Gibson and half a dozen platoons could rout 3,000 Viet Cong troops in the middle of a field.  LL just won’t allow that.  That battle could never have happened in LL, but in reality yup…  The Bulge saw the Axis with a massive advantage, as did Stalingrad, and LL would have allowed victory there, but that’s not how it really happened.

Sure, the numbers can be run and tell you that 4INF will lose to 1INF 1.16 % of the time, but anyone ever seen it happen in LL?  doubtful.  Sometimes you do loose wars because of bad luck and sometimes you win them in spite of it.

The poker analogy earlier rings truth–you can outplay your opponent and loose.  I was at a tournament this past weekend and teams were competing and good teams were shooting themselves in the foot and loosing because they didn’t perform up to their ability.  If it had been LL, they’d have all made it into finals because of their initial seeding, but as it turned out, 3 of the top four all dropped the ball and missed out even reaching the semis.

If someone likes LL, sure play LL.  If not, play with each dice roll, ADS or whatever you want to call it.  But the fundamentals is that you are playing a different game