1941 troop setup at the begining of the game?

with Russia invested in China (IC in Szechwan and raised territory value to 3) and getting the IPCs, pluss the turn order allowing to consolidate, made a KJF more viable. My friend tried it one game but made a couple mistakes with positioning

@thedesertfox I don’t think you’ll get people to agree on a bid, which is why you should have an auction if you’re running a tournament – let one player say "I’ll take the Allies for 10 ipcs (or whatever), and then the other player can either say “Ok, take them” or bid lower and say “I’ll take the Allies for 9 ipcs.” This continues until someone says ok.

There are just so few games in a typical a&a tournament that you can’t afford to have anyone feeling like they lost a coin toss. E.g. if you have 3 rounds and someone plays allies twice and they don’t agree with your fixed bid, that’s a real feel-bad moment.

@xlome_00 Sea Lion is one of those attacks where the threat is mightier than the execution. If you buy a carrier for the Baltic Fleet on G1, that’s a reasonable purchase anyway to protect your supply lines to Norway/Finland/Leningrad/Baltics. If you move the German Med transport to the central Med, it is protected by the Italian fleet and can reinforce Libya, which is a reasonable move anyway. If you then bring the Italian fleet to take Gibraltar and retake Morocco, that helps score your NOs, so that’s a normal attack. So all of these preparatory moves can be done with minimal cost to the standard Axis war effort.

But then the American bomber cannot sink the German transport without landing in either Egypt (where it will die on a G2 Egypt attack) or Caucasus (where it spoils the Russian NO.)

If they leave your Med transport alive, you move it to Western Med on G2 where Italian fleet protects it again, build a second transport in Baltic on G2 plus an extra plane, and now you are threatening UK with 3 inf, 3 tank, 1 CA, 4 ftr, 1 bmr on a hypothetical G3 sea lion.

UK can of course defend against this, but they will have to build a fat infantry stack in London instead of factories, ships, or air power. This could cost them the Atlantic fleet or at least force them to retreat it back to Canada; if they built a factory in Africa / India, they might lose it because they cannot afford to build units there on a critical turn. Meanwhile those infantry in London will just sit there inefficiently for several turns because there are not enough transports to ship them anywhere, and not enough warships to protect the Atlantic fleet in a forward position.

Your second Baltic transport is reasonably useful for shipping inf/art to Leningrad, and the extra fighter can of course be used for trading on the eastern front, defending France, etc. as usual.

So you never actually attack London in an AA50 game – you just quietly threaten to attack it, thereby forcing the Allies to waste much more money on defense than you spent on creating the threat.

@taamvan Can you say a bit more about what Japan is doing in your games? It’s true that with a well-executed KGF Germany will be contained to the core territories of France, NW Europe, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – but that’s still worth $30 a turn and it takes the Allies a very long time to build and load enough transports to crack it.

Meanwhile, a pure KGF usually leaves Japan free to take India, then the Caucasuses, then Moscow – the Allies can certainly rush a few fighters to Moscow, but sending even one ruins the only practical Russian national objective, and if you build too many then you never get enough Allied ground troops to crack the German turtle – fighters in Moscow can’t reach to support an attack on France.

In my experience, without a bid and with NOs on, the Japanese attack on Moscow is much faster than the American attack on Paris, let alone Berlin. How does the Pacific play out in your games?

One of the big questions is “How Easy is it to Hold France”?

@Subotai:

It’s an interesting concept. Other alliances would be tempting to play in revised, if not AA50 was released.

We did that in classic, I don’t remember if Germany + Russia worked for a good game, but Germany + US was pretty even, almost like the original teams.

US and Japan in AA50 is much too weak.
Also, NOs can’t be used when changing alliances, b/c the NOs are specifically built around the original alliances, while any territory with an ipc value can be captured, NOs are different.
I’ve already been thinking about other setups in AA50, I haven’t tried any other than the original teams yet, but Germany and Italy + Russia would probably work fine. I don’t think any other teams can work, except if Italy is an enemy of Germany, Germany will then capture Italy rnd1, this will slow down Germany, but Germany will then be stronger from rnd2 than if Italy is on the same team as Germany.
Maybe Germany and US could work in AA50, also original teams could work with the exception of Italy is teamed up with allies.
A team change that is interesting to try out is: Germany owns all of Italy and Italian units, not only to play different setups, but also to determine if it is an advantage for axis to “split” Germany, I think axis are stronger if Germany got the possessions of Italy including the Italian units. I also think if we just removed all of Italy and Germany had to capture Italy and eventually build in the Mediterranean, Germany would be stronger than in the original AA50.

I have been tempted to experiment to see if Italy is advantageous as its own seperate entity.  I am inclined to agree with you that an “uber Germany” is probably preferable for the Axis.  The only reason why I have any doubt though, is the nasty nasty potential for a double hit on Russia (and sometimes even a triple hit).  It really does seem that if Italy has a decent presence in the Russian theater, Russia can only defend against two fronts after about t2 and can no longer leave a 1 man inf defense.  That alone can tip the favour to the Axis.

There’s an easy solution, move the RAF fighters onto Karelia.  Problem solved.

It’s one turn of 5 less production for Russia… well, 3 really, since losing Karelia is 2.  It’s not a big deal.  That 5 bonus is for when Russia’s strong enough, which they aren’t at the beginning as everyone has shown.

Remember Germany also gets 7 (2 for the territory and 5 bonus) production from Karelia, and can start producing armies there.  That’s a huge negative, because without that factory the German line gets stretched out and weak on infantry.  The negatives from losing it are steep, very steep.

yes correct. When you DL just change the name of the file.