Best posts made by Arthur Bomber Harris

With the release of Elo rankings, I could identify BM4 League games between two high-level players of similar talent (no more than 100 elo point gap in skill level and greater than 1700 average Elo). I eliminated a few games which had a player surrender due to personal reasons, and analyzed 17 games from the last three years.

The following graph shows the magic cutoff point of a 20 point Allied advantage after turn 10 which guarantees victory or defeat. This is a useful threshold to calculate which territories you want to hold in order to ensure victory.

Interestingly, Moscow and India hold for a much longer time than in the “old” days. This isn’t surprising as the balance mod gives more income to Russia and handicaps Japan. The improvements of Axis gameplay has allowed them to eventually overcome Allied defenses despite territory advantages that previously would have marked doom.

Back from the holidays. Just in time. Please add me to the OOB tournament.

Rest in peace Trulpen! It is always a joy to have players who will compete with anyone at any time. His love of the game is unmatched.

I had an unusual game where the Axis captured Egypt early. The Americans focused heavily on the European operations and the Allies were steadily making progress on that side of the map. I built up the Japanese air force and sent it on a suicide attack into Moscow around turn 8. Stripping off 15 infantry Allied units in Moscow can change a battle from a 95% chance of losing into a 95% chance of winning when the Germans get their turn. It also means that Germany will keep their air force intact, allowing them to reclaim any European victory cities if necessary.

The best part of this strategy is that the extra Japanese planes can hold the Allies at bay for several turns, forcing India to cower and Anzac + USA to be more conservative with their fleets. All of the planes can raid Moscow from a base in Sichuan, meaning that only one turn is required to setup the pivot from Pacific to Europe.

Of course the Russian AA’s shot down half of my Japanese raiders and the German tanks had their turrets pointed backwards, leading to an abrupt and unhappy end to a genius strategy.

@trulpen yeah, BM is much tougher for the Japanese in China. I waste way too many men trying to suppress the rebellions. I hate it when an American bomber knocks off the lone defender and a Chinese soldier pops up in Tibet.

looks like it is my turn to lose to Andrew.

@crockett36 Normandy should be left completely unoccupied by the time the Allies have a sizable landing force. As you mentioned, there can be considerable devastation to any Axis force situated in that territory and it cannot be reasonably defended without diverting from the main goal of crushing Moscow or heading into the Middle East/Egypt. Normandy or Norway will fall, it just is a matter of on which round and whether the Axis will be able to retake it with a counterattack of ground units supported by planes. France is the best place to have the Axis counterstrike infantry/artillery. Mechanized units can help counterstrike from W Germany. Usually, though, a wave of UK fighters add enough defensive might to Normandy or Norway to ensure that the Axis are unable to strike back.

Aircraft carriers and subs are the best investment for the US as they have dual purposes of defending the fleet and attacking/convoy raiding. Build enough destroyers to prevent German wolfpacks from roaming the Atlantic

@Myygames redo the whole Japan turn then including builds and combat. I don’t think it is appropriate to win because of a rule misunderstanding.

Normally I get victory via superior luck.

There is a sub-forum for house rules. You are free to change the game however you like when playing with your friends. I personally enjoy naval and air bases. They enhance the strategic options.

@crockett36 I am missing something in your suggestions. For players who don’t have time to dive in deep to the game and understand the current metas, the OOB version is sufficiently balanced enough to play without any modification at all. The German player will inevitably build too much fleet in the Atlantic or forget that Berlin is the capitol, not Frankfurt. The Russian player will spend their income on tanks, while the American player decides to take the long-march through N Africa instead of launching a successful Normandy invasion.

For more experience players, we need a modification to make the game balanced. Either we can do that with fixed additional units/income, an adjustable bid, or a full-on balanced mod. We have empirical data that a majority prefer the balanced-mods, while a sizeable fraction enjoy OOB plus a bid, and virtually nobody can agree on intermediary house-rules. Out of the 221 matches last year, how many players could find agreeable custom-rules / modified bids? It has been a long time since I have even been offered anything different. A few players prefer low-luck, but I will only accept that against an inferior foe as I need dice to have a chance to beat players like Farmboy or Gamerman.

I am very happy if a subset of players champion a set of house-rules and demonstrate that they are both balanced and enjoyable. If you see something catching on and think a majority would support general adoption as default, let us know. I would suggest that we could have a League-wide vote on adoption of changes if it has been successfully demonstrated by a sizable percentage of League games. I don’t see anything that even raises to a couple percent adoption right now, but don’t let that stop you from advocating for variations in the matches that you play against opponents as you are free to negotiate any rules you want.

@The-Captain if people are experienced, but not masters, they can complete two games in a marathon game day (15h or so). The game takes about the same time for 2-5 players.

Highly experienced people with careful battle calculations will take more time per round and play 3x more rounds before the outcome is decided, but it is rare to find high quality opponents.

@axis-dominion you are 500 ELO points better than 666. You should be winning 95% of the time against him, a player who has 46 wins and 45 losses, the definition of an average opponent. If you don’t think that you could have that type of odds then you aren’t a 2100+ player.

Top players often have to find meta settings to keep up their ranking, perhaps finding the sweet spot for ELO rank difference and have rules like Low Luck to minimize dicing. Or you could just play games and not care about ELO ranking if you find chasing top-positioning takes away from the enjoyment.

@axis-dominion Here is a breakdown of BM4 game results that I pulled from the results spreadsheet. Player 666 is 1 win and 20 losses for players with ELO above 1800. You should be able to beat him 95% of the time if he has not massively improved in recent times. ELO looks to be working in this instance.

Looking at your record (since 2020), you have a weakness against low ranked players and it wasn’t primarily due entirely to bad dice. Against the Simon (ELO 1394), you were distracted by other games and didn’t move additional planes to reinforce the main Russian stack, and he got a bit lucky in the 60/40 Bryansk battle that couldn’t be recovered from. Without that mistake it looked like you would have easily won the game. In the other noteworthy loss against me (ELO 1497), you could have easily won if you played more conservatively instead of offering battles which were dicey.

If you want to maximize your ELO ranking, the 1900+ ranged opponents is probably your sweet spot as the occasional blunders hurt you in the matches against inferior players. Sadly that only gives you 3 opponents who will help you improve or maintain your ranking. The challenges of being one of the best in the world…

If you are new to the game, whoever is better will win with either side. Usually one person has a very defensive personality, focusing more on not losing than pushing towards a goal. That will inevitably lead to defeat as the other person finds weaknesses and builds an income advantage.

It takes a large number of matches to have the natural Axis advantage manifest itself in face-to-face games. Don’t worry about the imbalance until you are able to predict what happens during the first six rounds of gameplay based just on the first round of dice rolls and spending. Fun game for both beginners and masters.

Incredible match. I thought Oysteilo had the W after the mid-game when Moscow was so strong and the Allies had a foothold in Greece. Such masterful comeback, Andrew. I haven’t seen such high-level play from two players in a long time.

@AndrewAAGamer the game is different when you are first learning, and playing against yourself. Fun to try out radical ideas, especially when you are guaranteed victory regardless of the outcome.

I am glad to see new A&A.org members with so much energy and enthusiasm. The forum has been mostly dead for a few years without such folks posting “bold” ideas.

@Myygames thank you so much for the fun match. I learned so much playing against you. This was my first time attempting a Dark Skies for the United States in the Pacific and it was an interesting experience. I couldn’t recapture the Money Islands, but I could force Japan to spend so much income defending Tokyo and eastern China. I was curious if it would have succeeded in the long-term.

Crazy that only one single Russian fighter remained after the raid on Moscow. Very close ending

Thanks dawg for the great match! I was horrified early in the match when 8 Russian defenders destroyed half my German air force on G4. I still have nightmares about those dice.

Battle in Belarus
Germans attack with 1 armour, 1 bomber, 2 fighters, 4 mech_infantrys and 2 tactical_bombers
Russians defend with 8 infantry
…
Germans win, taking Belarus from Russians with 1 armour remaining. Battle score for attacker is -46
Casualties for Germans: 1 bomber, 2 fighters, 4 mech_infantrys and 2 tactical_bombers
Casualties for Russians: 8 infantry
Russians regular : 4.17
Germans regular : -6.67

@gamerman01 key to winning as the #10 seed is to have good luck with the dice. 👍

Congratulations Pacifiers for winning that game. That was an interesting match.