Best posts made by Arthur Bomber Harris

a bit better dice for you this turn…

decided to do no attack at all from India. Too hard to undo the mistake and have a different plan. See updated save with the W India troops added back in.

@mikawagunichi my fault for not reading the rules carefully. Learning match.

I probably would have changed my plans if that bomber had hit the air field…

Congrats Farmboy! You are so masterful in these playoff games. Impressive performance on both sides of the map.

@farmboy I doubt we will finish this year. I still am in a very close match with GeneralDisarray they could stretch on for quite a long time. He is playing well, and the outcome is undecided. the game likely will stretch into the Fall, and that is just the first round of this playoff.

@gamerman01 let’s see what happens.

When I battled against Andrew and Farmboy in past years, I only was able to win with audacious gambles and copious amounts of dice luck including invincible bombers. They both are quite a bit better than me, and I have a feeling that the dice lords will smile on them this year after some previous bad luck.

@Booper I would master the Cow opener, with more fidelity to his plane. You got almost everything correct on J1, and I agree with you attacking Yunan and SZ62. However, you did not take Borneo which meant your fleet was out of position for a critical extra turn allowing the Allied fleet to give you a bunch of headaches.

There was a risk that UK India could counterattack, but you should have welcomed the chance for him to get diced.

I definitely would have sent the battleship to 110 to soak up plane hits instead of the subs. I disagree though that it was a bad choice to do the SZ110 + SZ111 attack: Booper had about a 7% chance of winning this match based on ELO differences so an audacious/game-changing turn 1 is often necessary to change the odds to something better than 7%.

Here is the odds for the net planes lost (10 German vs 5 Allied scramblers)

45% disasterous (-1 relative planes lost)
20% not good (0 to +1 plane outcome)
25% good (+2 to +3 plane outcome)
10% amazing (+4 to +5 plane outcome)

Sadly for Booper, he got -3 plane outcome which made this game a Loss on G1, but I think he would have had a reasonable chance of winning in the 35% of outcomes where he gains 2 or more planes in the exchange, and would have a net increase of his expected win rate on average.

@gamerman01 I looked at the map after turn 5 and it was a very high probability of loss, needing a huge blunder by Farmboy to even have a chance of victory by that point. The victory would have been virtually guaranteed by the end of turn 1 if the Yunnan attack also resulted in disaster.

There is a reason why Farmboy has the ELO ranking he has earned. His mistakes are infrequent and minor, and to capitalize on the errors requires the game to still be close.

There are not too many game-changing battles where luck plays a major portion of the outcome after the first turn. I make the opening as dicey as possible when playing against better opponents like Farmboy or Andrew.

Hi Booper: Here was my gameplan against Farmboy last year. He did not have the Scottish fighter which made it safer to do SZ110 and SZ111 but the dice were not very kind in the second battle. He had a very strong defense of Moscow so I bypassed it down to the oil fields of the Middle East. India fell on J6 which was the crucial battle for the Axis. Perhaps you could have had a much stronger focus on capturing India in the mid-game, even allowing China to get out of control strong if that accelerated the destruction of UK Pacific.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/40891/l24-arthur-bomber-harris-vs-farmboy-a-41-oob/226?page=10

That dice was tough, but I would say that Pierce made the right decision. About a 20% of a game-ending outcome, another 30% where he loses a bunch of ground units but retreats his air without a massive game-affecting outcome, and 50% where he loses a bunch of ground units and is now in big trouble. I would take that gamble against a top player like Axis-Dominion (which is why he doesn’t play me any more).

If a top player is going against a much weaker opponent and doesn’t want to have a negative expected change of ELO ranking, low-luck is the best choice. I would bet that Axis-Dominion would have won more than 95% of the time in a LL game and have a slightly positive expected ELO boost. Very slight.

This game has made me superstitious. I am happy to build up karma by getting diced during a non-playoff match. Andrew has been crushing me in 50/50 attacks on Moscow. I am thrilled because that means I will get lucky in the playoffs. Well, maybe not but such thoughts are the only way I stay sane after diligently playing for dozens of hours only to have bad dice hand me the L.

@gamerman01 not glad you are in my bracket. This year OOB playoffs have an elevated level of competition with so much interest. We have had challenging round 1 opponents.

Congrats Farmboy! Another year of dominance in the playoffs. I was very impressed with your first two turns as the Allies in the west. I will have to study your perfectly-executed strategy against a top opponent.

Congrats farmboy! You are indeed one of the strongest players in the world. Your moves were nearly flawless. I will have to study the game to see if there are any minor weaknesses.