I have also heard of the bidding scheme where half the amount bidded, rounded down, must go towards the available cash rather than towards units.
I’m not sure how well this worked out though.
But I agree with the point made; it seems generally that PE bids are more powerful (at least, I always have a harder time defending against them), but at the same time PA bids are more fun and I would rather either bid that or have that bid against me.
As I said, I think I’d like to play it out trying PE myself. After this current game is over of course. Any takers? ncscswitch, given your previous stance on playing LowLuck, I doubt you’d be willing; what about you DarthMaximus?
Unless I pre-emptively evacuate Karelia on R1 like I was proposing, your analysis is more or less correct: the problem isn’t just G1 but G2 as well. However I would add that every single time I have played against PE, I have also lost a fighter in the Baltic in R1 (despite playing LowLuck every time too!), except for this time - this time I took a sub in with me and after losing the sub without getting any hits, I retreated the fighters, dreading the loss of a fighter yet again. That was obviously a bad move on my part because then on G1 my opponent was able to have two more infantry from Norway. He didn’t attack Karelia, as I expected (since I took Eastern Europe I pretty much ensured that he wouldn’t try), but rather stacked up in CAU to force me to evacuate Kar in R2, and reinforced the CAU stack with Japanese fighters to prevent me from strafing.
I’m thinking the best way of learning how to deal with this is to try PE a few times myself and see what my opponents do.
I think I remember reading through that game with SHP (I miss some of his strategic criticisms and games, and since I almost never read the General Discussion forum I’m not sure why he left). It seems to have been wiped out when the forum got reset back to 2003.
Why are you unsure of pulling out the AA gun? It seems to me that if you’re leaving Karelia undefended or lightly defended, GER would not really need to use air to take it anyway, so you don’t get any advantage of keeping it there, and if you intend on strafing it with your fighters, it could only hurt you. What am I missing?
Probably the weakest point in my play is defending against a non-RR PE bid of 21+. In the latest game I’m playing, my opponent bid 22: 7 inf to Ukraine, and 1 IPC GER. I think I’m doing alright this time - at least, better than I’ve done before against PE (the first time I faced it, I lost Moscow on round 3). I simply am not sure what to do and how to exploit the weaknesses of PE. It would seem like keeping Africa secure is one thing, but that doesn’t seem to be all that significant. What are the options for R1? In my current game, I attacked EEU and took it with all available forces sans a fighter, which I used with the sub to attack the Baltic. I moved the Evenki infantry to Moscow. However this feels like I am playing towards my opponent’s strength too much rather than trying to create my own initiative, but I’m not sure how to deal with that. Should I abandon Karelia? I ended up abandoning it on R2 anyway. If I do at the start, at what point could I plan to take it back? With allied forces from Norway rather than a Russian counterattack? Or should such a PE bid necessitate ignoring the German threat and bunkering down in Moscow, and doing a KJF strat instead?
Interesting you should bring the Eastern Europe battle up. Let’s take a look at that battle, and compare the possible low luck outcomes versus the possible ADS outcomes.
The battle involves 17 inf, 3 arm, 2 ftr (RUS) vs 9 inf 7 arm (GER).
Here is the table of possible outcomes (assuming the battle is fought to completion and no one retreats), with the winner on the left, the amount of units remaining, and the probabilities for that outcome under ADS and LowLuck (LL) on the right. Let’s also assume that the attacker kills off fighters before losing his last armor.
| Winner | Inf | Arm | Ftr | ADS | LL |
| DEF | 6 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 5 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 4 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 3 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 2 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 1 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 7 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 6 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 5 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 4 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 3 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 2 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 1 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| DEF | 0 | 0 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 0 | 1 | 0 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1% | 0% |
| ATT | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2% | 0% |
| ATT | 0 | 2 | 2 | 3% | 0% |
| ATT | 0 | 3 | 2 | 4% | 0% |
| ATT | 1 | 3 | 2 | 5% | <1% |
| ATT | 2 | 3 | 2 | 6% | <1% |
| ATT | 3 | 3 | 2 | 8% | 4% *** |
| ATT | 4 | 3 | 2 | 9% | 19% |
| ATT | 5 | 3 | 2 | 10% | 38% |
| ATT | 6 | 3 | 2 | 10% | 26% |
| ATT | 7 | 3 | 2 | 10% | 10% |
| ATT | 8 | 3 | 2 | 9% | 2% |
| ATT | 9 | 3 | 2 | 7% | 0% |
| ATT | 10 | 3 | 2 | 5% | 0% |
| ATT | 11 | 3 | 2 | 3% | 0% |
| ATT | 12 | 3 | 2 | 2% | 0% |
| ATT | 13 | 3 | 2 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 14 | 3 | 2 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 15 | 3 | 2 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 16 | 3 | 2 | <1% | 0% |
| ATT | 17 | 3 | 2 | <1% | 0% |
*** - actual result of battle in your game
As we see, the actual result in your game was statistically unlikely in either ADS or LowLuck, but possible in both. DarthMaximus in either dice system should have expected a more favorable result. In both dice systems, the median result (5-6 infantry alive for the attacker) is the same, and there are a quite a range of possibilities outside that median result. However, it’s curious that in ADS, it is actually more likely that DarthMaximus would have rolled worse than the exact outcome that was achieved. This is because although the odds of getting that result is more likely in ADS, the variance (or standard deviation) of results is much greater in ADS than LowLuck. This is the reason I like LowLuck: the “unlikely” scenarios of ADS are still possible in LowLuck, which makes every game different and forces players to adapt to dynamic changes in balance, but at the same time rules out the “extreme” circumstances of say, DarthMaximus actually losing that battle with your full armor regiment intact. While any individual “extreme” outcome is in ADS so insigificant to consider alone, when you consider the number of these outcomes it makes it so that you really cannot always expect to win such a decicisive battle, if you play enough. Someone recently posted the idea that any given player can expect to only win 80% of his games because of strategy and the remaining 20% would be affected by bad dice; this makes it so those proportions are more reasonably tilted towards strategy.
If I wanted to play a game where the dice can easily make a huge difference, I would play Risk, because the majority of the fun in that is the social interaction. And I play that on a somewhat regular basis. There is a good deal of “potential” strategy in that game, but the dice can make or break any valid one, and yet it is still often fun because you really don’t expect to win the majority of the time, because it’s pretty clear from the get-go that this isn’t too much of a strategic game: it’s more luck and politics than actual strategy. I’ve often won huge swatches of territories because I happened to be rolling well despite being the weakest player on the board at the start of my turn, and on the other end of the spectrum, I can recall at least one game where I was the strongest player on the board, and the next strongest attacked me on a whim with a moderate sized army only to win without taking any casualties, so he kept up the process until he had completely eliminated me from the game without loss to himself, destroying at least 30 infantry and taking over more than a continent, with only around 15 or so of his own infantry to start with. Statistically unlikely sure, and I walked away from that game somewhat disappointed, but more amused than anything else  because with a dice system like Risk’s, you expect these oddities to happen once in a while.
Axis and Allies on the other hand, is designed to be a more strategic game. I have very rarely played a game of Axis and Allies with more than one player controlling a side. In those cases, the social interaction did indeed add to the fun, but when I play online, that simply does not translate for me across the web. Unfortunately, the way the dice is set up according to the box, it actually has the potential to be more random than Risk. Good players are aware of this and deliberately conduct battles only when they can be more certain of results - not throwing away their armies in a 50/50 crapshoot unless they are already behind and are open to the possible but unlikely event of good dice swinging a decisive battle to their favor. However, the desired guarantor is hard to pin down because of the “extreme” outcomes discussed above. In every ADS game I have observed in the last year or so (since I started playing LowLuck), and every game I remember playing before then, one player or another will inevitably get some horrible dice within the first couple turns. Now if this player was a significantly inferior player to begin with, this makes little difference. Conversely if this player is a significantly superior player to begin with as well, this player is usually able to overcome this disadvantage until the dice inevitably land in his favor again. I’ve seen both these outcomes happen particularly when I would play others who are new to the game - if I get bad dice, I actually kind of like it then, because it gives my opponent some support and hope, and at least stretches out the game a bit so it doesn’t seem like I decimated them. Â However if both players are roughly equally matched, then an early blow is often crippling: I can usually predict the outcome of the game from that point unless another extreme dice result occurs in a way that is significant to alter the balance. After reading through most of the latest threads on the Games forum here, I can say that that seems definitely to be the case - except where the player with the good luck is gracious enough to offer to his opponent the ability to “revise” the dice to a more reasonable result. In this case, why bother playing with ADS anyway, since it seems you’re not willing to deal with its consequences? For instance, we have the G1 attack in your latest game on the North sea, where the outcome you got was actually not that unlikely even - it had a high chance of being the outcome even had you been playing LowLuck (I think it would have been about 20% in LowLuck, the second most likely outcome). But DarthMaximus, being extremely gracious to you since I suspect he rightly considered your overall position and strategy to be significantly inferior, offered to give you a fighter or two back for free. Well, consistent with what your gaming philosophy appears, you rejected his offer. I suspect that if you had lost all your airforce without having killed any of his units, you would still have rejected a similar offer. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s playing a game that’s significantly different from the game I play. If your only goal is having fun, that’s great, because a person can have fun no matter what happens. You can still potentially have fun if you were imprisoned and being tortured, so of course you can still have fun by knowingly playing out a losing game. I play not purely because of the fun itself, but because I derive having fun from developing my strategy further and seeing it successful if it is superior to my opponent’s, or seeing it fail if it is inferior. Currently I started playing a (LowLuck) game after seeing that you were not interested in playing, and I don’t think I’m doing as well as my opponent is, but it’s hard to tell even though we’re in round three. There have been some statistically unlikely events that have happened, that have affected both our strategies, such as my inability to kill Germany’s navy in R1 while losing the Russian navy completely, but because there has been nothing gamebreaking, it has been a match of my strategy against my opponents. A majority of the games I play end up being 10 rounds or more because unless one of us is significantly weaker, our strategies cannot count on waiting for a good dice result and then taking advantage of that; rather, there is a depth of play that is present but rare in ADS games in my opinion with the constant struggle of well matched forces.
So anyway, regarding the “simulations” you present in this thread, I say they are irrelevent to your support. My entire critique of your strategy was based on a simulated game I played based on expected results, and you remained unconvinced. I remain certain that by exchanging the German air force for the combined navies of the UK and the US, you open the possibility of direct and relatively unsupported invasion from Russia. These statistics you bring up in this thread have nothing to do with Russia’s stack that is growing steadily as you expend most of your energy making pre-emptive attacks against the west. (By the way, in the original thread where you brought up this discussion, you had assumed that Germany would buy 1 fighter per turn for the first couple turns, which I don’t see discussed anymore - did you give up on that?) So if you are unwilling to accept my simulation, all I can do is say that by playing an actual game where the dice don’t determine the balance of the game (granted it’s possible for this to happen in an ADS game, I’m just not really interested in taking the time to play one when the possibility is reasonable that it won’t), Â I am sure you will find that your strategy may have seemed just as good in your head as the Sea Lion Scare, only to find that it does not work in practice.
I ask because elsewhere you promised a discussion on my challenge and in this post you initially seemed to indicate that this was that post, but your statistics clearly indicate that you were not considering low luck at all, because when I plug the same battles into a simulator, I get different numbers than the ones you claim. I’ll probably elaborate more on this tomorrow, but I’m going to sleep now.
ncscswitch, an honest question: do you understand how lowluck actually works?
What operating system are you using? I use Windows XP, 1024x768 resolution with 32 bit colors. I don’t have a problem opening the program.
To move units, you click on a stack of units and drag them somewhere.
There is a toolbar you can use to add new units or delete existing ones (it will change the cursor to the currently selected item). If the cursor is a unit, it will place that unit -that can be used for either placing bidded units, or newly purchased units. If the cursor is a bomb, it will delete one unit from the stack you click on. If the cursor is the cross, it will move units or stacks of units. The map program basically just moves the sprites around on the static background, it doesn’t have any built in understanding of the game itself, by the way, so it doesn’t enforce any movement, placement, combat, etc. That’s up to you to do.
DarthMaximus’s post on the top of the games forum should have the necessary links. On the AAMC downloads page, GhoulLord’s map is the third from the top. You can also take a look at the recent game between DarthMaximus and madscientist for a sample of how these games are done. DAAK also has a Play by Mail guide and a LowLuck guide. I see you started another game with TriHero; let me know when you’re ready to start.
I see your game with Trihero is over; are you interested in starting a game soon? I play LowLuck so that no one can blame the loss on bad dice, and I walk away from each game I play satisfied that regardless of whether I won or loss, it wasn’t because of luck. If you’re trying to evaluate a strategy then that adds further reason to use LowLuck, because it’s possible to have a superior strategy and lose because of dice and vice versa. With LowLuck the same is still possible, but much less likely of course. Anyway, for the purposes of this discussion, if we’re not doing LowLuck, as 221B said, we would need to play several games to even out the statistical anomalies. I don’t know if I can commit to that, but if you are adamantly opposed to trying lowluck, I could give it a whirl.
Sure, I’m interested, but if we’re playing, I suggest you get more acquainted with the standard ways of play-by-email using a map (such as GhoulLord’s, which seems to be the norm) and dice server first. See the links on the sticky thread on the Games forum for more details, or look at some of the other games posted there for samples. I just got through a game of teaching my opponent how to do that, and what with him not being a native English speaker, I was having a rather difficult time. I looked at your game with trihero, and there’s no way I’m going to be doing that; I haven’t played on an actual board in over a year, it takes far too long, and allows much more leeway for mistakes. Plus my cat would knock over pieces of a game I set up but left overnight!
I also only play LowLuck games myself, (hence my simulations in the other thread were using low luck results). So we should therefore probably contest your other strategy (the one on the no-bid thread, although if you like you could still use a moderate bid), since it doesn’t involve weapons development. I hardly ever play RR, but as I mentioned in the other thread, I would consider a bid of around 12 IPCs probably a minimum bid, so if you’re interested in still using a bid of 8 with RR to prove your point, that sounds fine to me.
Hey switch,
Have you played any of the people who have been disagreeing with these strategies? I’ve seen you posting that you usually use the Hasbro version against yourself or against the AI, but you have to recognize that this is no substitute for playing against a human. I would be greatly interested in seeing a record of a play by email/forum (on the Games forum) attempt against some of the regulars of this forum to defend either this strategy or the no-bid strategy you propose (the one for which I recorded the no-luck game against myself). It’s all good to continue to argue statistics back and forth, but it’s much more useful to actually see it carried out in game. And to counter the suggestion that you get “bad dice” the first time around, go ahead and play more than once - I’m convinced that unless you get very “good dice”, these two strategies are going to be rather inadequate.
In this situation (7 ftr 1 bmr vs 7 trn 1 AC 2 ftr), the outcome as per my no-luck simulation would have been a retreat with 2 fighters and one bomber, leaving 2 fighters and 1 carrier still alive (43% chance). Next up (18%) is retreating with only one fighter and bomber, leaving the same amount behind. After that (18% again) is a retreat with 2 fighters and 1 bomber, but leaving 2 fighters, carrier, and a single transport remaining.
Keep in mind that the 7 trn is a minimum; it is probably more likely to be 8 and potentially 9: if the UK has 56 IPCs on turn 2 (this of course assumes GER was able to successfully take EGY and hold it through the end of UK1, which is only guaranteed with at least 4 additional infantry added to the Egyptian attack) they can buy 1 carrier, 4 transports, and 2 inf, which is probably optimal for their next turn transportation needs and survival rate, and US can easily purchase 3 transports on US1, possibly 4 if they are concerned about the pending attack. If the number of transports is increased to 8, our most likely result after 2 rounds of combat is a retreat of only one fighter, one bomber, and still leaving one transport alive (28%), and quite a few outcomes that leave 2 transports alive.
See, the problem with this outcome is the fact that at the end of this battle, not only is Germany now incapable of trying this attack again next turn, with only 2 or 3 air units left, but they also vastly lack for defenses. If you don’t believe me, try playing out the game I started, altering the purchase of UK1, cancelling the transport and fighter non-combat movement at US1 (and also countering Pearl with the new freedom you have to do so), cancelling the attack on NOR on GER2 (since there would be no ships there at that time), and purchasing 4 trn with the UK on UK2. You can use essentially the same board position I ended with on J2 with those alterations.
Over Christmas weekend, since I was without internet access visiting family, I spent some spare time playing a game of Axis and Allies against myself using No-Luck (I used Jason Bilbrey’s combat simulator and always picked the most likely outcome to resolve each battle) to assess this strategy. My hypothesis was that even with a bid, this strategy fails. I very quickly saw that this would be very easy to show if UK did not purchase units on UK1, since the naval battle on GER3 would result in a German victory, but a very costly German victory of only one bomber remaining (and actually, the variation of results was quite high1), not enough to halt the production of any more transports nor defend adequately from attacks. So I decided to see if the strategy was feasible even if UK did purchase naval units on UK1.
I posted the game in the games forum, available here: http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=5677.0
I stopped after Japan2 - quite early yes, but far along enough to see that the game was not obviously decided, particularly because of Japan’s fighters coming to the aid of Germany in G3. So my conclusion is that with that sort of bid, this strategy is certainly a valid and useful one, particularly if the UK purchases naval units on UK1, although it is questionable otherwise.
1This battle would involve 6 fighters and 2 bombers (or 7 fighters and 1 bomber) against 1 AC, 2 fighters, and I assumed 7 transports (3 purchased for each of UK and US - it could certainly be more than this). With the 2 bombers, there is a 24% chance the attacker will win with 1 bomber remaining, a 23% chance the defender will win with the carrier remaining, a 19% chance that the attacker will win with 2 bombers remaining, a 18% chance that the defender will win with a fighter and carrier remaining, and a 14% chance that both sides will be destroyed.
I first started playing Axis and Allies when I was 10 years old. As I’ve posted elsewhere, we played with seriously misinterpreted rules, including:
In my first game, I played Allies and the first unit I bought as Russia was a Battleship (hey, I had 24 IPCs, so I figured why not?). I lost horribly.
Anyway, I’ve been playing for 11 and a half years now; although I haven’t found too many opponents in my area, I discovered play-by-email just this past summer, and have been enjoying that quite a bit (I still prefer 2nd edition to AAR though).
Has all this discussion been for 2nd edition, no RR, no bid?
If so, why are we bothering?
I would be interested in discussing the feasibility and possible bidding strategy to go with it if we assume a bid of the lower 20s range. Otherwise it’s not really worth bothering with making a strategy for Axis, right?
I would think infantry poised to enter India and Yakut are the primary gating factors here, with a possible tank in Kwangtung. The primary question in my mind is if Japan is worth spending money on in this way, since we all know that it’s Germany that really needs it. I’ve always been interested in seeing if a power Asia strategy would work, but I’ve never actually tried it.
I agree with Cimber; however, I would take a different approach : refuse to play Axis unless they give you a bonus. Unless you desire a handicap (I sometimes do when playing against new opponents: play Axis without any advantage on purpose, because a new player usually won’t be able to win with the Allies still), playing Axis yourself without a bid isn’t going to accomplish anything. If you try your best to win, it’s entirely possible that you’ll actually win (since I’m assuming you’re a much better player) and they will think that it isn’t quite as unbalanced as you claim it is. If you lose on purpose, they might think you did it on purpose to prove your point.
The ideal scenario is that you get them to agree to a bid. That way if they still think Axis isn’t as poor as you think, they’ll just bid less and always end up with Axis, and lose as a result.
I live in Pittsburgh (Bloomfield) and I’m always interested, although my schedule for a face to face game would be very slim because of the time commitment. I’ll PM you my email.
I am also interested in online/email play since I can then respond at my leisure.