That’s insane. Japan can keep all their original navy intact for at least the first two turns with extra airplanes to replenish their carriers plus combat air patrols. This makes the Japanese navy exremely difficult to kill even if the US has a dozen bombers. The US can’t give that much aid to Australia and the British navy is usually destroyed by turn 3 or 4. This makes taking Australia relitivly easy to take if they buy what you say they did. As for India, if the Japanese navy is neglected and offensive power is built up in southeast asia (this is of course if the Japanese were wise and didn’t bother with China) and some of the convoys were taken then India can be taken much more easily than you describe. As for getting 40 IPCs on the first turn, that’s just foolish; there is such a thing as spreading yourself too thin.

Since I’ve begun playing D-day again I’ve pretty much decided that Cherbourg is merely a distraction for the Americans and isn’t really worth the time and effort it takes to get reinforcements all the way there.  I’ve begun to think that those reinforcements would serve far better to bolster the Areas around St. Lo and Caen.

What do you think?

I kind of like the intense amount of strategy involved with Germany.  I find the US kind of boring, though.  Sure they have freedom to do a lot of different things in the game, but it’s rare that the US will ever be in a position where they’re fighting for their lives, as is the case with most of the other nations.  To me, that seems dull incomparison.  Also, transporting a bunch of stuff over the Atlantic every turn isn’t really my thing.

Well, you could ignore all the free goodies in Asia and provoke the wrath of the sleeping giant some more.  I like the approach through Alaska myself, less open ocean to coverand the US might think you’re planning the amphibious assualt on the USSR.  Once you’re on North America, though, be prepared to deal with massive amounts of resistance springing up out of nowhere.

In simpler terms: it’s very difficult and highly situational.

I haven’t played D-day as much as I would like (not enough players in my area), but your fighter strats seem pretty solid.  I especially like your ideas on preventing the Germans from advancing on Allied units after they’re already on the board (Techniques 2-4).  I usually just kill the incoming reinforcements, especially if I can managed to convince the German player to place reinforcements further from places I’m focusing on, like Caen or St. Lo.  Next time I manage to play I’ll have to expand my thinking on the use of air cover.

I always thought of the AA in the game as the big artillery kind and the infantry’s ability to shoot down aircraft as something more mobile, like anti-air machine guns.  That’s beside the point, though, as the whole thing is pretty abstract.  The ability for a unit of lesser value to destroy one of much greater value is an important part of the game, I think.  To get hits with infantry consistent enough to put fighters in serious danger, however, would require an investment in them of significantly more than 15 IPCs, though.  It all balances out in the end.  Besides, who would bother with many ground troops if fighters could attack them with impunity?

@Chengora:

As for the laptop lasting 5-6 years…well, good luck!  :-)

I dunno about that, I’ve been working on some Pentium MMX laptops lately that run pretty beautifully with a custom installation of Slackware Linux.  If it weren’t for their awful resolution and the fact that the 16MB of RAM gets a little choked when dealing with Java intensive web-apps, I would probably use one just for the web.

As for your system, switch, no one deserves a celeron for a desktop.  Since you don’t need top of the line I’d recommend a Sempron or a single core Athlon (with the recent price slash they are quite nice and the Athlons are better than any P4).  Dual core if you’re willing to spend more than $150 on the processor alone.  As for video cards, ATI Radeon x1600’s should be able to do just about anything you demand of them, or maybe Nvidia 7600s as they should be comperable in price and performance.

Other than that, if you’re building it yourself get a dependable power supply.  No sense risking your shiny new components with a psu that has the potential of frying them.  I trust Enermax, Antec, and Thermaltake mostly, but there are others that build quility components.

@AgentOrange:

Machines with intelligence might just view their automated anatomy as superior to any organic models.  (Just like the machines in the Matrix, they might view humans and other biological life-forms as “unnecessary” and “obsolete”)

Or they may not recognize biological life as life at all.  Like Teletran-1 in the Transformers  :-D

Been wanting to play again for a while.  Anyone in or around Laramie regularly want to have a go?  I have A&A revised, Pacific, Europe and D-day, and could even retrieve my old board for the original (though I prefer revised edition).  I have one or two friends interested, but there’s nothing like a 5 player game.  My apartment is available for play.

Thar we go.  Been a few years, glad things are still up and running.

I’m at my state university for debate camp right now and I was just wondering what the debaters here (I know Yanny debates) were thinking about running. My partner and I were thinking about running Geneticly modified fish.