Posts made by trihero

I agree, the best player is the one who wields the dual swords of ADS and LL. They know how to deal with ADS dice (by taking increasing risks when bad luck comes early, and simply sucking it up when the dice are against them) and they know how to suppress the enemy in the long run if things go average or better (LL).

If it were as you say, neither of those should be possible.

If it were as I say, both players would be of equal skill. There is no coming back from bad dice except to hope for good dice if your opponent makes no mistakes or at least, not more so than you would.

I’m sure you can beat another player of significantly lesser skill when getting badly diced, and I’m sure you will get beaten by another player of significantly higher skill even when you get good dice, because the skill level is of such difference. But that has nothing to do with perfect strategy. Perfect strategy involves fighting someone who makes no obvious mistakes, and eventually you will fight someone like that, and then your dice will not save you but your overall battlefield vision.

In LL your major battles are effectively foregone conclusions, + or - a few units.  Your strafes can be perfectly planned and executed.

Hence why it is PERFECT for ANALYZING strategies, not having to toss out every other game due to hot dice.

In ADS, neither of those is possible.

How possible is strategy in ADS? I’m beginning to ignore posts that glorify one side or the other, because it’s hypocritical not to look at how either one damages the game.

And personally, I think that the gamer who can best take advantage of both hot AND cold dice is a superior gamer due to their flexibility… which demonstrates a superior tactical and strategic skill in my opinion.

There’s nothing you can do to adapt to bad dice, except to play in a losing fashion and hope the enemy makes a mistake or take ridiculous chances. There’s nothing tactical about hoping for good dice to correct your game.

LL is mostly an attempt to warrant/validate weaker strategic/tactical concepts through rule change

Funny, I think the exact opposite - ADS validates bad strategies because of hot dice. Everyone who defends ADS is so hot on shooting LL but don’t realize their own hypocrisy. How can you have good strategy with good or bad dice canceling it? I think players should be equally skilled in both LL and ADS, being good in just one or the other just isn’t suffcient.

Err, but Pearl Heavy lands 2 fighters already on land, not 2 more fighters closer to land.

Dice luck works both ways.  I’ve seen many games where over whelming firepower gets one hit while pitiful defenders score 100%. Why risk a battleship when you don’t have too?

Gee I know, we should never send any valuable units out ever because there’s the risk of losing them. Why use figs or bombs in battles anyways, they could die. I guess I’ll just wait for the enemy to give up by conserving my valuable units.

To be serious however, the battleship isn’t exactly a risky proposition. It always gives you a free hit to absorb and attacks like a bomber. For every Pearl Heavy that goes bad, you could be losing 3-4 fighters in Light Pearl which is really bad.

I like the progression Mazer. It’s also used by one of the best players on this site, U-505.

Couple things though - do you do Pearl Light, or Pearl Heavy? And what do you do if the solomon sub was killed by the UK sub and the UK sub survived? It’s not so easy just to plop some transports in SZ60 in that case, so island hopping could be a little bit slower.

Usually if I see the UK sub in Solomons, I will still do Pearl Heavy to conserve fighters, but I will build 3 transports in SZ61 and take SFE with the initial transport. SFE’s seazone is out of reach for solomons and you can still go to hawaii on J2.

One thing I also realized is that the units you send island hopping could conceivably be what you need to push faster in Asia, and there are IPCs in Asia, as well. I sometimes don’t like hopping with more than 1 transport, because it doesn’t appear to pay to me anyways. I’ll let the one transport slowly take islands, because I feel throwing another 14-16 IPCs (filled tran) just doesn’t pay for the one turn earlier you get the islands.

Sometimes also I like reverse islanding; taking Madagascar/Australia on J3, then Zealand on 4, then Hawaii on 5. This allows you to set up strongly in Indo on J2 (land 3-4 tp there with the aa gun for the complex), gets your bbs together for both shots when island hopping, and after you’re done with hawaii then you can annoy Alaska with 4 inf + bb shots + 2 fighters. Going to Brazil sometimes is too difficult because of a mediterranean US shuck.

Then you just argued my case for me - LL is excellent for testing strategies, and completely inappropriate for competition.

Thing that gets me is all of my off the wall, whacked out ideas work perfectly in LL.  But in ADS they normally get shot down.

This only because you do not persevere over bad luck. You cannot expect LL’s strategy to manifest itself in ADS as often, but if it’s actually good planning, then it should more often than not.

I admit, a few of the games I won were because of luck, but that’s about equal to the number of games I’ve lost because of luck.

So then how does one learn strategy games are thrown off by both good and bad luck?

Backpedaling, both I and Tim asked how it allows you to have more fighters available on land to “blitz Russia faster”, and it doesn’t.

@Emperor:

You completely miss my point.  The game was designed to be used with random dice.

Should I attack country X…statistically I should win, but what if I lose? Will it cost me the game? If yes then I may not attack.  In a LL game I would attack.  That’s why I say LL breaks the game.

So proving or disproving a strategy in LL means nothing, since it won’t hold up, when confronted with the REAL RULES.

So says the guy who allows rerolling in order to see how things play out. LL allows you to see how things play out. Hot dice shows nothing. LL is not the real way to play, but it is a valid way of assessing strategy. Hot dice does not show strategy. Hot dice destroys strategy and turns it into yahtzee.

It always amazes me when people say they have to use LL to prove their strategy.

I guess I’m not amazing you, because that’s not my position. My position is that LL quickly shows you strategy, while ADS takes many games because the dice has a humongous chance of making the strategy either a lot worse or a lot better than it actually is.

Breaking the game to prove a strategy proves nothing.

Hot dice proves nothing. What if I tried a big naval German strat but then all of them didn’t hit on defense and the Allies beat it at no cost? I guess the big naval German strat sucked then. Or should I just keep rerolling like in your AARE game until there’s “acceptable” results? Which is akin to LL?

Actually Frood shows I have an 83.3% chance of killing that fleet with the bomber or better surviving…I consider that acceptable.

That’s not in contradiction to what I said. I simply didn’t see losing a fighter as acceptable, while you do, which makes the chances higher for you. That I can accept, maybe you don’t really need that fighter anyways.

If the sub isn’t available, that’s not a big concern to me, I will take the fighter and bomber as losses before I expose my Capital ships.

But why not do Pearl Heavy? There must be something else you’re not telling us like there’s other threats immediately at hand, because if you do Pearl Heavy, not only will you lose less, but the Americans still will  not counterattack. If you have a btl 2 fig 1 car 1 dest in SZ52, the Americans would lose badly and your bb would repair itself.

I prefer you go Allies to show me how it’s done, I’m not particularly interested in trying it myself. I’m sort of slow with games too so it’s fine, this match doesn’t have much to do with pride or anything anyways so we’ll take it slow. I’ll take 1 inf Libya, 1 arm Algeria, and 1 IPC to Japan.

Due to ADS this has a 50% chance of not showing accurately how well Russian fighters work, but that’s fine.

All right all right, you wanna play a game bigdog? I want you to go ahead and build a lot of Russian figs and we’ll see how it plays out. This is for fun because I’m not sure how it turns out, I want to see instead of continually discussing it. Low luck or ADS? What level of bid would you allow me to take? I want to take 9 at least for the Axis.

For me, Pearl Light is:
1SS sz45
1dd, 1fgt sz50
1bmb Japan

This usally results in destroying the US fleet with the fighter and bomber intact, often the DD survives also.

That’s more like ultra light. That also leaves me very queesy, frood shows a 36% of having a bomber or less if you proceed with that attack.

I like this because I’m not risking any of my capital ships and the sub and DD are really expendable.

How do you account for the 33% of the time when you don’t have the solomons sub? A lot of players see nothing better to do with their Aus sub than to suicide it against Solomons.

I don’t like commiting my Capital ships to Pearl, the US can hit there with some decent firepower and i’ve lost a carrier and bb to counter attacks.

Which is why you do Pearl Heavy to make sure you have 1 car 1 btl 2 fig and 1 other ship.

The goal for attacking Pearl Harbor is to destroy the fleet.  Having some of your capital ships there serves no purpose.

You have to admit there are circumstances in which they are also serving no purpose by staying where they are. If Bury is empty for instance and nothing pressing is threatening SZ60, your btl has absolutely nothing to do so why not have it participate to provide the equivalent of a bomber’s attack and also absorb a free hit?

I agree however that there are some circumstances in which you do want to do Pearl light or maybe even ultra light due to needing to have your capital ships in SZ60.

I would welcome a heavey German move into Ukraine rd2 or rd3, Russian forces from the Caucasus and WR would crush them, and Germany would have no real follow up forces.

My whole point is you can’t crush them if you build more than 1 fighter. If you build 2 fighters you’re missing 6 inf 2 art with which to crush Germany. That’s a lot.

It’s not about “not being under pressure” it’s also about being able to pressure Germany. Trading territories with them with 1-2 inf is no pressure at all, while a big move in of units to Ukraine is. First fig I can’t really categorically say that is a bad thing to do and I even said earlier in this thread I used to like to buy one immediately as well, but the second and third is making the Allies too trading oriented without the control factor of moving in with a lot of units.

Hitting North America seems like a waste of time, the Americans can also back their shuck up! They might even be happy about it since your shuck is now completely abandoning Africa - way too far to get back.

:-) Feel free to ask questions and discuss, no matter how small.

(the straw that broke my back is when I attacked and the AA Gun hit 14 out of 14 times in a single battle.)

ROFL! -70 IPCs of units instantly,  :? :-o :-( :oops: :cry: :roll: :|