My wife for instance refuses to have much to do with it. To her it looks like grown men playing with little green army men. :lol:
Actually, my wife does not mind playing. She does mind the set-up time, the duration, and the fact that it takes up the entire dining table. :-D
only 1 brave soul for KJF?
I’ve seen enough games end with Panzers in Red Square to make me believe that KJF is almost “pie-in-the-sky” thinking. :lol:
@froodster:
But that outcome of those two dice is the same whether they are thrown simultaneously or one after the other - what’s your point exactly?
The point of throwing many die at the same time is to increase the chaos as each die bounces off other die, which cause them to crash into other die and so on.
When you get down to it, rolling a die is not truly random. It’s a result of several Physics equations. Gravity pulls the die down, friction slows the die down, imperfect collisions bounce and rotate the die. If you could perfectly replicate the same motions, force, and die orientation you can produce the same results. As Humans, we cannot easily calculate that in our head, at least not consciously. People who try to “cheat” are simply trying to reduce or remove the total amount of chaos to their favor. In effect, simplify the equations so it is possible for them to control the forces at work and make it easier to control the outcome. (that raises an interesting question: If you practice enough, can you call your shot with a single die? Even with a Tower?) [Edit: Just ran across this on Digg - [url]http://www.break.com/index/how_to_cheat_at_dice.html
A Dice Tower or the throwing rules for a Craps Table are really about enforcing a standard amount of chaos in the throw and trying to remove as much Human control of the outcome as possible while still letting them “roll”.
Well, I like to first re-enforce London with Bombers, Fighters, and Infantry.
Deters Sea Lion
Allows UK to go more offensive
Sets up for Overlord
Then I Liberate Africa and force Germany to defend the south and the Med. At that point, I have to see where the opportunities are and try to set up a shuck-shuck to start pouring into Europe from either England or Africa. Also, I may extend Fighter protection to Moscow if needed.
… It seems to be approaching 50% from below (for the attacker, eg the attacker odds start at 48% and increase to 50% as the number of units increases) which is weird.
It’s not really that weird. I do not know the exact mathematical expression for it, but as you increase the numbers of each unit the odds will approach 50%. You will never get exactly there, but you get closer and closer with more units. Each unit either hits or it misses (two outcomes - there’s your 50%), and the more units you add to each side allow for more combinations that allow the hits and misses to equalize. The hit percentage for the different units and the ratio between Attackers and Defenders becomes marginalized as the units on each side scale up to infinity. It happens in your example more noticeably since you chose a battle that was fairly even to start with. Theoretically, this is true for every battle…however you have to use extremely large numbers to begin to see it.
Cyan,
I believe what everyone is trying to say is “The Axis can only do a KAF if the US and UK allow it to happen.” ncscswitch is correct, the answer is ‘NO’.
Attacking the US directly is more of a sucker-punch, or a diversion. The US player should be able to see it coming several turns away, once they have seen it the first time, and should have no trouble preventing it.
Here’s a question: If you could choose to remove an IC instead of paying the IPC’s, at what cost is it worth it to remove the IC?
Naturally, 15 IPC’s come to mind, but then it’s not just replacement cost…it’s that one turn delay of not being able to build units there. How much is not having that one turn delay worth to you? If it’s a captured IC, you probably don’t care at all and would just ditch at the first hit as Jennifer previously stated. Certainly you would never think to sacrifice UK or Japan’s only IC. But if it’s Germany’s Southern Europe IC or the US West Coast IC… I’m not so sure There may be a price at which you’d just rather ditch it and rebuild later if you need to. I’ll have to think about that.
SBR are representative of the bombing of industrial resources via the IC’s. The IPC’s surrendered immediately to the bank are representative of a player spending money to rebuild their industrial resources. What I could never figure out: When you do SBR and successfully bomb enough IPC’s so the defending player cannot pay the full amount, why do they still get to have a fully functional IC? :? Do magic gnomes come and rebuild for free when you have no more money? :lol: From my point of view, you just bombed the tar out of their IC and they ran out of money to rebuild it…therefore, that IC should be removed from the game. Also, why not just allow them to refuse payment and remove the IC to keep their IPC’s? (granted, it would only happen in extreme circumstances)
I have no idea what version it was. A friend of mine, Kurt, invited me over to play while he was downloading something over his 14.4 modem off of some ftp server somewhere. Anyway, he was Axis and I was Allies. I played the Russians by buying a mix of things. I know I bought fighters, not sure on how many tanks or infantry. I played them aggressive. Always attacking towards Germany. I was not sure what to do with England or America so I bought tech and bombers. eventually, both had Heavy Bombers and Long Range Aircraft and I kept doing Strategic Bombing Runs against Berlin. The tide started to turn at that point because I would blast away most of his income leaving him a few IPC’s for a handful of infantry. I completely ignored anything that was not Europe. I eventually lost due to the Magic 84 rule, I had forgotten about it, because I just let the axis control all of Africa and most of Asia. That actually made me mad because I was sure I could have cracked into Berlin within a turn or two. :x I was practically knocking on the door with huge stacks of Russian units and I had a ton of US & UK bombers. That and I had some amazing early rolls, I think. He was a good sport about it and pointed out that if I had done Torch with the US I could have avoided it for a bit longer and probably would have won. I literally had not touched/moved a single US or UK land unit the whole game.
Have any of you played with the d10 that looked like logs? I have seen them in stores, but I don’t know how they play. I thought it would be annoying if one finished rolling as it was leaning on another. Can that happen?
You like throwing d100? Well, I guess that is ok. I personally think they are too hard to read (are you sure its not “that” number on top??) and they tend to crack over time. d20 have some coolness to them, even if it is only because they are not d6.
If you want to throw d100, I suggest that you don’t round. Make the values odd percentages that don’t divide evenly into each other for the units. For the people that like to calculate everything, that will drive them crazy. :lol: ( Make them all different prime numbers if you can. Infantry 13/23, Tank 37/31, Artillery 17/29 and give Inf +10 :evil: )
UK Player Russian Player
----------------------------------
| |
German | | Japan Player
Player | The Board |
| |
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US Player
German player has to reach a bit, but is ok
UK player has to reach for India, but others are good.
US Player has good access to entire board
Russian player has good access to …. well… Russia
Japan has good access to the Pacific and East Asia.
But in LL you don’t remove the luck factor. You just minimize it. There’s still luck involved.
Also, I wanna start working on a d100 variant. I think we’d have to round off to the nearest 5% to make it easier to remmeber what units have what percentage chance to hit.
But I do think that AA guns should have a higher percentage to hit then attacking infantry. Especially over capitals!
A few thoughts:
Low Luck (LL) is still too close to straight math, IMHO, which dosen’t give you the thrill of the great battles. With LL, would the 101st Airborne have held Bastogne in the Battle of the Ardennes? No. Would the RAF have fought off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain? No. Would the Russians have held off Germany at the Siege of Leningrad? No. Come to think of it, the Allies got pretty lucky in Europe. :-D
d100 rounded off to the nearest 5% becomes d20
While I agree that there should be better defenses against strategic bombing other than a puny AA piece, AA guns in and of themselves were really not that effective, historically. I believe the game rules reflect night-time air raids, which means they were shooting at the dark and hoping the bombers would run into their shells. In that case, I would say that the attack rating of 1 is very generous.
What is an effective Defense against WWII bobmbing raids are Fighters. If I were going to modify the rules, I would allow Fighters to shoot once, like an AA gun, at each Bomber in a SBR entering the territory. This would reflect Day-Time air raids. One Fighter per territory. The Fighter would hit on 3 or 4. (I would have to play-test it.) However, a 50% or 66% chance of losing your Bomber would be a huge deterrent. Would you even bother doing SBR’s? Even with Heavy Bombers?
@88:
So as Jen alluded to, sometimes it feels like you might as well play yahtzee.
Remove the luck factor of the dice, and you might as well quit playing A&A and go play chess. :wink:
@88:
One suggestion would be to switch to a d20 and try to make the numbers more realistic- i.e. make infantry hit 20% of the time, or make transports hit only 10-15% of the time etc. At the least the effect of bad dice would be diminished.
Bad dice are part of the game. The swings in luck are part of what make the game fun. When I say “fun” I mean it adds tension, suspense as a battle unfolds. Without it, battles turn into algebra equations that are solved, not fought.
Luck is a big factor in real battles. It reminds me of a story I once heard about Napoleon:
Napoleon’s aides came to him to recommend a man to promote to general. They went into detail extolling the man’s virtues and why he would make an excellent addition to Napoleon’s staff. Napoleon cut them off half way through their speech. “Yes, yes, I understand he’s brave, he’s smart, he knows tactics, he is loved by the men. But I only need to know one thing.”
His aides nervously looked at each other. “Yes, Emperor?”
“Is he lucky?”