People are always throwing out numbers that say the allies win 90% or 95% or whatever% of the time. Obviously if you have experienced players this will happen, even with RR and Axis advantage. However, does anyone have any actual numbers on the winning percentage of allies without bids?
I don’t have independant numbers, only personal experience and the opinions of the local gang. The 90-95% number that I have often read about matches what occurs locally. It’s often been said and I agree that if the allies are controlled by more than 1 player the winning percentage goes down.
I have rarely lost as the allies when playing all 3 countries, perhaps roughly 87-3 in real face-to-face games. As the Axis I am about roughly 60-30 so it’s obvious the local players either aren’t that good or I am that good :-) Those were all played without bids. However some of the early games didn’t have russia restricted or the german jet power and jap supersub option. It was the wild west back then, I kinda miss it too!
BB
Okay, so lets say you have two good players who know how to coordinate between their countries and you are not playing bids. Since the axis guy is thinking he has about, at best, a 10% shot at winning, I think his best bet is to go for tech.
I almost never roll for it myself in a serious game, but if you consider that if Germany or Japan got either industrial technology or heavy bombers the axis would almost certainly win. On their first round the axis would get 11 chances to get a tech and although I haven’t checked it I believe the chances that one of those 11 comes up as heavies or industrial tech is a better than 10%. Especially if you are playing axis advantage. With jet power and super subs already taken I would say the axis have about a 33% chance of getting a “winning” tech on the first round.
Granted your destruction as the axis would be inevitable if you got something useless or nothing at all, not to mention that this would make the game really boring. Set everything up only to have the game decided by the end of Japans first turn.
Well, Germany could do 6 rolls say and should get 1 tech. Since they already have Jet Power they have a 40% chance of getting either ITech or HBMR. ITech would be great, bombers not so good for Germany really. Germany might be better to do 4 rolls and save 12, at least if you got ITech you could build 6 INF right away.
The bids try to prevent this ‘roll the dice to see who wins’ scenario. The axis might be better off to have Germany play the all infantry conservative ploy until a wall of infantry is built say at round 4-6. Japan should maximize it’s income while avoiding expensive trades on units, build infantry in other words then perhaps try tech big time for Japan and take the odd shot with germany. If Germany can hunker down then Japan has a few rounds where she can toss 5-6 dice and have enough left over to build a bomber right away if she gets HBMRs.
BB
