• So I’ve been playing A&A hard now for a couple weeks, mostly on tripleA against Moore N. Able (those knuckleheads).  Today I’m going to be playing against a couple of my friends over the board.  I have a strategy that works 100% against the computer (i know that’s not impressive or relevant) and I wanted to know how you guys thought it would fare against people.

    To start when I analyze a strategy game (i played a lot of starcraft in the past) I try to break my strategy down and remove any words that could even tell me what game Im playing.  I don’t see a mighty japanese navy coming down on me because those words might cause my brain to make decisions based on JAPAN.  But japan doesn’t HAVE a mighty navy, because japan doesn’t exist, the only thing that exists is player number 4 who has units represented by 3 numbers, that are separated by my units by a difference in (x,y) coordinates.

    Assuming we are all on equal footing at the beginning (from what I understand 1942 considered somewhat balanced without a bid)  then my strategy should be to gain an advantage and exploit that advantage without allowing my opponents to gain progress in their desired strategy.

    So basically what I do when I fight as the allies is I try to win a war of attrition.  On the first round of play every faction starts with X number of IPCs.  In the future rounds I want to make it so that axis are receiving X-Y IPCs and ALlies are receiving X+Y IPCs.

    After I achieve that goal… turtle.  I do this because of the idea of snowballing advantages.  Assuming I can gather more territories than I started with and sit on them indefinitely, then eventually the IPCs will leave me with such an overwhelming numerical advantage that I can’t lose.

    So you’re saying “no shit, sherlock, axis isn’t going to sit back and let you stall”.  So my strategy has to do something that thwarts axis endeavors.  With germany (against AI) this was the easiest thing to do in the world, I take western russia with ussr and then norway with UK (also karelia if I am able) and I attempt to hold off their push in afr.  So how do I stop the axis from just spending their money and taking back the territories?  WHen it’s my turn I just attack then for 1 or 2 rounds to take out their infantry and then retreat back into caucasus (or w/e I was attacking from)  I leave my entire force in caucasus basically and then one infantry in the other territories.  They never will be able to attack caucasus cause they can only attack from ukraine and have no infantry there.  If they dont’ keep reinforcing it I’ll just attack and retreat again (but this time taking out much more expensive units)  If they want to try their hand at west russia they will have to split up some units and I’ll just mow them over anyway.  I do the same thing on the western front.  I take western europe and just start piling bodies in there from america and UK, this forces them to stack forces in germany, meaning my stone wall in russia is about to become a stone wall with terminator legs.

    Obviously this lets japan have some free will, and this might be where you guys tell me my strategy is a joke because against the AI i don’t think japan is taking advantage of it’s opportunity as much as it should.
    However as germany gets held inside I should be able to determine the minimum amount of force to hold my european road block and use the extra to thwart japan.

    So yea, it’s a war of attrition, and there really is no end part of the strategy except for “wait until you have an obscene numerical advantage and then just kill the capital”

    So this strategy I kind of designed to hopefully ignore bad dice rolls by only attacking with overwhelming forces and removing his cannon fodder so that any attack he makes will be risky.

    SO…

    1. acquire more IPCs for your faction than you started with
      2)thwart axis attempts to go around you (blockade their navy if they try etc)
      3)Snoballing advantage.  Be patient  +/- 10 IPCs might not matter on round 3, but a 10 IPC difference for 10 rounds starts to add up

    I apologize if my train of thought is hard to follow, I’m not always good at explaining what I’m thinking, but hopefully I got my point across and you guys can tell me if you think this could work, or if this is completely laughable and would only ever work against tripleA computer?


  • I read the post and you have a point concerning attrition and control of key areas of the map to ensure parity or superiority on income (if Russia still stands but Axis control or contest all of Europe/Asia then they’ll have achieve parity, for instance).

    However, I’ve played quite a few times against TripleA players on v4 (Spring 1942) that you could tell that they were assuming that I’d followed the Moore AI actions and they make really bad mistakes at the beginning against human players:

    • Usually they don’t consider correctly the possible coordination actions between powers since the AI doesn’t use it. One typical example is Germany advancing a stack of units to West Russia/Ukraine and Japanese landing fighters there to protect it from a Soviet counterattack).
    • And the Japanese navy & air force are kept back on Asia or only used on the Pacific.

    The issue is that the key game mechanics are related with income and unit position but another critical factor is  any opportunities that may appear that the AI is unable to recognize but a human player can/will use it to its advantage. For instance, the Soviets may be able to stop Germany from progressing but that will really depend on the results of the first game round. And usually it is difficult for them to stop Japan from advancing/conquering Russia without any Allied help.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    So I’ve been playing A&A hard now for a couple weeks, mostly on tripleA against Moore N. Able (those knuckleheads).  Today I’m going to be playing against a couple of my friends over the board.  I have a strategy that works 100% against the computer (i know that’s not impressive or relevant) and I wanted to know how you guys thought it would fare against people.

    To start when I analyze a strategy game (i played a lot of starcraft in the past) I try to break my strategy down and remove any words that could even tell me what game Im playing.  I don’t see a mighty japanese navy coming down on me because those words might cause my brain to make decisions based on JAPAN.  But japan doesn’t HAVE a mighty navy, because japan doesn’t exist, the only thing that exists is player number 4 who has units represented by 3 numbers, that are separated by my units by a difference in (x,y) coordinates.

    Assuming we are all on equal footing at the beginning (from what I understand 1942 considered somewhat balanced without a bid)  then my strategy should be to gain an advantage and exploit that advantage without allowing my opponents to gain progress in their desired strategy.

    So basically what I do when I fight as the allies is I try to win a war of attrition.  On the first round of play every faction starts with X number of IPCs.  In the future rounds I want to make it so that axis are receiving X-Y IPCs and ALlies are receiving X+Y IPCs.

    After I achieve that goal… turtle.  I do this because of the idea of snowballing advantages.  Assuming I can gather more territories than I started with and sit on them indefinitely, then eventually the IPCs will leave me with such an overwhelming numerical advantage that I can’t lose.

    So you’re saying “no sh*t, sherlock, axis isn’t going to sit back and let you stall”.  So my strategy has to do something that thwarts axis endeavors.  With germany (against AI) this was the easiest thing to do in the world, I take western russia with ussr and then norway with UK (also karelia if I am able) and I attempt to hold off their push in afr.  So how do I stop the axis from just spending their money and taking back the territories?  WHen it’s my turn I just attack then for 1 or 2 rounds to take out their infantry and then retreat back into caucasus (or w/e I was attacking from)  I leave my entire force in caucasus basically and then one infantry in the other territories.  They never will be able to attack caucasus cause they can only attack from ukraine and have no infantry there.  If they dont’ keep reinforcing it I’ll just attack and retreat again (but this time taking out much more expensive units)  If they want to try their hand at west russia they will have to split up some units and I’ll just mow them over anyway.  I do the same thing on the western front.  I take western europe and just start piling bodies in there from america and UK, this forces them to stack forces in germany, meaning my stone wall in russia is about to become a stone wall with terminator legs.

    Obviously this lets japan have some free will, and this might be where you guys tell me my strategy is a joke because against the AI i don’t think japan is taking advantage of it’s opportunity as much as it should.
    However as germany gets held inside I should be able to determine the minimum amount of force to hold my european road block and use the extra to thwart japan.

    So yea, it’s a war of attrition, and there really is no end part of the strategy except for “wait until you have an obscene numerical advantage and then just kill the capital”

    So this strategy I kind of designed to hopefully ignore bad dice rolls by only attacking with overwhelming forces and removing his cannon fodder so that any attack he makes will be risky.

    SO…

    1. acquire more IPCs for your faction than you started with
      2)thwart axis attempts to go around you (blockade their navy if they try etc)
      3)Snoballing advantage.  Be patient  +/- 10 IPCs might not matter on round 3, but a 10 IPC difference for 10 rounds starts to add up

    I apologize if my train of thought is hard to follow, I’m not always good at explaining what I’m thinking, but hopefully I got my point across and you guys can tell me if you think this could work, or if this is completely laughable and would only ever work against tripleA computer?

    All that can be said as quickly as “Play for the money”.


  • @Gargantua:

    All that can be said as quickly as “Play for the money”.

    Although I appreciate your simplification of my argument I’m not sure that’s an appropriate response to my thread.  If I had come in here said, “Hey guys I have a question on this strategy… play for the money.  Well what do you think?”  I doubt I would have been taken seriously.  I realize that my strategy focuses on an economic advantage. My specific question was about snowballing advantages and how it might work out against a human in the situation I described.  I’ve read some of your other posts on these forums and I’ve seen that you seem to know what you’re talking about so if you have something specific you could tell me about what is good and bad about what I’ve proposed I’d love to hear it. (after posting and reading this back to myself I hope that didn’t come off as snide, that’s not how I meant it)

    In response to Hobbes:
      I hear what you’re saying.  So my follow up question would be have you seen people play this passive style and to what success?  If I started my strategy as described against a professional player what do you suppose their response would be?  Even in my own description of my strategy you can see that I’m not quite sure myself of what to do with japan.  If you believe this to be viable, what do you suppose I should do with japan and what should I expect from them in terms of initiative if I’m focusing on germany?

    edit: added social disclaimer


  • Lo, and in that dream did GUPPERS see a wondrous TITAN made of clay, full three hundred cubits in height, yea, and a small and vicious BUNNIE, the height and weight of a Can of Beer.

    Yea, and the world wondered at the Might and Appetite of the TITAN, for LO, as it Stretched forth its Arm, its Shadow was like as unto a Mountain looming over the World, and in that hour did the Kings of Men cry in Despair, with much Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth.  And yea, then did the TITAN devour the Countries of Men, with much Smacking of Lips and Burping, and its Shadow did swell and stretch forth until a Pall was cast over the entire Earth.

    Yet a light pierced the clouds, and a voice as thunder spake unto GUPPERS, saying “Now see my Pet, with whom I am Well Pleased.”  And LO, the Light illumined what the Kings of Men had noticed not in their Despair, that even as the TITAN had devoured the Countries of Men, so had the Small and Vicious BUNNIE devoured the tender bits of the TITAN.

    Then did the TITAN crumble, yea, even unto Dust, and the BUNNIE let loose with a thunderous FART that swept the Dust away as if it had never been.

    And there was Much Rejoicing.


  • @Guppers:

    In response to Hobbes:
    � I hear what you’re saying. �So my follow up question would be have you seen people play this passive style and to what success? �If I started my strategy as described against a professional player what do you suppose their response would be? �Even in my own description of my strategy you can see that I’m not quite sure myself of what to do with japan. �If you believe this to be viable, what do you suppose I should do with japan and what should I expect from them in terms of initiative if I’m focusing on germany?

    What I usually say is that battles against the AI are great to learn the interface and the controls but you can forget any kind of tactics/strategy you’ve learned there once you’re facing a human player. If it’s the first time your friends are playing then you’ll have the advantage over them but that will go away once you’re facing players with a few games on their belt.
    About your strategy and responses… there’s simply too many things that can happen to describe them all here. But if you want to try that strategy against me, look me up on the TripleA server one of these days - easier showing than explaining :)

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    If you want me to be more specific, I can be.

    • First of all,  Human and Computer opponents are apples and oranges, and should NEVER be compared.  If that deflates your theory, I’m sorry to hear that.

    • Second, all strategic level Axis and Allies game live by the same principles, and although setups, rules, maps, and powers may be different, the core strategic realities are the same.

    You cover that when you say this
    “then my strategy should be to gain an advantage and exploit that advantage without allowing my opponents to gain progress in their desired strategy.”

    There really isn’t anything more.

    You’ve made a good point of articulating that your strategy is NON-specific, and general.  In my opinion, that’s good.  But it doesn’t require more thought than just what I wrote.

    Play for the money, and as long as you win that game, eventually your enemy will fall.


  • 1.  “Appropriate” and “Gargantua” cannot properly be used in the same sentence.  It’s like a double negative.  “Appropriate” and “Bunnies” you may draw your own conclusions on.

    2.  Gargantua seems to know what he/she/it is talking about.  The same is true of many amateur therapists and cooks.  “You don’t need pasteurized eggs!” was advice I received just yesterday, at some length.   :roll:  The lesson is, always beware!  You can’t trust in anyone.  Especially people that say “trust me”.  You can trust me on this.   :wink:

    3.  This passive snowball thing generally does not work.  Imagine you are playing Starcraft, and that you have decent micro and your opponent has no micro.  Then yeah, you scout a bit, expand a bit, and you eventually just passive snowball right over your opponent.  Now imagine you are playing Starcraft, and your opponent has better micro than you.  You better have something more than a snowball, or you’ll have a snowball’s chance in h-e- double hockey sticks.

    4.  Axis start with more power in the right places than Allies do.  Say you’re playing Starcraft with two allies (total three), and each of you has a normal base startup.  Now say you have only two opponents, but they start with normal base setups plus 20 Marines each.  Now yeah, if you’re against a passive computer AI, the Marines won’t attack you until you invade your opponents’ bases.  But if you’re up against HUMAN players (that don’t suck)?  Hooo ya.


  • Thank you to garg and bunnies.  I’ll be sure to let you know how my game turns out

  • '12

    Playing for the money is pretty much the best ‘general strategy’, how you accomplish this is via tactics.   The draw back is that without experience you might not know that you might be winning the battle of attrition but losing the war because of positioning.   For instance, you are winning the war of land attrition battles as the allies because the axis is setting up your atlantic navy for destruction.  You then find yourself doing a turn and realizing in 1 round your navy is toast and there is nothing your successful land battles can do to stop it.

    But in general, if you can win the sum of the earnings delta and the attrition delta you are heading in the right direction.

    I would add that computer AI is difficult.  I should say, good computer AI is difficult.  The problem is that computers are really really stupid.  They are good at working towards a goal, but that goal is defined by us.  For chess, how does the computer know what is a good board state and bad?  You can add up all the pieces as a measure of ‘fitness’.  If I have all my chess pieces and you have only the king and queen, in general I am in a better position.  Unless of course you have me in checkmate on your move.  I won every battle of attrition in every case because I lost no pieces, yet I lost.  It is very difficult or impossible to pass in two board configurations to a program and have it determine exactly which one is better.  The programmer assigns goals like “win the battle of attrition” and the program it will happily do that every turn until it loses because it was ‘winning’ according to the rules we gave it.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    how does the computer know what is a good board state and bad

    Ok so I’m not an expert, and I’ve only taken a course or two in programming.  But I HAVE played against computerized chess opponents on a number of occassions and from what I can tell it’s like this…

    The longer you allow the computer to calculate the best move, the better that move will be.

    Now a chess board is DIFFERENT than an Axis and Allies map, in many ways,  but the same several others.

    THE CALCULATION to determine GOOD BOARD STATE / VS BAD seemed to be on a point system, for chess it looks like this:
    -what pieces does my piece threaten?
    -how many spaces can I move?
    -How many squares of the board do I control
    -How many squares are around me?
    -How many pieces threaten my square?
    -How much support do I have for my square, and what is the point value of my units if I trade this square with several units of my opponents
    -Do I expose any of my other pieces or my king to attack?

    Basically the computer puts values, on ALL that information…  add’s up all the points, and suddenly the most EFFECTIVE scoring location, is now the BEST move.  Kind of like Scrabble, if you had a computer that could decipher for you all of the POSSIBLE word combinations, and applicable locations to place them on the board, it would only be vetted by how long you let it calculate.

    I have no idea how TripleA computerized opponents are coded, but if they switched to this kind of system… it might improve them?  No idea.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    All that said… the AI willing to gamble factor could be difficult to code in.

  • '12

    I’m actually taking a machine learning course now to finish of my degree.  All those factors are no doubt part of a chess playing program.  The ‘art’ of the system is to assign weights to each of the determining factors in order to come up with your measure of fitness.  How do you know your weights are right, by playing to the end and seeing if you win or not.  The problem is that those inputs often don’t totally capture ‘the game’, its a rough approximation of the game.

    Longer time means a deeper search but the number of ‘game states’ grows exponentially.  With chess on average say there are 16 possible moves.  Looking ahead 1 set of moves, mine then yours means 256 game states to evaluate, 2 moves is 65, 536.  4 moves is 4 billion game states, 8 moves ahead is 16 million trillion game states.

    I’ve talked to the folks at tripleA quickly about their AI.  It would make a heck of a masters thesis project I think, a bit more effort than I am willing to give it!

  • '12

    Gambling is easy.  It’s the multi-player long term outlook that is the trick.  Alternating between black and white in chess is one thing, 7 players on 2 teams alternating and co-operating is hard to capture.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    Maybe that’s the problem.  Maybe they have been coding “theoretical moves” as independant nations.

    Perhaps if the outlook was change to look at the game as just.  AXIS,  ALLIES.  Black and White.  The coding would be easier?

    Just imagine the simplicity.  These are all your units, facilities, etc,  and at different stages, you can move different parts of YOUR pieces,  suddenly the computer isn’t thinking of them as a seperate entity, and will make efforts to do things like hold territories, or protect valueable pieces with other ones during other turn phases, based on how it is strategically coded to play - which is the balance of the point system I discussed, linked to a player design plan of HOW to achieve to victory.

    Worth a thought?

    But billions of hours could be spent coding that AI, and it may still only resonate as mediocre.

    Who is most responsible for AI coding anyways?  I would LOVE to help with the theory… if I could be helpful.


  • What Malachi said.
    A&A is a lot like chess.  You may be working hard on the material advantage, and often this will win it for you (in chess you can often win by being just 1 point ahead) but that does not ensure your victory.  For while you are continuing to take turns, and are relishing your material advantage, you may find your opponent increasingly willing to take risks to catch up.
    Key difference between chess and A&A - dice.
    As in chess, you move from novice to intermediate quickly merely by seeing all immediate possible moves (threats) your opponent can put on you.  In chess, this is when you stop leaving open unprotected pieces for your opponent to pick off.
    A&A AI is so much harder than chess to program effectively.  Beating A&A AI is like beating level 1 or 2 on chess AI on a scale of 1-10.
    Unlike chess, you need to play human opponents to improve significantly at A&A.  Just playing against yourself (sounds like you are playing on TripleA, so this is not necessary) is a big improvement over playing pathetic AI.


  • @Gargantua:  Say you’re on a diet.  So you take five regular boxes of donuts, remove the donuts, then you put the donuts into two large boxes.  So far, you’re great.  Because all the donuts are still in boxes, see?   :roll:

    But if you do end up eating all the donuts, it won’t matter if they started out in five boxes or two boxes.

    Programming for Axis and Allies is like that.

    @Gamerman01:  A&A is a lot like chess, in much the same way that a football is like a hamster.  Although both fun to kick and squeak a bit when they are hit, there are differences.  For example, hamsters can be made into effective infiltration type zombies, while footballs cannot be made into zombies at all, as footballs lack an anima to begin with.

    These are subtle points, I know.  But important.

    I disagree that A&A would be harder to program than chess.  Put in a book of openings, midgames, closings, and conditions for when to shift, plus some build constricts so later play isn’t hampered by early poor builds.  Because of the dice factor, the game conditions cannot be calculated to a high degree of precision in advance, so it’s not as if you need to calculate sixteen turns in advance.  On the other hand, in chess, there are no dice, so moves must be calculated 50 or even 500 moves in advance (the last, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_endgame#Longest_forced_win).

    Now if you wanted to program an A&A AI based on a chess algorithm, that WOULD be pretty f***ed up difficult yeah.


  • Discussion about chess v. A&A AI has already been discussed at length, elsewhere.  Like you, I thought A&A AI would be easier, but after reading all the arguments, I changed my mind.  For starters, there are waaaay more immediate possibilities in A&A than in chess.  Never mind the whole looking ahead 3 moves part….

    Anyway, there’s a reason A&A AI sucks, and it’s not just because fewer programming man-hours have been put into it.

    I stand by my chess and A&A comparison.  I have played thousands of games of chess in the past few years, and I’ve played about 200 A&A games.  There are a lot of similarities, and many of the analogies are relevant and worth discussing.


  • Ok, it was an 8.5 hour game but I’m ready to give you guys the synopsis.

    It was me vs. two of my friends and they decided to take axis, which is what I wanted.  I started off with russia as I usually do, take west russia with 9 inf 2 tank.(after posting this and re-reading that sentence, I wanted to clarify that I started with same moves I usually use for russia, rather than implying that I sometimes start with a faction other than russia)  Then I take the rest of my available attacking units and attack ukraine with the intent of doing one round of dmg and retreating.  Unfortunately the first round of battle I missed everything and got hit twice on defense, so I just straight up retreated,

    Even though I’ve only had about 2 weeks of playing tripleA for experience, my friends had a bit less than that so they did make a number of blunders that I cant’ really say “look how good I am”  Germany only attacked my destroyer in the Mediterranean and didn’t touch the cruiser and they pushed back in russia.  They didn’t attack egypt.

    for my american and UK turns in the game I decided I was gonna go KGR.  I"ve never really played a KGR strategy against humans so I was sure how hard I was supposed to commit to that, but since I needed to make a decision I decided 100% should about do it.  I bought transports and ground units and got ready to invade.

    Japan made a lot of blunders, he followed my UK fleet to the Mediterranean cause he didn’t know he couldn’t pass through it.  He took out pearl harbor and built more fleet, so I just retreated through the panama canal.   Germany kept trying to push back russia but with terrible success.  After a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG debate about whether or not I could place navy units in SZ3 (he didn’t want to take my word for it, and then he didn’t want to take the larry harris FAQ’s word for it)  I brought all my american troops and UK troops to norway and landed all my planes there.  When he took the bait and defended karellia, I said something to the effect of “REMEMBER THE ALAMO YOU NAZI BASTARDS” and then I rained hellfire down upon western europe.  Japan spent an obscene amount of effort trying to control the canal for the mediterranian [and succeeded on round 4 (germany died shortly before hand also on round 4)]  After taking Germany’s 40 IPC I had 90 to spend the next round and bought 90/6 submarines and japan surrendered.

    so pretty much a shot for shot remake of WWII

    thanks for the help guys, I look forward to playing a skilled player soon

    edit: poor grammar

  • '12

    I’d love to read the chess Vs A&A AI threads.  I am rather intrigued about this, so much that I have already mentioned this to my machine learning professor.  But it is not a trivial matter.  More possibilities is actually not a problem at all, it’s just a matter of zeros.    If real AI was just a matter of zeros, we would have sentient computers, they would just think slowly.  In fact, there is no difference in computer power between the first programmable computer at Bletchley Park in 1944 and the fastest supercomputer now, well, the ONLY difference is in the number of zeros after any measure of performance.

    Bunnies……When you talk about opening moves, you are ‘hand coding’ specific solutions for specific problems.  There is no generalization which is the holy grail.   Once you can provide for a general solution ie some ‘metric’ for a given ‘game state’ then and only then do you enhance this with specific opening move sequences.

    The AI thread with Veqryn
    http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=26221.15

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