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…
- 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?