Submarine first strike

@Dovenik-Hyseni

To respond to your points:

To be fair, I prefer stacking Galacia over hitting Poland AH1. I only brought up the possibility of hitting Poland as a hypothetical.

I don’t particularly care about winning in Serbia round 1. I only even attack Serbia at all because the rules of the game force you to. The rules of 1914 allow you to choose whether or not to press combat each turn, so you can simply have the Austrians not attack the Serbians each turn, which allows you to potentially roll 3s with your stack there instead of 2s (assuming the Entente presses combat).

That being said, I think I was a bit off in assuming the Serbia guys would be capable of hitting Romania round 2. You’d probably need to split the Galacia mega-stack to hit both Romania and Ukraine, depending on what Russia does.

You can most definitely contest Romania and Ukraine AH2 if you’re committing 100% of Germany’s buys towards Russia. Yes the battles won’t go in your favor initially (and you may have to spend some turns not pressing combat in Ukraine), but your objective in a Kill-Russia-First style of strategy should be to hit Russia on multiple fronts and force them to lose more troops each turn than they can feasibly replace. Starting fights in Poland (with Germany), Ukraine and Romania should be enough to accomplish this goal.

Side-Note: Your 10 INF/4 ART swings for 36 (8@3 + 6@2) and has a 60% chance to wipe the Romania stack in one round of combat. Those are pretty good odds, but it’s not exactly consistent, especially considering that a big chunk of your strategy hinges on having the Romania stack available to march on into Ukraine AH2.

On the topic of fighting/holding off Italy, I prefer killing Italy first as Austria over killing Russia first, but that’s beyond the scope of this conversation. However, because Italy goes after Austria, you can send some of your turn 1 buy into Trieste Round 2 to slow down Italy if you’d rather send 100% of the Vienna guys East.

I don’t have much more to add, really. If I were Russia playing against this I would just shuffle all of my units into Ukraine R1 and hope that France/Italy/UK can do something productive in other theaters.

Yeah France first is super rough.

Reading the rules again, I begin to get a bit fussy about the RR rule. We have always run with that Moscow have to be contested in order to RR to occur. I now realize that perhaps thats wrong and that for example  holding Ukraine, Polen, Belarus and Livonia is enough?
IN our games AH have to put enough units in AH% in order for Russia not to be able to kill them all in R5. However if we have been wrong about RR, the 4-7 remaining Germans from G4 is enough since Russia cant advance untill they have been destroyed… And in that scenario AH can have its entire stack moved from Ukraine to Sevastopol in round 5, very much changing Britians advance.

In the west Germany usually have to tactically retreat in r2-r3. However since all buys from G1 and forward will be moved into the west they wont need to retreat further. And even with Belgium and perhaps an orginal German territory gone they will have an income advantage against France alone and therefore push them back r4 and forward.

Same goes for Italy really. AH will use all its income towards Italy (exept 5 planes in r1-3 = 30 IPC). And by r4-5 AH will push Italy out of Trieste/Tyrole for good.

I envisioned calvary working like this.

Attack at a 2
Move at a 2
Defend at a 3 (If on a territory containing defending infantry)
Defend at a 2 otherwise.

Cavalry played a minor role during the entire war. (Lawrence of Arabia for example)

Cavalry would have one other feature. They alone would be able to leave a contested zone and attack an empty adjacent enemy controlled territory.

By turn 4 they would no longer allowed to be built.

I do agree the game is great as is.

Of course you can attack when you reinforce an contested tt. But its no amphibios assault where the enemys Artillery can shoot at your offloading units at the coast…

@Frontovik:

India can’t fall… you know the Brits have unlimited production there, right?

You’re right.

What do you think about possibly pulling the two German subs back to SZ 4?  First, they wouldn’t have to dodge 2 mine rolls (and Germany has enough to kill Britain’s home fleet anyway). Second, you’re set up to make a joint attack on SZ 8 turn two if Britain should try to drop a fleet. A G1 build of a BB in SZ would help (a battleship could likely survive 2a mine rolls on its way to SZ 8).

I haven’t tried this yet, but it might help a Paris or Bust strategy (preventing British reinforcements to France).

The British don’t even need to put much in India- they start with significant forces in India and Egypt- not to mention they can activate Arabia.