India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?

[taamvan]

@SS-GEN Yes, I am preparing for next year’s tournament, which is a bit different than OOB or Open play.

1942 Set
No NO
No Tech
Interception Rule Escorts 1 Defenders 2 Bombers 0
5h 45m play time 5-6 turn game
VC win
If tied 9/9, total IPCs
Average Bid 4
Top Bid 6
Allies win 9-7 games

I don’t see this version as ANYWHERE close to equal. Axis have major issues in both versions, but worse in 1942

1. Russia is neither weak nor out of range of help
2. India is lost
3. KGF is devastating even when Germany prepares all game
4. bids higher than 14 allow the Axis to Sea Lion before the UK turn
5. Axis setup is anemic and weak (1 tt for japan), most of the starting stuff is dead by turn 3
6. this version has more territories for Russia as a buffer zone, and much more infantry
7. pat buys are obvious–all tanks for Russia and all fighters for UK
8. Russia cannot be defeated or Caucasus held under these conditions
9. axis do only need 1 more city than start to win, but how they keep Karelia and all the others in the face of a MASSIVE allied fleet by turn 5 is a mystery to me

[PizzaPete]

I think the UK factory can work, but as others said it has to be part of a coordinated and balanced allied effort. If you expect the IC alone to stop Japan, all you’ve done is bought Japan an IC to use against you.

If I go with a India IC (in 41 or 42) I like to keep some soviet armor and air in Caucasus as an insurance policy. If Japan takes India with just one or two land units surviving, Russia can recapture it, and UK can place three new units before Japan can takes another strike. This means that Japan either has to hit India with such overwhelming force that they can take AND hold, OR be able to take it AND have a strong follow-up attack ready, and both of those scenarios take time.

[axis_roll]

@taamvan said in India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?:

The allies have a very easy way to win both versions of this game–buy fighters and send them to moscow. The middle is lost to the Axis–but Russia has tons of room to maneuver, plenty of time and pieces, and its 1 step for fighters from USA to london and 1 unblockable way from London to Moscow.

Last night, there were 11 fighters, 4 bombers on Moscow by Turn 3. That and the unfavorable geometry for Axis control of Russia (all the contestible zones are right next to a well-defended moscow = dance back and forth all game, no way to stack up next to moscow before KGF comes knocking) means Axis has little chance of taking Moscow out and therefore winning.

My thoughts: Sure Allies can do this to survive longer. Axis can do a similar move to keep Germany alive with Japanese ftrs in Europe and hold Europe ground longer as well. Meanwhile Japan will be making $50+ (NO game), and slowly either taking all Russians territories (income) or units (if Russia trades).

Maybe because we play low luck, the crazy dice that MIGHT bite Germany and Japan during the first round WILL do so… Just looked at a dice simulator. G1 on Egypt is 95% win (no UK units left) with low luck, 80% with pure luck. Wow. Now I remember WHY we play will low luck.

I bring this up because an early fallen Africa in German/Italy hands weakens UK, especially with Japan’s focus being the south pacific to also take money from UK. These dollars help Germany beef up her France defenses while keeping the pressure on Russia.

[axis_roll]

@PizzaPete said in India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?:

I think the UK factory can work, but as others said it has to be part of a coordinated and balanced allied effort. If you expect the IC alone to stop Japan, all you’ve done is bought Japan an IC to use against you.

If I go with a India IC (in 41 or 42) I like to keep some soviet armor and air in Caucasus as an insurance policy. If Japan takes India with just one or two land units surviving, Russia can recapture it, and UK can place three new units before Japan can takes another strike. This means that Japan either has to hit India with such overwhelming force that they can take AND hold, OR be able to take it AND have a strong follow-up attack ready, and both of those scenarios take time.

well not necessarily. The Axis can work well together too! German fighters in range can land to protect 2 Japanese infantry before the Russian counter attack. ftrs in Egypt or Eastern Poland or Ukraine are close enough to do the job.

[PizzaPete]

Right, which is why it has to be part of a coordinated strategy. If Germany has air in range Russia would need several units of armor and air to make it work. Even in that case though, if the German fighters go to India, you can trade Russian armor for German fighters, and if they don’t, its not like having armor and air in Caucus isn’t going to be useful to Russia in eastern Europe. And its only a factor in '41. In '42 Russia’s turn follows Japan’s.

[taamvan]

@PizzaPete @axis_roll

Since there is no axis factory there to start, and planes can fly from UK in one turn, it is an area that should be conceded to Japan in order to focus on the KGF.

In 42.2, the india factory is your vector to put fighters and armor into the middle, and it is much more difficult for Japan to take over unless the US heads east. If the US is focused on KGF, then India is eventually lost.

In 42.2, the move is 4 spaces from Moscow/Egypt/India and so you can re-allocate and defend wherever you like.

In AA50, the UK has an entire rescue force for Russia set up before its even needed. Some games dave has 5-10 UK pieces concentrated just to the west of India with Air that can come down from Russia…Japan will need 2 factories to try and overcome this.

[axis_roll]

@PizzaPete said in India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?:

, if the German fighters go to India, you can trade Russian armor for German fighters,

Germany wouldn’t be ftrs in India if they’d be lost…

[Argothair]

@taamvan I think this says more about the weakness of the tournament design than about the game as a whole. How can you be expected to generate interesting results after only five turns of play? Anything even slightly non-obvious will require longer than that to wear down your opponent’s starting forces in a region. It takes four turns just to travel to some parts of the map from your starting factories – so if you build units in New York on turn 1, they just barely reach Leningrad or Stalingrad on the last turn of the game, even with no opposition. Or if you buy units in Tokyo on turn 1, they just barely reach Rome on the last turn. It’s just not enough time.

[axis_roll]

@argothair said in India Complex for UK - usually a bad idea?:

@taamvan I think this says more about the weakness of the tournament design than about the game as a whole. How can you be expected to generate interesting results after only five turns of play?

One idea to make the Short time frame of that tournament more palatable to a better game is to utilize dice averaging. Less dice to roll and less wild dice outcomes to skew the results.

[DoManMacgee]

@argothair As a counter, I’d argue that the logistics challenges that come from a forced 5-6 turn time limit make for an interesting an alternative way to play. Having to try to scrounge together forces to make a critical, last-second attack in a crucial territory results in games that are wildly different from the hyper-optimized INF stack showdowns that define how A&A is played normally.

[Argothair]

@domanmacgee Fair enough. My own taste lies somewhere in between those extremes, at 8 to 10 turns: long enough to actually build up for and plan an attack that has multiple moving parts, but not so long that you win based on squeezing out 1 ipc per Battle of expected value over and over and over again.

[DoManMacgee]

@argothair I would typically agree with you about ideal game length, but as someone who’s gone to a decent number of IRL tournaments, you have to consider a few mitigating circumstances:

A: Most tournaments (excluding stuff like the invitational tournaments @Young-Grasshopper and @siredblood have run out of their own homes) happen at large-scale conventions, so A&A only has a certain amount of allocated time to even hold its tournament.

B: The sheer number of participants in the tournament demands that at least 3-4 rounds of preliminary games (if doing a swiss system) and/or another 2-3 rounds of playoff games need to be played over the course of the tournament. If you run a 8-9 round game in every round, you would need to have your tournament running for a fairly long amount of time, which leads me to my last point.

C : Player fatigue. While stamina is a skill that should be factored in for Face-to-Face play, there has to be some level of realistic expectations of how much time players can allocate to the game during the tournament. People need to take time off of work/school to even attend a tournament in the first place, so realistically this only gives you 2-5 days to actually hold your tournament when you factor in travel time. A 5-6 turn game takes about 4-5 hours to play out (including the time it takes to set up the board/cleanup), and a 8-9 round game would probably take about 7 and a half hours or so unless the game is a one-sided curbstomp. Having matches go on for that long simply becomes unfeasible in a face-to-face environment (unless we one day have the honor of living in a world where A&A becomes as revered as something like Chess, of course, and corporations are willing to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at players to participate in large-scale tournaments).

EDIT: Grammar.

[Argothair]

@domanmacgee You raise an excellent point! I do think it’s important to keep tournament games playable in just a few hours each; otherwise you wind up with silliness where there are so few games that you can win every game you play in the tournament and still come in 3rd.

That said, my preferred ways to shorten tournament games are:

1. Clocks! Set a time limit on each team’s thinking time per turn or for the whole game or both, and penalize players who exceed those limits with escalating penalties. If you’re late the first time, maybe you lose 1 ipc per minute. If you’re late a second time, maybe your turn ends immediately without a chance to make further moves. Any pieces that you’ve bought and not yet placed are automatically placed in your capital. Many players seem to feel that using time controls for Axis & Allies is somehow ridiculous, but if you want to play a lot of games in a short amount of time, it’s profoundly unfair to let one or two players ruin that schedule for everyone else.

2. Simplify! There are all kinds of little quality of life changes that can make the game inherently easier and faster to play. Get rid of cruisers and you cut out all the time players spend squinting at ship profiles trying to guess if a ship is a destroyer or a cruiser. Buy some of the young grasshopper dice, and you save the time sorting dice into piles based on which dice hit on 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, and so on. If you play with national objectives, use physical trackers so you know at all times which NOs you are entitled to collect and what territories you’d need to seize to add one. Either use an income tracker and make damn sure it stays accurate in real-time, or leave the tracker at home and count up your income fresh each turn…but don’t waste everyone’s time by stopping play to fiddle with a tracker and then second-guessing the tracker by doing a backup count before every other purchase.

3. Etiquette. Get in the habit of counting up your income and make your purchase while the player before you is finishing their noncombat move – you can change your buy if you really need to, but most of the time it’ll be pretty similar. If you’re playing on a team, have your strategy discussions while the other team is thinking or moving, not while it’s your turn to move. If you break for lunch, have a scheduled break where both sides step away from the board; don’t pause play while the axis get lunch, only for the game to stop again 10 minutes later while the allies get lunch.

4. Fast Forward. If you do all of the above and you still need to cut the total number of turns, at least start the game later on in history. A 1942 scenario that ends after 6 turns could at least plausibly have a real D-Day landing or a real return to the Philippines. A 1940 scenario that ends after 6 turns means that the US and USSR barely got to play.

[General 6 Stars]

They the key is having both sides of the map going at same time. This is no way any knock towards any guys games and such.
I know some have time limits to play a country but if you have battle boards on each end of map plus cut back on strategy talking when both players are discussing 1 country which is fine to a certain point then say Germany plays while Japan plays and other side is defending same time.