Hey, I was pointed to this article from elsewhere and I absolutely love it! All the analysis in here is fascinating and really has helped me up my game. I think the most interesting part to me is the discussion on the value of units versus their actual cost, which is something I always kinda intuited but never really thought about and mathed out liked this.
I wanted to ask where a lot of the numbers for the values of things come from, especially mobility and certain special abilities like bombing runs and bombardments. I ask this because I wanted to do a similar analysis of units on some TripleA maps I like with different unit types that have some stats beyond what Global 1940 units have. In particular, I’m looking at Domination 1914 No Man’s Land, where there are 3 things that I’m having trouble assigning value to:
More mobile land and air units: As always, the base mobility of a land unit on this map is 1, while the base mobility of an air unit is 3 instead of 4. The really tricky thing is that there are now two tiers of mobility for land and air units. There are land units that can move at 2 and some that can even move at 3, and the same goes for air: some units move at 4 and some at 5. What would be a fair mobility value for a land unit with 3 movement, and would an air unit with only one more mobility than base have a mobility value of 2, or would it have a value of 4 and the mobility value of something with two more movement than base jump to 8? To complicate things further, you can unlock technology that makes certain naval units move at 3, so what would be the value of naval mobility in this case?
Bombing runs: In this variant, industrial complexes don’t have internal anti-air capabilities, instead you need AA guns to shoot down bombers at the same hit rate. However, unlike on most WWII maps, the vast majority of industrial complexes don’t start on tiles with AA guns, meaning your opponent has to buy them for each factory you could potentially raid. At the same time, there are no bombers like strat bombers that add 2 to whatever they roll on bombing run rolls, and there is no escort/interceptor mechanic for fighters. I tried to do the math on this myself and the best I could get was that the value of 3 for a strat bomber’s SA came from getting an average of 5 raids until it gets shot down, as well as an average on one fighter getting shot down every six raids. This means it should be 5 times an average damage of 5.5 = 27.5 minus 12 and 10 for losing a strat bomber and a fighter = 5.5, divided by 2 because of the fact that instead of taking a territory, where you gain and your opponent loses, only your opponent loses without you gaining = 2.75 rounded up = 3. So in Domination 1914 No Man’s Land, that would mean a strategic bombing SA is worth 5 times an average roll of 3.5 = 17.5 plus one AA gun your opponent has to buy = 22.5 minus 16 (the cost of bombers in this variant) = 6.5 divided by 2 = 3.25 rounded down = 3? Is that how you came up with the value of a strategic bombing run SA, and does that seem fair for the value of it on this map?
Bombardments: There are suicide units called “gas” that do what are effectively submarine first strikes on land, but then they die immediately. Being charitable, I would compare this more to bombardments (that are even stronger because the units taken as casualties from them don’t get to counter-attack) as they can’t be negated by destroyer-like units. In fact, they’re really even stronger than that because there are special trench units that are cheap and very durable (they’re 2-hit) that normally soak up all the damage of an attack, but casualties from gas can’t be taken to trenches, so your opponent has to kill their actual defensive units first. The problem is that gas costs 4, so because you lose them after their first strike, this SA needs to be worth 4.5 or more innately for it to not be negative value overall, and that seems wrong. Now, this could just be explained by gas being really really bad, but the community consensus is that gas is quite good, so no matter what, the numbers here don’t seem to be adding up.
Thanks for reading through this, I don’t demand that you answer everything and try to solve what the values of these units should be, I mostly was just curious where you got the value numbers initially for Global 1940 units so I could reverse engineer it and apply them to other units. Again, I absolutely love this post, this is probably one of the best articles I’ve seen in all of board gaming as a hobby!
