• You guys are too nice.  8-)

    At our table, when the attacker rolls, he usually stands over the defender taunting him as he removes pieces. Then the defender retaliates, usually with equal trash talk.

    ‘Better take that plane off, you need that infantry to hold if any survive the next wave’

    ‘Flip that carrier and the planes are stuck (or dead)’.


  • @Marshmallow:

    The attacker rolls for attacking units. The defender designates casualties after the attacker concludes rolls, and then the defender rolls for all units (including those declared as casualties). Once the defender finishes rolling defense, the attack designates casualties for the defender’s hits.

    Then the attacker decides whether or not to continue or retreat. If the attack is an amphibious assault, ground units landed amphibiously may not retreat.

    There is no changing your mind once you’ve designated casualties.

    Marsh

    This is the way we do it.

    @ausf:

    You guys are too nice.  8-)

    At our table, when the attacker rolls, he usually stands over the defender taunting him as he removes pieces. Then the defender retaliates, usually with equal trash talk.

    ‘Better take that plane off, you need that infantry to hold if any survive the next wave’

    ‘Flip that carrier and the planes are stuck (or dead)’.

    Child’s Play. I be saying * Yo, go away, your in my way * or * You need to get back to your side of battle board now *

  • '21 '18 '16

    We subscribe to what would be a common “house rule”? Everybody rolls their dice attacker/defender then each side picks casualties at the same time. I’m sure this is wrong as stated here but it makes the game better if you don’t always get shafted on combat.


  • @SS:

    Child’s Play. I be saying * Yo, go away, your in my way * or * You need to get back to your side of battle board now *

    We have fun. We trash talk the whole time. Whether it’s A&A, Bismarck, Feudal, Midway, Risk, Skull, etc. It’s part of the play, get in the other guy’s head.

    We don’t think we’re Marshall, Stalin, Hitler or Churchill. In my house, we’re bozos playing a game. Yes it is Child’s play. That’s the point.  8-)

  • '21 '20 '18 '17

    It does give the Attacker an advantage; but that’s not the reason for the rule in my opinion.  The rule is set up that way to force you to lose cruisers before destroyers and carriers before planes (or vice versa depending on the situation).  If you can’t knock down his DD cover, its better to lose your subs as casualties (attacker).  If you can knock that DD down, then keeping the “cheap” subs is a good idea.

    It is one of the few examples where the combat rules force you to be forward looking from round to round and make hard choices that affect the special rules.  It makes the sub/destroyer rule more interesting, and DD’s more valuable.

    And I’ll tell you from experience, the rule changes outcome.  There were multiple times in the last tourney that I kept a sub which could have been lost in these battles (instead of leaving a Cruiser and DD behind on the surface) and killed a cruiser, and 2 tipped BBs.

    If you leave surface ships alive, they can be attacked by anything.  If you only leave subs alive, they can only be attacked by destroyers.

    If you tip carriers, you have to lose planes in kind, so it makes  the carrier tipping rule much harder to game and that part actually favors the defender.  If you take exactly 3 (anywhere) hits, you can tip a carrier and lose 2 planes.  But if you did not know at the time whether you were about to take 0, 2, 4, 5, 6 or exactly 3 casualties, you couldn’t so neatly adsorb them as the attacker.

    This is why the rule is flavorful in my opinion.


  • Thank you all for the responses.  As always, such a helpful community!


  • :-D :wink:


  • This rule is just one element in combat, this rule helps the attacker. A rule that helps the attacker alot more than this rule is the rule of allowing only the attacker to retreat. if the defender could retreat, this would have been a completly different boardgame.

    A rule that helps the defender is : unit stats, especially on land.

  • '21 '20 '18 '17

    You make a good point sir.

    Nonetheless, I feel that the rule forces some calculated decisions, asks you to remove higher value pieces before “lower” value pieces, and that knowledge of the precise rules is a benefit when making the decision, thus it still encourages the kind of gameplay you want the game to have.  Normally AxA would be a “cheapest first, all the way up to most valuable” order of casualties game, but all sorts of (added) rules, such as infantry being cheap but easiest to load on a transport, might make you decide to lose a more expensive or valuable piece first in order to keep a piece that is valuable in that immediate situation or for some other reason.

    That’s why the Global edition is so cool, is that the pieces don’t always feel like beefed up versions of one another all the way up the chart, they are all different and useful in various situations.  But as you point out, that is due to special rules that have accumulated over time, not a calculated choice.

    Since various teams are the attacker at different times, the rules isn’t biased.  And also I might argue, that there NEEDS to be a subtle advantage to attacking overall (in addition to the retreat chance), so that the game doesn’t devolve into a stackfest of slow, plodding movement and defensive building up.


  • The point of who it helps is not really a big concern in my opinion. At least not in a game as big as G40. If They made the rules to make the defender the strongest, then the two forces would be standing right next to each other. if they made the rules so that the attacker is the strongest, then the two forces would deadzone each other.

    there are so many rules and effects that help the attacker or defender, Order or casualties is probably one of the least important. More important include: unit stats, planes cannot land on taken terretory, planes needs carriers or airbases to defend a seazone, retreating gives you an extra round of production in your stack while removing one from your enemy, taking a capitol gives you all of the money, etc…

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