Hall of Shame - tales of the worst dice ever

I thought I had a good story and then I read some others and realized this is nothing. I’ve had crazy odds ofc but this one really hurt me. First game trying out the cruisers with 2 AA shots and after a very successful Taranto raid and not much of a Italian counter, the UK is set to clear out the med round 2. But both of the cruisers AA shot a hit leaving the UK with no planes or a single fighter in the med with Germany poised to do a Sealion where there’s only 2 fighters in the UK. This is why you buy heavy for London UK1. The Allies lost pretty bad because Italy took over the Med quite well and Germany easily took London G3.

@windowwasher UK was too air heavy, which meant a bad dice roll would adversely affect UK more than Germ, as UK had much more TUV at risk. UK only had 8 ground units, so a modestly favorable G dice roll could have destroyed all its ground units on the first dice roll. Why risk expensive planes against cheap mech after that first round? If you wanted to take the territory, it would require taking a plane as a hit to save one ground unit. Without knowing the circumstances, I’d still say cut your losses. Your fighters were attacking at 3 against mech defending at 2. If you retreated, your fighters would defend at 4 and mech attack at 1. G might have planes or other units for offense that might offset that somewhat, but cut your losses.

@fmerwinrommel I needed to clear out his ground units, he could have hit my factory with those and his airforce. By clearing them, I could leave the factory unguarded and use the troops and planes on another landing. I was winning the game and was comfortable taking the risk.

@fmerwinrommel said in Hall of Shame - tales of the worst dice ever:

@windowwasher UK was too air heavy, which meant a bad dice roll would adversely affect UK more than Germ, as UK had much more TUV at risk. UK only had 8 ground units, so a modestly favorable G dice roll could have destroyed all its ground units on the first dice roll. Why risk expensive planes against cheap mech after that first round? If you wanted to take the territory, it would require taking a plane as a hit to save one ground unit. Without knowing the circumstances, I’d still say cut your losses. Your fighters were attacking at 3 against mech defending at 2. If you retreated, your fighters would defend at 4 and mech attack at 1. G might have planes or other units for offense that might offset that somewhat, but cut your losses.

Absolutely correct – yet another instance of not having enough infantry.

The calculator is correct – the odds of winning the battle are accurate assuming that the dice fall as average, but you also need to look at the TUV cost. It should have shown that UK was going to spend a lot more taking the territory (or clearing) then the Axis was going to lose on defense.

Marsh

@gamerman01

This isn’t a big one, but it’s certainly a new one:

1 destroyer and 1 submarine (both American) died trying to kill a German submarine, which survived. The transports had to retreat.

@superbattleshipyamato

Sorry about replying to the original post-I meant to create a new one.

This is another that although not a major battle was quite devastating because it was so early in the game–and also odd, because the bid placement hurt me.

Bid: somewhat standard SS in SZ110 to help fleet + ftr in Scotland.
G1: Elects to forgo SZ111, and doubles down on SZ110 : 2 SS+ 1 BB+ 2 sb + 4 ftr + 3 tac
No scramble, as I’m fine with losing the fleet since I should be able to counter-attack his remaining fleet.

This is where it gets nuts…
All German navy misses.
All German air hits
UK all miss (not overly excited about that since very possible to hit only 1x which with BB is unimportant–but it adds to the tale of woe…)

So because only air hits, the bid unit 1 SS survives! Germany says thank you for that and decides to retreat all navy to SZ112. Battle over.

44 IPC kill, no losses, and German navy (bought 1 more SS) has 4 SS, 1 BB, 1 CA in SZ112 and a lot of air (bought 2 more sb).

The “defense” of the SZ111 fleet was meaningless because with all the subs and bombers, there is nowhere for the UK fleet to run and is eliminated G2.

Allies now had to expend an inordinate amount of resources to establish control of the Atlantic and the game went down hill from there.

@surfer

Amazing. What else is amazing is looking back, I can’t believe I read through the entire conversation back in the day (that’s a lot).

@surfer thank you for sharing.

@surfer and then the dice lords decide to poop on you in virtually every other battle in the game. I have never witnessed such consistently bad luck from the server in my entire play history. One bad outcome can usually be overcome, but the avalanche of unfairness kept coming and coming.