Russian NO, Errata rules clarification, and how to play G40 without a Bid

  • '17 '16 '15

    cyanight

    can’t remember how to post links, but it is on the bottom of page 8 under house rules

    I don’t know if anyone has a saved game for the latest triple a so you might have to edit one

    A couple people on here used to play it they seemed to enjoy it        I thought it was fun as well

  • 2024 '22 '21 '19 '15 '14

    “5 IPCs if the Soviet Union is at war with at least one European Axis power, the convoy in sea zone 125 is free of Axis warships, Archangel is controlled by the Soviet Union, and there are no units belonging to other Allied powers present in any territories originally controlled by the Soviet Union.”

    At the very least, this NO is ambiguous with respect to the final clause.

    Interpretation…

    5 IPCs if the Soviet Union is at war with at least one European Axis power, the convoy in sea zone 125 is
    free of Axis warships, Archangel is controlled by the Soviet Union.

    5 IPCs if there are no units belonging to other Allied powers present in any territories originally controlled by the Soviet Union.

    The first is basically unachievable, but the second could have an impact. Somehow I suspect +5 ipcs alone, would not be enough when considered against the advantage of Western units for Soviet defense. Meaning I think the Allied player would likely give up this NO, in order to get the Western unit advantage. But at least it would be something. I still think Russia at War needs to get in the +10 range (achievable), to be competitive, but even +5 per round would be way better than it stands right now OOB.

  • '14 Customizer

    Germany can counter Russia’s NO by moving a sub in 125 on turn 2.  They use all their subs on round 1 to decimate the royal navy but that doesn’t matter because the DOW on turn 2 or 3.  UK usually has 1 DD left after turn 1 but they have to retreat that DD to Canada or suffer the same fate as the rest of the ships.  Now Turn 2 comes around and Germany moves a sub to counter the Russian NO and there is no DD in range because if there was then the Luftwaffe would have eliminated it on round 2.  There are some games where Germany fails to wipe all the ships but I would say they normally do this without a problem.

  • 2024 '22 '21 '19 '15 '14

    but like i said, if russia needs more units why does everybody put their bid in for the UK iso Russia?

    The simple answer to your final question is… because competent players will always use the bid to break an opening battle. For the Allied player it makes little sense to bid in Russia, since the DoW restricts Russian play. The goal with a bid is always to have the greatest impact, and trade as much TUV as possible (either on attack or defense) as soon possible for the bid amount spent. This has been the case on every A&A board. The reason everyone bids UK in G40 is because UK is already at war, and they are the first allied nation in the turn order that can make an effective attack.

    Sz125 doesn’t matter for the purpose of the NO until Russia is at war. So unless Germany DoWs it’s not even relevant yet. The problem in subsequent rounds is that Germany can disrupt sz125, and doesn’t have to hold the sz for the enitre round to do so. All they have to do is park a single sub in sz 125 through Russia’s turn (which follows their turn immediately.) It’s a cost of 6 to disrupt 5 from Russia, and draws a UK dd at 8 which can easily be destroyed if Allies attempt to contest the sz with light forces.  In later rounds the NO is disrupted by the no western units on red land or the Archangel requirement. Basically it’s an inconsequential NO if the German player does their job.

    But again the reason to give the money to Russia is for balance on the center crush, without disrupting first round battles. A UK bid just busts the game vis a vis Italy and the med.

    This is similar to the way an extra tank was used in an Axis bid to break Egypt in Revised, or to break the Ukraine battle, (or doing those, but saving some extra for a 4th Japanese transport to be purchased on J1 as well.) Similar again to the way UK can break naval battles on 1942.2 board. A preplacement bid will always be used to break the game in favor of the side perceived to be a disadvantage, creating first round battle conditions entirely different from the OOB game. This is what we’re trying to avoid, and why Russia is the prime candidate for a boost. Because the political situation prevents them from distorting the opening round,  and because Moscow is invariably the focus of the endgame.

  • '21 '20 '18 '17 '16 '15 '14 '13

    @Black_Elk:

    but like i said, if russia needs more units why does everybody put their bid in for the UK iso Russia?

    The simple answer to your final question is… because competent players will always use the bid to break an opening battle. For the Allied player it makes little sense to bid in Russia

    Interesting thread, but those in red are not perfectly correct. I encourage you both to play the league games.
    http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?board=54.0

    Or get a team for playing in the XDAP 2 tournament that starts soon.
    http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=34519.0


  • Me1945,
    The thing about the use of absolutes, such as “always” and “everybody”, in most Western languages, particularly English, is that more often than not they are not used for their strict meaning, but rather for emphasis, particularly in persuasive speech. This is also known as a form of exaggeration. Speech does not need to be “perfectly correct” to still convey valid points in an effective manner.
    Source: Linguist

    But I gather your real point is that you have experience contrary to his, and you have seen players bid in Russia. That’s cool. Thank you for contributing!
    Is there any chance you could regal us with a story on how that experience you’ve witnessed or performed was an effective decision? At the moment, I’m leaning towards Black Elk’s logic of getting the most bang-for-buck by utilizing the resource (bid) as soon as possible. It, too, seems to be such the stronger play to me that I have difficulty imagining another course of action being as effective. As such on this, it’s quite possible that when Black Elk used absolutes, he really meant them in those absolute terms as per his own experiences.

  • 2024 '22 '21 '19 '15 '14

    Yes, I was speaking emphatically from my own experience and observations. ;)
    Dead on EnoughSaid.

    I know other people have different ideas about how to use the bid in a more restricted way, or how to affect a hard set up change. (e.g. Russian bomber or the like.) I’m actually a fan of aircraft, in a lot of instances, for the dynamic situations they can create. I’m sure there are ways to get at game balance that don’t involve NOs. But again, I have to say, if you’re already playing with National Objectives, I think they can be improved as a game balance mechanism over bids. Especially the largely irrelevant ones.

    Tournaments are fun, but can be time consuming esp g40. The last time I really dedicated enough regular time to tripleA was for AA50 and 1942.2 games. The way my work schedule and rl commitments are these days, its harder to commit to regular play for the longer games. I do have a buddy that might be up for it though, relatively new to A&A and tripleA.

    League play is useful, I fully support this and any kind of tripleA war room stuff. Its the best way to gather balance information, since tripleA is much faster than A&A.

    I go by “triplelk” in the tripleA lobby, and black_elk on all the boards. We’ve probably crossed paths at some point, though my lobby activity enthusiasm goes in waves. Most of my G40 games lately have been using house rules that are a bit more challenging to support with the edit mode, so I do a fair amount of FtF now, which is time intensive. We average like three sessions per game, with all the set up time and breaks and snacks. TripleA is always faster. I definitely endorse using the engine, and its good to see it still going strong after all these years. I live in San Francisco, but I work late hours, so I’m usually encountering people in different time zones. The friends across the pond, in UK, Italy, Germany and the North, or the Australians sometimes. Depends what kind of shift I have to work haha. It would be fun though.

  • '21 '20 '18 '17 '16 '15 '14 '13

    My point is, those who don’t play here sometimes post judgements that pretty often  differ from what I’ve learned in the league. Which is fine, if you play in your groups or somewhere else. Since I’m unable to join your groups and you are in the site already, I think everybody will be benefited from your play in the A&A forums.

  • '21 '20 '18 '17 '16 '15 '14 '13

    everybody will be benefited from your play in the A&A forums

    That is wrong one. Should put everyone except your family.

  • 2024 '22 '21 '19 '15 '14

    I’m curious which statements here are differing from what you’ve seen in the league? Do you feel that this NO is playing differently or is more relevant in the league?

    I suppose its important to realize that any statements you read here on the boards are largely anecdotal. It comes down to how much of what you read accords with your own experience. And of course results will differ depending on what conditions you typically play with. For example, I noticed just now you mentioned the Russian bomber in another thread. In G40, and in other prior A&A games, many people have used additional Russian aircraft as an expedient alternative to the open pre-placement bid. An Extra Russian fighter in AA50 for example, or a Bomber in G40. In G40 specifically, that option is preferable to me, than an open bid for UK. Its the sort of set up change you really have to force though, because given the option most people would take that same bid amount and instead throw down 4 infantry or 3 art units in separate territories to spread the advantage, or a pair of subs to break a naval battle. Anyway, the point being that if you are using a Russian bomber in your games regularly, then chances our you’ll be seeing different results from people who try other balancing options. Beyond this, there is also the No Tech aspect, or things like whether or not players are using standard dice rules or low luck rules. All this stuff can skew the results in a given set of games, or provide somewhat different play-balance results from the games of people who play other ways.

    I will say this about G40, if you play standard dice, there is a fairly substantial swing potential on sz 110 and sz 111, not to mention with casualties in France. This can be a pretty big deal for an opening battle that sets the stage for the whole game. The results there can be a lot more consequential than say Classic/Revised when a transport hit, or a destroyer dudded out was in the opening round. The old German battleship headache comes to mind. Or take for example how in Revised the swing on the W. Russia battle could really effect the whole game in a massive way, such that some players would just quit outright in the opening round, if the dice didn’t go their way. Something similar can occur here (though perhaps not quite as extreme) with sz 110 and 111. If the Luftwaffe trades well in those battles it can be a huge boon for Axis. If they trade poorly it can be a small nightmare for G. Low Luck can control for that to a certain extent, but what you gain in consistency by using LL during the opening round, you lose out on in dynamism during the endgame. This is why I tend to prefer dice since they are so unpredictable for the endgame, though I appreciate the place for LL and understand why so many are fond of it. Still even a small bid disrupting either of those battles, or the battles in the med, can take it from a risky swing to a clear and obvious choice, especially under LL conditions.

    So all that is just to say that the conventions in your playgroup, the typical bid, what sort of rules you option in or out, can really affect the patterns that emerge.

    You’ll probably have noticed as well, that because A&A uses a very fixed set up and involves a number of scripted first round battles, that players often use a technique that you might call mirroring. Where players tend to model their strategies and opening moves, on things that they’ve seen stronger opponents do. Adopting the strategies that beat you last time, we might call it. This happens a lot after a board first comes out, or especially with players who are new to the game. So what happens is a kind of gameplay evolution, that selects for the best opening plays and weeds out the poorer ones over time. So right after a new board comes out everyone is excited, since the playing field is leveled, and nobody really knows how to exploit the map. Very quickly though, players start adopting standard buys and standard openings, until at some point (after a year say) someone hits on a strategy that is very dominant, which never remains secret very long. Soon variations in it get more popular, until eventually it becomes a scripted move (something everyone does.) Its usually at this point, if the advantage is clearly going one way, to one side over the other, that people start seriously examining bid solutions.

    Whats interesting about all this, is that if you are playing with someone who is inexperienced, and does something totally batshit crazy, that you wouldn’t expect anyone to do ever, sometimes that sort of game can actually get entertaining as well as challenging. Since you really don’t know how to predict the erratic behavior of the newb. These games can be fun, since they force all sorts of weird decisions on you. Like wow, he built that? I guess I have to go destroy it now, and do something I wouldn’t usually do haha.

    I agree though, from an archival standpoint, its nice to have a league and a way to track what sorts of things are happening in games (what sort of bids are being used for example, and what opening moves.) The overall tally Axis wins to Allied wins. But even there, the nature of the dice can be pretty nuts in providing different experiences.

    All this is just to clarify something that it might have been worth saying at the outset. When I talk about game “Balance” or “Balance by Sides” what I am really referring to is the ‘feeling’ or ‘sense’ among both players that the starting conditions provide a roughly even shot for either to prevail. There’s no way to be really absolute about this, since as soon as you roll the dice in a single round of combat, you shoot off into so many different variables that its probably impossible to say anything with certainty… eg. whether a bad roll somewhere can be recovered by an amazing one somewhere else, later on. So really what we a striving for is the sweet spot, where the feeling of balance is the same for both players at the outset. Where one person isn’t constantly grumbling about how the odds are totally stacked against them from the get go, or how if they don’t win battle X, “its basically all over!” I’m not sure how much you could learn from seeing my games in an after action, since I’m perhaps not as cut throat as others, and I like to experiment a lot (often with game mechanics.) I don’t mind losses and haven’t bothered to keep a running tally on anything.

    If I’m in the lobby and I have more time to play, I also almost never concede defeat, at least until I see the deep endgame ;) Since that’s the one that fascinates me most in A&A games! The deep endgame, for those unfamiliar with how I use the term in A&A, is how things play after capitals have already fallen. So in Classic or Revised or 1942.2 the Deep Endgame is when you are down to just 4 nations. In AA50 when you are down to 5 etc. Another way to think about it is the gameplay when W. Allies can take over Russian land directly because the capital has fallen.

    Pretty good at grinding it out, since even a losing game can be entertaining, and it teaches you about the production spread and the importance of the center ;) But now I’m just rambling.

    Is it the general premise of this thread (that Russia’s NOs are too weak, and virtually pointless) that you find problematic? Or the proposed solution as a bid alternative? I guess I’m just a little confused where you think we’re running off track. Most of the results posted in that league forum for g40 games (at least for the last several months) show Allies being bid out consistently, often at above +10 ipc. So I feel that it supports the general position of game unbalance in favor of Axis. I’m not sure what bearing any of those games would have on my proposed solution right now, since those games are virtually all using pre-placement bids. What I have suggested here is a standard income modification for an NO as an alternative to what people are currently doing, which is bidding pre-placement. Does that make more sense from the perspective of a bid replacement/balance perspective?

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