L24 BM4 Playoff Finals Adam514 (Axis) vs farmboy (Allies+22)

@farmboy
awesome - take a moment and enjoy!

@Adam514
it probably will a short while only until you got another opportunity to celebrate!

congrats @farmboy , our new champ! and sorry @Adam514, clearly that game did not go as well for you as we all have come to expect! hopefully next year’s tourney will be a really challenging and fun one for all of us.

now we wait for JDOW’s expertly detailed analysis hehe

A game fitting for the 2023 championship, and no one expected less
I only popped in here and there but I’ve seen enough to know that I should go through it more carefully to learn Allied tactics much different than my own. And of course I’d learn a lot from the Axis too.

@farmboy is the 3rd player in league history to win 2 championship games, and also the 3rd to repeat back to back years. And the final wins came within 9 months of each other! What a rush.

More congratulations will be posted in the game results thread.
I’m thrilled you two players participated in the playoffs for 2023 and gave everyone a show!!! Well played, by definition, you can’t go 16 rounds against Adam or farmboy unless you play great.

You both already have your 6 2024 games to qualify in January,

Can anyone stop you (in the playoffs) from a rematch next year?

I’m honest, I’m still amazed at how decisive some choices or battles can be right from the first or second round… perhaps too much so.

G1 results are massive

@Adam514 Curious if you had any thoughts/comments on the pacific side of the game. I was quite surprised when you didn’t go for Yunnan. I have seen that combat fail occassionally but never saw someone not bother with it and I had figured, wrongly it seems, that this was something that I could make you pay for. And then I was struck by how much you had to threaten India with J4. My thinking at that point was that I could stack Yunnan and hten I was going to stack Burma and delay your control of India by holding that with China. It became clear after J2 that I would have no chance to do so.

I’m guessing the good J1 and the units conserved from Yunnan helped but I’m wondering if there was anything I could do to save India early. If I had done a better job of stacking India (playing more conservatively with teh British units, getting anzac units in and in bringing the soviet air I think I may have just barely done enough to discourage it for a turn (you would have had 99% odds but with a good chance of losing quite a bit of air). But there were a lot of costs to me in doing that (Among others I really needed that soviet air back on the Europe side). In any case, I was struck by how overwhelming that attack was. For much of the rest of the game I was just trying to do enough to keep Japan from being able to focus entirely on that final VC and I guess I just managed but I felt like things could fall apart at any moment. And I thought maybe you were playing more conservatively than perhaps you needed after India fell.

@Adam514 thanks for the comments. And I certainly realized after this that Yunnan is not as essential as I would have expected. On CHi1 I was thinking I might have a chance of holding Burma/China for a while which clearly did not materialize.

On France, I don’t disagree. and had been thinking about it for a few turns. But I was fairly confident that I could stop you in the pacific and I felt like I needed more US troops to make sure I could keep Germany down. I was also a little worried when you started to go aggressively against Moscow again and didn’t want you to be able to spend much on fast movers or air to support that. And also thinking that more pressure on the West was going to free up the Soviets to pressure Japan.

I’m assuming also that you decided on your gamble at the end more last minute and after I ensured that Moscow was safe. I had thought you were setting up take Caroline islands back at that point and that we might still have a few more turns in the pacific.

Farmboy, I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to congratulate on your back-to-back league championship! What an incredible achievement to defeat Adam’s Axis in the final.

I have to say, after the G1 110 disaster, it seemed like the Allies’ advantage vanished by turn 8 or 9. At that point, I would’ve bet on the Axis. The early Europe play felt a bit sluggish - Egypt was temporarily abandoned, and the first major U.S. landing was to liberate Egypt instead of securing a beachhead. Despite delays, Germany managed to break through Bryansk, alongside with some very expensive Russian blockers that weakened their position.

On the Pacific side, Japan had favorable early dice and took India with relative ease, even with an early British Indian Ocean fleet. Japan’s dominance at sea was clear, though the Chinese-Russian cooperation posed a thorn in their plans. However, with India already taken, that threat seemed manageable in my opinion.

Your consistent, error-free play was impressive. Though cautious at times, it was precise, and you managed to exploit Germany’s weakness in the skies until they eventually collapsed. The subtlety in your strategy was remarkable. I especially liked how you kept ANZAC aggressive, even though Japan was just one victory city away. While not all the island trades seemed efficient, you kept Japan occupied, preventing them from launching a decisive attack on Sydney or Hawaii.

One question, though, regarding the Russian strafe-stunt back to Moscow - did you miscalculate earlier? It seemed like you could have just stacked Bryansk, and the risk of the strafe felt unnecessary to me.

Again, congratulations on a very well-played game! Certainly a game for the books to study on Allies play against Axis giants!

@JDOW thanks for the review!

two quick comments. It was probably a mistake on my part to give up Egypt early. I did it for two reasons. Given the loss of German air on G1, I thought he was more likely to gamble (especially with Italian units). My standard opening is the gibraltar airbase. I realized though that if I did that (and also cleaned up the surviving German naval units in the Atlantic especially the battleship) he would have almost 50% odds on the British navy in 92 on I1. Because I also needed to keep British air in the pacific, he would also have had about 70%+ odd on Egypt I2. I knew though that the loss of that German air meant that he couldn’t take and stack Egypt. So I thought it was a safer move even though it gave Italy a little more room and a little more income early.

And you are right about the strafe at the end. I was just sloppy. I was playing more forward because I thought I could and that doing so would deny him another chance to hold Leningrad or get Moscow. I hadn’t been careful about stacking Caucasus initally. In the correction I removed Soviet fast movers from Rostov. That allowed him to can open with Italy and use a German mech to move there and block a number of my units. It turned a combat that was well above 90% to one that was around 10%. So initially I thought it was safe for me to do and I didn’t realize how the correction I made opened up this option for him. But fortunately for me the one round strafe was still likely still a safe move and it did work out.