Revisiting the Kill Japan First (KJF) Strategy

  • '18 '17 '16 '11 Moderator

    But I don’t look at just one battle in a large set of battles.

    Thing is, in LL if  you can optimize each and every battle you can end up only a very slight bit off what ADS would give you (which is different because you have to account for extremes, not optimal, that usually means bringing more to the battle then you otherwise would if you want the land for sure or to protect your fighters for sure.)  Compounding that glitch over hundreds of battles in a game and you can be so far off an ADS result as to make the LL result unrealistic.


  • DarthMaximus, neither of us is attempting to argue that a single good-odds battle is the penultimate goal of a LL or ADS strategy.  The question is whether or not LL and ADS employ different strategies, and my answer to that is no.  Your answer is yes (I believe).

    Your stance, if I understand correctly, is that with LL, you employ the odds-on line, and with ADS, there’s some give and take, but the optimal strategy line still holds.

    My stance, though, is that since LL allows you to employ the odds-on line, LL allows you to carry out attacks that would be ridiculous under ADS, and that therefore strategies that are ridiculous under ADS are viable under LL.

    Allow me to refer to my earlier Norway-West Russia-Ukraine attack description.  To wit, with ADS, the attacker has little control over bad outcomes, and probability distribution plays some role, so the strategy has a 60% chance of failure, of which a fair proportion is considered “disasteriffic” to use Rikku (Final Fantasy X) terminology.  So the attack is simply unsound from the outset under ADS, this is obvious.

    Under LL, however, the attacker has moderate control over bad outcomes, so has a 32% chance of moderate failure, but a 68% chance of outright success.  So under LL, although this strategy MAY be countered in the long-term by Germany, it is NOT necessarily simply unsound as the ADS attack is.

    So under ADS, you shoot yourself in the butt RIGHT AWAY, but under LL, who knows?  I will say, though, that to say that Germany will in time find an efficient counter for this LL strategy simply because the strategy is immediately unviable in ADS is logically unsound!

    If you can explain how it is INEVITABLE that the Norway-West Russia-Ukraine attack will inevitably fail under Low-Luck, and tie that to the fact that the Norway-West Russia-Ukraine attack is a bad-odds attack under ADS, then I feel that the position that LL and ADS strategies are analogous is sound.

    However, my little brain cannot right now comprehend how that would be possible, so I will leave it to wiser minds to explain.  (Platonic gloating ensues  :-D)

  • '18 '17 '16 '11 Moderator

    NPB:

    He said the tri-lateral attack (the Hat Trick) with Russia is much better in LL then in ADS, so much better, it’s actually a viable move for Russia in LL while it’s utter suicide in LL.


  • @Cmdr:

    NPB:

    He said the tri-lateral attack (the Hat Trick) with Russia is much better in LL then in ADS, so much better, it’s actually a viable move for Russia in LL while it’s utter suicide in (edit)ADS(/edit).

    I thought that’s what I said . . .  :wink:


  • @Cmdr:

    NPB:

    He said the tri-lateral attack (the Hat Trick) with Russia is much better in LL then in ADS, so much better, it’s actually a viable move for Russia in LL while it’s utter suicide in LL.

    For what reasons do you say this? Mazer Rakham does the Russian Triple in ADS. The odds aren’t much better, in fact there’s almost 0 change for the total numbers. It’s simply that it can go way way better than normal, or slightly worse (then just retreat). You only need W. Russia + Ukraine to succeed which is 80% or so, and Belorussia is just a bonus. You can retreat if the dice go bad, but if they go normal or better….ouch Germany!

  • Moderator

    I said it is a bad move in BOTH.   :-)

    Russia ends up losing about the same amount of units worth about the same IPC (in LL) as Germany and this is just bad tactics, esp in Rd 1.

    When you attack someone you want to do A LOT BETTER than a 1-1 trade.

    Edit:

    I’m refering to the hypothetical triple attack of Nor/Wrus/Ukr.


  • I agree it’s a bad move in both; I was simply asking Jen why she thinks it’s so much better in LL than it is in ADS. The dice goes both ways, you could easily overpower all 3 territories and then Germany’s in a mess. That happens just as often as disaster does.


  • @DarthMaximus:

    I said it is a bad move in BOTH.  :-)

    So are you saying that the Norway-Wrus-Ukr attack is bad for LL and for ADS for the SAME REASONS?  No, of course not.  See my last post.  Would you like to expound on the idea that what is good for ADS is good for LL and vice versa?  For I disagree.

    Russia ends up losing about the same amount of units worth about the same IPC (in LL) as Germany and this is just bad tactics, esp in Rd 1.

    Why is it inherently bad for Russia to lose the same number of units in its initial attacks as Germany?  True, Germany has superiority of force, but Germany has the logistic problem of moving units from Germany/Europe to Russia.  Furthermore, let me point out that I will readily trade Russian tanks for German fighters.

    When you attack someone you want to do A LOT BETTER than a 1-1 trade.

    I would say that is a fair rule of thumb, but that there are exceptions to that rule, and I’m sure that on reflection, you will agree with me.

    Edit:

    I’m refering to the hypothetical triple attack of Nor/Wrus/Ukr.

    @Bean:

    I agree it’s a bad move in both; I was simply asking Jen why she thinks it’s so much better in LL than it is in ADS. The dice goes both ways, you could easily overpower all 3 territories and then Germany’s in a mess. That happens just as often as disaster does.

    I posted all the odds in an earlier post . . . it just IS better in LL than it is in ADS.  You don’t “easily overpower” all 3 territories unless you are hella lucky, and the chance everything goes well is MUCH smaller than the chance that something important will go wrong.

  • '18 '17 '16 '11 Moderator

    Because in LL you are all but guaranteed to get a certain result while in ADS you arn’t even guaranteed to have a unit left after the first round nor do any damage to the enemy.

  • Moderator

    @newpaintbrush:

    So are you saying that the Norway-Wrus-Ukr attack is bad for LL and for ADS for the SAME REASONS?  No, of course not.  See my last post.  Would you like to expound on the idea that what is good for ADS is good for LL and vice versa?  For I disagree.

    My contention is that what is good in LL is good in ADS HOWEVER what is good in ADS may not be good in LL.
    My point about the nor/wrus/ukr battle is that just b/c you may succeed in certian battles (either individual battles here and there or a few battles taken in the same turn) in LL way way way more in ADS does not make it a sound strategy for the entire game.  And I laid out just a couple of example where you could have high odds battles but it hurts you in the long run (the Moscow scenerio and the crazy ala move etc.)

    It is much easier to translate LL strats to ADS.

    I don’t think I said this triple would “inevitablely” fail in LL, I believe I said it “may” fail which in a way would confirm what the ADS odds told you in rd 1.
    I certainly think there could be a coerrelation between LL odds and ADS odds.

    Due to the nature of LL we know you can have a battle of a 100% success, which in ADS may be 90-95%.  I don’t think it is then unreasonable to think that multiple battles in LL where you have 80% success awould translate to maybe 65% in ADS.  Thus it isn’t unreasonable to think a LL battle with 60% success rate may then indeed be 40% in ADS (per your triple example).

    So when playing a game in ADS if you have a threshold to actually go through with most battles (say you would like a 60-70% chance to succeed in ADS) that does not mean you’d have 60-70 in LL, the LL odds would probably be much closer to 80.  So when you see a battle at 40% success in ADS it should probably tell you that you have maybe 60% or so in LL BUT those AREN’T great odds for LL, considering you can be much more efficient in your attacks in LL.

    60% odds are not that great for LL, considering the best LL players probably should win about 75-80% of their games.  Why lower your standards to 60%?  It just doesn’t make sense to me.  Maybe it is a good opening and causes enough damage to Germany, but I think it can leave Russia a bit too thin.

    And yes there are times where 1-1 is a good trade and even times where you come out on the low end but the battle can still be deemed a success, but I don’t think Russia 1 is that time esp since the Axis can usually make an Africa push and Japan can make early gains in Asia, and it still takes the UK/US a few turns to get their shuck going.

    Edit:

    I should also say that by strat, I mean a series of moves (or buys) that take place over several turns not something a player may do in only one move or one turn.

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