Back from the holidays. Just in time. Please add me to the OOB tournament.

Rest in peace Trulpen! It is always a joy to have players who will compete with anyone at any time. His love of the game is unmatched.

I had an unusual game where the Axis captured Egypt early. The Americans focused heavily on the European operations and the Allies were steadily making progress on that side of the map. I built up the Japanese air force and sent it on a suicide attack into Moscow around turn 8. Stripping off 15 infantry Allied units in Moscow can change a battle from a 95% chance of losing into a 95% chance of winning when the Germans get their turn. It also means that Germany will keep their air force intact, allowing them to reclaim any European victory cities if necessary.

The best part of this strategy is that the extra Japanese planes can hold the Allies at bay for several turns, forcing India to cower and Anzac + USA to be more conservative with their fleets. All of the planes can raid Moscow from a base in Sichuan, meaning that only one turn is required to setup the pivot from Pacific to Europe.

Of course the Russian AA’s shot down half of my Japanese raiders and the German tanks had their turrets pointed backwards, leading to an abrupt and unhappy end to a genius strategy.

@trulpen yeah, BM is much tougher for the Japanese in China. I waste way too many men trying to suppress the rebellions. I hate it when an American bomber knocks off the lone defender and a Chinese soldier pops up in Tibet.

looks like it is my turn to lose to Andrew.

@crockett36 Normandy should be left completely unoccupied by the time the Allies have a sizable landing force. As you mentioned, there can be considerable devastation to any Axis force situated in that territory and it cannot be reasonably defended without diverting from the main goal of crushing Moscow or heading into the Middle East/Egypt. Normandy or Norway will fall, it just is a matter of on which round and whether the Axis will be able to retake it with a counterattack of ground units supported by planes. France is the best place to have the Axis counterstrike infantry/artillery. Mechanized units can help counterstrike from W Germany. Usually, though, a wave of UK fighters add enough defensive might to Normandy or Norway to ensure that the Axis are unable to strike back.

Aircraft carriers and subs are the best investment for the US as they have dual purposes of defending the fleet and attacking/convoy raiding. Build enough destroyers to prevent German wolfpacks from roaming the Atlantic

With the release of Elo rankings, I could identify BM4 League games between two high-level players of similar talent (no more than 100 elo point gap in skill level and greater than 1700 average Elo). I eliminated a few games which had a player surrender due to personal reasons, and analyzed 17 games from the last three years.

The following graph shows the magic cutoff point of a 20 point Allied advantage after turn 10 which guarantees victory or defeat. This is a useful threshold to calculate which territories you want to hold in order to ensure victory.

Interestingly, Moscow and India hold for a much longer time than in the “old” days. This isn’t surprising as the balance mod gives more income to Russia and handicaps Japan. The improvements of Axis gameplay has allowed them to eventually overcome Allied defenses despite territory advantages that previously would have marked doom.

@Myygames redo the whole Japan turn then including builds and combat. I don’t think it is appropriate to win because of a rule misunderstanding.

Normally I get victory via superior luck.

There is a sub-forum for house rules. You are free to change the game however you like when playing with your friends. I personally enjoy naval and air bases. They enhance the strategic options.

@crockett36 I am missing something in your suggestions. For players who don’t have time to dive in deep to the game and understand the current metas, the OOB version is sufficiently balanced enough to play without any modification at all. The German player will inevitably build too much fleet in the Atlantic or forget that Berlin is the capitol, not Frankfurt. The Russian player will spend their income on tanks, while the American player decides to take the long-march through N Africa instead of launching a successful Normandy invasion.

For more experience players, we need a modification to make the game balanced. Either we can do that with fixed additional units/income, an adjustable bid, or a full-on balanced mod. We have empirical data that a majority prefer the balanced-mods, while a sizeable fraction enjoy OOB plus a bid, and virtually nobody can agree on intermediary house-rules. Out of the 221 matches last year, how many players could find agreeable custom-rules / modified bids? It has been a long time since I have even been offered anything different. A few players prefer low-luck, but I will only accept that against an inferior foe as I need dice to have a chance to beat players like Farmboy or Gamerman.

I am very happy if a subset of players champion a set of house-rules and demonstrate that they are both balanced and enjoyable. If you see something catching on and think a majority would support general adoption as default, let us know. I would suggest that we could have a League-wide vote on adoption of changes if it has been successfully demonstrated by a sizable percentage of League games. I don’t see anything that even raises to a couple percent adoption right now, but don’t let that stop you from advocating for variations in the matches that you play against opponents as you are free to negotiate any rules you want.

@Stucifer I find it fascinating that we probably only have a decade before a good AI is developed for Axis and Allies, one that can consistently beat the top players. Even an AI that can identify all major weaknesses 3 turns ahead would be a massive tool to take gameplay to a much higher level. Moscow falling a turn earlier is a game changer.

Chess has mostly managed to keep their top ranks honest, but I don’t think we will be able to maintain the League for very much longer. We are counting down the days of top human players.

@axis-dominion Here is a breakdown of BM4 game results that I pulled from the results spreadsheet. Player 666 is 1 win and 20 losses for players with ELO above 1800. You should be able to beat him 95% of the time if he has not massively improved in recent times. ELO looks to be working in this instance.

Looking at your record (since 2020), you have a weakness against low ranked players and it wasn’t primarily due entirely to bad dice. Against the Simon (ELO 1394), you were distracted by other games and didn’t move additional planes to reinforce the main Russian stack, and he got a bit lucky in the 60/40 Bryansk battle that couldn’t be recovered from. Without that mistake it looked like you would have easily won the game. In the other noteworthy loss against me (ELO 1497), you could have easily won if you played more conservatively instead of offering battles which were dicey.

If you want to maximize your ELO ranking, the 1900+ ranged opponents is probably your sweet spot as the occasional blunders hurt you in the matches against inferior players. Sadly that only gives you 3 opponents who will help you improve or maintain your ranking. The challenges of being one of the best in the world…

@axis-dominion you are 500 ELO points better than 666. You should be winning 95% of the time against him, a player who has 46 wins and 45 losses, the definition of an average opponent. If you don’t think that you could have that type of odds then you aren’t a 2100+ player.

Top players often have to find meta settings to keep up their ranking, perhaps finding the sweet spot for ELO rank difference and have rules like Low Luck to minimize dicing. Or you could just play games and not care about ELO ranking if you find chasing top-positioning takes away from the enjoyment.

@Gargantua It was a 15%-outcome for the Axis. Certainly not an unlikely outcome.

We all have had far worse dice beatdowns in pivotal battles. Those 1% outcomes in Paris on G1 are awful, and all of us have had 0.1% results that just seem implausible.

That dice was tough, but I would say that Pierce made the right decision. About a 20% of a game-ending outcome, another 30% where he loses a bunch of ground units but retreats his air without a massive game-affecting outcome, and 50% where he loses a bunch of ground units and is now in big trouble. I would take that gamble against a top player like Axis-Dominion (which is why he doesn’t play me any more).

If a top player is going against a much weaker opponent and doesn’t want to have a negative expected change of ELO ranking, low-luck is the best choice. I would bet that Axis-Dominion would have won more than 95% of the time in a LL game and have a slightly positive expected ELO boost. Very slight.

This game has made me superstitious. I am happy to build up karma by getting diced during a non-playoff match. Andrew has been crushing me in 50/50 attacks on Moscow. I am thrilled because that means I will get lucky in the playoffs. Well, maybe not but such thoughts are the only way I stay sane after diligently playing for dozens of hours only to have bad dice hand me the L.

Hi Booper: Here was my gameplan against Farmboy last year. He did not have the Scottish fighter which made it safer to do SZ110 and SZ111 but the dice were not very kind in the second battle. He had a very strong defense of Moscow so I bypassed it down to the oil fields of the Middle East. India fell on J6 which was the crucial battle for the Axis. Perhaps you could have had a much stronger focus on capturing India in the mid-game, even allowing China to get out of control strong if that accelerated the destruction of UK Pacific.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/40891/l24-arthur-bomber-harris-vs-farmboy-a-41-oob/226?page=10

@gamerman01 I looked at the map after turn 5 and it was a very high probability of loss, needing a huge blunder by Farmboy to even have a chance of victory by that point. The victory would have been virtually guaranteed by the end of turn 1 if the Yunnan attack also resulted in disaster.

There is a reason why Farmboy has the ELO ranking he has earned. His mistakes are infrequent and minor, and to capitalize on the errors requires the game to still be close.

There are not too many game-changing battles where luck plays a major portion of the outcome after the first turn. I make the opening as dicey as possible when playing against better opponents like Farmboy or Andrew.

@Booper I would master the Cow opener, with more fidelity to his plane. You got almost everything correct on J1, and I agree with you attacking Yunan and SZ62. However, you did not take Borneo which meant your fleet was out of position for a critical extra turn allowing the Allied fleet to give you a bunch of headaches.

There was a risk that UK India could counterattack, but you should have welcomed the chance for him to get diced.

I definitely would have sent the battleship to 110 to soak up plane hits instead of the subs. I disagree though that it was a bad choice to do the SZ110 + SZ111 attack: Booper had about a 7% chance of winning this match based on ELO differences so an audacious/game-changing turn 1 is often necessary to change the odds to something better than 7%.

Here is the odds for the net planes lost (10 German vs 5 Allied scramblers)

45% disasterous (-1 relative planes lost)
20% not good (0 to +1 plane outcome)
25% good (+2 to +3 plane outcome)
10% amazing (+4 to +5 plane outcome)

Sadly for Booper, he got -3 plane outcome which made this game a Loss on G1, but I think he would have had a reasonable chance of winning in the 35% of outcomes where he gains 2 or more planes in the exchange, and would have a net increase of his expected win rate on average.

@gamerman01 let’s see what happens.

When I battled against Andrew and Farmboy in past years, I only was able to win with audacious gambles and copious amounts of dice luck including invincible bombers. They both are quite a bit better than me, and I have a feeling that the dice lords will smile on them this year after some previous bad luck.