Topics created by Brian Cannon

While we understand your frustration from combat with bad results for your power, we would like to forward you to these threads:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/898920/discussions/0/3186862118573965934/?fbclid=IwAR3W6LmvQVFRKkCPcPMtme2Vl2UY7DAp5Q7IgVSZZ3sKk79RfODxGQPUbIw

https://steamcommunity.com/app/898920/discussions/0/3186862118580593607/?fbclid=IwAR0uNm1gAkiy37tfvJv3LKX3kdLZ-j4_e51O378AGCFVPTTOqNgWBdJD0rE

If random dice feels like too much a challenge or unfair to you, please play with Low Luck.

Having played the classic edition back in the day, the wild swingyness of the dice mechanic was always a bone of contention. A lot of board wargamers dismissed it as a kids game because luck was such a big factor, I always appreciated the unpredictability.

There are basically two types of wargamer, or two ends of an axis we all lie on. Some treat these games as puzzles to solve, to find the ‘right’ tactic or the perfects strategy. Then there are those that like having to think on their feet and adapt to the situation as it unfolds.

A&A in all its forms has always been a game for the latter group. Yes you need to strategise, but you need to hedge your bets, have a backup plan, adapt creatively to unexpected reverses. That’s the fun of it.

As for randomness, if you randomly generate points on an x/y graph, you’ll quickly notice that the points tent to form clumps and little chains. Truly random distributions are not smooth or evenly distributed. Humans are hard wired to see and create patterns. We’re truly awful at generating random numbers ‘by hand’ and also terrible and judging whether a range of numbers are random or not. There’s been bags of research on this. I play role-playing games so Ive rolled huge numbers of dice and seen some amazing runs of luck, disastrous bad luck and just numerically weird looking results. That’s just randomness for you. I’ve had this argument with gamers ‘proving’ that particular outcomes were almost impossible. Yes. All the possible outcomes are almost impossible, when you roll enough dice. They’re all equally unlikely. That’s the point.

It never ends

https://imgur.com/a/AQG3QBC

2 Bombers shot down, 1 left and it does 1 damage.

@Brian-Cannon Shocked response by the Devs

@Brian-Cannon I’m a bit late getting to this but as @aardvarkpepper suggested, the battle calculator (hosted by this very site at http://calc.axisandallies.org/) is your friend here. Basically, before committing to your moves, take a look at what your opponent’s possible moves are going to be and run battle calculations on what would happen if your opponent played a certain way (IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember to set the “rounds of combat” setting to “all” and “10,000X” (more simulated battles = more accurate prediction) and to also set the “luck” setting to “1942” and “Pure Luck” to be accurate to AAO.

I’m not going to speak to your specific game example because that’s not what this thread was about, but I’ll give you the same advice other people gave when faced faced the “Dark Skies” strategy. Basically, a large intimidating air stack can only attack one large stack (be it a land stack of ~10 INF or greater or a naval stack of ~5 Destroyers or greater) in one round. Because of this, you need to be a bit greedy and push forward with all of your large stacks simultaneously, creating potentially-game-winning threats in multiple regions of the board. This puts the Allies in a bad spot because they’ll be forced to choose between solidly destroying one of your threats (and letting the other ones get off scott-free to accomplish its objective) and taking multiple risky fights trying to stop all of your threats (which will probably result in the air stack getting severely reduced/destroyed, making it your victory). I’ve been talking in abstracts here but I can give a rough-ish approximation based on your game. Don’t take this as a one-to-one guide on what you should’ve done in that game, I have no idea what the board looked like:

Scenario: USA is ferrying air stacks from W. USA -> Yakut -> Center Map (Moscow). USA is using said stack to wipe out anything that moves (i.e. Japanese navy, Germany trading attempts in Russia, etc.).

Threat #1 - Get Germany’s entire army (or at least a good chunk of it) in Caucasus, threatening Moscow and demanding that USA keep the air stack in or around Moscow.

Threat #2 - Move out with Japan’s fleet and either threaten taking Hawaii+India for the last VCs (you said you had Karelia earlier and I’m assuming with a strategy like this the Allies weren’t taking Philippines/Rome/Paris anytime soon) OR threaten challenging/destroying the US fleet off of Alaska. If taking the first option here you’d just need to spend a turn or two spamming land units on Japan proper to avoid a landing in Japan. Japan is really easy to defend because of it’s 8 production.

With a large-enough Japanese Navy threatening game-over in one part of the board (by either sinking the USN (thus shutting off the stream of air units into Russia) and the German Army threatening game-over in another (Moscow), the USA in this hypothetical scenario is forced to use their air stack to either sink the IJN or wipe out the German Army. If they sink the IJN the Nazis grab Moscow and win the game, and if they wipe out the Caucasus stack the IJN accomplishes its objective and you win the game. If the USA tries for both they’ll probably fail unless the AAO RNG screws you, in which case you do what the rest of us good folks do and make a thread/post complaining about it.

tl;dr Use the Battle Calculator. Make multiple threats so the Allies need to pick one to deal with and the other(s) can prevail without issue. Don’t fear the reaper, as the song goes.

Hope this helps at least somewhat.

@Brian-Cannon The Japanese basically need to hang out in SZ 61 with all of their navy and air force. If the starting US forces in SZ 53 are killed J1 then there won’t be any credible US forces at the Solomons until US3. By that point Japan should have enough parked in SZ 61 that it would be suicide for the US to move in. The magic of SZ 61 is that it threatens both India and the money islands and allows you to shuck in troops from Japan right into Yunnan so you can choose to either march for India or Russia from there. The US player is very limited in how fast they can attack since they have to start by replacing expensive capital ships and then moving them into position. Japan mostly just needs to buy fodder. J1’s first buy should probably be enough transports to get 3 total and then subs. J2 buy a carrier. After that you make sure your transports are always full dropping off troops for Japan while buying more naval fodder or an air unit as the need arises. You may have to buy more carriers later on to keep parity with the US but with massed subs on your side 3 carriers total may suffice and it may be more cost-effective to build bombers to base in Yunnan as they can support Japanese pushes for a long time from that area. All purchases of capital ships by the US make them stronger at the cost of slowing down when they can make their big move.

Speaking of which, a lot of players promote massed subs + air for the naval game, and this is a good combination but one that only works for attack, not defense (the same IPC spent on destroyers or subs always has a higher chance to defeat the equivalent number of subs). Luckily this works out for Japan since you want the US to be so desperate to save Russia or India they attack Borneo at bad odds, so you’re almost always going to be guaranteed a first strike. In this light you have to be careful since something the US can do is send in just enough to take Borneo while still leaving their main navy camped at the Solomons. Now you may be forced to send in capital ships to retake Borneo since you can’t send in air power to get the island back without giving them carriers to land on and you may be very weak to counterattack if you did nothing but sub buys. If you don’t fall for this trick then you’re sacrificing transports, but that still works out. If you do a big dump of 6 units on Borneo (only if you’re forced to take it back, mind, not until then) then the US player will not take it back again without either taking time to buy a bunch more transports + ground (ok for you, any navy they don’t buy delays the big showdown) or having to move in their navy so they can use air power to get it (same choice Japan needs to make on retaking it).

Very long-term though (like turn 10+) the UK and US will of course defeat Japan if they refuse to take needless losses since they outnumber Japan in income. So the wiseguy answer to How do you beat KJF? is really win with Germany. Given that it is so easy for Japan to at least tread water in the Pacific even if they can’t expand, Germany should be close to taking out Moscow. If Germany can reliably hold Caucasus then the UK can be forced into doing trades for both Persia and Burma that is not sustainable given the 3 unit production limit, or they have to let Axis units pile up there and let themselves be bottled in. With Japan in SZ 61 and pipe-lining troops into Yunnan every turn it takes a major effort from the UK to keep India in the game- they will be forced to fly in fighters which means their European spending won’t be anything more than an annoyance. Consider making sure the Med transport doesn’t die so that Egypt goes under by turn 2 at the latest and you keep pumping 2 units every turn into Africa to capture it and add more pressure to India. Take Gibraltar so that there is no place for Allied air to land if they try to get air units into the Med to sink your navy. Possibly also start a very slow build-up of men in Morocco so you have a small stack there mid-to late game to discourage the Allies from landing there and taking back North Africa or encourage them to waste a turn cleaning it out. I’ve never tried that personally but it might have a little more value in a pure KJF setup since it might discourage the Allies from switching their strategy or make it far more difficult to pull off if they do switch. Either way make sure that over half your income as Germany goes into infantry every turn and you only add to your supply of tanks and air power very slowly. Based on Russia’s opening moves minimally you would have 9 tanks in Europe which is already a good stack after you consolidate it. I would probably not even buy any tanks at all and just build up the air force which will likely need a few replacements anyway after the G1 naval attacks against the Allies. A stack of German fighters in Caucasus will be able to threaten Moscow and India. Germany has such an income advantage over Russia there is no way they can hold out that long if the Allies literally do nothing in Europe. The most likely players would probably do 2 turns of US buildup unless Japan was so misplayed that they went in immediately. In this kind of a case the US would not have a navy at Borneo until US4 meaning Japan attacks on J5. With 4 turns of buildup I don’t know how Japan wouldn’t devastate any fleet the US could possibly get to Borneo. And after that comes G6, by which point Russia should be doing well just doing exchanges over Archangel and Kazakh. Honestly I think it is so easy for Japan to delay the Allies (notice I said delay, not defeat) KJF seems like an nonviable strategy in this version of A&A between skilled players.

Side note- with Caucasus in German hands, you could also even consider shucking German fighters onto Japanese carriers in SZ 61 to help shore up the defensive power of the Japanese navy, but from what I understand A&AO doesn’t implement this capability which violates the board game rules.

I know its an online game with “Online” in the name, but I still think not having really any focus on the single player experience is a bit of a missed opportunity. Its the lowest barrier to entry, low-pressure first introduction, that A&A really needs from a product like this. like at least as much as it needs solid online matchmaking. I know I probably played a hundred solitaires or games against goofy computer opponents with the old Hasbro CD before I ever put up an even remotely decent game in a head-to-head match.

Axis and Allies is a kinda wonky game to learn how to play, and one that would be well served by a robust computer tutorial. Even a middling computer opponent would be great to have for learning the basic mechanics of A&A, to say nothing of learning the UI. I think this one is serviceable for people who already know what they’re doing, and just want an official way to play, but I worry its not the most spectacular thing ever if what you’re using it for is just getting your head around the nuts and bolts. Or if the way you’re trying to learn how to play A&A is by running through the tutorial and then playing against the computer, before into a pvp match lol. The Hasbro CD attempt even with the limits of mid 90s gameplay still managed to find ways to engage the Single Player, with like AI generals, splashy stats/graphs/newsflashes stuff of that sort, and a lot of game mode options to mess about with.

This one really does need an editor though or at least a time machine.
Would be cool if there were more built-in communication features too and a way to share histories and gamesaves and such.

I wish I had more time to play lately. I missed the second season entirely. Might check it out again in the third. Things tend to open up for me in the Fall for A&A time sinks heheh. Hope all’s been well!

@Brian-Cannon don’t be -too- scared of fighters. For the 10 IPC cost of the fighter you can buy 2 INF + ART which will defeat the fighter at 98% odds while the fighter has 2% of winning an attack. If you push fodder units while your opponent pushes high-quality units too early you should win. Any player spending all their income on high-end units is disadvantaged against one buying mostly or all fodder.

Honestly if I saw an Allied first-turn purchase like this I would probably immediately assume I would win as the Axis (maybe making me cocky enough to make a mistake, which could happen). The only thing Russia will do with the fighters is trade territory with Germany but they will quickly run out of fodder. Maybe the extra defense will help them hold Moscow a few turns longer- so what? Just take everything else and start doing SBR on Moscow when Russia is down to 8 income.

Something that might make this buy useful for the Allies is if the point of these fighters is to be placed on carriers purchased round 2. It might be a viable strategy to place 4 fighters E USA to have them land on UK carriers dropped in SZ 7 turn 2 but as I understand it A&AO doesn’t correctly implement this rule. In this case these fighters would either have to start a shuck going through Greenland->London or the US would build carriers for SZ 11 so that newly made fighters can get to London in 1 move after being directly produced in SZ 11. With US fighters building up in London the Germans won’t be able to maintain a fleet in the Baltic for long if they are trying, and the US planes can land to defend any territory taken by the UK in Europe on their turn. Keeping behind enough units to recapture territories held by air -might- be enough to save Russia, but what is Japan doing all this time? This sounds like a plan designed for a very fast KGF so India should fall by J3/4. If Japan has been sending units to Yunnan every turn it will be able to take India with a combined attack of land units by sea + walk from Burma and its carrier-based air which will crush any defense of India that is just mostly air. Plus if Japan is willing to sacrifice its transports you can leave its navy in SZ 61 to keep having a standoff with any US forces camped at the Solomons, but even if the whole navy goes in to India you can still counterattack any US invasion of Borneo.

Doesn’t help that the animation exaggerates hits over non hits.

@Boston_NWO said in 1942 2nd Edition (Steam) Genco Harris version:

{snip}
Just based on status, infantry are by far the most broken unit in the game. This has been the case in every version of Axis and Allies but the unit is so common that many people don’t appreciate the brokenness in plain sight.

Don Rae was singing their praises in the 1990s to anyone who would listen: Don’s Axis and Allies Strategic Essays.

While the advice contained within was tailored to the old, Milton Bradley, version of A&A, the Infantry Push and Dead Zone mechanics are still as effective today as they were 25+ years ago.

-Midnight_Reaper