@Bunnies:
Actual donuts are reserved for players that can inflict permanent psychological scarring at forty paces.
If I kept screaming racial slurs at them when it wasn’t my turn, is that in the ballpark?
@Bunnies:
Actual donuts are reserved for players that can inflict permanent psychological scarring at forty paces.
If I kept screaming racial slurs at them when it wasn’t my turn, is that in the ballpark?
Truth be told I’ve only played in person games where you select your own casualties and I’m about average win/lose rate with the guys I usually play with. Never really played where you choose your oponents loses.
yea, my point is when you are in a position where you have to choose your opponents losses you have to choose what they would want to choose if they could do it themselves.
sooooo…. I’m not upset that the thread has gone tangential (that’s not a passive aggressive way of saying I am upset) but you guys could at least give me a pat on the back for winning my first human game :(
@bunnies If you ever in your LIFE request funding for AI programming I’m calling ASPCA on you
Ok, it was an 8.5 hour game but I’m ready to give you guys the synopsis.
It was me vs. two of my friends and they decided to take axis, which is what I wanted. I started off with russia as I usually do, take west russia with 9 inf 2 tank.(after posting this and re-reading that sentence, I wanted to clarify that I started with same moves I usually use for russia, rather than implying that I sometimes start with a faction other than russia) Then I take the rest of my available attacking units and attack ukraine with the intent of doing one round of dmg and retreating. Unfortunately the first round of battle I missed everything and got hit twice on defense, so I just straight up retreated,
Even though I’ve only had about 2 weeks of playing tripleA for experience, my friends had a bit less than that so they did make a number of blunders that I cant’ really say “look how good I am” Germany only attacked my destroyer in the Mediterranean and didn’t touch the cruiser and they pushed back in russia. They didn’t attack egypt.
for my american and UK turns in the game I decided I was gonna go KGR. I"ve never really played a KGR strategy against humans so I was sure how hard I was supposed to commit to that, but since I needed to make a decision I decided 100% should about do it. I bought transports and ground units and got ready to invade.
Japan made a lot of blunders, he followed my UK fleet to the Mediterranean cause he didn’t know he couldn’t pass through it. He took out pearl harbor and built more fleet, so I just retreated through the panama canal. Germany kept trying to push back russia but with terrible success. After a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG debate about whether or not I could place navy units in SZ3 (he didn’t want to take my word for it, and then he didn’t want to take the larry harris FAQ’s word for it) I brought all my american troops and UK troops to norway and landed all my planes there. When he took the bait and defended karellia, I said something to the effect of “REMEMBER THE ALAMO YOU NAZI BASTARDS” and then I rained hellfire down upon western europe. Japan spent an obscene amount of effort trying to control the canal for the mediterranian [and succeeded on round 4 (germany died shortly before hand also on round 4)] After taking Germany’s 40 IPC I had 90 to spend the next round and bought 90/6 submarines and japan surrendered.
so pretty much a shot for shot remake of WWII
thanks for the help guys, I look forward to playing a skilled player soon
edit: poor grammar
we should probably add food rules for the rest of the units too, more realism. Also pooping rules
first of all, I’m tired of the spam trying to get me to buy hat of shame ceremony tickets. If the ceremony isn’t real I’m probably only gonna get 5 or 6 more and that’s it.
second of all that makes sense, sounds like a server game would be much less complicated.
@ isnala: I imagine you win a disproportionate amount of games that way
I’m sure this question must have been asked and answered on this forum somewhere but I couldn’t find it when I searched.
From what I understand when you play TripleA via email or forums, you roll on the dice server and then choose appropriate casualties for the other side. This makes obvious sense if you have to choose between a tank or an infantry.
But let’s say you attack with 2 tanks into a territory that is defended by one bomber and one fighter. The dice server rolls 1 hit for you and 2 for the defenders. How do you choose the casualty for your enemy? Since a bomber is not simply an upgraded fighter you cant say that one is better than the other. Bombers attack on 4 and maybe they really want to continue their “fuck your IPC” campaign. Or maybe they feel they really need that fighter defense.
Maybe that example doesn’t pan out, but surely there must be SOME situation where a defender might have to make a decision on casualties
I like it, but i think a free shot at 6 ships on a 2 or less is a bit strong. Maybe 1 or less for ships?
Thank you to garg and bunnies. I’ll be sure to let you know how my game turns out
All that can be said as quickly as “Play for the money”.
Although I appreciate your simplification of my argument I’m not sure that’s an appropriate response to my thread. If I had come in here said, “Hey guys I have a question on this strategy… play for the money. Well what do you think?” I doubt I would have been taken seriously. I realize that my strategy focuses on an economic advantage. My specific question was about snowballing advantages and how it might work out against a human in the situation I described. I’ve read some of your other posts on these forums and I’ve seen that you seem to know what you’re talking about so if you have something specific you could tell me about what is good and bad about what I’ve proposed I’d love to hear it. (after posting and reading this back to myself I hope that didn’t come off as snide, that’s not how I meant it)
In response to Hobbes:
I hear what you’re saying. So my follow up question would be have you seen people play this passive style and to what success? If I started my strategy as described against a professional player what do you suppose their response would be? Even in my own description of my strategy you can see that I’m not quite sure myself of what to do with japan. If you believe this to be viable, what do you suppose I should do with japan and what should I expect from them in terms of initiative if I’m focusing on germany?
edit: added social disclaimer
So I’ve been playing A&A hard now for a couple weeks, mostly on tripleA against Moore N. Able (those knuckleheads). Today I’m going to be playing against a couple of my friends over the board. I have a strategy that works 100% against the computer (i know that’s not impressive or relevant) and I wanted to know how you guys thought it would fare against people.
To start when I analyze a strategy game (i played a lot of starcraft in the past) I try to break my strategy down and remove any words that could even tell me what game Im playing. I don’t see a mighty japanese navy coming down on me because those words might cause my brain to make decisions based on JAPAN. But japan doesn’t HAVE a mighty navy, because japan doesn’t exist, the only thing that exists is player number 4 who has units represented by 3 numbers, that are separated by my units by a difference in (x,y) coordinates.
Assuming we are all on equal footing at the beginning (from what I understand 1942 considered somewhat balanced without a bid) then my strategy should be to gain an advantage and exploit that advantage without allowing my opponents to gain progress in their desired strategy.
So basically what I do when I fight as the allies is I try to win a war of attrition. On the first round of play every faction starts with X number of IPCs. In the future rounds I want to make it so that axis are receiving X-Y IPCs and ALlies are receiving X+Y IPCs.
After I achieve that goal… turtle. I do this because of the idea of snowballing advantages. Assuming I can gather more territories than I started with and sit on them indefinitely, then eventually the IPCs will leave me with such an overwhelming numerical advantage that I can’t lose.
So you’re saying “no shit, sherlock, axis isn’t going to sit back and let you stall”. So my strategy has to do something that thwarts axis endeavors. With germany (against AI) this was the easiest thing to do in the world, I take western russia with ussr and then norway with UK (also karelia if I am able) and I attempt to hold off their push in afr. So how do I stop the axis from just spending their money and taking back the territories? WHen it’s my turn I just attack then for 1 or 2 rounds to take out their infantry and then retreat back into caucasus (or w/e I was attacking from) I leave my entire force in caucasus basically and then one infantry in the other territories. They never will be able to attack caucasus cause they can only attack from ukraine and have no infantry there. If they dont’ keep reinforcing it I’ll just attack and retreat again (but this time taking out much more expensive units) If they want to try their hand at west russia they will have to split up some units and I’ll just mow them over anyway. I do the same thing on the western front. I take western europe and just start piling bodies in there from america and UK, this forces them to stack forces in germany, meaning my stone wall in russia is about to become a stone wall with terminator legs.
Obviously this lets japan have some free will, and this might be where you guys tell me my strategy is a joke because against the AI i don’t think japan is taking advantage of it’s opportunity as much as it should.
However as germany gets held inside I should be able to determine the minimum amount of force to hold my european road block and use the extra to thwart japan.
So yea, it’s a war of attrition, and there really is no end part of the strategy except for “wait until you have an obscene numerical advantage and then just kill the capital”
So this strategy I kind of designed to hopefully ignore bad dice rolls by only attacking with overwhelming forces and removing his cannon fodder so that any attack he makes will be risky.
SO…
I apologize if my train of thought is hard to follow, I’m not always good at explaining what I’m thinking, but hopefully I got my point across and you guys can tell me if you think this could work, or if this is completely laughable and would only ever work against tripleA computer?
There need to be POW rules for Axis and Allies!
-POW’s can be targetted by SBR, they do not have built in AA support,
how do you sleep at night…
Also you mentioned an enemy choosing to give POWs in battle, this makes it less of a consequence of the dice and perhaps a viable strategy. If that’s the case then the other power should have the option of executing POW. And idk much about WWII history so if someone says “the allies are the good guys” i’d say “war is war play to win”
@Varn:
Based on your description, I have analyzed your situation carefully. I have identified your three options. You may be able to search this forum for articles that inform you which of these three is best for you given the exact situation:
1.) German prison/labor camp.
2.) Japanese prison/labor camp.
3.) Apologize heavily to the Germans. Agree to do more chores around the house. They may agree to let the Russians join the Axis, but only this once and only as a house rule.
Don’t take option number 1, I heard they got quite a bad rep around the historical period we’re talking about.
-USA builds IC in Brazil
-UK builds IC in eastern Canada
-Amass large land forces and transports with battleships and cruisers at both areas
-US moves troops to Africa(already occupied by US in my game)
-US invades Italy, with bombardment support
-On Uk’s turn, the combined canadian and UK forces, perhaps even extra forces from US, do a D-Day invasion on France, again with naval support
-Russian forces attack Germany
Could this work? Are there any major/minor flaws? I came up with this overnight and haven’t tested it so please tell me if this could work.
Well I’m still fairly new to the game but I’ll tell you what I think.
First of all I get confused sometimes on versions. I have the 1942 version but there is no italy, I’ve seen versions with italy, but to my knowledge 1942 wasnt’ one of them.
However, if this is your strategy for the version I am thinking of I think you could do the same thing but easier.
Building the IC’s in brazil and canada does not seem prudent to me. You’d need lots of transports, and if you need to have those transports anyway, I don’t think you could spend more IPC on ground units in Britain or Eastern US that you couldn’t just place them all in those territories and transport them from there. You can move 2 seazones from US to africa just as easily as you can move from brazil to africa (but you’d be closer to the combined allied navy) And with UK you don’t even have to move your transports, they can just chill out below britain and you can transport 10 units per turn. Furthermore with this setup I think you’d need a smaller atlantic navy than what you were proposing. As for invading itally, I don’t know if this is a version difference or if you mean bringing in transports and invading from where itally is located geographically on the board. In the version I"m talking about I think you’re better off just dropping all UK and US troops in Western europe to prevent them from taking it back.
Anytime you come up with a new strategy do not try to add anything to it. In fact see how much you can take away.
K
I
S
S
-guppers-
You can also play-by-forum here with TripleA.
that sounds great. I downloaded tripleA and I’ve been playing on it for about a week now with 1942 rules. I want to start playing against people but I wanted to get familiar with the computer first but that leads to some questions.
My first question is not so much to do with tripleA but bidding in general. The threads that I read on bidding seemed to be discussing revised rules so I don’t know if it’s relevant to 1942. From what I understood, a professional club game will have an average bid of 21-23 for the axis side. So that means in top level play the game is horridly unbalanced? Would it be ridiculous for two people who know what they’re doing to have a serious game w/o bidding.
My 2nd question regarding bidding is, let’s say axis gets the bid with 21. Does that mean that the axis side gets 21 ipc to do w/e they wish with or just germany? If they wanted to place a bb for japan instead would that be allowed?
And my 3rd question regarding bidding is how it applies to 1942. Was the game balanced since revised? Seems like it would be prudent for the game maker to design the game so it could be played OOB by pros w/o house rules. I’m trying to piece together the history of A&A by reading forum posts but it’s only been a week and I haven’t quite gotten it all yet, I seem to recall seeing something that said 1942 bids went in favor to allies, meaning the allied side would have the disadvantage and be placing preplaced units correct?
I have some questions about A&A also. I’ve been playing games as the allies first on medium AI then on Dynamix (I assume from context that it’s the hardest difficulty) Should I be giving the computer starting bid advantages to give myself a more realistic idea of what I’m going to go up against when I play a human?
One strange thing I noted about playing the computer is that when it was on medium it offered me some challenge, (it would punish me for leaving underpowered fleets in range of anything that could kill it or lone transports, and it would gobble up any territories I didn’t specifically reinforce). I got used to beating the computer on medium by focusing on germany and then pushing japan back out of asia. But when I switched to Dynamix using the same strategy and opening moves the computer played so passively it was ridiculous. Japan never once made a combat move the whole game (not even to take the northern asia territories that I backed off from to avoid shore bombardment). I wasn’t allowing germany to take any advantages on the eastern front, I would simply take west russia and then attack on that front until their infantry are dead and then retreat (my logic behind this is that they will never have enough fodder to justify attacking me). Apparently this strategy humbles the computer so much that germany can do nothing but curl up into a fetal position at their capital and make 40 infantry (also the radio japan and tell them to do the exact same thing).
Is this a bug in the tripleA AI or did my strategy of retreating exploit the AI into not being able to make any aggressive moves? Anyway, I play strategy games because I like to be challenged, and I thought I could get a little more out of AI games than what I did. Any suggestions?\
I’m so sorry for the wall of text, I hope someone will take the time to help me out though :)
Hey folks,
Have a quick question for you. I noticed that in PBEM games the attacker generally handles the casualty choices in combat for both players. However, in some cases, where multiple rounds of combat are involved, or in some tricky naval engagements, I can see that the defender would no doubt prefer the autonomy to make these important choices. How is this difficulty generally handled?
Best,
MIR
I had this exact same question so I searched the forums. I thought I’d bump this rather than start a new thread.
This seems like it could be a game losing factor in the naval battles he suggested. Perhaps an opponent might choose to lose his carrier so that the fighters can fight one more round and then crash into the ocean, or perhaps he wants the opposite. And what if you combat move into a submarine, how do you know if we wants to submerge it or sacrifice it and take down a ship.
Even if the answers to these examples are obvious and I"m not aware, maybe noone would ever in their life sac a sub or something. But surely there must be SOME situation where it is not appropriate for the attacker to choose casualties even if they do their best to remain unbiased.
Looks like I answered some of my own questions in the time since my last post. I said something to the effect of not seeing the A&A name on that game I downloaded then I stopped to think what triple A might stand for. And I figured out how to download any version of the game for it. Also Im pretty sure I was playing the A&A 1942 revised rule set.
So my new question is why the update from revised to 1942 revised. Did they feel it was more balanced with no tech and cheaper navy? Aand would they be considered the standard rules or the original revised rule set. the LHTR 2.0
Hey guys, first time poster here.
I noticed the last post was a year ago so I hope I’m not falling on deaf ears. I played A&A for the first time in 2003 probably and it was on the original game board and I had a lot of fun but didn’t get a chance to play it again until this last week. The board my friend had was different than the one I originally used and I read and understood the rules thoroughly. I thought we were using revised rules but I found some inconsistencies in the ones we used and the ones I found here (link removed cause I Didn’t realize I couldn’t post links, but I dont’ want to change all of my paragraphs, but these were the LHTR 2.0 I found on this forum)
Are these the “standard” rules that people would play in general tournaments? Because I’d like to get into this game so I’d want to learn on the most common rule set first before branching off.
I read the rules on that link thoroughly and although I dont’ have my friends instruction book anymore I remember what it said and there were a lot of differences, some very significant.
-there was no research at all
-AA guns only got to fire if they were being attacked (planes could pass over enemy AA safe from what I understood, so long as they didn’t attack)
-when you did strategic bombing it did damage points to the IC that limited production at that IC by the amount of damage points done. Up to twice the countries value.
-the naval stuff was WAAAAYYYY cheaper. subs cost 6, carriers 14, transports were 7
-transports had no attack or defense (free targets)
-cruisers existed and were 3/3 could automatically bombard coast
-destroyers completely nullified sub surprise fire (also destroyers were 2/2)
So I assume that is specific enough that you guys know what version I played. I know that versions exist like pacific and doomsday and what not, but Im pretty sure this wasn’t those, and I know that there are original and revised rules. but these dont’ match the revised rules I saw. So why so many rule sets? And do you recommend we play on my friends rule set or is there any reason we shouldn’t be able to adopt the rule set I linked by removing the cruisers and adjusting the costs/stats on navy and adding a research board. Are the piece setups different at beginning? they didn’t seem to be based on some videos I watched here (link removed)
So besides that stuff I’d also like to know where I could play A&A for free online, preferably against other people, but against computers too. I downloaded this (link removed, is called TripleA) but it doesn’t actually say A&A on there anywhere that I can find, and of all the game options they are for 6 people or more, I would expect only 5 if it was traditional A&A right?
Also when I start playing a game like this my learning curve is usually pretty high, if there are any resources you’re particularly fond of that have to do with A&A strategies, discussions, etc. I’d love to really plow straight through and take in as much as I can right away (as of writing this I have a dedicated firefox window with 13 A&A tabs)
I know this was a long post and I hope I’m not bothering anyone, but I look forward to learning what I can from the community