I have tried to look for some games of Europe 40 2nd Edition in the play by forum section, for assessing the most used BID amount, I am not able to found any.
A 6 IPCs BID for Allies, in OOB, is enough for having a better balanced game? Do I get it correctly? But for the 2nd Edition. It seems that Allies have the edge with the updated rules.
EDIT: post updated for clarification.
“Why are you moving those ACs next to my naval base?”
“ACs? Which ACs? They are luxurious liners with tourists on board”
“Mmm… and why there are three of them?”
“Never heard what happened to Titanic? We do not allow our liners going around alone…”
Just joking and not sure my joke is understandable (it id difficult for me to make a joke in English)!
My point is: in A&A it is impossible to move “secretly” units in order to place them for a surprise strike. Only way of modelling something like a surprise strike is allowing combat move to be made as the powers were still at peace and then… in the combat phase declaring the state of war starting to roll dice. Even so I believe it is really difficult to obtain a surprise.
Mmm… making war movement means you are at war… using Pacific 40 rules Yamamoto could have not done Pearl Harbour attack. This rules prevents surprise attack.
I am with you Sergente!
TripleA 1.1.1 unstable has been released, you can get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/triplea/files/
You may found the description here: http://triplea.sourceforge.net/mywiki/Forum#nabble-td4086205
You may download the maps from here: http://sites.google.com/site/tripleaerniebommel/home/mods/maps-for-triplea-1-1-1-0
Mmm really you can not abandon Island hopping, you have spent resources but you are also obtaining results. And if you are at turn 6 and Russia is still alive you may still turn the table.
I suppose that a good option is to focus on East Indies then, try to build a factory there and engage the Japanese forces, avoiding Japanese focusing on Russia.
The problem is that UK have to:
All this objectives may be out of reach for the british alone, so I would suggest focusing on the first two and try to stay alive with Russia, which may be the real problem in this scenario.
But, sincerely, I think that Pacific strategy with USA, though may bring to good results, is a long time strategy, maybe too long.
The problem of the Pacific Strategy is that USA is not helping directly Russia, because reduce Japanese rush to Moscow but Red Army is forced to face a stronger Germany, which may a have a more easy life against UK alone.
I prefer to go all in Atlantic with USA in the first turn, with the objective of winning the Battle of Atlantic, liberate Africa and starting to create problem in Europe.
I have no problem with the KGF and JTDM. It is only the high level objective of the game.
The important, and funny, things to do wth A&A are the logistic, the planning and the conduction of the combats.
Also Chess have only a way to win, checkmate the oppenent King, but there are numerous way for obtaining such objective!
Independently from being Allies or Axis the economic avantage may be leveraged to acheive victory, so, imho, operations in A&A must be planned in term of strategy but also economic factor should be considered.
The sudden broke out you mention maybe is the result of a constant Axis build up, possibile thanks to economic gaining.
In the specific situation, as alredy pointed out in preceding intervention the Allied objectives could be:
Both objective require dealing with Germans fleet that may interfere in the operations. This is the problem, because dealing with such fleets requires ships and aircrafts that are not directly useful on the ground in Africa and in Russia. so while USA and UK fight to gain control ofthe seas Germany and Japan may squeeze Russia and take Moscow.
The USA fleet island hopping, in this context, could be a wasting of resources.
I have played too few games and I agree with the fact that, at moment, I am still trying which strategies use with the Allies. I the games played, Axis won the majority of the games and the few games Allies won had seen some ugly rolling for Axis. Right now I am not using a bid, and I will start to consider a bid only when a soundly allied strategy will be found.
To me, it seems that the miniatures in AA42 have a better finishing. In my AA50 the miniatures are not so good. Russian an Japanese fighters are bend, ships of alla navies have molding problems. Maybe refreshed is intended in the sense they have re-modeled the “original” of each miniature.