Posts made by uffishbongo

Hi all,

Sorry if this question is asked/answered on another thread–I didn’t find it with a couple minutes of poking around and am too lazy to look farther than that. 

Is there a list somewhere of the difference between the Revised and Spring 1942 maps and initial setups?  It seems like the list is pretty short.  Here’s what I’m aware of so far on the map:
—SZ63 no longer borders WCA
—Iceland and Formosa are playable game spaces
And the setup:
—DD in SZ 35 is now a cruiser
—BB in SZ 13 is now a cruiser
—DD in SZ 50 is now a cruiser
—DD in SZ 10 is now a cruiser

It seems like it would be pretty easy to play a face-to-face 1942 game using a Revised board and pieces: just figure out some way to mark a cruiser, and disallow Wca landings from SZ 63, etc.

Fleetwood Dan: I absolutely agree, stacking Karelia on G1 can be a watershed moment for Germany, even a game-winner if it holds for the long run.  By the way, if suicidal British are a danger in the first round, you can always NCM a sub to SZ 3 to take that out of the equation.  In my mind, it’s well worth the loss of the sub and the reduced defense in SZ 5.  Long term is trickier, especially if you’re trying to hold it while also ramping up your defense in Western Europe; I’ve seen some very, very good players abandon Western Europe in order to hold onto the Karelia stack (and done it myself a few times).

In answer to the original post: It’s not too unusual to see the Axis equalizing the income by round 2-3, however, it’s often for a fleeting moment because the Allies can recapture Africa and may start to make gains in Europe.  Sometimes you can make a second income surge in round 5 or so, due to Japan hitting 50+ income while Germany holds the line at 35ish (assuming KGF, of course).

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that comparing the incomes at any one point in time isn’t the best way to assess the economic balance, because any territories that are getting constantly traded will only be counted for whoever owns them at the moment.  (So if you compare after your team’s turn, things will look better than they are, and if you compare after an opponent’s turn they’ll look worse.)  A more accurate index is to compare the total amount of money collected on each side over the last 5 turns.  That may sound tedious to add up, but since people generally don’t save too much, you can get a good estimate by comparing the cash on hand (unless there are a lot of SBR’s going on).

For those of you who don’t check the AA50 boards, there’s a discussion going on over there that’s relevant to AAR as well.  It appears that Hasbro is taking action to shut down TripleA, probably in the hopes that they will make more money from Game Table Online as a result.  See http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=14893.60

Sounds like it might work.  You could combine such a move with a pure air build…might be enough to make the Americans back off.

I would probably go for it in those circumstances…I don’t really have a lot of good guidelines though, just gut feelings.

Darth: I absolutely agree.  Everyone wants to push their stack east, but not everyone is willing to sacrifice WE to do it.  The “stack WE until they pry it from your cold dead fingers” approach that many follow (and that I myself used for a while) only gets you so far…there just aren’t enough inf to have your cake and eat it too.  Timing the abandonment of WE is, I think, a lot of the finesse of playing Germany well.  Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of expert players empty it on turn 3 or 4, and one world-class player I’m in a game with emptied it on G1!

Zhukov: At the risk of going off topic into a full discussion of G1 purchases (hey, the Revised boards are slow enough we should probably take any activity we can get, right?): I think one reason art are less popular on G1, besides that most people undervalue art anyway, is that you don’t need them for a while.  During the trading phase where you swap border territories with Russia, you have enough air power to just use inf and planes for the trading.  Art really only come into play when you want to push your stack up, or prevent them from pushing theirs, so you can probably afford to buy it turn 2 or 3.  Tank purchases on G1 immediately project power into the hot zones of Karelia and Ukraine.  For example, you can deter a Russian stack advance to Ukraine if that was a danger.  Or, if you stacked Karelia on G1, your tanks can help hold the line on G2 until your G1 inf purchase arrives on G3.  In the longer term, it’s good to have a decent number of tanks around, either to help defend WE as Darth recommends, or (after you abandon WE) to keep in EE where they can pressure Russia while simultaneously keeping WE deadzoned.  I do like to have some art in my German stack as well, but often get them G2 instead of G1.  Sometimes I go with 12 inf 1 art on G1 if I feel like playing a slower game.

Thanks for a great article, Darth!  I’ve been doing something similar to this as my “standard” German strategy, but haven’t ever laid it out quite this systematically.  I used to always aim toward a Ukr “Lurch” coordinated with a Japanese push to Persia, hoping for a 1-2 on Caucasus; I’d try to do this early (say round 5-6) before much UK/US help could get there.  Worked well much of the time, but often ended up depending on the dice in one major battle.  Later I came to prefer a Kar Lurch that was more focused on isolating Russia from the other Allies, and let Japan do most or all of the actual attack on Cau+Mos.  I’m still trying out new things, though.

It seems that if you ever do get to the point where you can safely stack Wru (and, on the other side, if Japan can safely stack Kaz) then the Russians will probably have to abandon Cau to save Mos.  When things get to that point you’re usually very close to victory, unless the Allies are pouring tons of units through Arch or something.

Lots here to digest and ponder.  I hope people see this; it could seriously raise the general level of Revised play on the site!

Yeah, that may not have come out very clearly in the article; I wasn’t trying to recommend type 1 KJF; I was trying not to comment on it one way or the other (because I feel I have insufficient data).  A more complete breakdown of the different types of KJF I’ve seen would be as follows:
(1) Go whole hog against Japan, from the start, with everybody.
(2) Go against Japan from the start, but only with the US Navy.
(3) Go against Japan (either US Navy only, or with other assistance) in response to dice and/or opponent mistakes.

The purpose of the article was to make the case that (2) is a bad idea.  In my mind the jury is still out on (1); at best it’s very difficult, but it’s possible I just haven’t honed it enough.  I think (3) can be usable.  Although, as you say, I’ve been suckered into (3) when I shouldn’t have.  I wouldn’t do (3) just because Japan skipped Pearl; in that case they still have all 4 capital ships and all or most of their air, i.e. they’re still an absolute beast.  I might go for it if they went to Pearl and left the BB and CV open to counterattack, although even then I’d be reluctant if there weren’t other things going my way too.

There are two kinds of KJF’s in the world: those that start that way, and those that switch to it.  I was referring to the first.  If you decide at the beginning of the game “hey, I want to go KJF this game,” then it’s very, very difficult to make it work unless you go all in.  This means things like stacking Buryatia with 6 inf on R1, moving 2 inf into Sinkiang, and basing fighters in Kazakh to up the threat to Manchuria; building an India complex UK1; consolidating UK fleet in SZ 30, or taking Borneo, on UK 1; and either building a Sinkiang IC and spending the rest of America’s paycheck in the Pacific, or skipping Sin and going full bore on the boats.  If you only do one or two of these, Japan can easily squash them, but with all together it can be too much for them to handle.

I should add the disclaimer that I’ve never successfully won a game this way, nor has anyone beaten me with this tactic.  I know some players have been able to make it work, but it’s awfully difficult.  You can contain Japan’s Asia expansion, but sinking their navy tends to take a while (unless they defend poorly), and Russia just can’t hold out long enough against a good German player without American assistance (and with only half-hearted UK assistance if they build the India factory).

The second kind of KJF is the only one I use myself.  Sometimes Japan gets hosed by the dice on J1; this often happens, for example, if they try to take on too many naval battles at once (e.g. retaking Borneo while still going after Pearl).  Sometimes they go Pearl heavy and don’t come out with a strong enough fleet to survive counterattack.  Etc.  When the dice or opponents’ mistakes give you an opening, you can go KJF to exploit it.

In this aspect I think it’s similar (though in a less extreme way) to KAF.  I used to think KAF was completely impossible, but two of my league losses last year were to KAF strategies!  (Funcioneta and U-505 both beat me this way.)  The thing about KAF is that you can’t do it right away, but if you build up enough transports, have some ground troops in or near Bry, and the USA doesn’t have a lot of ground forces in North America, then you can suddenly switch to KAF and take them by surprise.

In short, my opinion is that you pretty much do have to start every game KGF, and keep your eyes open for the possibility of switching.  This might seem like a bummer, but I think it’s actually kind of fun; learning to recognize what combinations of circumstances provide openings for things like KJF, KAF, or other “non-standard” tactics is an important part of advanced play.

Hate to compromise my deity status, but JWW is giving me quite the schooling in the league this year…he beat me in 5 rounds our first game, and 4 rounds into the second things are looking hopeless.  I managed to beat him a couple times last year, but I had to work for it–he’s hardly breaking a sweat!  Now if we could just get him to write some strategy articles. 

This post is about the concept of a transport “overbuild”, by which I mean building more transports than you need to maintain a steady flow of ground troops to your destination.  Such an overbuild can be extremely valuable, for reasons to be outlined below.

First, though, a little background.  With island nations, the number of troops you can move to the front lines is often limited by your factory.  This suggests a natural limit on how many transports you need.  In particular, the UK is limited to 8 units per turn, even though it may have money for more if Africa is in Allied hands.  This seems to imply that 4 transports is as many as UK can use.  Similarly, Japan’s production in its capital is limited to 8/turn; though you will likely build a factory or two on the mainland, you don’t need transports for those, so again it seems that 4 is the most you need.

However, building an extra transport or two can be very helpful.  Consider a few reasons why:
–-For the UK:
------Fleet defense.  Transports provide fodder if you’re attacked by enemy air, and also make it so they have to kill more before they actually damage your shipping capacity.  If you have 6 transports plus your battleship plus the Russian sub plus an American destroyer or two, you can hold off the Luftwaffe without buying a carrier.
------Force projection.  This is the crucial reason to overbuild with the UK.  Even if you can only ship 8 ground units per turn to the mainland, you can also pick up and move some of last turn’s units.  Say you’re typically shipping units into Karelia and then moving them from there.  If you have 6 transports, you’re threatening to pick up 4 units from Karelia plus the 8 new ones from UK, and drop all 12 on your target.  The key thing to consider here is that adding to your offensive capacity threatens all targets at once!  Typically Germany is trying to defend 3 stacks (for example, Weu, Berlin, and Eeu or Berlin, Eeu, and Kar), possibly even 4.  If you increase your attack threat by 1 transport, i.e. 2 ground units, then in order for the defense to keep pace they need to add 2 units to all of their stacks.  You build your threat by 2 units, they have to increase their defense by 6!  Talk about leverage!  Now, you might think that this implies you should just keep building transports sky-high: why not have 15, with a pile of 30 ground units threatening the whole coastline?  The thing is that you want to be using your ground troops at the same time that you’re threatening the coastline with them.  So you keep a stream moving into Europe, and only need an overbuild that can move the “leftovers” from last turn.  In practice, I’ve found that 6 is about as much as I can use with the UK.
–----If you move the Australian transport to the Atlantic, it can join your fleet on turn 4 (though it may actually be turn 5; arriving on turn 4 requires stopping in SZ 12 on turn 3, when there may not be other Allied ships there, so you may need to detour around German air threats).  This is plenty early enough as it will take that long to have your main transports in place and your ground troops built up to where you can use an overbuild.  So you get one of your overbuilt transports for free.  Since you start with two, that means you should build 3 transports.  UK is the most variable nation in its opening turns, I think, so I won’t even attempt to prescribe when to build those 3.  But in general it’s a good pattern to get up to 5 tran fairly early, and 6 when the Australian joins you.

—For Japan:
------Here the main reason to get extra transports is so you can get the infantry off those remote islands and/or take things like Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Madagascar.  Again, 1-2 extra transports is probably enough.
-----Another possible reason to get extra is if you want to really emphasize the southern route (Fic/India/Persia).  If you have 4 transports then you can put 4 units/turn into the south and 4/turn into the north (Manchuria or Buryatia).  If you had 6 transports then you can rearrange this to 6/turn in the south and 2 in the north; depending on the strategic circumstances, this may be desirable.  (I generally like to emphasize the southern route, but find that dual complexes in Fic and India are enough.)
------Extra transports allow you to get into Africa and the Middle East.  You have to anticipate demand here.  If you only build up to 4 transports, a turn will come when you want to use the transports in SZ 36 to hit Africa, and suddenly you have a hiccup in your flow of troops to the mainland because those transports were supposed to be shipping new guys across.  So make sure to get some extra transports before you make any forays into Africa.

—For the US:
------Unlike Japan and UK, factory production isn’t really a limitation; WUS and EUS together can make 22 units a turn.  Instead, you’re limited by your income, which is usually around 38-40 at least for a while.
------Other threads (most recently http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=14315.0) talk more about US shipping options.  I’ll just mention one where an overbuild can be useful.  One US approach is to shuck units into UK, and then have a second fleet follow the UK into the Baltic and move units into Europe.  In this case, it can be worth having an extra transport in the Baltic fleet.  So if you have a 4x4 shuck going, adding a 5th transport to the Baltic can be worth your time; with a 5x5, consider adding a 6th.  The main reason is the force projection mentioned above in the UK section.  Unlike the UK, however, it takes a while to get an extra transport to the Baltic, so it’s not quite as useful for the US.

Concluding thoughts: I wouldn’t consider going over 4 transports with Japan to be a “true” overbuild, since those transports are being used in different areas from the 4 baseline ones.  The UK overbuild is the one I want to emphasize and to recommend the most heartily.  When I’m playing Germany, few things make me more uncomfortable than a 5th and 6th British transport!

Just for completeness, I thought I’d mention one more US shipping option, even though I personally don’t use it anymore.  You can have fleets in SZ 1 and SZ 3 swapping places every turn, bringing 8 units/turn into Norway.  From there they walk to Karelia and then all over Europe.  The advantage of this method is that, as with the Med, you have the threat of a double strike (8 transports) against Western Europe.  However, there are significant drawbacks: It reduces the pressure on the rest of the coastline (Berlin, Eastern Europe) as compared to shipping in the Baltic, and the fleet defense could become more of an issue again since your fleet is separated from the UK’s.  The fleet defense is not as much of an issue as with the Med strat, though.  I mostly abandoned this method because I like to directly pressure Berlin and Eeu, but if you like the threat of a Weu double strike enough then this is another option.

77–

When I play the Med, that’s usually how I do it; shuck into Algeria, walk to Libya, and shuck to Weu/Seu/Blk/Ukr/Cau/Trj.  Generally, though, I find myself wanting to hit several of those targets, usually ones in distinct sea zones.  So you may need to defend fleet in 3 areas: SZ 12, and two of the others (say you go to Southern Europe and Ukraine, then you need to defend SZ 14 and SZ 16).  You have the battleship and two DD’s to start, and you can take the Russian sub for extra fodder.  One CV may or may not be enough to cover it the rest of the way, depending on how much air Germany has and where they put them.

One other thing that’s nice about the Med strategy is it threatens a double-power strike against Weu.  If you take the aforementioned approach (shuck to Alg, walk to Lib, shuck from there) then you could on a given turn shuck everyone from Lib to Weu, and use your SZ 12 fleet to shuck from Alg to Weu.  This disrupts your supply chain severely, as you won’t be bringing any more units across the Atlantic for 2 whole turns.  However, as a one-time attack it can be quite effective, especially when following up a UK raid on Weu.  The threat of 4+ UK transports hitting Weu followed by 8 American transports, both supported by air and battleships, is pretty daunting.  If things get to the point where you even have that threat the Germans are likely to abandon Weu–which simplifies your fleet-defense situation since SZ 12 is no longer under threat.

Hey macphearsome,

77stranger77 already covered much of what I’ll say, but I want to go into a little more detail on the transport logistics.  Before I do, though, I will re-echo the point that going after Japan is in general much harder than going after Germany–I would only send the US Navy after Japan if there were specific game circumstances that opened up that possibility (i.e. Japan gets really screwed by dice, or makes some really bad decisions).  Also, if you do KGF well then you don’t actually need to worry too hard about stopping Japan.  You can slow them initially with the UK (as in 77’s recommendations), but by the time they are a serious threat to the Russians you should already be pushing Germany back and also have Allied troops available to reinforce Russia where needed.  Also, remember that if Berlin and Moscow both fall then it is almost always an Allied victory, so as long as you kill Germany you can afford to lose Moscow–though you’d rather not, of course!

The USA is the country whose strategy is most heavily about logistics, because of the need to cross the wide ocean.  Technically, there is one place on the map where you can still cross the Atlantic in one move–SZ 9 to SZ 12–so you can still do an old-school AA Classic shuck into Africa.  I actually lost a game once to a guy who did just that…shucked troops into Algeria, then had them trudge all the way across Africa to Trans-Jordan and then into Caucasus to join the action.  He got some help from the dice, though.  I wouldn’t recommend that approach as it’s far too inflexible and the supply lines are just ridiculously long.

What that means is that you’ll need two transport fleets and two shucks.  The basic (and best, IMHO) method is to shuck troops into UK using a fleet that bounces between SZ 8 and 9 (or 8 and 1, or 2 and 1–some flexibility there), and then do a second shuck into Europe, either Norway via SZ 6, or Karelia/Eastern Europe via SZ 5, or Karelia and Archangel via SZ 4.  The second fleet will generally follow the UK around so that you don’t have to buy a second set of fleet defense to protect from the German air.  You can either set up a 4x4 shuck (meaning 4 transports in each fleet), which can move 8 ground units per turn, or a 5x5 to move 10 ground troops.  I usually go with a 4x4 so that I can get more air, but 5x5 is quite strong and I’m thinking about switching to it.

For a 4x4 shuck the soonest you can get the whole system up and running–meaning you’ve reached the “steady state” situation where all the pipelines are in place and you’re just turning the crank each turn–is turn 5.  That’s assuming you don’t buy any ships other than transports and that you don’t divert more than a couple troops to the west coast to ward off potential Japanese invasions, so in actuality it may be turn 6.  You will be landing some partial loads before that, but it will take that long for the US to hit its stride.

A lot of the US logistics is about how much of your money to spend on transports and how much to spend on ground troops.  If you buy all your transports up front then it will take a while to get any ground troops moving at all.  On the other hand, if you get too many ground troops too soon then you won’t have transports to carry them.  I did the math once and the solution I came up with is a 2/1/1/1 transport buy–meaning you buy 2 transports on turn 1, and 1 transport on each of the next 3 turns, and spend the rest on ground troops each time.  (This is assuming you send the transport from SZ 55 to the east so that it shows up on turn 2 as if it were a free build.)  This way your ground troops will keep pace with the transport chain as the latter is being established, so that you can land some partial loads while you’re getting the infrastructure in place.  You may have to deviate from this for specific game circumstances, but the basic rule to keep in mind is that if you’re buying a transport on turn X, you need to start buying ground troops for that transport on turn X-1.  If you only start buying the ground troops on turn X then after it shucks to SZ 8 on turn X+1 there won’t be anybody in Canada for it to pick up on turn X+2.

There is an alternative US strategy that focuses on the Mediterranean instead of following the UK around the north.  This has some advantages: It allows you to directly funnel troops into Caucasus, which is in many ways the most critical territory on the map; it puts more territories into play (specifically Seu and Blk), which raises your paycheck and drains Germany’s troops as they have to trade more; it often forces Germany to abandon France in order to stack Italy, or to trade Italy heavy and thus drain their troops that way; etc.  On the other hand, it requires USA to purchase more fleet defense, at least one carrier and possibly more, since you have to defend at least 2 and sometimes 3 fleets without UK help, and it doesn’t allow you to triple-stack Eastern Europe.  (In the first strategy, the critical turning point is when the Allies can all team up to stack Eastern Europe with a stack that Germany is unable to kill.  After this point Germany loses the income for all the territories east of that, and things quickly spiral downhill from there.)  It becomes harder to actually advance on Berlin since the Allies aren’t working as closely in concert.  For these reasons I recommend the first strategy (following the UK around), especially if you’re relatively new to Revised.

A word about France: Generally the way to crack France is with a two-wave assault, with the UK attack weakening it and the American attack capturing it.  This may require the UK to sacrifice a couple planes, but you generally kill some defending German planes so that it balances out.  Once the fleets are in place the UK and US will both be threatening France with 8 ground troops (more if you overbuild transports, which the UK should definitely do by one or two–but that’s another post) plus a battleship plus several planes.  In order to withstand that the Germans will need something like 15 inf plus several fighters on defense.  If they put that much in France, don’t attack it; just consider your mission accomplished.  A stack that heavy in France should enable the Allies to take control of the eastern front, after which you can reinforce Russia as needed and start to press against Berlin from the east.

There is a Caspian Sub policy paper that covers a lot of these concepts about Allied shipping options.  Unfortunately Caspian Sub is no longer active, but I’d be happy to email the paper to you (or anyone else reading the forum); just send me a PM.  (For those who don’t know, Caspian Sub was a Yahoo group devoted to A&A Revised strategy; in addition to the email discussions, they published a number of “policy papers” with in-depth analysis of various topics.)

@bb82:

I don’t think it is that much of a paradox. It makes sense.

Maybe that’s just because I explained it so well! 

Of course, “paradox” isn’t technically correct…more like “initially counterintuitive phenomenon that makes sense when you think about it.” 

The paradox referred to in my rather grandiose-sounding title is this: The ability to conduct offense in A&A is often based on the defensive power of your units; conversely, the ability to defend yourself is often based on the offensive power of your units.

The reason behind this is the way that stack warfare tends to proceed.  Typically on a given front there will be two stacks staring each other down (e.g. in Eeu and Wru), until one stack becomes strong enough to advance deeper into enemy territory.  If you’re waging an offensive campaign, your objective is to advance your armies into enemy territory.  Whether you can safely do so is based on whether your army is likely to survive an attack from the enemy, i.e. on your defensive power.

Conversely, in a defensive war you want to keep the opponent at bay, to prevent him from advancing farther into your territory.  Your ability to do this is based on the attack power of your units.  This is a result of a front being several territories wide; if there were a single string of territories leading from your base to his, you could just create a mountain of infantry on one of the territories, but the fronts are always wide enough for the attacker to maneuver around a single monolithic stack.  So you need attack power to keep him at bay.

Ironically, this means that the fact that defense is cheaper than offense can actually become an advantage for the attacker much of the time!  (Though it is often offset by the lengthening of supply lines that accompanies any push deeper into enemy territory.)  If you can identify a border territory that the enemy just can’t afford for you to stack, you can start pushing piles of infantry toward it and watch them sweat as they have to spend more than you to be able to kill those infantry.

This simple yet deep phenomenon–that defense requires offensive power, and offense requires defensive power–is partially responsible, I think, for some poor purchasing strategies that are common among less experienced players.  A lot of Russians make the mistake of buying pure infantry, or nearly so.  They reason that Russia is a defensive country and hence needs to buy as much defense as it can.  The flaw in their reasoning becomes apparent when a large German stack makes camp in Wru, the Russians have nothing to attack with besides infantry, and they’re forced to abandon Caucasus in order to save Moscow for a couple rounds longer.

Conversely, many Axis players make the mistake of buying too many tanks.  With Japan one can get away with this better, because your paycheck is so flippin’ huge, but with Germany this can be deadly as it leaves your unit count too low and your armies are unable to hold the line against Russian counterattacks (let alone UK and US attacks).  Of course, tanks do have other advantages too–the long supply lines become less of a problem–but without infantry to accompany them it is difficult to make much headway against a good player.  Even when playing a very aggressive Germany I will usually do two turns of nearly pure infantry builds before switching to tank production.

It’s been a while since I played the TripleA AI, so I’m not sure what strategies it’s using to beat you (I’ll assume a fairly traditional KGF…)

Don’t be too concerned if you’re behind in TUV.  I’ve won a ton of games as the Axis where I was behind in TUV right up until I took Moscow.  Position is more important.  If you’ve managed to equalize the production, that generally means you’re doing well even if your TUV is behind.

A few miscellaneous thoughts:
—Use the battle calculator often to make sure that Allied attacks on Germany, Western Europe, etc aren’t likely to win.
—Get mostly inf with Germany.  Assuming the computer does indeed go KGF, Germany will ultimately be on the defensive.  You may play a fairly aggressive defense, pushing against Russia, but you won’t be able to actually take out Russia with Germany alone in KGF.
—Try to keep most of your units in stacks where they’re hard to kill.  On the eastern front, you have two basic options: Stack Karelia, or stack Eastern Europe.  The former is more aggressive and will increase your income, but the latter is safer.  I generally stack Kar when I can and Eeu when I must.  Use inf and fighters to trade border territories with Russia.  You have a bigger air force, so you should have an advantage in the attrition war.
—Don’t spend any money on German navy.  Some people like a carrier on G1, or an extra tran in the Med, but try going without any naval purchases.  Don’t spend much on air either (ideally, none).
—With Japan, I usually prefer to build the first factory in FIC rather than Man.  It’s closer to the front line (3 spaces from Cau) and better positioned to get you into Africa if needed or to participate in the Pacific if needed.  You should eventually get up to 5-6 tran and 2 mainland factories with Japan; it’s generally pretty easy to get your income in the mid to high 40’s and then you can be pumping 12-14 ground units into Asia each turn.  Russia can’t hold up against that for very long.
—It’s worth experimenting with ways to get the Japanese navy into the Atlantic (again, assuming KGF) in order to disrupt the Allied supply lines and ease the pressure on Germany.  One way is to go through the Suez, which requires some teamwork since Germany must open the canal for Japan to go through.  Another way is to send part of your fleet west around Africa and part east around South America.

Good luck!

I can’t speak for the CSub folks, and I’d be interested to hear what approach predominated for them, but personally, whether I send 2 or 3 tanks to Ukr is the sort of fine-tuning that depends on how aggressive I feel on a given day, what I know about my opponent, which way the wind is blowing, etc. 

@Craig:

I never do the Ukraine attack.  I don’t feel comfortable with my USSR disposition after that, win or lose.

Of course, the flip side of that is, I get very happy when I’m playing Germany and the USSR leaves Ukraine alone!  I’m sure you feel stronger as Russia, but Germany is stronger too.  Who gets the better end of the tradeoff is a judgment call, of course.

I agree with Zhukov and Darth.

To echo Zhukov’s point, you’d rather be attacking (or threatening to attack) Japan then having them attack you.  Typically in the first 3-4 rounds at least, Japan has a very thin infantry front with a crapload of planes behind them.  If you trade their front-line territories you can slow them down a round, but if you put your forces where they can attack you then you’d better be able to survive against their air force.

Typically I’ll retreat my forces along the top (Bry/Yak/Nov/Mos) route, and ideally try to find one turn in their to stand still.  For example, if you retreat to Yak the first turn, you may be able to stay in Yak for one turn before you have to pull out (depending on how they do J1).  It’s all about finding a few well-chosen stands to make to slow things down.

Darth’s advice about using the two American inf is excellent.  With air support they can clear two whole territories.  UK inf similarly if a couple survived.

One other thing, if you accumulate some tanks in Moscow then they can be useful on both fronts.  They can contribute to making deadzones out of both Sin/Yak on the eastern front, and Ukr/Kar on the western front.  So the same units can be preventing both Germany and Japan from advancing their stacks.  Of course planes can do the same, but you generally can’t afford them.  Anyway, one thing that can help keep a buffer against Japan is having some tanks in Moscow–say, 5-8 if you can get them–and a handful of inf in Nov.  This should buy you at least a couple turns in which Yak and Sin are traded rather than defended by the Japanese.

However, in KGF defense against Japan is secondary.  I’ve lost a number of Axis games against opponents who did squat to stop Japan.  Remember that if both Moscow and Berlin fall it’s almost always an Allied victory.  I’d be more concerned right away with your Allied game against Germany.  The three errors you mentioned are all worth correcting, especially (2) and (3).  There are a number of ways to set up the transport system (US can focus on the Mediterranean or follow the UK into the Baltic; UK can operate in the Baltic or go north to SZ 4 and drop troops in Arch; etc) but getting an efficient transport chain set up is the single most important component of an Allied KGF game.

Just want to throw some mad props your way, Mazer/marvinmartian (and the rest of the editors’ too).  CSub was in many ways my ideal A&A group.  It had easily the highest level of A&A strategy analysis I’ve seen.  I don’t want to knock this site–obviously I like it enough to be pretty active here!–but most of the forum threads are rules questions or superficial discussions, and truly in-depth analysis is rare.  I suspect the same is true of most other strategy forum sites.  By devoting itself to serious strategy discussion, CSub claimed a unique and extremely valuable niche in the A&A world.  I miss it!

@RogertheShrubber:

I live in Chicago, but I hail from the great state of Iowa where my heart still resides.  Go Hawkeyes!

+1 karma for a fellow Hawkeye!

The one involving Archangel says there must be “no other Allied forces…”

This is probably a stupid question, but does that include AA guns?  I’m so used to retreating the British gun to Caucasus and now I may have knocked out 5 of my own IPC’s by doing so.  :x

This thread appears to be long dead, but I never get tired of math questions! 

To answer the original question: The statistics of when a bomber gets shot down are determined by something called the geometric distribution, which you can find plenty of info about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution.  The geometric distribution describes the first occurrence of an event when you make repeated, independent trials.  For example, the number of times you have to flip a coin before getting heads; the number of times you have to be dealt a poker hand before getting a royal flush; and the number of times you have to roll a die before getting a 1 are all described by geometric distributions.  Once you know the probability of success in a single event, the geometric distribution tells you how long you have to wait before seeing the first success.

Some of the information for the geometric distribution:
–-The probability of getting your first success (in our example “success” is the bomber getting shot down!) on the nth turn is (1/6)*(5/6)^(n-1).  This is because, in order to be shot down on the nth turn, the bomber must first survive the preceding n-1 turns, which has a probability of (5/6)^(n-1), and must then be shot down on turn n, which has a probability of 1/6.
–-The probability of getting your first success by the nth turn is 1 - (5/6)^n.  This is just 1 minus the probability of the bomber surviving the first n turns.  (It’s also the sum of the probabilities of getting shot down on turn 1, 2, …, up to n, but that’s the long way to do it!)

Given this, a number of other facts can be calculated (I’ll spare you the details…)  The question “When will the bomber, statistically speaking, be shot down?” has three different answers: the mean, median, and mode.  Here’s what each of those is:
—The mode is the single turn on which the bomber is most likely to be shot down.  This may be surprising, but it’s the very first turn!  The probability of getting shot down is the same (1/6) on all turns, provided the bomber makes it to that turn , but first it must survive all the turns before it.  Hence, the first turn is the most likely turn-of-death since the bomber doesn’t have to survive any prior turns in order to reach it.
–-The median is the first turn for which the bomber has a 50% chance of getting shot down before it.  This is the fourth turn, because the probability of getting shot down on one of the first four turns is 52% whereas the probability of surviving the first four turns is 48%.  So it’s about 50-50 whether the bomber survives at least 4 turns.
–-The mean , also known as the expected value, is the average number of turns that the bomber will survive.  This is 6 turns.  It turns out that you can actually calculate this by taking the reciprocal of the 1/6 probability of getting shot down on a given turn, although the reason why that works is slightly less obvious than it might seem.

So, which of the mean, median, and mode is the most useful?  When should we expect to lose the bomber?  Well, the mode is the least useful for answering this sort of question.  One can make a case for either the mean or the median, but for the types of calculation that people usually have in mind, the mean is the way to go.  For example, if you’re trying to figure out the average amount of economic damage inflicted minus damage received from each bombing raid, then the statistic you want is the average, aka the mean.

Of course, the question of whether bombing raids are worth doing involves a lot more than calculating the average IPC’s lost and destroyed.  My test: If you want to decide whether bombing a given country with your country is useful, ask yourself, “Would I destroy $10 of mine if I also got to destroy $10 of theirs?”  If the answer is “Heck yes!” then SBR’s are useful.  For example, Japan bombing Russia generally makes sense, as does US or UK bombing Germany.  A weaker power bombing a stronger power is usually not so smart.

I’d be honored!  And yes, this is about Revised.

Let me know if you want me to edit or rewrite any sections before posting on the main site.