This is an interesting board, lots of ideas and thinking on what to do G1, R2, naval units, fighters,
KJF, KGF, art+inf or inf+tank, etc. etc. etc……
I have come to some conclusions about A&A.
When I play A&A, I usually play in the tripleA lobby.
And there are lots of good players, but also lots of not-so-god-players :roll:
I’ve been reading many posts here, and many of you have a very good understanding of gameplay and strats in
A&A. But there is something I’ve never seen discussed or mentioned yet.
Skills, abillity, intelligence (!), I don’t know excactly how to name these “traits”.
What determines good players, or should I say really good players, is nothing about buying AC G1,
1-2 ftrs with Russia, UK+US --> Algeria rnd 1, 1 or 2 IC J1, pearl or not pearl, etc.
All these things matters, but these issues has almost nothing to do with how good a player is!
I have identified 6-8 different matters or issues which determines how often a player wins, and on what level
that person has reached with his/her gameplay.
In chess, I can name 2-3 different ways of thinking, or abillities that determines good from mediocre players.
Most of the methods/tactics are probably well known among you, but I have never seen it mentioned in discussions yet. Some of you think that AC G1 is crucial, or you used to before…
Some is certain that if you don’t do pearl, then US will come after Jap and kill her…
This is not what determines who wins or who lose.
So why Am I not the best player around???
Because it’s way easier to analyze and think theoretically about this stuff than to actually move all those units on the gameboard so your opponents never gets any opportunity to gain enough advantages to win.
Any other of you have many moments during games where you think: “ohh!, I made mistake!!”?
I can see all my bad moves after I made them, unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to see what is bad or clever moves before I make my decisions, but if, or when this happens, I will beat all of you :evil:
If an A&A AI had all these “special” traits, then even the best players would lose games to the AI :mrgreen:
There is a lot of things that make a player a great one.
IMHO, Experience is a huge one. If you’ve seen the standard KGF moves, you know what’s best as Germany/Japan (in your eys) to beat it. I am speaking very generally there.
Lots of people feel LUCK has alot to do with this game.
Check out this thread for an interesting discussion:
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=8840.0
There is no denying the best strategy can not overcome poor dice.
Conversely, excellent dice may be all a poor strategy needs to win.
Nice topic.
I’m not sure if this is THE most important thing in A&A, but the first one on my list is:
Buying.
Some units are better than others, and different powers need different units and different strats means
some units will be more used than others.
Example is DD. You don’t lose a game if you buy a DD, but for fleet protection AC+ftrs is best buy.
For attacking enemy naval units it’s subs and ftrs.
I do not know the order of importance, and I will not try to order them. I consider them roughly equals.
Agreeing with Lucifer I consider buying am important factor. What I can do is related to what I buy, and I will buy after the current turn. Moreover buying is related to the IPC I make and the IPC I think that I will earn. Buyng unit you can not afford is hampering for your srategy. Buying unit that do not help you in delivering your punch where is it needed is also bd.
I think that Logistic is important. Having a costant flow of units going to the front is fundamental. Battle are fougth every turn, losses have to be replaced. Units to replace losses had to be buyed (see preceding point) and sent to the froint timely (before the losses reqiures their presence)
Tactic and mechanic is important. I mean here the operative possibility of the units. Knowing them helps in better positioning and better using of them. For example: German Fighter in WE and EE may help in trading territories on the russian front (Karelia, Belorussia, Ukraina) and then come back switching their position (those from WE land in EE and those from EE land in WE) ready to defend those terriotories in the remain of the round. Blocking a fleet with a lone TRN may allow for saving a territories from an invsasion.
Probabilities evaluation. Math! I think that making calculations about attack and defensive strenght may help a lot in taking soundly decision. Probabilities may help in taking decision.
Luck. Being A&A a chaotic system slightly difference in the outcome of the battles in the initial rounds will determine completely different evolution of the game. Butterfly effect.
Imagination. Being creative may disorientate our “usual” opponents. If the way in wich games are conducted is similar then yo uare predictable and this may create problems.
I do not know how to define this in englis. In italian we say “colpo d’occhio”, i.e. the ability to see at first look the situation being pushed towards a decision. Is something bounded to intuition. Sometimes, happend to me that I see an opportunity on the board only after I finished my combat, and so I can not exploit it.
Concentration. A&A turn is fought with a particular sequence (buying, moving, combat, NCM, deploying). The final situation of our army on the board is the result of all this phases. Being able to “predict” the final configuration is hard and require evaluation of probabilistic outcome, movement, missed possibility and exploited ones. It helps a lot.
Experience. The more I play the more I am aware of when I am making a mistake, when I make a weak move, when I make a strong move. Moreover I am able to see errors of my opponent that I can not see in my firts game and I am also starting to be able to exploiting them.
A good A&A player should have good in this features. The more features he is able the more he is good at the game.
I have not mentioned Strategy. Why? Because it is the sum of this concrete skills and of our abstract idea of how we would like “to win” the game.
Romulus, you mentioned several factors on my “list”.
First, luck is irrellevant because I meant only those things that humans can intefere with.
And logistics are very important too, but in my observations on gameplay variations between different players, I
include only the thinking and decision making that lies behind different moves and actions in a game.
Tactics.
Very important. I.e. blocking naval units, blocking the G stack of 20/10 tanks/inf with 1 inf in WRU….
Probabilities evaluation. I would not use such words, but english is not my first language.
I would say judgement, it’s the same thing anyway.
In tripleA you can use the battlecalc. I’m not using it often, but when stacks are getting big there’s too large numbers
for my brain to figure out the outcome of a possible attack. You have to know if your enemy can take WE or Caucus.
In reg dice games this is tricky, if the battlecalc says 51%…will your forces be attacked…?
Concentration. This is one of the most important issues for newbies. Like me.
If you’re attacking Berlin with everything UK has got, then you certainly lose your planes if you know for certain that you will take the capital.
But if you forget for a second that it’s Berlin and not WE, in WE you always retreat planes if your not taking it, or
you got crappy dice. And you always choose tanks or inf as casualities instead of ftrs.
Not so if you’re knocking on the door to Hitlers bunker.
Sometimes I even forget to move stuff from NY to Canada, or from Canada to UK/Algeria.
AA guns, probably not the most important detail, but if you move them around instead of giving them to your
opponent, he might lose some ftrs, and you might save some.
About experience, better to have than to have not, but not all players learn from experience…and many
don’t learn what decisions that causes either axis or allies to lose.
I wouldn’t consider experience a skill on its own, it’s rather experience that may cause some players to posess more
skill in several ways, than other players.
On my list there is also, overview. Visual “intelligence”. May overlap with concentration, but the difference is that
when lacking concentration skills you are forgetting things that you have planned to do.
When not noticing that G can strike your UK fleet with 1 AC, 2 subs, DD+trans, 6 ftrs + bmr, then this is lack of
overview, or not looking at the map at all. This may not happen often in boardgames, but in tripleA this seems to be
a common problem :-)
I’ve been there, and I also bought the t-shirt…that t-shirt could cost about 100 ipc in naval units :-(
And don’t forget sealion G2!
Next one is dead zone territory swapping.
This one is really easy with lowluck.
All here probably knows about the d.z.t.t.swapping routine, but I got comments like: “why keep taking WE when G takes it back every turn?”. :lol:
Ok, I need to precisate two things.
On luck I was too much short. Luck is not a quality of the player. When I speak of luck I intend the necessity to plan for every evenience. I mean If I am elaborating a plan that will work only if a certain event will happen, and that event have a very low probability., then could be better that I try to think to “B plan” (an alternative plan to go with if the primary fail). If the reserve plan do not exist then it should be better to re-think to the primary plan in order to re-formulate it.
Another thing that I have said too briefly is:
I do not know how to define this in englis. In italian we say “colpo d’occhio”, i.e. the ability to see at first look the situation being pushed towards a decision. Is something bounded to intuition. Sometimes, happend to me that I see an opportunity on the board only after I finished my combat, and so I can not exploit it.
I intend the ability to look the board and have inspiration. Discovering a weak point in the enemy deployment or an opportunity somewhat “masked”. I do not know how to express in English.
If they bring free snacks, they is good playerz0rz.
If they have bewbies, they is good playerz0rz.
Snacks AND bewbies? teh next level!!!1!one!
If they bring free snacks, they is good playerz0rz.
If they have bewbies, they is good playerz0rz.
Snacks AND bewbies? teh next level!!!1!one!
More… if they have a very beatiful sister… then next level (two)!!!
:-D
Add in “horizontally accessible”, and I will happily lose every single game to those sisters… :evil:
And if they are Bi, I will never even set up the board again!!!
LOL, it is from a joke about PC terms for women.
Oh dear - a little off-topic…
To my mind, a major key to the game (and thus a good player) is unit count and IPC value. The player with the most land units at the end of the game wins. Units give you options, and the ability to limit your opponents’ options, the ability to control territory, and thus build more units.
Units at the front are more important than other units. Don’t lose these unless you are making the other side lose more of them.
So to my mind the keys are:
#1 is tactics
#2 is logistics
#3 is economics
#4 is force multiplication, and allows you to do more of #1 and #2 with your existing units. You can evacuate, attack, create kill zones, shift fronts, etc.
