Ok folks. Here’s some math
Chance of event A and event B both happening.( allied win)
= p(A) x p(B)
That is .5 x .5 = 0.25 or 25% chance of allied win.
Chance of Axis win. Since condition is OR.
= 1 - ( p(A) X p (B) )
= 1 - (.5 x .5 )
= 1 - 0.25
= 0.75 or 75% chance axis win.
Underlying assumption is that axis win = 50% on either board.
The revalation from this perhaps is for Japan to give up on Australia or Hawaii and attack egypt instead. Then build a few factories in middle east and join the assault on Russia. Should be pretty easy to get the three russian ones with joint assault from all three axis powers.
@Elsass-Lorraine:
Axis can win on either side by collecting victory cities. Three of four scenarios have a win for the axis - therefore 75%
Allies on the other hand have to take all three capitals. That means they have to win on both sides - that’s only in one of those four scenarios, therefore 25%.
Thanks for your clear and concise analysis, which points to the terminology problem that’s been at work here. The thread has been discussing Axis versus Allied victories in terms of “chances”, and has been quantifying them as percentages. What victory really hinges on in the game is hitting a certain number of benchmarks (i.e. victory conditions), which is an additive situation rather than a percentage-based situation. And what makes the Axis different from the Allies is that, in case of each side, they don’t have to hit the same types of benchmarks nor the same number of benchmarks to achive victory. And I guess that the point to which Garg was drawing attention was that the benchmarks are not distributed equally on the two halves of the game map – which is a valid point, but a point which I think got a bit lost when it was expressed through the concept of percentage victory chances rather than though the concept of additive victory conditions.
I once came across something similar in a book I was reading about the American Civil War, in which the author stated that the Confederacy had a two-thirds chance of winning. I remember blinking when I read it, and taking a moment to think before going on to the next sentence. I wondered what the basis of the author’s reasoning could be. If he was going by the relative military competence of both sides in the first half of the war, and nothing else, then the argument made some sense, but if he was going by the economic, industrial and demographic imbalance between the two sides, then the argument made no sense to me. I looked at the next sentence, and I saw that the author wasn’t basing himself on either of those factors. His argument was basically that, in order to win, the North had to physically occupy the territory of the Confederacy; the Confederacy, by contrast, could win – defined by the author as “continue to exist” – either by physically occupying the North or by achieving a stalemate. In other words, the author was giving the North one way of winning and giving the Confederacy two ways of winning (which is arguably correct), but he was then translating this state of affairs (“2 is bigger than 1”) into a two-to-one advantage for the Confederacy (which is faulty reasoning because it disregards the question how achievable those winning conditions were for each side).
@CWO:
[…](which is faulty reasoning because it disregards the question how achievable those winning conditions were for each side).
And here we have this taken into account because of the assuption that axis win in 50% of the cases on the european resp. pacific side.
So all four outcomes have a 25% chance of happening. Therefore axis win 75% of the games.
So if we say on the Europe map the axis will get 5-6 quite easily
Berlin. Rome. Paris. Warsaw.
Then 2 in Russia. Leningrad/ Stalingrad
Victory depends on getting 2 of Cairo/Moscow/London
On the pacific map it comes down to India/Australia or Hawaii.
The real question is what are the odds of capturing each of these individual cities and how can gameplay or purchases or cooperation affect the odds of individual cities.
Eg is Japan better off attacking the 6 territories around Soviet Far East and ignoring China. This will have more impact on the Germans collecting the 3 russian victory cities.
How can the European Axis distract UK so Japan can push through India.
This is something i havent thought of before but lets take this one step further. The axis could go completely bonkers on one board in order to gain victory on the other and win the game.
Eg germany invades canada. Lets say Germany ignored russia beyond maybe a token effort. But over turns 4-8 could go all out after America. The goal to is get US forces distracted and committed to going Atlantic. Russia takes the opportunity to invade germany but as a consequnce Japan gets hawaii.
Another scenario might be germany building strategic bombers to do Japans dirty work and bomb Australia. Germany again loses on the Europe map but with german help Japan walks into Sydney picking up the last Victory City.
This is something i havent thought of before but lets take this one step further. The axis could go completely bonkers on one board in order to gain victory on the other and win the game.
Eg germany invades canada. Lets say Germany ignored russia beyond maybe a token effort. But over turns 4-8 could go all out after America. The goal to is get US forces distracted and committed to going Atlantic. Russia takes the opportunity to invade germany but as a consequnce Japan gets hawaii.
Another scenario might be germany building strategic bombers to do Japans dirty work and bomb Australia. Germany again loses on the Europe map but with german help Japan walks into Sydney picking up the last Victory City.
All good points, and they raise an interesting conceptual issue about the Global 1940 victory conditions, whose OOB form reads:
The Axis wins the game by controlling either any 8 victory cities on the Europe map or any 6 victory cities on the Pacific map for a complete round of play, as long as they control an Axis capital (Berlin, Rome, or Tokyo) at the end of
that round.
The Allies win by controlling Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo for a complete round of play, as long as they control an Allied capital (Washington, London, Paris, or Moscow) at the end of that round.
These victory conditions are actually rather abstracted when you look at them from the perspective of how the actual powers fighting the actual Second World War might have seen them. One part of the problem is that victory is defined in terms of the control of certain cities (capitals and/or non-capitals, depending on which team is involved). This concept has both merits and questionable elements, but in my opinion a more serious conceptual problem arises from the fact that the game is trying to deal with two aspects of WWII which can both be viewed in two different ways. The first aspect is: was WWII fundamentally a single global war or was it fundamentally two separate (though linked) theatre-scale wars occurring pretty much on opposite sides of the planet? The second aspect is: was WWII fundamentally a war between two coalitions – the Axis and the Allies – or was it fundamentally a war involving multiple individual powers who, at various times, were either out of the war or were in on one side or were in on the other side?
I raise this point because the game’s concept of an Axis win (or an Allied win) would probably have looked strange to the actual participants under some outcome scenarios. Let’s take, for example, a hypothetical scenario that fits the requirements for an Allied win: a scenario in which the Allies control one of their capitals (Moscow), plus all three Axis capitals, while the Axis controls Washington, London and Paris. Would the Americans, the British and the French have considered this to be an Allied victory? Perhaps. A Soviet victory? Probably. A victory for themselves? I wonder.
Let’s take another example. In May 1945, the Allies “won on the Europe side of the board” when the parts of Germany and Italy that were still under Axis control surrendered. Let’s say that this situation get replicated on the Global map. The OOB rules says that, for the Allies, “winning on the Europe side of the board” (as happened historically in May 1945) isn’t enough for them to achieve victory; they also have to control Tokyo. (That’s probably the reason why that rule is there: because historically, having the Allies “win on the Europe side of the board” wasn’t enough to complete the Allied victory over the Axis.) Now let’s say that Japan, improbably, somehow manages at this point to defeat the Allies in the Pacific theatre and fulfil the game’s requirements for an Axis victory. Would the defeated Germans and Italians (in real life ) have regarded this outcome as an Axis victory? I rather doubt it.
My point here is that WWII was, in many ways, a complex set of interrelated localized conflicts with different starting and end dates and different participants. To give just a few examples: the war between Japan and China lasted, non-stop, from 1937 to 1945; the war between Germany and France lasted, arguably, from 1939 to 1940 (and was lost by France); from the American and Soviet perspectives, WWII began in 1941 rather than 1939.
And WWII also had a complicated geography – not just because of its overall European theatre / Pacific theatre structure, but also because of the geographic differences between the participants themselves. Some have very small home territories (the surface area of Great Britain is smaller than that of Kansas) while others (like the USSR, the largest country in the world) have vast ones; some had no “remote” territorial possessions beyond their home territories, some had a few, and some had vast holdings of this kind. Just out of curiosity, I assembled this table (I hope the formatting won’t be too wonky when I post it into this thread) to describe each of the game’s powers situation in this regard:
Player Home territory on Has any remote colonial / territorial
powers which side of board? holdings? If so, on which board side?
US Both Yes / Both
USSR Both No
UK Europe Yes / Both
France Europe Yes / Both
ANZAC Pacific Yes / Pacific
Japan Pacific Yes / Pacific
China Pacific No
Germany Europe No
Italy Europe Yes / Europe
Non-player Home territory on Has any remote colonial / territorial
entities which side of board? holdings? If so, on which board side?
with map
roundels
Canada Both No
[Same situation as USSR]
Holland Europe Yes / Both
[Same situation as UK and France]
I guess what I’m wondering at the end of all this is: have any of the folks on the forum who’ve developed house rules come up with a more nuanced set of victory conditions which take these various factors into consideration?
Marc, you make some great points in your previous post. I think in order for the game to mesh most effectively, the Axis victory conditions need to be more global (e.g. 11-14 VCs on the whole board, perhaps 1 MUST be a major capital, numbers need to be play tested with), while the Allies conditions should remain roughly the same. Perhaps the Allies and/or Axis have to hold 2 major capitals (E.g. the big 5/6) in order to ensure that winning is more realistic. As for the territorial possessions, I think that, while important, they should in no way play into the victory conditions. I mean, UK lost most of their possessions soon after the war (albeit not ALL because of the war necessarily, but it still happened), and of course they still saw the outcome of the war as a victory. I think the most pressing matter is, as you mentioned, the fact that the idea of victory for Japan was much different than Germanys or Italys. But for gameplay purposes, I think this must be overlooked, and both sides must be viewed as completely united bands of belligerents.
Hypothetical scenario: Tokyo is taken by Allies. Axis are one VC short of the new global victory condition of 11-14 cities total. Think about it. If the Axis take the last one (say, Moscow or some more important, thus more difficult since it will be the last one they need), then I think it would be fair to say that the Axis win. Theoretically, in “real life” this would put the Allies in a position where they would surrender and, if the axis were truly the good partners in the war that they are made out to be in Axis and Allies, conditions of surrender would be Japan is brought back under Japanese (thus Axis) control.
Sorry, this is messy. Just my random thoughts.
Setting a number of global victory cities would be a good idea for both sides instead of requiring the Allies to hold Axis capitals to win. If the Axis dedicates itself to it, it can never lose by making sure it’s two big capitals (no one counts Italy really :-)) are completely impregnable without three or four dozen turns of Allied play.
I would suggest that 13 is a viable number for both sides. If the Allies have held 13 VCs for a full round, the Axis is pretty much toast.
Marsh
But dont the allies start with 13? UK: London, Calcutta, Cairo, Hong Kong, Ottawa (5) US: San Fransisco, Manila, Honolulu, Washington (4), Russia: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow (3), ANZAC: Sydney, and even Paris for 14, that is if I’m not missing any
Edit: I guess maybe you could say US and Russia aren’t officially Allies at the beginning, but still. I also wouldn’t say the Axis are toast after round 1 if they dont take any besides Paris because the only really other possible ones are Hong Kong and Manila and that is only if Japan does a DOW on J1, which the 13 VC condition would force them to. Perhaps instead of strictly taking capitals the allies have to ‘neutralize’ the Axis Powers. For example, Japan only has Tokyo left (only territory), allied convoy surrounding it, so Japan can literally do nothing since they gain no IPCs, thus neutralized. Of course this would have to be played with, but just a thought.
Our house rule for modified victory is simple: neither side can win if they don’t also own ALL of their starting capital cities. So, the Axis can’t win, no matter how many victory cities they may own, unless they also have control of Rome, Tokyo and Berlin at the same time. Same goes for the Axis.
Our house rule for modified victory is simple: neither side can win if they don’t also own ALL of their starting capital cities. So, the Axis can’t win, no matter how many victory cities they may own, unless they also have control of Rome, Tokyo and Berlin at the same time. Same goes for the Axis.
That’s indeed simple and easy to remember, which is very practical. Just to clarify two points: am I correct that you mean capital in the Global rules sense (i.e. red-square cities), rather than in the Pacific 1940 rules sense (which confusingly refers to the red-dot cities of Calcutta, Sydney and San Francisco as “Allied capitals”)? And am I correct that Paris is included in the count, meaning that the Allies have to control 4 starting capitals, versus 3 for the Axis?
Basic capitals. So Berlin, Rome and Tokyo for Axis. Washington, London, Calcutta, Sydney and Moscow for Allied. We don’t require the others for victory. But most times one side will concede once the writing is on the wall, as IPC dominance tends to tell after the first eight to ten turns.
Maybe have different types of victory.
Tactical victory = control 15 victory cities.
Total victory = knock out all enemy capitals.
Political victory = enemy conceded.
Economic victory = combined ipc over 175
Before game starts each side secretly writes down their goal
@CWO:
This is something i havent thought of before but lets take this one step further. The axis could go completely bonkers on one board in order to gain victory on the other and win the game.
Eg germany invades canada. Lets say Germany ignored russia beyond maybe a token effort. But over turns 4-8 could go all out after America. The goal to is get US forces distracted and committed to going Atlantic. Russia takes the opportunity to invade germany but as a consequnce Japan gets hawaii.
Another scenario might be germany building strategic bombers to do Japans dirty work and bomb Australia. Germany again loses on the Europe map but with german help Japan walks into Sydney picking up the last Victory City.
All good points, and they raise an interesting conceptual issue about the Global 1940 victory conditions, whose OOB form reads:
The Axis wins the game by controlling either any 8 victory cities on the Europe map or any 6 victory cities on the Pacific map for a complete round of play, as long as they control an Axis capital (Berlin, Rome, or Tokyo) at the end of
that round.The Allies win by controlling Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo for a complete round of play, as long as they control an Allied capital (Washington, London, Paris, or Moscow) at the end of that round.
These victory conditions are actually rather abstracted when you look at them from the perspective of how the actual powers fighting the actual Second World War might have seen them. One part of the problem is that victory is defined in terms of the control of certain cities (capitals and/or non-capitals, depending on which team is involved). This concept has both merits and questionable elements, but in my opinion a more serious conceptual problem arises from the fact that the game is trying to deal with two aspects of WWII which can both be viewed in two different ways. The first aspect is: was WWII fundamentally a single global war or was it fundamentally two separate (though linked) theatre-scale wars occurring pretty much on opposite sides of the planet? The second aspect is: was WWII fundamentally a war between two coalitions – the Axis and the Allies – or was it fundamentally a war involving multiple individual powers who, at various times, were either out of the war or were in on one side or were in on the other side?
I raise this point because the game’s concept of an Axis win (or an Allied win) would probably have looked strange to the actual participants under some outcome scenarios. Let’s take, for example, a hypothetical scenario that fits the requirements for an Allied win: a scenario in which the Allies control one of their capitals (Moscow), plus all three Axis capitals, while the Axis controls Washington, London and Paris. Would the Americans, the British and the French have considered this to be an Allied victory? Perhaps. A Soviet victory? Probably. A victory for themselves? I wonder.
Let’s take another example. In May 1945, the Allies “won on the Europe side of the board” when the parts of Germany and Italy that were still under Axis control surrendered. Let’s say that this situation get replicated on the Global map. The OOB rules says that, for the Allies, “winning on the Europe side of the board” (as happened historically in May 1945) isn’t enough for them to achieve victory; they also have to control Tokyo. (That’s probably the reason why that rule is there: because historically, having the Allies “win on the Europe side of the board” wasn’t enough to complete the Allied victory over the Axis.) Now let’s say that Japan, improbably, somehow manages at this point to defeat the Allies in the Pacific theatre and fulfil the game’s requirements for an Axis victory. Would the defeated Germans and Italians (in real life ) have regarded this outcome as an Axis victory? I rather doubt it.
My point here is that WWII was, in many ways, a complex set of interrelated localized conflicts with different starting and end dates and different participants. To give just a few examples: the war between Japan and China lasted, non-stop, from 1937 to 1945; the war between Germany and France lasted, arguably, from 1939 to 1940 (and was lost by France); from the American and Soviet perspectives, WWII began in 1941 rather than 1939.
And WWII also had a complicated geography – not just because of its overall European theatre / Pacific theatre structure, but also because of the geographic differences between the participants themselves. Some have very small home territories (the surface area of Great Britain is smaller than that of Kansas) while others (like the USSR, the largest country in the world) have vast ones; some had no “remote” territorial possessions beyond their home territories, some had a few, and some had vast holdings of this kind. Just out of curiosity, I assembled this table (I hope the formatting won’t be too wonky when I post it into this thread) to describe each of the game’s powers situation in this regard:
Player Home territory on Has any remote colonial / territorial
powers which side of board? holdings? If so, on which board side?US Both Yes / Both
USSR Both No
UK Europe Yes / Both
France Europe Yes / BothANZAC Pacific Yes / Pacific
Japan Pacific Yes / PacificChina Pacific No
Germany Europe No
Italy Europe Yes / Europe
Non-player Home territory on Has any remote colonial / territorial
entities which side of board? holdings? If so, on which board side?
with map
roundelsCanada Both No
[Same situation as USSR]Holland Europe Yes / Both
[Same situation as UK and France]I guess what I’m wondering at the end of all this is: have any of the folks on the forum who’ve developed house rules come up with a more nuanced set of victory conditions which take these various factors into consideration?
I think you are mixing up a few things here CWO Marc.
Historically accurate and Gameplay purpose.
To define VC Condition, the Maker chose a certain scale, Timeline and let’s call it Balanced Territory Size = BTS for the map and some Historically accuracy.
The VC is also there to bring this game to an end.
We know from experiance that it also could go on and on to over 20 Turns.
If we are trying to ripp apart the VC conditions we should also then change the Timeline and the BTS for this map.
I think a great analysim was allready given with a 25% chance for a single Power and to sum it up to 75% chance for Axis or Allies on a global game.
Wich for my understandig explains it a 100%.
I knew this thread would be an epic battle.
But dont the allies start with 13? UK: London, Calcutta, Cairo, Hong Kong, Ottawa (5) US: San Fransisco, Manila, Honolulu, Washington (4), Russia: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow (3), ANZAC: Sydney, and even Paris for 14, that is if I’m not missing any
Edit: I guess maybe you could say US and Russia aren’t officially Allies at the beginning, but still. I also wouldn’t say the Axis are toast after round 1 if they dont take any besides Paris because the only really other possible ones are Hong Kong and Manila and that is only if Japan does a DOW on J1, which the 13 VC condition would force them to. Perhaps instead of strictly taking capitals the allies have to ‘neutralize’ the Axis Powers. For example, Japan only has Tokyo left (only territory), allied convoy surrounding it, so Japan can literally do nothing since they gain no IPCs, thus neutralized. Of course this would have to be played with, but just a thought.
Yeah, math sucks :)
By the time the US enters the game, the Axis should have reduced the Allies VC count to 11. By the time the Allies can recapture those initial losses (Paris, Manila, and Hong Kong), the Axis should have taken Leningrad and Calcutta as well.
It could be as simple as putting a starting round on it: If at the end of any round following round 10 either side has held X victory cities for a whole turn, that side wins. Of course, we would still need to agree on X (or make X different for Axis vs Allies). A number higher than 13 means that the Axis essentially has to win on both sides of the board. A number lower than 14 may make Allied victory too easy.
The neutralization concept is interesting, but it sounds like epic arguments could emerge. Control of sea zone 6 by the Allies does not always neutralize Japan.
Marsh
I like the idea of more than one conditions for victory as mentioned previously. One being a victory city condition and the other being an economic victory. Perhaps assigning a point value to each city, such as 10 points for player capitols and 3 points for other VC’s and then a threshold for victory after a certain turn for the city condition.
The economic victory is often a more obvious win. Once one side is out-earning the other by a significant margin the outcome is usually apparent to both sides. It shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with either a margin of economy figure for victory, or a straight threshold for combined economy, whichever would work better.
edit: gud grammer
I also think a bit more of a link to the national objectives would make sense. Economic victory makes more sense for japan than anzac for example.
Reading this thread, I find myself wondering how the following Allied VC change would impact the game:
The Allies win if, at the end of any round, the only Axis-controlled victory cities are Berlin, Rome and/or Tokyo and the combined value of all Axis-controlled territories is less than 33 IPCs.
This change to Allied victory conditions raises a few questions.
I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens. One potential impact I can see is that often-overlooked territories (in the games I’ve played, anyway) like Okinawa and Formosa gain strategic value to both sides as the Axis approach the 33 IPC threshold.
Sensible axis players would surrender well before that.
