@Gargantua:
It really works well.
We’ve found that it’s not the -Big- battles where you get screwed.
It’s the little ones…
- You send two fighters and a bomber against a destroyer.
- You miss with everything and he hits…
- Having already lost a fighter, you roll your fighter and bomber, MISS again, he hits again
- Now you’re screwed, you just lost two fighters for nothing, after 7 dice are rolled.
- Do you continue with the bomber? Hell no, you’re outta there, -20 IPC’s…
That scenario has surely happend to all of you.
Medium luck eliminates those kinds of scenario’s for the attacker.
And for the Defender, Low Luck always screws them. � You have 3 infantry defending a territory you HAVE to keep, and your opponent only has 2 infantry, but a handful of planes.
With LL, he just takes your pieces off the board and removes one of his own.
With Medium luck, you can call for a hot streak, and roll to get 2, or 3 of his JUICY pieces, and then maybe losing that territory wasn’t so bad!
It’s even more historically explanable than dice.
-choosing a Low Luck battle, is like choosing a conventional military strategic approach to a situation
-choosing to roll dice, is like choosing an out of the box solution/gamble, that’s either going to pay off huge, or blow up in your face.
IMO all future axis and allies games should be medium luck!
Medium luck also totally deflates the “I had a bad dice game” complaint. Because you can always throw it back “It was your call to go with dice.”
Case closed, game improves, lots of fun, there are still chance variables, but they are yours to CONTROL!
From a different perspective:
Defenders are never afforded an opportunity to retreat. Attackers are. Its not the defender’s fault they are trapped and have to roll dice to continue the battle. Further, its not their fault that you elected to trade 2 fighters for a destroyer because the destroyer cannot retreat and was forced to roll dice. There was a 1 in 3 odds that you’d lose at least one of your units in the attack in the first round.
Granted the odds were in the attackers favor, but historically odds don’t always reflect the outcome of battles.
My proposed solution:
Defenders may retreat anytime the attackers have the opportunity to retreat and elect not to. In order to do so, the defender has to leave units equal to the units lost that round in combat but may retreat all units in excess of that to an adjacent territory the defender controlled before combat begun, or into an uncontested sea zone.