Like CWO stated, you can try playing with LL and no LL. The attacker gets to pick what way he wants to go. Your gonna use LL when you know your going to pretty much win and if your losing, like chillaxe stated then you want the luck of the dice roll.
I’m gonna have to check that out.
I’m a dice man :-D
This topic is a fun horse to Frankenstein, as it always elicits strong opinions haha.
I played LL for a long time after we first implemented it in TripleA, but I find that the ultra conservative endgame playstyle which LL encourages just doesn’t suit my tastes.
LL puts most of the emphasis on the first round combats. This is where most of the swings occur, because the battles are narrow and deal with small forces. This can make for a very exciting opener, but, at least in my experience, a much less exciting closer. Playing as the underdog becomes increasingly demoralizing, as the game starts to move further and further away from you. To me the swing on a remainder just isn’t enough to keep the game surprising. Not enough nail biters. Not enough bitter reversals of fortune. LL also allows for something that you can never see in Dice. The calculated perfect strafe, with the ability to just count pips and determine the max hits a defender could put up. Then use that calculation to determine the exact results of an attack/retreat before it ever takes place. And related to this, the ability to air-blitz capitals with predictable results every time. I don’t mind rolling a ton of dice for large battles. To me that’s almost the whole point of the game, and the thing I actually look forward to the most.
The variability of the dice results provides the chief narrative component to the gameplay for me. LL diminishes this story telling aspect as every battle becomes narrow. There are no “do or die battles” no “balls to the wall” attacks in LL. No dramatic final defense of the homeland. I guess I’d be in the Yamamoto camp. In LL there isn’t much gambling or bluffing, it’s all down to the numbers. And if you goof it, even once, there is little room for recovery.
I’m always struck by this idea that LL is somehow more competitive, or more strategic. I don’t see that. It just involves a different type of strategy, and a different set of calculations. You don’t have to deal with the possibility of a large dice swing, on attack/defense, and you don’t have to plan for the contingency that your units dud in the first round of combat. The best example I can think of is everyone’s favorite LL combo…
1 inf, 1 art, 1 fighter for the auto-hit vs a single defending unit.
This inf+art+fighter combo vs a single unit, and you will never lose more than 1 hitpoint in the engagement. In a dice game, there is no guarantee that simply because you dedicate 7 ipcs in ground risked (with a fighter), that you will automatically win the battle and take the territory. I prefer to sweat it, and to watch my enemy sweat it too haha.
Of course, to each his own, but I’d be careful how much credence you put in LL strategies or the LL analyses of overall game balance, as translating to the Dice game. They’re very different styles of play, and produce a pretty different game on balance.
Let me put it another way, in LL, all the “flaws” and all the “exploits” of the OOB unit set up or the map design (on any given board) are laid totally bare. There is no crazy dice randomization to save it, if the game is unbalanced. So in LL the bid process and the first round combats, the starting TUV and location, are way more significant.
I find the endgames rather less climactic, as the play-style is more likely to produce early concessions, and sometimes even greater frustration with the results of the LL rolls. It’s not No-Luck after all, dice are still rolling. I’ve seen people get so pissed that they missed a remainder roll, that they drop the game completely. LL dropping occurs just as often in tripleA as Dice dropping, usually with the same bad attitude and hostile spirit you might expect after a really lopsided battle in a normal Dice game. And I think this is because there just isn’t room for underdog recovery in LL, so those types of players just up and quit, the same way they probably would in a dice game. The point being, that LL is not a surefire antidote for players who are easily frustrated by the results of combat rolls.
All these impressions of mine are totally anecdotal, just based on personal experience while playing games in tripleA. I know there are many great LL players out there, and I’ve played with quite a few. Excellent opponents and good sports.
But I’ve also played with the poor sports, and seen the real sour grapes. People who definitely confirmed my pre-existing bias and suspicion, that those who can’t handle a bad dice roll, or the collapse of a multi-round strategy due to the results of a single dice battle, are basically just not the sort of A&A players I want to game with anyway.
I prefer to play against dice masochists, with a sense of humor about it. :-D
These days, if a player insists on LL, I’ll just pass on the game, and wait for another Dice player to come along. I just have a harder time investing myself in the LL game, and getting excited about it, and A&A takes ����ing forever to set up, so I enjoy a game with likeminded people. Of course that’s probably the exact same logic that others will use when they enjoy an LL game with other likeminded LL players.
So either way is cool, but just recognizing that it’s really a very different type of game.
:-D
I agree with ya. I would rather get back in game with better chance with dice rolls if I’m losing.
But I’ve also played with the poor sports, and seen the real sour grapes. People who definitely confirmed my pre-existing bias and suspicion, that those who can’t handle a bad dice roll, or the collapse of a multi-round strategy due to the results of a single dice battle, are basically just not the sort of A&A players I want to game with anyway.
Don’t play with cry babies …
Granted, in a dicegame you may make a come-back from your grave, where LL most likely will not give you that (assuming equally good skills on both sides).
Which hits the nail on its head, I s’pose.
Some people just don’t like it when their opponent makes an idiotic move and gets away with it… only because the dice helped.
And speaking of bad sportmanship, overly cheering about lucky (smelly) dice, or worse, being cheerful about someone else’s bad dice is also not very fun to play with. If I roll very lucky, I always apologize. Especially when I feel I just won the game unexpectedly because of this particular dieroll…
Having said that, I like to play an A&A dicegame particularly with beers and lots of banter, but I must admit that I do not take these games very seriously. After all, who can drunk good make decisions when playing and being strategical ;-)?
Beyond that (when sober), I just like LL better. I don’t like to depend on luck during the next 10 hours of playing, if the dice screw up my opening round.
I don’t really understand the attitude that leads to a dice apology. Where is the excitement in that? I think you gotta own it either way. If the opponent rocks you, instead of getting angry, why not congratulate them on their kick ass roll? If you slay with a gang of 1s, a fist pump is definitely in order! haha! I just have a hard time patting myself on the back for counting pips better than the other guy. Or getting all stoked because I can do simple division in my head and increase my likelihood to hit on a remainder in the second or third round of a combat. A&A just isn’t that interesting to me without the variability of dice. Play enough LL games, and after a while the maps get rather boring. They game loses its replay value, at least in my experience, once you’ve seen the same thing play out the same way 20 times.
But it just goes back to my point about knowing what sort of opponent you like to play against. Its very personal I find. Asking an LL player to play Dice, or vice versa is asking for trouble. One person is likely to get frustrated, and the game can cease to be fun pretty quickly. Too much emphasis on expected averages or expected results in a given combat, just kills it for me.
Ps. I worry that I might be coming off as a bit of a dice curmudgeon, which isn’t really my intension.
:-D
Sometimes I have to stand up against the idea that dice is for simpletons or drunks, whereas LL is reserved for like A&A Kung fu masters, or the counter prejudice (which I know I’m guilty of) that LL players just can’t handle hot dice, whereas dice players have like iron stomachs to play through terrible rolls. These are clearly both ridiculous caricatures, and just a silly shorthand that don’t describe the differences between the playstyles in a very meaningful way.
To the OPs original question… it’s true, the openings can be rather different. There are moves which work in LL consistently, even 100% of the time, which would not necessarily work in a dice game. Similarly there are moves which might work in a dice game, that would fail 100% of time in LL.
Changing how the combat dice function is pretty major. In general a “winning strategy” that works in LL, will often work well in dice too. But this is not always the case.
Take for example, any opening that involves a strafe hit. In LL, as I said earlier, you can calculate this out to know with certainty how many hits you might conceivably sustain before retreating. You can often plan it to within a single pip or hitpoint, so as not to “goof” and accidentally take the territory. This is not possible in a dice game.
Likewise, in dice it is possible to resolve a battle in a single round of combat, which in LL would require 2 or more rounds of combat, and this can dramatically change the sort of attacks it is possible run in the opening.
So its true, the openings are not the same. They are similar, but there are definitely differences in terms of what’s possible or what’s wise.
Just to be clear:
No worries, Elk :-). But you are right: this would be a better discussion without the prejudices. I see lots of good reasons why people like LL or Dice, but we should realize this sort of discussions often lead to people interpreting things being said that are not really meant that way. I definately don’t think a dicegame is for simpletons. Drunks may be another matter ;-).
About the apologetic attitude; I guess it comes from an empathic ability. It’s not like my opponent’s dog just died, but still. I’m talking about games that take at least 10 hours to play and some of us don’t like to play for 10 hours, knowing for certain that victory is beyond any possibility. Sure, the dice may resurrect you, but that is something I personally have never seen. May be a personal experience, but -I- rarely see (though it’s not completely absent) that critical luck averages out in a game. A&A is too delicately balanced for our group to allow for that.
Honestly…. I really dont understand what the fuzz is about. Now, if you are the ultimate player having placed a bazzillion wager on beating this guy in a 1:1 game AND playing dice AND losing because of bad dice I feel with you. But then again, you are stupid…
I think most players these days (who are serious) will play say 10+ games a year ( I am talking online). In one single game you will throw maybe (I have never calculated it) more than a thousand dice. At these numbers you are going to be so close to the average outcome anyway. Sure you can be unlucky in key battles, but then again, if you play many games, you will also have your fair share of luck. But most importanly if you think LL is no luck think again. A lot of battles are decided when both sides have an attack/defence strengt of less than 6/6.
But most importantly…if you look at the league scores and these games most people play dice…it is not random who is in the lead…simply said
But then again, if you dont like one or the other, play what YOU like!
An amusing footnote to this discussion would be to consider some of the alternate methods of combat resolution that tabletop miniature gamers have experimented with over the decades. They’ve even included, believe it or not, firing little spring-loaded cannons at the opponent’s men, or going into an adjacent room to take shots at circular targets with BB-pellet air pistols. Fred Jane (of Jane’s Fighting Ships fame) advocated a method that involved hitting a ship diagram with a “striker”, a rod attached to a circular plate from which an off-centre nail projected – the offset position of the nail being used to introduce an element of randomness to the strike. Fletcher Pratt’s naval wargame, which was designed to be played on big ballroom floors using little balsa-wood model ships, required players to estimate the range of the enemy ships at which they were firing their guns and write down their shooting orders accordingly; referees would then use tape measures to measure the actual range and would use upside-down golf tees to mark the position of the shell splashes, and the players would then use these splashes as reference points to adjust the range of their next salvo. Great fun, but very labour-intensive and obviously quite unsuitable for A&A board games (though it could be applied to the A&A naval miniatures games).
If you guys really want to speed up the “crazy long” “boring” gigantic battles, get four separate boxes, a whole lot of dice and roll into each box all within a matter of seconds. do you have 20 units at 4 20 units at 3 and 20 units at 2, throw your 20 dice into each separate box like you’re some filthy rich man makin it rain :mrgreen: gigantic battles are fun and exciting so quit your complaining and have fun! Someone has to take the dramamtic losses sometimes and I really think people are over-reacting to losing or winning.
@CWO:
I’ve never used the Low Luck system, so I don’t have any opinions on its merits relative to standard dice…but one element of this discussion caught my eye: the general issue of “result predictability” versus the potential for having a good strategy ruined by bad dice. Although I never really developed the idea beyond just a rough concept, I’ve sometimes wondered whether a variable-risk dicing method might be interesting to use in an A&A context.
I got this idea from a subject area that has nothing to so with wargaming: possible ranges of investment returns (both positive and negative) based on the riskiness of investment types. Financial institutions sometimes offer investors various types of pre-packaged investment portfolios which contain mixtures of stocks and bonds, in different proportions, and in varying ratios of domestic versus foreign holdings. Here are three simple (and completely fictitious) examples of what I’m talking about. At one end of the scale, you might have a very conservative portfolio that consists entirely of domestic guaranteed government bonds; its upside is that it’s very safe (you’re virtually certain never to lose any money), but its downside is that the rate of return is very low. At the opposite end of the scale, you might have an aggressive portfolio consisting entirely of foreign stocks in high speculative and volatile sectors of the economy; its upside is that it has potential for generating spectacularly high returns, but its downside is that you could end up losing all your money. In the middle of the scale, you might have a balanced portfolio which distributes your money among many different asset classes, and therefore which offers a mixture of safety and risk and a mixture of low and high returns.
How might this apply to A&A dicing? As I said, I never really worked out any details, but the idea would be that a player who’s about to enter a round of combat would choose one of three dicing options: low-risk, medium-risk and high-risk. These options would, I imagine, work either by using either different dice types (4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, etc.) or by using standard dice combined with some sort of interpretation table. The low-risk option (represented, let’s say, by 4-sided dice), would offer a narrow and hence fairly predictable range of outcomes, which would translate into only modest gains or modest losses. The high-risk option (represented by, let’s say, 8-sided or 12-sided dice) would offer a much wider and less predictable range of outcomes, with potential for either spectacular gains or spectacular losses. The medium-risk option would fall somewhere between those two extremes.
The point of the system would be that each player would have to decide on a case-by-cases basis whether he wants to use a low-risk, medium-risk or high-risk dicing strategy in a particular round of combat, rather than being locked for the whole game in either a Low Luck mode or a standard dice mode. In principle, this would have two advantages. First, it would mean that each player would have to make a new type of “command decision” during the course the game, which adds to the thrill of being an armchair general or admiral (which is part of the whole attraction of wargaming). Second, a player who decides to use a high-risk dicing strategy and who ends up losing big won’t be able to put all the blame on the bad dice: he’ll have to take responsibility for having chosen the high-risk dicing strategy in the first place (which, again, is something that a real commander has to live with in a real war). Conversely, the player who decides to use a high-risk dicing strategy and who ends up winning big will be able to congratulate himself for pulling off a gamble which succeeded spectacularly. Yamamoto (who was an avid poker and shogi player) was definitely a commander of the “high-risk dicing strategy” type, and he’d probably have agreed with what James Graham, the 5th Earl of Montrose, said during the English Civil War :
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all.”
Lets get a system like this up and running! It sounds nearly perfect and you are very wise to try to make a compromise between both parties! I say that this system would nearly double the Great fun of playing as Military Commander and I fully support it. It might as well go into the next A&A edition if we can create a smooth version!
@CWO:
An amusing footnote to this discussion would be to consider some of the alternate methods of combat resolution that tabletop miniature gamers have experimented with over the decades. They’ve even included, believe it or not, firing little spring-loaded cannons at the opponent’s men, or going into an adjacent room to take shots at circular targets with BB-pellet air pistols. Fred Jane (of Jane’s Fighting Ships fame) advocated a method that involved hitting a ship diagram with a “striker”, a rod attached to a circular plate from which an off-centre nail projected – the offset position of the nail being used to introduce an element of randomness to the strike. Fletcher Pratt’s naval wargame, which was designed to be played on big ballroom floors using little balsa-wood model ships, required players to estimate the range of the enemy ships at which they were firing their guns and write down their shooting orders accordingly; referees would then use tape measures to measure the actual range and would use upside-down golf tees to mark the position of the shell splashes, and the players would then use these splashes as reference points to adjust the range of their next salvo. Great fun, but very labour-intensive and obviously quite unsuitable for A&A board games (though it could be applied to the A&A naval miniatures games).
CWO that reminds me of the days in my bedroom were we were always shooting army men with a BB gun.
@SS:
CWOÂ that reminds me of the days in my bedroom were we were always shooting army men with a BB gun.
This puts you in very distinguished company because, if I’m not mistaken, the spring-loaded cannon method of combat resolution was recommended by H. G. Wells in his book “Little Wars.”
I played a low luck game tonight for the first time on this map (I’ve used it on other maps) and boy oh boy did it feel like I was playing a completely different game.
As someone who had only played G40 the normal way, running into someone who wanted low luck and already had specific strategies that worked in low luck (but probably wouldn’t work nearly as well with dice) was a completely demoralizing experience.
My opponent played Axis and it felt like he had the game’s entire play sequence completely mapped out before we started. It was an enlightening experience, but not fun at all (and not just because I got spanked).
Maybe it’s just sore butt syndrome, maybe it’s just that I ran into a really good player who steamrolled me (and I made plenty of mistakes to help him along, to be sure), but low luck really felt like a lobotomized version of the game, and that a lot of things that usually worked out well for me just weren’t effective at all.
When dice are used, it is inevitable that attacking forces will encounter setbacks every so often, but that’s never the case with low luck. There is something just not right with always knowing the outcome of a battle before it starts, which makes the game qualitatively different from knowing the probable outcomes but not being certain in any given case.
A slightly underdefended territory might still be too risky of an attack with dice, whereas with low luck the attacker just needs that one extra unit to be certain of victory. 50/50 outcomes disappear almost completely, as does everything else between 100% and zero. Picketing sucks when two inf and two planes will capture every time and never fail. AA loses its bite when an attacker can calculate exactly how many planes - and no more - will go down to it. And the precisely calculated strafe is just cheesy.
…low luck really felt like a lobotomized version of the game…
When dice are used, it is inevitable that attacking forces will encounter setbacks every so often, but that’s never the case with low luck. There is something just not right with always knowing the outcome of a battle before it starts, which makes the game qualitatively different from knowing the probable outcomes but not being certain in any given case.
…And the precisely calculated strafe is just cheesy.
All of these points are spot on. The game loses its soul, as I say. Low luck may have its place for convoys (or tech, if you play with that (I don’t)) or whatever, but for combat rolls…
And you probably are a bit butt hurt, but your points are still entirely relevant regardless :p
I’ll just add that I am a dice man and agree with those who have said that LL is actually less strategic. It conjures up the image of a poker table where everybody plays with their cards face up on the table.
Well as long as the dice are playing nice it isnt that bad.
But once you got all your planes shot down by AA gun fire, or having 10 tanks hit once where his 5 inf all scored hits and it becomes painfull.
With dice some battles really can deside the game by a simple throw. If your attack with the pacific fleet goes the wrong way or russia defends against abnormal odds then the game is desided right there and then. Does not mather if your opponent made all sorts of mistakes hell you can even lose to the AI opponent that way.
But it is a slightly different game with low luck, it benefits the attacker in every situation, but then again so do dice as the attacker can retreat. You just get rid of the extremes of dice that especialy if you are playing it online are frequent to happen as the dice roller isnt really random at all.
I find that a lot of those bad rolls can have interesting strategic effects on the game in the form of withdraws. In LL you’d never have reason to retreat from a battle, barring a strafe attack. In a normal dice game you have to decide whether or not to carry out fights.
Going back to poker as an analogy: the best poker players in the world would all tell you that a key part of winning is knowing when to fold, even if that means folding the best hand. If you’re playing hold’em and you’re holding two aces, one spade one club, you bet big. If the flop comes down and it’s all hearts, well you need to proceed with caution. If the next card is also a heart you may have to accept that, even though you had the best hand to start and placed a big bet, you need to back out and live to fight another day. In my mind, that’s true strategy (then again, there’s a lot to be said about what’s going on in my mind…)
It’s more than just the extremes you get rid of with low luck.
For example: are two hits from two defending infantry an “extreme” outcome? It should happen on average every nine times you throw the dice - in other words, it occurs many times during a normal game with normal probability.
How about three inf on defense missing all their shots? That’s a 30% probability outcome with dice, zero percent with low luck. And at the same time, those three inf will never hit twice in a round - when you add up the possible outcomes that disappear with low luck, you’re actually throwing out up to half the actual outcomes that occur. The three-inf case, if you work out all the probabilities, is actually really really REALLY different between dice and low luck - in a way that’s really bad for the defender: one third of the time three inf will score two or three hits. Eliminating those very common, very frequent outcomes has a huge impact on the amount of commitment an attacker needs to make (many fewer attacking units needed over the course of a game) as well as that for a defender (many more defending units needed).
Consider a must-take scenario for an attacker. With two defending inf, 11% of the time they’ll deal two hits. In a must take scenario, that’s not acceptable, so the attacker needs to commit three land units to take (assuming you don’t want to trade your planes for inf). With dice, you never need the third unit to be sure, so now that third unit can be used in a different attack, as are all the overkill units that are normally used in a must-win combat.
Swap that around to the defender’s side - you want to at least have the possibility of dealing two hits to an attacker (let’s say that’s all he can move into a given fight before he loses planes). In a normal game, two inf produce that threat. With low luck, you need twice as many inf to produce that same threat - minimum four inf just for the mere threat of dealing two hits in defense.
In this scenario, low luck cuts the attacker’s commitment by a third, minimum, while doubling the defender’s! That’s a massive balance change, so much so that it changes the very nature of the game.
Sure everyone has seen those fraction-of-a-percent outcomes which change the winner of a game, but the vast majority of the time it doesn’t happen. To throw out 30% outcomes in order to avert the possibility of a 0.1% outcome has a “baby with the bathwater” kind of feel to it.
I have abs. no idea why someone would want to play a “simplistic, unrealistic” style wargame (which to me, AxA is the paragon of) and then eliminate luck.
Do you guys not see that the brilliance of AxA in the first place is the d6 system it pioneered? It is a reaction to years, decades (1960-1985) of overcomplicated and equally silly debates about balance, luck, strategy etc (see Avalon hill wargames) that are much more easily resolved by simply playing the game more often and playing a variety of games that do not all have the same disadvantages (unplayably long, high learning curve, poor balance) etc.
d6 is a simple system and as you can see, entire unit types (tactical bomber, cruiser) are pretty much just upcosted variants of existing units. The entire game worked fairly well with 2 ground types 2 air types and 3 sea types for 15 years.
It is also a really bad system (for randomness, realism, flexibility, variability, pricing, balance etc.), as it breaks the entire odds system down to a dice rolling mash up (%16 is the smallest available chance to the designer). d8 and other systems are far superior, but they are more complicated and not usually for the better (see old Warhammer 40K).
Now, I like rolling dice well enough, but the elephant in the room here is the concept of “Regression to the Mean/Odds” that no one has mentioned. This principle states that when you roll small numbers of dice, there is a greater chance of anomalous or unusual results, but when you roll tons and tons of dice, the results will tend to be much more averaged over time and will appear more like the calculated odds.
This in my mind is why this is an absolutely silly debate; Larry knows about this concept. Small battles tend to be capricious. Large battles tend towards the averages. THAT IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE GAME.
The idea that you would want to play a game that is “simplistic and unrealistic” and then eliminate luck or chance is simply silly. Go acquire other games that do not have such a basic or capricious style of combat system, play them (subsequently, get annoyed at tracking minutiae and arguing about rules) and then come back to AxA!
Many games do not accept that random luck should determine much about the outcome of a battle at all. Warhammer 40K is a great example; you roll absolutely tons of dice, over multiple phases, but the result is always the same–weak units cannot damage strong ones and teams with high average skills dominate the numerically large teams. d6 does not provide enough flexibility to keep that game random or simple, and the creators refuse to address this ultimately fatal problem that compromises the rules and play.
Don’t make the same mistake with “beer and pretzels” games like AxA. We shouldn’t be calculating odds at this point–I can see whether I have a high or low chance of victory at a glance. I also do not need to discuss classic or ‘perfect’ openers–we have discussed these to death and the only thing that creates any variability or uncertainty at all in the outcome of the game is…
Luck.
Game 94(G40) 12/6/15 woohoo!!
