Submarine first strike

@Dovenik-Hyseni

To respond to your points:

To be fair, I prefer stacking Galacia over hitting Poland AH1. I only brought up the possibility of hitting Poland as a hypothetical.

I don’t particularly care about winning in Serbia round 1. I only even attack Serbia at all because the rules of the game force you to. The rules of 1914 allow you to choose whether or not to press combat each turn, so you can simply have the Austrians not attack the Serbians each turn, which allows you to potentially roll 3s with your stack there instead of 2s (assuming the Entente presses combat).

That being said, I think I was a bit off in assuming the Serbia guys would be capable of hitting Romania round 2. You’d probably need to split the Galacia mega-stack to hit both Romania and Ukraine, depending on what Russia does.

You can most definitely contest Romania and Ukraine AH2 if you’re committing 100% of Germany’s buys towards Russia. Yes the battles won’t go in your favor initially (and you may have to spend some turns not pressing combat in Ukraine), but your objective in a Kill-Russia-First style of strategy should be to hit Russia on multiple fronts and force them to lose more troops each turn than they can feasibly replace. Starting fights in Poland (with Germany), Ukraine and Romania should be enough to accomplish this goal.

Side-Note: Your 10 INF/4 ART swings for 36 (8@3 + 6@2) and has a 60% chance to wipe the Romania stack in one round of combat. Those are pretty good odds, but it’s not exactly consistent, especially considering that a big chunk of your strategy hinges on having the Romania stack available to march on into Ukraine AH2.

On the topic of fighting/holding off Italy, I prefer killing Italy first as Austria over killing Russia first, but that’s beyond the scope of this conversation. However, because Italy goes after Austria, you can send some of your turn 1 buy into Trieste Round 2 to slow down Italy if you’d rather send 100% of the Vienna guys East.

I don’t have much more to add, really. If I were Russia playing against this I would just shuffle all of my units into Ukraine R1 and hope that France/Italy/UK can do something productive in other theaters.

Anyone out there given this a crack after DoMan and I put it together?

To support CdeG, although I have played 1914 just twice, both games featured an axis focus on taking out Russia (no Russian Revolution) while Turkey holds on, leading to an axis victory.

I envisioned calvary working like this.

Attack at a 2
Move at a 2
Defend at a 3 (If on a territory containing defending infantry)
Defend at a 2 otherwise.

Cavalry played a minor role during the entire war. (Lawrence of Arabia for example)

Cavalry would have one other feature. They alone would be able to leave a contested zone and attack an empty adjacent enemy controlled territory.

By turn 4 they would no longer allowed to be built.

I do agree the game is great as is.

AH softening France’s air force up to open the way for Germany to have air supremacy: this will henceforth be known as the “Happy Artillery” strategy.  Thanks for making my day, WB.

@WILD:

Yep, makes sense for the CP to have Germany go full tilt in one front, and Austria the other. We have seen Germany push France back to the brink, and Austria start off defending against Russia (and those damn Italians) then actually gaining the upper hand on their front as well with an aggressive Russia (they will need some inf from Germany, and the Turks). It is also helpful to have say a 10 unit friendly force with you to take out smaller adversaries, or grab more land so you don’t splinter off your main force. This can also help you to gain air superiority for the larger partner. Like Austria sacrifices a few inf and ftrs into a French stack just to force a dog fight and kill off a couple allied ftrs. Then Germany goes in full force, finishes off the air, and has very happy artillery.

What do you think about possibly pulling the two German subs back to SZ 4?  First, they wouldn’t have to dodge 2 mine rolls (and Germany has enough to kill Britain’s home fleet anyway). Second, you’re set up to make a joint attack on SZ 8 turn two if Britain should try to drop a fleet. A G1 build of a BB in SZ would help (a battleship could likely survive 2a mine rolls on its way to SZ 8).

I haven’t tried this yet, but it might help a Paris or Bust strategy (preventing British reinforcements to France).

I much prefer to make Switzerland worth 4 IPCs. The non-aligned tts in the game are, essentially, those countries who never became involved in the war as an active power (the one problematical exception is Greece), hence they cannot be assigned an alignment.

I don’t like anticipating history by making them into some fictional alliance of neutrals. Would Switzerland or Sweden really even think about mobilizing because the Russians crossed the Afghan border?

Bulgaria, for example, listened to offers from both sides before joining the Central Powers; largely because they promised it a large slice of its enemy Serbia.

If I were Germany I’d feel completely cheated by the Revolution. UNLESS it created a new Bolshevik power friendly to the Central powers…

@ossel:

I find it interesting that none of the games posted on this forum have ended with the victory conditions that are stated in the rules…which doesn’t really surprise me due to the nature of the war, but I kind of wish there had been more of a design consideration for alternate game endings, besides ‘we don’t feel like playing anymore.’

Flashman, remember what Sun Tzu said:

Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

I think the Allies are giving up too soon as well, but taking Moscow is a major morale victory for the CP’s, and it seems to be very effective.

[Edit]: I guess revolution was triggered in this game, but the effect is similar.