Adjustable bid

@arthur-bomber-harris

Only based on your bidding rules. My bids puts them in a power’s treasury (so they have to be spent later).

Hi @LebaneseWarlord

Here is the Taamvann mod

Option taamvan Changes the control of Novgorod, Volgograd, Russia Objective to 3 PUs for Germany. Control of Caucasus is also reduced to 3. Also adds a Fighter to Russia and a Armor to Urals.

taamvan is an experienced player and has had good luck using the above.

It has the advantage of small changes compared to BM, which has a lot but is very popular with experienced players.

Yep. Fortifying the money islands - well we’re only talking about Celebes aren’t we? UK can take Sumatra and ANZAC can take Java. Or do you mean two transports to the same island? I don’t think that strategy is much good with a J1 DOW though. Japan will just crush your force for no real losses and you’ll have taken troops off India.

From South Africa you can also hit Ethiopia which you might not do without that transport. Or take Persia and do something else with the SZ98 Transport. The two inf who start on South Africa normally only arrive after Egypt has been secured so I think that is worth something. You can also land the troops on West India if you think fortifying India is the most important thing.

Flip coin or roll dice for each team
Winning team can choose to call “Axis” or “Allies” or “Pass”
Once a side has been called, the other side will be getting resources if any
Choosing team calls “Axis” (meaning Allies bid of 0 or 2)
Other team responds by accepting Allies as Out of Box setup or offering some amount of IPCs to the other team to PLAY the Allies (thus taking the Axis)

“We will play Axis, and Give the allies 17”  (binary choice;  either choose the Allies, or raise the bid to the allies in return for playing the axis)

No cash can be kept
No change will be given
No bases or factories can be built
Like units only with like units (navy units added where you have like navy, land and air forces where you have at least 1 ground unit in a territory at game start)
Only 1 unit to place per territory* (this is a tournament rule; you could also permit stacking but it makes the bid quite different)

therefore, bids such as 2 (and 11, and 17) do not divide optimally into 1 or 2 specific units some money will be lost

Everyone seems to differ on whether the bid is needed, but not necessarily on where.  I have seen some players give it to the US or China, but the prevailing wisdom is that the best use of the bid is to buy a sub, destroyer and some ground units for UK in north Africa.  A UK destroyer can protect the Canadian destroyer, or the Cruiser in SZ 91, so that stuff is more likely to survive and become the nucleus of your new fleet for later in the game.

Even better, if you can get some ground units or Taranto add-ins (Tirano Suggests-  1 armor, 2 artillery in Alex, Egypt, Sudan, 1 DD with Cruiser or a sub etc for 15-17 bid G40), then the Italians never really have the odds to become a raging threat in the Med, and they are less likely to get income over 20 at some point.  With the extra bid pieces, the war for the middle east is more of an easy win, so you can establish your bases in Egypt or your navy down there without many Italians surviving the first turn.

other popular places to put the bid units are to add Russian infantry or artillery, Chinese infantry, etc to add some staying power.  Infantry are too weak and slow (and for USSR and China) support units might be better because they have so few.  You still can only place infantry as china, note.    The problem with this approach is making a difference with what you do place without it getting pretty quickly killed, but this could help you protect directly against Germany during Barbarossa somehow.    There are tons of ideas about this but no consensus.

the bid helps handicap the teams and give the Allies a better chance at cracking one of the Axis.  However, the bid doesn’t do a good job of addressing the dogpile and running program aspects of the game (attack Russia with everything is the critical path to victory)

G40 typical bids run over 15+, usually as UK units
G42 bid needs to be at least 8, to save the UK BB on G1.

I’m curious which statements here are differing from what you’ve seen in the league? Do you feel that this NO is playing differently or is more relevant in the league?

I suppose its important to realize that any statements you read here on the boards are largely anecdotal. It comes down to how much of what you read accords with your own experience. And of course results will differ depending on what conditions you typically play with. For example, I noticed just now you mentioned the Russian bomber in another thread. In G40, and in other prior A&A games, many people have used additional Russian aircraft as an expedient alternative to the open pre-placement bid. An Extra Russian fighter in AA50 for example, or a Bomber in G40. In G40 specifically, that option is preferable to me, than an open bid for UK. Its the sort of set up change you really have to force though, because given the option most people would take that same bid amount and instead throw down 4 infantry or 3 art units in separate territories to spread the advantage, or a pair of subs to break a naval battle. Anyway, the point being that if you are using a Russian bomber in your games regularly, then chances our you’ll be seeing different results from people who try other balancing options. Beyond this, there is also the No Tech aspect, or things like whether or not players are using standard dice rules or low luck rules. All this stuff can skew the results in a given set of games, or provide somewhat different play-balance results from the games of people who play other ways.

I will say this about G40, if you play standard dice, there is a fairly substantial swing potential on sz 110 and sz 111, not to mention with casualties in France. This can be a pretty big deal for an opening battle that sets the stage for the whole game. The results there can be a lot more consequential than say Classic/Revised when a transport hit, or a destroyer dudded out was in the opening round. The old German battleship headache comes to mind. Or take for example how in Revised the swing on the W. Russia battle could really effect the whole game in a massive way, such that some players would just quit outright in the opening round, if the dice didn’t go their way. Something similar can occur here (though perhaps not quite as extreme) with sz 110 and 111. If the Luftwaffe trades well in those battles it can be a huge boon for Axis. If they trade poorly it can be a small nightmare for G. Low Luck can control for that to a certain extent, but what you gain in consistency by using LL during the opening round, you lose out on in dynamism during the endgame. This is why I tend to prefer dice since they are so unpredictable for the endgame, though I appreciate the place for LL and understand why so many are fond of it. Still even a small bid disrupting either of those battles, or the battles in the med, can take it from a risky swing to a clear and obvious choice, especially under LL conditions.

So all that is just to say that the conventions in your playgroup, the typical bid, what sort of rules you option in or out, can really affect the patterns that emerge.

You’ll probably have noticed as well, that because A&A uses a very fixed set up and involves a number of scripted first round battles, that players often use a technique that you might call mirroring. Where players tend to model their strategies and opening moves, on things that they’ve seen stronger opponents do. Adopting the strategies that beat you last time, we might call it. This happens a lot after a board first comes out, or especially with players who are new to the game. So what happens is a kind of gameplay evolution, that selects for the best opening plays and weeds out the poorer ones over time. So right after a new board comes out everyone is excited, since the playing field is leveled, and nobody really knows how to exploit the map. Very quickly though, players start adopting standard buys and standard openings, until at some point (after a year say) someone hits on a strategy that is very dominant, which never remains secret very long. Soon variations in it get more popular, until eventually it becomes a scripted move (something everyone does.) Its usually at this point, if the advantage is clearly going one way, to one side over the other, that people start seriously examining bid solutions.

Whats interesting about all this, is that if you are playing with someone who is inexperienced, and does something totally batshit crazy, that you wouldn’t expect anyone to do ever, sometimes that sort of game can actually get entertaining as well as challenging. Since you really don’t know how to predict the erratic behavior of the newb. These games can be fun, since they force all sorts of weird decisions on you. Like wow, he built that? I guess I have to go destroy it now, and do something I wouldn’t usually do haha.

I agree though, from an archival standpoint, its nice to have a league and a way to track what sorts of things are happening in games (what sort of bids are being used for example, and what opening moves.) The overall tally Axis wins to Allied wins. But even there, the nature of the dice can be pretty nuts in providing different experiences.

All this is just to clarify something that it might have been worth saying at the outset. When I talk about game “Balance” or “Balance by Sides” what I am really referring to is the ‘feeling’ or ‘sense’ among both players that the starting conditions provide a roughly even shot for either to prevail. There’s no way to be really absolute about this, since as soon as you roll the dice in a single round of combat, you shoot off into so many different variables that its probably impossible to say anything with certainty… eg. whether a bad roll somewhere can be recovered by an amazing one somewhere else, later on. So really what we a striving for is the sweet spot, where the feeling of balance is the same for both players at the outset. Where one person isn’t constantly grumbling about how the odds are totally stacked against them from the get go, or how if they don’t win battle X, “its basically all over!” I’m not sure how much you could learn from seeing my games in an after action, since I’m perhaps not as cut throat as others, and I like to experiment a lot (often with game mechanics.) I don’t mind losses and haven’t bothered to keep a running tally on anything.

If I’m in the lobby and I have more time to play, I also almost never concede defeat, at least until I see the deep endgame ;) Since that’s the one that fascinates me most in A&A games! The deep endgame, for those unfamiliar with how I use the term in A&A, is how things play after capitals have already fallen. So in Classic or Revised or 1942.2 the Deep Endgame is when you are down to just 4 nations. In AA50 when you are down to 5 etc. Another way to think about it is the gameplay when W. Allies can take over Russian land directly because the capital has fallen.

Pretty good at grinding it out, since even a losing game can be entertaining, and it teaches you about the production spread and the importance of the center ;) But now I’m just rambling.

Is it the general premise of this thread (that Russia’s NOs are too weak, and virtually pointless) that you find problematic? Or the proposed solution as a bid alternative? I guess I’m just a little confused where you think we’re running off track. Most of the results posted in that league forum for g40 games (at least for the last several months) show Allies being bid out consistently, often at above +10 ipc. So I feel that it supports the general position of game unbalance in favor of Axis. I’m not sure what bearing any of those games would have on my proposed solution right now, since those games are virtually all using pre-placement bids. What I have suggested here is a standard income modification for an NO as an alternative to what people are currently doing, which is bidding pre-placement. Does that make more sense from the perspective of a bid replacement/balance perspective?

You can find an example here:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=31303.0

some peeps bid up, most bid down.

A: 12
B: 11
A: 10
B: ok you get it, I get axis and you get allies at 10.

Going up

A: 8
B: OK, I take it at 8.

The difference with going up is you bid for what the other person will get as the allies. When you go down it is for what you want to take the allies with.

Agree on a fair bid (9 is quite standard)
Roll dice for desiding countries.
Change countries with one another as you please.