Anyone been defeated in trying to take France?

Well, never been wiped out trying to take France, but have been forced to retreat.  Kinda nice that Italy takes it though - some good convoy free income for them.

Yup! :-D

Its possible to get mercilessly diced. Just roll this attack 10 times in a row in tripleA and see what happens. The TUV swing can be wild. Even if you bring the max coverage for all your battles, it’s not unheard of to get completely rocked by a UK scramble in the sz attacks, or just hammered by defensive 2s on the France attack. Basically if you dud hard in the first round of combat, there’s no telling how bad it might get…

This is one of the reasons I don’t really like the idea of a pre-placement bid to begin with, since it assumes Germany will roll an average or better than average result in all their opening battles, even if playing conservatively. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how conservative you are, if the dice are against you, you can see half your forces melt away in the opening round.

I believe that Low Luck play has a disproportionate influence on the way people bid in dice games. In LL every pip can be counted before the battle occurs, and the only variable is in the remainder. But in dice the TUV swing can swing way harder.  I favor a bid to starting income over preplacment in dice games, since it doesn’t screw with the first round battles.

I have a button that reads:  “Good dice beat good strategy every time!”

Haha too true!

I honestly judge a player more based on how they handle a bad roll, than whether their strategies under optimal conditions are awesome. I think half the game is managing to keep it together when you’re down. Playing through a rut, and just grinding things out, trying to recover from a poor start. Most people would probably just quit if they got backed out of France, but I’d have total respect for person who played on hehe

IMNSHO, you can’t really quit a G40 game before round 5 at the earliest.  Game really hasn’t started until all nations are at war, after all!

@Black_Elk:

I honestly judge a player more based on how they handle a bad roll, than whether their strategies under optimal conditions are awesome. I think half the game is managing to keep it together when you’re down. Playing through a rut, and just grinding things out, trying to recover from a poor start. Most people would probably just quit if they got backed out of France, but I’d have total respect for person who played on hehe

The dice is what makes A&A games great. I believe there is some God of War out there rolling dice for real battles too. Just look at the attack on Singapore, Percival could not handle poor dice so he surrendered, same with Freyberg on Malta. Look at the Winter war in Finland, or the attack on Norway. Or what about the German attack on France 1940 ? The Germans were outnumbered in men, tanks, artillery, planes, everything, but anyway they won in 6 weeks, cant copy that in a game of A&A. They say the real world is more crazy than fantasy. And it all boil down to, as Black Elk says, who can handle the bad roll.

While I agree with all this about handling a bad roll,
If the game is played at a high level, there is not much to ‘handle’ after a bad roll in this game (except perhaps if the roll wasn’t as critical as Paris).
What you can do is wait for your opponent to also make a bad roll in an equally critical battle to get even, but that’s it.

If Germany doesn’t get France R1 then the game is really heavily allied favor. True Italy can take it, but it you don’t kill enough then maybe UK can help defend it. Say if France has 3 units left then UK can put 4 fighters and a bomber in there. That makes it really tough for Italy. Even if Italy takes France Germany is in really bad shape vs. Russia.

I totally disagree that you can’t call a game before R5. If the first turn goes horribly wrong for the axis, with the allies having a fair bid, then it could be like a 95% chance for allies to win from there. Not really a fun game to play if the allies would be 95% favored after a horrible German first round.

This is one reason why I have always favored doing LL for the first turn, and then dice after that. This makes it a much more level playing field.

@Narvik:

@Black_Elk:

I honestly judge a player more based on how they handle a bad roll, than whether their strategies under optimal conditions are awesome. I think half the game is managing to keep it together when you’re down. Playing through a rut, and just grinding things out, trying to recover from a poor start. Most people would probably just quit if they got backed out of France, but I’d have total respect for person who played on hehe

The dice is what makes A&A games great. I believe there is some God of War out there rolling dice for real battles too. Just look at the attack on Singapore, Percival could not handle poor dice so he surrendered, same with Freyberg on Malta. Look at the Winter war in Finland, or the attack on Norway. Or what about the German attack on France 1940 ? The Germans were outnumbered in men, tanks, artillery, planes, everything, but anyway they won in 6 weeks, cant copy that in a game of A&A. They say the real world is more crazy than fantasy. And it all boil down to, as Black Elk says, who can handle the bad roll.

Add to that the battle of Midway.  Wow what bad dice for Japan.

@theROCmonster:

This is one reason why I have always favored doing LL for the first turn, and then dice after that. This makes it a much more level playing field.

LowLuck is ….maybe…good for Tournaments, but then why not play Chess, now that’s a fairly balanced game. When you gather 4 or 5 real men in your basement, some of them vets, then you don’t start the game with cheating and candy. You use the dice, man. If you cant handle bad dice, then play it safe, always attack 4 to 1, and if that miss too, whine until you get a reroll.

Now the real battle of France was not fairly balanced in the real world, it heavily favored the Allies. The Huns had to use everything they got, and they barely won, by luck. So why should the A&A battle of France be a sure thing ? It can be a sure thing if you throw in your planes too, but then the UK fleet survive. And you don’t want that, neither. So we got a dilemma, play it safe or gamble. I guess that’s A&A in a nutshell

Well said Narvik. Frankly, I hate low luck. A few weeks back we tried a whole game using low luck and I really didn’t like it. I will say it made combats a little quicker. For some of the small battles, we didn’t even have to move units to the battle board. I really don’t like moving units into a sea zone or territory and having units basically just disappear. ROLL THE DICE! Give the defenders at least a chance to take someone with him.

By the way, we had a game where Germany underestimated the France battle and simply didn’t send enough in there. Germany got whacked bad. UK sent in some planes so when Italy tried, they also got spanked.]
ROUND 2. France got to buy some stuff to protect Paris. Germany sent everything they had left within range but STILL failed. However, this time they beat France down pretty hard too and UK didn’t have but 1 or 2 planes to send this time. So Italy finally took Paris. Axis lost this game by the way. A miserable time to be an Axis player. Heck, Italy actually outlasted Germany in this game.
I do remember a game where Germany failed to take Paris. UK scrambled and lost the RAF along with the Royal Navy so they had no planes to send to Paris. Italy took Paris on I 1. I think the Axis actually won that game but it was sure different. Germany had to do some real different strategy without that French plunder. Italy on the other hand was able to beef up their navy and dominate the Med. They got into the Middle East then took Cairo and spread like a plague through Africa while sending a fair amount of tanks and mechs into Russia.

I guess people hate LL or love it for all different reasons.

I must say I have dual feelings about it for a real game, but when testing strategies you don’t want dice to mess up your analysis. If you want to know if a strategy works or not, LL is the best friend you have.

In a real game the most striking downside of LL is in small battles, where the attacker can more safely (if calculated) attack and if the defenders don’t have >6 defense factors, they only have a chance to take down 1 attacker with them. Much less so in Larger battles ofc but the attacker can still plan with greater ‘security’ (the odd dice rolled can still mess up an attack).

The Obvious upside of using LL is you eliminate that some1 always wins  because his/her dice are just blessed (or yours jinxed) even though strategy-wise they should loose the game, or, less dramatic, it just eliminates the more outrageous dice-swineries. Like getting 6 hits from 3 FTR attacking your 3 fully loaded CV (happend to me once), which is ofc rather silly to do in the first place…

In my personal experience, I have seen things like that happen too often. Luckily not always on my side, or even in a game that I am playing personally. Still enough for me to Always play LL in a 1v1 game, leaving the dice for games with more players.

@ItIsILeClerc:

. Like getting 6 hits from 3 FTR attacking your 3 fully loaded CV (happend to me once), which is ofc rather silly to do in the first place…

I think that is what actually happened at Midway in the real war, and that is the beauty of using dice. Now if your friends got upset because of that, offer them hot beverage, that helps, it do for Sheldon anyway.

OK, being slightly borderline off topic, but IMHO what causes this issue is that France is way to overpowered. France was not that strong in the real world. It should be possible to play several turns with France alive, but in that case France and UK combined should not receive more IPC than Germany, and at least not poor Russia. When this 3 Allies out produce Germany 2 to 1, then the game is obviously scripted in the way that Germany need to capture France in T 1.

BTW, here are a pic from a game where France surrendered in Turn 1

Interesting ideas here. I also don’t like LL very much either. I do use it to develop strategies like ItIsILeClerc does.

Do you think playing with LL helps or hinders Air Blitzes?

That’s a funny pic, Narvik. I take it the French pose is intentional :-D.

@ Cyanight:
I think it still depends on luck. Without LL you roll more dice but with lower hit range.
I once played a game where me and my opponent agreed on both sides being allowed to choose how to roll dice for every battle: either LL or roll all units (so yes, this could result in one side rolling all units and the other side rolling with the LL system during one battle). Choice at start for the complete combat, not just for a round.
We both ended up rolling everything for the smaller battles, because the temptation of rolling (for example) 6 dice @ 1 in stead of just applying 1 hit is very big.

Unfortunately I missed all the dice @2 or below, that I rolled in that entire game… ALL 1’s and 2’s failed to hit. Miserably.
Looking back at that game, LL could have given me 5 to 6 hits on my opponent’s aircraft (a lot of his ‘smaller’ attacks involved larger airstacks attacking 1, 2 or 3 of my INF or raiding my IC’s), which has a huge effect on the game… On the other hand, I might have rolled normal to Lucky, resulting in even more hits…

So I guess it really depends on how Lucky you are.
If playing against an opponent who you really fear because of his luck but not so much because of his strategy, you could try more LL games and leave the dice in games for opponents you know will be good for more normal luck ;-).

That is a funny pic Narvik…I think HBG should offer those units for sale!

I’ve been defeated by France in global and it was the standard attack by Germany…I didn’t divert any units to Normandy or South France.
One of my opponents was also defeated by France…so it’s really not that uncommon. It’s tough for the axis to win when that happens…every game I’ve played or heard/read about that happening was an allied win.

I saw this in a tripleA game just last night! France survived with 2 tanks and a fighter. Taken on Italy 1. Then the Regia Marina wiped the British at Taranto. It was a double smack down basically, pretty terrible swings for the attacker in both cases. Fun to see though! Because it was different.

The issue with LowLuck is that you put all the interest and emphasis into the first round of gameplay, since its highly dependent on the unit set up. It highlights the production spread on the gameboard and magnifies its significance. Starting balance matters more in LL, because you can’t count on the random swings in TUV to even things out over time, and there is less to give the underdog hope at any given point, when they’re down.

Consider that in an LL game, with max coverage, it is impossible for Germany to lose the France battle. So if you build your whole strategy around LL conditions, and then try to port that strategy into a dice game, you could very well get hosed right out the gate! haha Same deal with the anti-air and the scrambles. Having a solid LL based strategy/understanding is all well and good if you are playing an LL game, but I don’t know how much insight it offers, when you try to take that same strategy a bring it into a normal dice game.

I think its the variety in the rolls that give A&A its overall strategic interest. The set up and start conditions are basically fixed in Axis and Allies boardgames, so without the wild rolls its fairly static. No big swings in TUV, and its pretty much just going through the motions. It loses the surprise factor for me. I understand why some people enjoy it, but my preference is for dice. In a dice game, its possible for France to hammer back. I don’t mind this, so long as its dice, there’s always a chance something could go terribly wrong for Allies somewhere else to compensate.

LL favors the attacker, and the side which moves first in the turn sequence. It also allows predictable strafing. Advantage to Axis in G40, because of the way the turn order sequence is designed and because the political situation is restricted for Allies on the DoW.

@Field:

I was wondering if anyone has been defeated in attempting to take France with G1’s attack? I have suffered losses, but nothing ever where it looked like I was going to fail.

Yes is the answer to your question and it is a complete kick in the balls for Axis players to be truefully honest. I can honestly say that in our group if the Axis fail in taking Paris its a 99% certinty for an Allies victory.