Is there a perfect strategy?

Hmmm, I 'd consider a 60/40 advantage for any side in any game as way too good (for that 60 side). Broken beyond repair, even.

I think A&AG40.2 is balanced at roughly 60/40 for the axis indeed. By looking at the league standings that is. By my own experience I do not know where the balance lies, yet. In experienced groups I play in, the axis simply always win but 1v1 my results are more close to a 50/50. Personally I play OOB but most people in the league use allied bids, which leaves me wondering why it’s still a ~60% favor for the axis in league standings (last time I checked). Whatever it is, I cannot and will not think that “others might have gotten it wrong” so I tend to take the league results more serious than my own.

And as far as my personal experience goes, this 60/40 balance does indeed not come from J1DOWs, which I (personally ;-)) consider a better starting point, for the allies. But maybe that’s just because we’ve all become so familiar with its ins and outs.

I like to play Atlantic-heavy as well. It can be as heavy as 13 fully loaded US TRS (with adequate escorts), ready to invade from Gibraltar US5 (J4DOW) or 10 TRS US4 (J3DOW). Needless to say Hawaii and Sydney can hold out as well.
This ‘Europe first’ has gotten me very good results untill German players started to forsake their efforts to take out Moscow in favor of building up adequate defenses against the Wallies. WGermany, Berlin and SItaly, and to a lesser extend Finland and France, can be stacked with so much forces for defense and counterattacks that even the heaviest spending in Europe will get the Wallies no place to invade.

Ofc this leaves the axis unable to grab Moscow and in fact Russia should be able to start pushing back, but Moscow has its own problems. It has only very small income left by this time and Japan often also threatens to walk into Moscow through its back door if Russia gets too agressive. Long story short, I find that this course of events leaves both the axis and the allies in very strong positions for a long time coming (15+ turns, or even much much more).

@ItIsILeClerc:

Hmmm, I 'd consider a 60/40 advantage for any side in any game as way too good (for that 60 side). Broken beyond repair, even.

There is this game I like to play, and with the two most popular first moves, the spread over the course of history is the following:

1. e4: White wins 39.2%, Black wins 32.6%, Draw 28.2% = 53.3% / 46.7% spread.

1. d4: White wins 39%, Black wins 29.5%, Draw 31.5% = 54.75% / 45.25% spread.

And yet, people have been playing chess for a long time now, without constantly complaining that the game is broken.  :wink:

I’m sorry, but bidding should be a 100% equalizing process for most Axis & Allies games.  If the results are still 60/40 after the bidding, that means that people aren’t bidding right.  That, or there is just more propensity to play one side more accurately than the other.  This does NOT denote a flaw in the game, but rather a flaw in the play.

I’m still learning, and quite frankly it seems to me like it takes a lot more creativity to be successful with the Allies than with the Axis.  So, I will contend that it takes a better player to be consistently good with Allies.  But, if you are not good at both sides equally (and few are), comparative statistics are not going to give you the information you need.

The only way to truly get those statistics from league play would be to play a match with one game from each side with the same bid amount for each game within the match.  Then if you still see a very skewed result, then it is due to an imbalance.

But even then, it is a difficult proposition to tell how much of the imbalance is due to the game and how much is due to the players.

There is no perfect strategy.

There is however some key areas and strategies that seperate the mediocre player from the master:
(Note: I do not myself claim to be a master)

Good play is and must be flexible and is dependent on both luck and opponent counter moves. Its smart to have a wide array of possible moves instead of projecting a single strategy, thus making it difficult for your enemy to decipher what you realy intend to do :

Example 1: Germany buys nothing round 1, now allies must calculate both sealion and barbarossa.
Example 2: US has a fleet with 8 trannies of gibraltar, now Germany and Italy must guard both WGR, France and southern Italy.

There are some important key areas on AA 1940 map which can be realy critical to gameplay, these can be considderd the “center” of the chessboard. Offencive initiative here is good, loosing such areas is bad.

Examples:
Bryansk (If allies can stack and prevent Germany from taking it its a real headake for Axis)
Caroline Islands (A US fleet here is flexible and its expencive and hard for Japan to block of all targets with destroyer)
z97, z6 and z19 is vulnerable to massive sub convoying.
Yunnan, Gibraltar, Norway, Egypt, Iraq/Persia, East Indies, Caucasus, Stalingrad
And ofc all capitols.

Good allied players should master the following.
Playing after:
London has fallen
Egypt has fallen
India has fallen
Moscow has fallen

Dont be a defeatist, you’d be suppriced to see that what looks bad sometimes is actually good.

Actually, on second thought, we can say that there is something called perfect play. Not to be confused with a perfect strategy, ofc, and it is incredibly hard to play perfectly (i.e. making no mistakes).

From my own experience, the side who plays perfectly, wins.
If BOTH sides play perfectly however, I don’t know what will happen. I know that the axis situation looks better after ~12 rounds of play because they’ll have more income (and often also more TUV), but position (location) of forces is also very important and I have never had the time and will to play on in such situations. Playing >13 rounds of intense calculating because both players do not wish to make a mistake (knowing your strong opponent will make you loose the game if you do) is very tiring.

I agree on everything with anonymus but would like to emphasise that I don’t think there’s a lot of people in the league that do not also fully grasp these things.

So once again, if the league results show a 60/40 win ratio for the axis (in spite of the allies in the league already playing with bids), I can only think that there has to be a balance issue pressing on the gameplay.
The only other explanation would be that the league players do not know what they’re doing. That they have gotten it all wrong  (most of them anyway) so that the league results can be disregarded completely. But Who wishes to make such an assumption? Not me, I can assure you  :wink:.

Or, perhaps, like me, most league players simply loose interest in the game if there’s no sign of victory for any side after a long time of playing. People maybe get discouraged by the thought to have to play on for another long time and simply give up. If this is the case I can understand where the ~60/40 comes from. After a long time of playing (~turn 15), things often still look pretty grim for the allies. Maybe ‘defaitism’ is indeed the allied worst enemy.
But I don’t know, just guessing in the dark here. That ~60/40 has to come from somewhere…

Agree with a lot of what Anonymous has to say.

Let me reiterate: I’m saying the game is 60/40 at most. The only reason I give the Axis an edge is they have more room for error.  For example, a disastrous G1 roll on the British ships doesn’t necessarily spell game over for Germany.  On the other hand, an early game disastrous roll for the Allies (i.e. a Taranto raid that goes horribly wrong) probably spells doom for the Allies.  If the rolling is even early on I’d be inclined to call it an even split.