Anyone have any alternate setups or house rules for this game?
Alternate bidding scheme
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Once again well said by JDOW
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Yup, +1 for JDOW.
Although I wouldn’t always call it ‘poorly executed’ if the allied progress failed. It’s also that the axis are just very strong in general. Oh wait, he already said that ;-). -
Although I wouldn’t always call it ‘poorly executed’ if the allied progress failed. It’s also that the axis are just very strong in general. Oh wait, he already said that ;-).
And bomber-games are of course dicey. In close games, they can make the difference. But in the end, dice decide less games than most people claim.
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And bomber-games are of course dicey. In close games, they can make the difference. But in the end, dice decide less games than most people claim.
Hehheh, I was thinking about that too but didn’t want to say it out loud. I’ve said it too many times already.
It is true, ofc. I may be a bit more pessimistic about the long term effects the dice have on a game (especially during the opening battles) but I agree with the spirit of what you are saying. And in good spirit as well ;-).
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There are currently 4 games underway with the proposed bidding scheme:
Elrood (axis) vs. wittmann (allies, US+10) www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35743
DutchmanD (axis) vs. nerquen (allies, US+10) www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35731.0
Arthur Bomber Harris (axis) vs. nerquen (allies, US +9, UK sub in SZ98) www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35735.0
nerquen (axis) vs. Arthur Bomber Harris (allies, US +9, UK sub in SZ98) www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35736.0 -
It is an exciting prospect. But a shock to play the UK on T1. Am so used to the bid in the Med, I found playing the UK strange. And scary!
We are playing +10 from US1, regardless of Japan’s DOW. I would have happily played +30 for holding America when at war and started on 52 still.
I think 80 as a base war income makes more sense(Philippines lost, obviously), so hope this experiment helps the Allied cause. -
Yeah.
Imho the initiative of this game should be at Axis side. I find it weird that because of bids in range of +20 the Init changes, since suddenly Allies dictate which ways Axis cannot go anymore.
So in first turns sure, Axis is most likely having the time of their lives, but eventually the US income will come crushing in, and then its Allies turn.
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@wittmann:
It is an exciting prospect. But a shock to play the UK on T1. Am so used to the bid in the Med, I found playing the UK strange. And scary!
We are playing +10 from US1, regardless of Japan’s DOW. I would have happily played +30 for holding America when at war and started on 52 still.
I think 80 as a base war income makes more sense(Philippines lost, obviously), so hope this experiment helps the Allied cause.The reason, why we have been thinking that the bonus to the US economy shall influence all US turns is that we did not want to mess with Japan’s incentives to DOW early or late too much. If the bid would be awarded to US only when in war Japan might have increased incentive to DOW late and J1 DOW could easily disappear. But it might be just fine either way.
@wittmann:
But a shock to play the UK on T1. Am so used to the bid in the Med, I found playing the UK strange. And scary!
In my 2 test games with Harris we kind of used a mix of the two bidding schemes, we added the UK sub in SZ98 and then added US income on top of that. We felt that the sub is not changing OOB dynamics much and makes Tarranto raid less dicey if UK opts for it. With OOB rules, Tarranto raid is like a 80% battle (with a fighter and a bomber from London). With the sub it becomes like 95% and is more predictable for UK, still if G1 threatens Sea Lion, UK shall not be able to send planes to Taranto, with or without the extra sub.
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Posted by: nerquen
There are currently 4 games underway with the proposed bidding scheme:
Nice to see it getting some attention. Too good of an idea to just disappear.
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Thank you for your input Nerquen. Perhaps I should have done Taranto anyway, but Elrood’s opening German go combined with a 2TT buy, scared me off. I lost SZ91 Cruiser and both DDs. Caution seemed the word of the day.
Has really piqued my interest. -
@wittmann:
Thank you for your input Nerquen. Perhaps I should have done Taranto anyway, but Elrood’s opening German go combined with a 2TT buy, scared me off. I lost SZ91 Cruiser and both DDs. Caution seemed the word of the day.
Has really piqued my interest.Hmm, I don’t think Taranto raid would be a good choice there, you even lost the SZ91 cruiser, so I believe Sea Lion would hit you if UK sent planes to MED. I think attack on Tobruk and Ethiopia was a good decision there, but you just got unlucky in Tobruk….
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Elrood said the same. Glad we are all on the same wave lenght.
He had an unlucky I1, so we are probably close again. -
Nice idea Nerquen.
But I’m inclined to defend unit bids. A bid averaging 20 means spectacular diversity of bids and bidding strategies (the revised bid of 6-10 was great but 18-22 is even better). A high and variable placement bid helps keep the game fresh and interesting (longer than it would be w/o a bid), as bids can be used to frustrate previously dominant strategies.
I worry that if a single means to balance the game is universally adopted (say by a cash bid to USA), then that risks an impasse where there’s one ‘winning’ strategy that everybody plays.
Looking forward to seeing/hearing about the results of the experiments with this.
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Nice idea Nerquen.
But I’m inclined to defend unit bids. A bid averaging 20 means spectacular diversity of bids and bidding strategies (the revised bid of 6-10 was great but 18-22 is even better). A high and variable placement bid helps keep the game fresh and interesting (longer than it would be w/o a bid), as bids can be used to frustrate previously dominant strategies.
I worry that if a single means to balance the game is universally adopted (say by a cash bid to USA), then that risks an impasse where there’s one ‘winning’ strategy that everybody plays.
Looking forward to seeing/hearing about the results of the experiments with this.
In theory you might be right, but is that really the case in practice? Most unit bids I see are used to help beat down Italy with UK early. And that leads to the infamous KJF strategy by Allies. since when Italy is gone, UK and Russia have it much easier with holding Germany back.
So for Axis it means they have less options now, while THEY should have the initiative. We all know they lost the War, but isn’t this game to see “what if?”
E.g. Germany is starting the game. In my current one with Wittmann I chose to push hard on UK to prevent them from Taranto, and it worked, but for a cost, since in Ger2 I was not ready now for Barbarossa. Isn’t that what this game should be about?Little detour:
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I tend to compare the A&A with chess. (As weird as it might sound chess is a game with some portion of chance as well.)And at chess, what would you do to give the opponent an advantage? “you can use another pawn, just put him somewhere next to a starting pawn” ;-) Rather not, more likely you set yourself a tougher time limit to give your newbie some edge when it comes to thinking and planning. And imho thats what this proposal of nerquen equally does. Having more income with US is more forgiving in case of bad moves or mistakes made. So Allies get “more time”.
I know some people see it differently, but changing the starting units on the board is much worse than putting more troops onto ii in later turns. Since thats when actual uncertainty begins, like bad or overly good dice rolls etc.
How the game will evolve should be in Axis hands, else creators would not have chosen them to be the ones starting the game and by that giving the allies an direction how it will go.
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Speaking to these last two posts, I can see the merits of both perspectives. What I would really prefer from an alternate bidding scheme, is not a balance corrective for one side or the other, but some element of equitable variability that makes it effectively impossible to say which side has the advantage in any given game at the outset. A&A doesn’t have a standardized way to achieve this, at least no OOB way provided for us in the manual. A&A is a bit strange on this account, since the game is fixed in the first round.
The analogy to chess isn’t entirely insignificant. Between two novice players there is no real difference between opening as White or following as Black in Chess, just like in A&A it doesn’t really matter between two novice players if you play as Allies or Axis. At a higher level of play though, usually one side can be said to have the advantage out of the first round (in this case Axis) just like at a higher level in chess, White can be said to have the initiative, and a better chance to win rather than draw. The psychological pressure of thinking that the game is “yours to lose” based on which side you play, is probably even more stark in A&A. But the issue with the preplacement bid, is that you reset the starting conditions and potential TUV trades. There is no second bid phase for example, to offset the balance of the initial bid. Imagine a situation where the Allied player receives 18 ipcs on the bid, places their extra units, then the Axis player looks at it and says “damn, those subs in the Med!” Based on these new conditions maybe the Axis could really use a 6 ipc bid of their own to adapt? But of course that would just be silly, because before you know it, the whole starting unit set up and balance of local power would be totally different. And none of it “by the book.”
What does a pre placement bid for Allies really give you? I think its largely psychological.
A single decisive roll in the second round could easily undermine that starting advantage a bid provides just in one combat round alone. So the bid is more about starting confidence, than anything you can really depend on for the duration. A competent Axis player acknowledges this when they accept an Allied bid, otherwise they’d just bid lower. Its the equivalent of saying “I know what extra units you can buy, I’m familiar with the bid strategies at that amount of IPCs, but I think I can still beat you!” Again pretty much a psychological thing, at least in a dice game, since we can’t predict the future or see the rolls in advance. We’re really just going off expectations or odds in the opening round of play. The reason why I like a bid to income over preplacement, is that it doesn’t distort the opening battles, and it pushes the bid advantage out one full game round. The “extra” units, in that case still have to enter play through the normal purchasing mechanism. I think this makes it somewhat harder to play fortune teller and predict outcomes. Players have to plan further in advance via purchasing/placement, which in turn makes it more likely that the actual effect of the bid on game balance is harder to isolate. I think there is enough variability in purchasing/production, to ensure that the same amount of dynamism can be achieved as you’d find with a preplacement bid. But eventually you will hit the same wall, if there is a magic number that makes the game perfectly 50/50, we’d probably get bored of that too, and still desire some way to randomize the first round for novelty.
I often come down on preplacement bids as something I find slightly unnerving, but I appreciate what they do in preventing the game from getting stale. Each time you reset the board with some new starting unit, the whole thing changes. I think its the cascading effect of the small change that keeps the game feeling fresh, not the specific advantage provided for one side or the other. Basically once the bid becomes “standard” and you’ve played it enough times to get bored, then you need to find new ways to keep it enjoyable.
Bids are House Rules. If we wanted to be really strict, all these threads should end up in the house rules section (where most of the threads I start seem to end up haha), because most of the strategies and game situations we talk about in the G40 section assume a standard bid, or at least have to reckon with it. I don’t suggest that these threads should be moved. Merely to point out that if you dig one house rule, why not try some others?
There are many ways we might change the game to tweak the balance, other than adding more starting units at the outset. Popular conventions, function mainly because they’re popular. If enough players want to try alternative “bids” to starting income or production, or recuring income bonuses, rather than bonus starting units, maybe we can come up with more ways to keep the game fresh, after the preplacement bid thing has run its course.
:-DIf variation or diversity is the goal, you could just as easily give every nation a bid, either to starting icome or secret ballot style for preplacment units. Then you’d have like 10 times the diversity, and who knows, maybe a nation like Italy or China or Anzac or France would be a bit more interesting to play? But that might be more than most players are after, perhaps some are content with just a USA boost, and that’s fine too. It all invites at least some level of A&A apostasy, and admission that the OOB game could use a fix or two.
:evil:I still wish some of this stuff would get an official nod, or official recommendation, by being written down somewhere in a game manual. You know, on some final page of the rulebook, that offers different options and systems for incorporating them into play. Meanwhile, it’s up to us to figure all this out I suppose.
Ps. Just as an added curiosity or possible encouragement, it’s perhaps worth remembering that even a “perfect” game like chess, has had a few house rules of its own added in over the centuries. It took a couple hundred years and an India factory just to nail down the basic shape of the chess “Map.” Queens, Rooks and Bishops etc. didn’t have their “unit stats and abilities” formalized until what? like the Quattracento? Remember when the pawn’s opening movement ability was increased? and you thought defenseless transports were bad! Then there are all those pesky “one-off” rules like Castling, En Passant, and pawn-promotion. A&A has only been around since the 1980s, so we’re probably doing alright in the grand scheme of things. ;)
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I often come down on preplacement bids as something I find slightly unnerving, but I appreciate what they do in preventing the game from getting stale. Each time you reset the board with some new starting unit, the whole thing changes. I think its the cascading effect of the small change that keeps the game feeling fresh, not the specific advantage provided for one side or the other. Basically once the bid becomes “standard” and you’ve played it enough times to get bored, then you need to find new ways to keep it enjoyable.
Right on.
The merit of the placement bid is precisely that it can lead Germany and Japan to change up their opening moves. Opening moves tend to determine the way the game dynamics play out. So if the bidding schema involves only a cash bid to the USA, then there is a danger of Germany and Japan settling into a set opening move that they consider optimal. Then it becomes a question of how much of a cash bid does America need to defeat this optimal strategy.
but is that really the case in practice? Most unit bids I see are used to help beat down Italy with UK early. And that leads to the infamous KJF strategy by Allies. since when Italy is gone, UK and Russia have it much easier with holding Germany back.
We haven’t discovered the optimal bid yet. The ss to 98 is solid. But there are other bid strategies that are (potentially) just as good or better. For example bidding units to make Germany’s G1 harder in 110, 111, 106, and Scotland. Bidding units to China/Russia/UKPac/Anzac to help set up a KJF. When the bid is 20+ it’s hard to anticipate the myriad bid combinations that you might have to face.
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If you don’t like a flex/placed bid, what we should be bidding on is extra income for RUSSIA instead of East USA.
Make Novisibirsk worth 10 IPC’s (to represent eastern factories). That will make all the difference in the world. The Germans will have a fight on their hands instead of a massacre, and Japan will have an interesting target to consider.
It’s that or place a significant Russian force in Novisibirsk that can opt to aid China, or bail out Moscow in time.
4 inf
3 art
2 mec
1 arm -
I like Garg’s idea!
Eastern Front is the least historical part of A&A and it would be great to actually have the Russians have a shot of turning the tide of the Hun’s as they historically did. I
like this approach much better then US cash, UK extra units (it’s always them that gets it) and an actual chance for a Russian player to make a game of it instead of just trying to see how long they can go before getting crushed.
Thanks Garg.
Kim
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removed
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Are we playing the same game? :?
If Russia is strong enough to give a real fight to Germany, then I would not play Axis. What chance would Germany have to really capture 8 capitals then?
And also… it WAS a massacre … Russia lost how many? 22 Million people?And again: sorry guys, but this just doesn’t belong in this thread. Its about US Income vs. Unit bidding.