Playing in 2017 still, General Strategy/Discussion

We have abandoned that game. Every game went something like this:

G1, build 2 bombers. Force the allies to invest in navy to be able to enter/come close to europe mainland, with the threat of planes and possibly a few "meatshield"subs. Never a german navy, just a sub or two to save the airforce.
And when the allies have enough navy to come close to europe, then they have spent too much in navy, and your air force simply switch to fighting on land instead with freshly made tanks and awaiting inf. And in general mass tanks, beat russia.

J1. Build 2 factories. J2. Tankstankstanks, beat India and Russia with the help of air forces.  Gather together your navy into one force to protect mainland Japan. This force is big enough to buy Japan a lot(!) of time, and within then your tanks will reign supreme and give you enough income to win against american aggression.

Unfortunately, 42 (1st Ed) is caught between a rock and a hard place.
The game has Revised’s Map/Setup but with Anniversary’s Rule Set (sans China and Italy).

This succeeds at alienating both the “old school” players, who prefer the rule set of Classic/Revised (Transports that can defend themselves, subs that defend on 2, old AA rules, etc.) and the “new school” players, who prefer the larger and more involved maps like 42SE and G40 (and its many variants).

It also doesn’t help that defenseless transports combined with the small scale of the board make the following tasks absurdly difficult:

• Establishing a US/UK Navy in the Atlantic capable of landings any earlier than round 3/4

• Establishing any sort of German Fleet capable of holding Norway/taking UK

• Establishing any sort of meaningful (i.e. capable of threatening the Pacific Islands) Japanese/American Fleet

Not that this doesn’t leave a balanced game (it sort of does, in my opinion anyway), but it severely limits the diversity in strategies that can be employed by both sides.  This leads to the conclusions that Wibe has made about the “optimal” strategies being relatively stale (compared to other versions of the game, anyway.  Even in the fairly static Revised there’s a few variations in strategy available to both sides).

In my opinion, you might be better off going one of four ways:
1. Keep playing 42 1st Edition.  Don’t let some pessimists on the internet get you down!
2. Try playing with the Revised setup/rules on the 42 1st Edition Board.  The setups for the games are identical (just swap out
3. Try buying 42SE (or make the leap to G40).  All the rules (for the most part) are the same as 42 1st Edition with bigger and more detailed maps/setups.
4. Any combo of 1, 2, 3.  Don’t limit yourself to just one version of A&A!

@domanmacgee Good advice. I guess I’m old school, then, hehe. I prefer the 1st Edition for two reasons. I honestly like it. And, it’s all I have time for right now in my life. I do like the new school games. They look really fun.

@general-kromwell I prefer Revised personally but 42 1st Ed is still fun. I can’t get into 42SE or G40 because the game balance in those two is too off (42SE at least has a tournament ruleset that makes it a lot more balanced, but it’s a very linear game strategy wise).

Anyone else than me has issues with the Eastern United States sea zone having 1 cruiser and 2 transports which can be attacked only with 1 German submarine?

That is an exactly 50/50 battle that ends either with a +26 unit value for the Axis or a +6 for the Allies: a huge 16 value standard deviation of no little importance right on the first turn of the game, basically turning the whole game into a coin-throw of a starting setup unbalanced in favour of the Axis or of the Allies.

Of course, I know that there are a lot such starting battles in Axis&Allies games, swinging heavily on round 1, but this one looks too extreme to me in its coin-throwing extreme simplicity (and it would be the same even if you play Low Luck!).

@cernel Yes, actually. It’s probably an unintended side effect of the fact that, in Revised, the Cruiser was a Destroyer (which rolled on a 3 and still had it’s property of negating the abilities of Submarines). Transports also defended on a 1 in Revised, so the 50/50 battle isn’t actually possible.

I bring up Revised because 42 1st Edition just copy/pasted Revised’s exact map/setup, but swapped a few Destroyers out for Cruisers here and there (and used AA50s unit values/stats).

@domanmacgee Winning with 1 submarine against 2 transports and 1 destroyer in Revised is actually less than 1%. On the other hand, attacking 1 cruiser and 2 transports with 1 submarine in Spring 1942 is a juicy 50% chance of sinking 1 cruiser and 2 transports while your submarine survives!

Either Larry Harris didn’t see that when he switched the rules of the (almost) Revised map to the (almost) Anniversary ones, or he thought that it was a fun way to represent the “American Shooting Season”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time

If that was intended, I don’t think it was a good and fun idea: it is a very dicey battle which is not much optional because it is, on average, a very good take. That submarine is making a battle with an average +10 value swing there (140% the value of the attacking force!), which is more than sending it to kill the lone British transport and also more than whatever reasonable betterment of odds you can obtain by adding the submarine to an other battle. You can still decide not to do it, but only if you think it is a good idea to lower the average effectiveness of your opening turn in exchange for decreasing its risk, which is something you should do only against opponents whom you believe are worse players than you.

@cernel said in Playing in 2017 still, General Strategy/Discussion:

That submarine is making a battle with an average +10 value swing there (140% the value of the attacking force!), which is more than sending it to kill the lone British transport

Actually, sending the German submarine which is in the North Atlantic to kill the transport next to Eastern Canada (average +7) instead of taking the shot against the 1 cruiser and 2 transports next to Eastern United States (average +10) is some less than a -3 difference since, if using it to kill the British transport, then nothing can kill the submarine on the same round, whereas the 50% chance of the submarine surviving next to Eastern United States implies the ability for the Americans to make a battle with 1 destroyer, 1 fighter and 1 bomber (or even more units) against 1 submarine, which is an about +4.4 value swing, to be reduced to +2.2 on the account that the submarine will be there only 50% of the times. So that covers at least most (2.2/3) of the difference between the two options the submarine has if you actually think that having that submarine alive next to Eastern Canada at the start of the second German turn is actually worth its value or more. Opinions?

In any case, the battle next to Eastern United States is certainly a good option which your opponent may take and, in this case, it will be a 50/50 on either:

• Germany having 1 less submarine for nothing.
• America having 1 less cruiser, 2 less transports and having to invest units to kill 1 German submarine, with slightly more than a 1/6 chance also to lose 1 destroyer in the process.