The good times are over

So I played a quick game against a friend last weekend (we agreed it was experimental and would not count towards our scoreboard).

I was the axis and picked two national advantages: naval night-fighting and nazi scientists.

The allied player insisted on also having two national advantages, so he picked colonial garrison and flying fortresses (I forget the name, it’s the non-LHTR national advantage; US bombers are immune to AA).

Colonial Garrison gave me a lot of problems!  He placed the IC in India, which I went for right away, but the allies managed to trade it for a few turns, and then the US player waited till I was in a bad situation and bought two factories in china and sinkian.

The battleship advantage was not that great.  It was fun for a couple of battles, but then the US player just avoided my battleships.  I was a few turns from opening the suez canal, and my fleet was prepared against africa, but the US player was going to provide quite a hassle.

The game ended prematurely; I suspect I would eventually have lost.  The nazi scientists got me a tech upgrade only after 10 tech buys.

Maybe I need to recall Rommel from Africa and have him and the 7th Armoured division come back and hide in plain sight in Berlin. Maybe scare off the Allies for a while!  :lol:

Was the paper arguing that this is true for the first round of combat, and where smart attackers know when to call it off?  I didn’t quite follow the paper since the whole Mr T thing was distracting.

Intuitively I’d guess that the size of bad luck depends mostly on force composition.  If the attacker uses planes, sure they can lose big.  If the defender has planes, they can lose big too.  Defenders can also lose really big if you take their capital (or to a lesser extent if you take WEU or SEU).

For single round combats, most of the time attackers can retreat if they see their luck going bad after the first round - and that makes a huge difference.

There are numerous errors in the rule book that comes with the game.  You may want to check out Larry Harris Tournament Rules (which are available from a link on the main page of this website).

The only “opening fire” that repeats after the first round of combat is Submarine Sneak Attack.

BB Shore Bombardment and AA fire are limited to only opening fire of the first round of combat.

Every Nation gets 2 NAs + 1 Tech.

Allies pick 1 more NA and 1 more tech for the nation(s) of their choice. (ie both don’t have to go to the same country.)
Axis pick 1 more NA and 1 more tech for each nation.

That could be fun!

I am not aware of any paratroopers in any game, except as an optional rule for “3rd Edition”, the Hasbro CD-Rom

@Axel:

but the day after: we played axis&allies for 2 hours!
and remember this: after 1 hour, i asked her: “do you want to do something else?”
but she said: “no no, i want to see where this is going”
:-P
BINGO!!!

Ha ha, good work mate!

One suggestion I would have for the original poster is have a decent grasp on the rules.  If you can explain the basics to your friends before the game starts, then explain the more intricate details as you come to them during the game, the game will be more fluent.  There’s nothing like checking the rule book every two minute to detract from the fun.

Correction to my previous post:  I should’ve said the entire high value (IPC-wise) German empire.  That should make more sense now…  :lol: