Allied Playbook - G40 Collection of Essays - Compiled by jacobgeo24 Nov 18-19 2023

TripleaA lobby is seeing a lot of bids between 16-24 on average? In LL I agree with what’s been said, I really am starting to come to the conclusion that even mid-20s makes it a very tough match for Allies. I am not surprised the league is going higher than that. But I really do think you need to guage the skill level of your opponent. If you get a newbie in your triplea lobby, maybe cut them a break. It’s the somewhat experienced guys that always throw me, strong for about 3-5 rounds but then don’t really have any mid-game strategy experieince. It’s hard to know how much to bid in those cases too.

But anyway, back to what units are getting bought: Subs/DDs around the Med for UK. Sometimes fighters for UK (Scotland, Malta). Other threads have answered this question as well, from recent memory: Inf in Yunnan for example, and ground units in africa.

Less often variations: Russia bomber, UK transport in South Africa. UK sub in Malaya. I’ve also seen Subs in the north atlantic.

Some people dump a bunch of ground units in Russia. Whether or not that actually does anything I doubt.

I am also going to take this opportunity to plug this thread about Bids and bid rules: https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/35874/allied-bids-what-are-the-common-rules-on-placement … I do so to personally recommend not allowing facilities for bids.

@waxenhen4 said in Allies getting destroyed every game?:

@Contango thanks for the pictures

So is the most optimal counter for an all in Russia attack really abandoning EVERY thing except Moscow? I suppose this would deny the VC but give Germany almost all of Russia’s ipc value for free.

the UK advice seems pretty strong but what do you think makes a better permanent main landing for the allies: Normandy, north/south Italy, or south France? (assume your not playing a mod that appears to have made southern France neutral)

For Russia it might be a bit strong to say to abandon absolutely everything. I think you can justify deviating from a full on retreat under certain circumstances:

You can make a case that your deviation stands a good chance of actually helping your Moscow odds.

Examples:

Trading units to re-take Novgorod, Ukraine and Volgograd -> not only kills German units but also denies factory usage Sending some mechanized units to kill small groups of German tanks/mechs trying to do a Northern run-by to gobble up income If Germany moves ahead too quickly, or splits up and leaves you an opportunity to strafe his army and still be safe afterwards, (a strafe is where you make an attack with intentions of retreating on purpose) or otherwise leaves you a lucrative unit trade Germany has allocated resources away from Russia, so Russia can now flip to offense.

Examples:

German production switches heavily to the Atlantic Germany decides to do a mid-game Sea Lion Germany goes hard with mechanized units into the middle east leaving you outnumbering his slower army

As for my thoughts on an Allied permanent landing:

Normandy is probably the best:

Free factory Opportunity for UK ground troops to use US transports easily UK Air cover (watch the Italians taking out your airbase before Germany’s turn) UK production of extra naval units if things get lively and it’s necessary Furthest from Moscow, meaning German planes have to pick one or the other German infantry/artillery have to move off of defending West Germany to get there Can quickly switch to the Med if you see opportunity Threat of sniping Berlin (US takes Denmark, UK follows up with transports to Berlin)

I find Norway is good, but kind of situational. You can sometimes really annoy Germany with a small investment of suicided transports and not taking your entire fleet out of position and away from air cover.

I’d agree with everyting said.

I believe that any 2player game should be played with a bid or a handicap based on skill (in a broad sense of the word). We have had players here who believe the axis can’t win, and need a bid of 20. That is probably correct for the way they play the game. That being said, it is an interesting exercise to figure out what the bid would be on an expert level.

One thing that has not been mentioned is the game LL or not?
a LL game has to have a higher bid than a luck game. LL attacks can be optimized a lot better, an a smaller force in needed to ensure a win. Just try to calculate how much you need to be 99 % certain of paris falling in a LL game vs a regular game

build infantry. say prayers.

YG, I haven’t seen Low Roller’s document (BGG requires a person to register in order to download files), so I can’t really comment on it – but here’s an idea that you might want to consider for your own rulebook project, since it may save you a lot of work and may perhaps also be safer from a legal point of view.

I imagine that your project to rewrite the entire Global 1940 ruleset as a combined document will require you, as a first step, to create an outline of the document that you want to create – basically, a plan for the structure of the whole document, arranged in whatever way you think will be best from the point of view of clarity and ease of use.  I also imagine that, as another preparatory step, you’ll need to make an inventory of all the parts of the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks that you wll want to use, with page references to those parts of the two rulebooks.  One way to make that inventory would be to plug the page references into your structured outline, to give yourself a complete plan of where in the rulebooks you’ll need to go to write each section of your projected document.  (This may not necessarily be the way you were planning to prepare the project, but for the sake of argument I’ll assume that this was going to be your methodology.)

Anyway, what occured to me is this.  Having prepared a detailed outline of the type I’ve described, and having inserted into the outline all the required page references to the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks, you might not find it necessary to re-write anything at all.  The document I’ve described would serve as a kind of sophisticated index – a conceptual one, not an alphabetical one – to the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks that treats them in a combined way and that provides access to their content according to whatever logical structure you think would be most convenient for use by players.  The players would still have to go from your document to the rulebook page to which you referred them, of course, but the point is that you wouldn’t have to spend any time actually rewriting the two rulebooks, which would save you an awful lot of work.  Furthermore, since you’d neither copying-and-pasting the rulebooks (which would be questionable from a legal point of view) nor re-phrasing the actual content of the rulebooks (basically trying to get around potential copyright problems by putting the rulebooks into your own language), you might be on safer legal ground.  Essentially, you’d be providing people with a structured and easy-to-use way of accessing official rules, rather than either reproducing or rephrasing the rules.

@Marshmallow:

It would be even more effective if the US could spend its money to build bases on Allied territory, regardless of whether or not the US owned the territory.

For that matter, the US should also be able to produce units at the factories in France (as a whole) on its turn even after France (the territory) has been liberated. Historically, the US provided everything for the French army after the liberation of Paris – the French could not supply their own army at all after Paris was liberated.

Marsh

@the_jetset:

In fact, it could even be argued that Germany should collect the IPCs for these Vichy French territories after capturing Paris.  … but that might be going a bridge too far.

While I agree with this in spirit, I do think it could be taken too far. You could have people that say it should be this way for all countries: Once the capital is captured, the capturing power now controls all the territories and units of the vanquished nation.
For one thing, this would eliminate any possibility of liberation and I think this game would end up being a sort of Deluxe Risk rather than Axis & Allies.
Imagine this scenario:  Germany goes after Russia and tries punching straight through to Moscow along the north route, thereby NOT taking Ukraine or Stalingrad.  Suppose Japan didn’t attack Russia at all in the far east.  Now suppose Russia was foolish and bought a battleship for the Caspian Sea instead of infantry so they didn’t have a proper defense in Moscow and Germany wins.  Now Germany controls territory all the way to the Pacific and Japan now has a buddy to their north instead of an enemy. Plus, Germany becomes instantly rich, almost doubling their income with all the Russian 2 point territories plus all the troops that were guarding those territories (not to mention Germany’s shiny new battleship in the Caspian Sea.).

I wonder if a crazy rule like this would make games longer or shorter?  Capital defense would probably be even heavier.

@Pelanderfunk:

I like the early attacks against the US, but it looks like Russia was becoming a problem.

The attacks against America were half baked - I was still at the drawing board but jumped in anyway.

A bigger problem than Russia is UK in Africa, the Mediterranean, and South East Europe.  If Italy were an asset to Europe and not a liability, I think I could deal with the Russians.  In fact, if I could lock UK out of the Med (without extra effort from Japan or Germany) I would combine the Japanese North American campaign with Sea Lion and be sitting pretty.

What to do about that pesky Med…