Strategic bombing your way to a win

i think this would be easier in classic than revised but i’m guessing you play revised.  i don’t think it would be worth it germany can only loss 16ipc a turn. if you do 1bmb for italy and 2 bmb for germany thah is  16- 7.5ipc = 13.5 ipc. plus the fact you are going ot loss 4ipc for any aa hits 1/6 * averge bomber damge is 6ipc * 3or 3ipc. sp ypur at 10.5 ipc so far. to build 2 bmb thats 30 ipc. it takes 6*5ipc to obtian heavy bobmers or another 30ipc. it would take you 6 turns to be 3ipc up. your probbablly going to need 2 bombers for italy anyway to get 16ipc.

@General_D.Fox:

I’m tempted in my next game I play to play as the Americans and build up a massive bomber group to go and attempt to pound Germany’s economy down to dust.  I’ve read all the threads and papers and et al. regarding how this is unfeasable, but still, I’d like to give it a try.  Obviously the first few rounds would be to get some foot soldiers into either England or Europe somewhere, but at the same time, slowly build up the bomber corp until maybe a bit later on when I go full bore on BBer buys and go nuts into Germany and Italy.  Any thoughts, suggestions, apprehensions, derogatory jokes you’d like to make, either yaying or neying this possible plan o’ mine?

With NA “Superfortresses”, USA kills the crap out of Germany with strat bombing.  Of course, if you’re playing with LHTR, I believe the damage is limited to 16 per turn; that is, you can only inflict 16 IPC maximum total damage to Germany’s IPCs when strategic bombing Berlin and Rome with US bombers.

But if you’re playing OOB / FAQ, I believe it’s not limited to total damage per turn or territory, but per bomber.  So you can inflict a lotta IPC damage.  In fact, you should kick the hell out of Germany.

It’s something like - USA1, 2 bombers, USA2, 3 bombers, USA3, roll for heavy bomber tech and fly bombers to London, USA4 + shut down Germany with 12d6.  Of course each bomber is limited to 10 damage per turn, so it is actually less than 12d6, but it’s still pretty horrible.

Forget the infantry to England and Europe.  Either you build bombers, or you don’t.

Bombing isn’t going to work in regular OOB / FAQ, because losing even ONE bomber is a real setback to the US, and if you go for heavy bomber tech, that loss becomes even heavier.  I mean, okay, strat bombing can work if you’re lucky, anything can work if you’re really lucky.  But it’s PROBABLY gonna crash and burn by USA6 or 7 as Germany and/or Japan marches into Moscow.

–

“derogatory jokes you’d like to make”

Why yes.

crack pipe lol.

(edit) fixed explanation to make more sense.  too much crack (/edit)

Add 1 or 2 extra UK BOMs and it MIGHT be worth it.  You could theoretically get Germany down about $26 IPC if UK also had 3 BOM.

The risk of course is the damange that Germany will do in the interim…

Use your bombers to kill other units. The cheapest unit you can kill is Inf at 3 IPCs, which is almost the same as the average 3.5 IPCs damage on SBR. And the added advantage is that you are killing active units instead of future ones - the effect on the enemy’s strength is immediate. Of course, you also have a lot more stuff shooting back at you, so your bombers need backup.

And for me any excitement about SBR’s really fizzles when that pesky AA gun blows 15 of my IPCs out of the sky.

Exacta-mundo NC!

Instead of all bombing done by one power, divert the cost across multiple powers (quite historic if you ask me). Even a sassy player like myself would consider a russian bomber if the cash flow is there.

If you get real crazy with NA’s…… lend lease can make this pipe dream(crack pipe off course) a reality. And forget about superfortresses - they wreck Germany every time.

But if and when the zitties start hitting (non-NA games), it is a large loss to the allies. Law of averages will eventually shoot down bombers as you throw enough of them at Gerry. The outcome from this is determined by how well you spent your disposable income after Bomber purchases. In all actuality, it would have to be a KGF tactic. Bring the entire US fleet around to the Atlantic, along with the latecoming British aussie fleet, and as they slowly feed into the game, you may be able to offset the german naval onslaught. I get the impression that if the allies do not feed all existing forces into Europe, Germany can offset some of the IPC loss with gains in Africa / Mid East / Russia combo and also the possibilty of an early and undeterred naval consolidation.

In conclusion,

good luck!

Actually, I disagree with Switch.  The risk is that you’ll be forced to use DAAK’s dicey and Germany will have 100% accuracy with her Anti-Aircraft Guns….shrapnel hurts, man!

Seriously though, you do run a high risk.

A)  You have to stage all your bombers in Russia to hit Germany and S. Europe or you have to split them up, that means defensive units to protect them from attack. 
B)  That’s English money you don’t have for other things like, oh, soldiers? 
C)  That’s American money you don’t have for other things like, oh, transports and soldiers?
D)  1 American Bomber + 1 English Bomber = 1 Pissed off Germany anyway. (2-12 IPC dmg a round, that’s like loosing Africa and Madagascar in one round.)

If you want to go “heavy” SBR, I’d go max 3 Ameircan bombers, 1 British Bomber.  (the 3rd American is an extra just in case you do loose one to AA fire.)

What about going for long range aircraft and then also bombing Japan from Western Canada?  How much would it cost to do this in exchange for taking 8 off Japan and 16 off Germany each turn?  Probably way too much…

I’d almost like to see 2 british bombers, 3 american ones, if you can do it and still put 3 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 armor into Europe every round from England MINIMUM.

As for Japan, not worth it.  If you want to SBR Japan, stage your bombers in Novo and/or Cauc and hit his mainland factories.  Usually free of pesky AA Fire and ifhe does put up AA Guns, well you forced him to waste the money on them, cause now you can go SBR germany instead. (Hey, if you have to loose a bomber to AA Fire, I’d rather loose it to Germany.)

Use the roller at FROOD.  His AA Gun is about 17% acurate. (as in out of 100 bombers it’ll shoot down about 17 of them.)  And yes, I have seen it shoot down 2 bombers in a row, but that’s an oddity, not a regularity like in DAAK.

DAAK the cure to anyone SBRing, ever, even when the IC is open without an AA GUN. :P

Then again, I’ve used DAAK for really big battles where I have lotsa infantry to attack with because it’s SO heavily biased to giving AA Guns on Defense and Infantry on offense higher then average successes.

It’s been a long time since i used it, but last time I did it was 24 infantry attacking with 18 hits.

I’ve never used DAAK and I don’t know how it works, but I can say mine works by generating random numbers from 1 to 6. If it’s a 1, the AA gun hits. More specifically, the PHP expression used is mt_rand. mt_rand is supposedy better than the rand function, more random somehow. I wonder how DAAK does it, but I haven’t heard of random number generators with a bias toward lower or higher numbers - that’s not really random!

Maybe DAAK (or the programmers) thinks its more exciting when there is more hits, so they give AA guns a +1 bonus or something crazy like that. But to do that they’d have to be honest about it.

That sounds kind of weird.

the worst thing is when your lone bomber or fighter gets killed by a transport and you don’t even hit it.

Haha, I once lost a fighter AND a bomber on the same attack on one transport without killing it.

FROOD:  It’s my contention that DAAK first see’s if you get a 1 then works its way up through the numbers.  That’s why if I’m doing a massive infantry push, I’ll gladely use DAAK because I know I’m going to get closer to about a 30% hit rate with my infantry.  If I’m doing an SBR, I know to avoid DAAK like the plague because there’s a good 30% chance I’m going to loose my bomber.  (It’s actually worse, I think my bomber loss rate on DAAK is much closer to about 80%)

It would be good to actually document that track record with DAAK. Has anyone questioned them on this? I speak German, maybe I should look into it.

Not sure I understand what you mean - that DAAK rolls all the dice, and then assigns all the 1s to your infantry? Or how do you mean, “works its way up through the numbers”?

It seems to me, and I can’t get them to give me the source code, that first they see if you roll a certain number out of the maximum amount of numbers available.

6 out of 6 - 16.67%
5 or 6 out of 6 - 33.33%
4, 5 or 6 out of 6 - 50%
3, 4, 5 or 6 out of 6 - 66.67%
2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 out of 6 - 83.33%
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 out of 6 - 100%

So basically, if you DONT roll a 2-6 then you got a 1 and that skews the numbers.  You’ll end up with more '1’s then any other “random” number in that method because you are eliminating results, not determining a random result.

For instance, if you have a 4 out of 6 chance of hitting (say a battleship) you actually have (50% + 66.67% + 83.33% + 100%) / 4 or 75% chance to hit, not a 66.67% chance to hit.  If you have an infantry, say, attacking then instead of a 16.67% chance to hit, you have 58.33% chance to hit.  This explains why AA Guns have an insane accuracy rate and why you almost always seem to win a 2 infantry vs 1 infantry scenario at DAAK.

Now, as I said, I do NOT have their code, I have never SEEN their code, I cannot prove this theory in a court of law.  However, it seems to fit the results.  And yes, I have tracked the number of bombers that hit.  I’ve done too many infantry assaults to track those.  However, let me put it this way, if I had 20 infantry without armor or fighters and I wanted to attack someone, I would use DAAK because I’d get 8-14 hits out of 20 infantry almost every time.

Back on topic, I’m finding with JSP that 4 bombers for the allies seems to be optimal.  You loose a lot of bombers to AA fire over the course of the game, but you’re talking 14 IPC a round in damage to Germany in return. (Assuming an average score of 3.5 IPC damage dealt per bomber.)    That’s the equivalent of removing Germany from control of Africa and if you add that in with territorial conquests that really, really puts a damper on Germany…

Though, I have to admit, if you are blocking the Japanese navy by closeing the Suez, make sure to garrison it adequately to KEEP it closed so some stupid german artillery unit doesn’t walk in, open the door and let the Japanese fleet in to sink 33% of your american fleet, including your only Battleship!!!

Just to add my two cents about DAAK, I don’t really agree with Jen’s assessment that it is skewd, or that it is delibrately skewd.  Now I too have seen my share of weird results in terms of good and bad rolls and I remember seeing a recent incindent where NoMercy (I think) lost like 4-5 ftrs to aa fire in one turn.

But these types of things can happen.  I remember seeing lots of weird stuff playing Yahtzee as kid including rolling Yahtzee on one roll etc.

If you want to avoid the the dice, play LL.  That is why it was created.

I think many people cling to bad DAAK results b/c it is the most commonly used roller around here at the moment, so yeah if you use the roller enough you are going to see a wide variety of the good and the bad.

As a sample, I just ran this battle 5 times, 90 inf vs. 50 inf.  I should have done 90 inf vs. 90 bombers though, but nevertheless here are the results I got.

For the purposes of this, I list the defender even though that is 1’s and 2’s but I’m going to focus on the attacker and the 1’s.

Base line LL results
Att              Def
units/hits       units/hits
90/15             50/17
73/12             35/12
61/10             23/8
53/9               13/5
48/8+              4/2

Now the DAAK results (ADS)
Test 1
90/13            50/18
72/7            37/16
56/11            30/8
48/8              19/8
40/7              11/4
36/4+             4/1

Test 2
90/15            50/10
80/13            35/10
70/8              22/8
62/13           14/4
58/1+             1/0

Test 3
90/13            50/13
77/14            37/10
67/12            23/6
61/11+          11/3

Test 4
90/16            50/17
73/14            34/18
55/12           20/7
48/6               8/3
45/2+             2/2

Test 5
90/16            50/13
77/13            34/18
59/10            21/5
54/3             11/1
53/4              8/3
50/4+             4/1

Okay, now what does this all mean?  In the LL base line the battle goes 5 rds with a take of 46.  Of course that can be upto a +/- 10 if you include an attacker roll up/down combined with the the defender roll up/down.  But I’m not really concerned with the overall result as I am with the individual dice rolls.

Only rarely did I see what I would consider an “extreme” skew and these happened to be skewed down.  (bolded them in red)

[(edit)  I highlighted a few of the skew-ups in green]

I’ll have to look a bit closely, but the majority seemed to be right in the sweet spot of +/- 2 hits or so.  There were one or 2 defender skews that resulted in one 4 rd battle and some takes with 57, 58 units.

Also taking the total attacking rolls for each round minus the final killing roll where DAAK doesn’t display the results once the last defender is killed I had a total of 1492 rolls (attacker only).  This does include the 61/11+ one b/c in that case there were only 2 dice that didn’t get rolled.
in those 1492 rolls there were 239 hits.

That means 239/1492 = 16.02% hits.   Hmmmm….
1/6 = 16.67%

Seems pretty close to me.

Again, I’ll scan through my results maybe highlighting some more things if I think it is necessary, maybe I’ll try the 90 inf vs. 90 bom, but overall I think the results fall in line with what you would expect from a random number generator.

I understand that everyone gets screwed from time to time but that is the nature of the dice and we can all recount our horror stories but I have also been “screwed” using the in house roller, the AAMC roller, FoE roller and hand tossed dice.  It happens.

The other options are to play LL or No Luck.