I’m looking to play a game with someone. I am completely new to this and don’t know what to do. I am not sure of the frequency that this will be played. I have a feeling it will be pretty slow as I have been working a lot lately. I mainly just want the experience of setting up a game and playing it through. If someone (who is patient) would be willing to help me out, would be appreciated.

AA50
41 or 42
with NO’s
without tech

I got most of my LL info from here: http://www.daak.de/indexe.php3 It is a German language website, but also has an English version. My computer already has cookies set for English, so when you go there, you will have to look for the button to switch it to English. It is on the left side under the Dicey Server login. There is a large black button that says “Click Here For English Version”. Once you are in the English version, click on the Rules tab and you will find a lot of info.

We just started a game where we used both and chose the higher results value. I think it worked out well. What we decided to do was, if you didn’t have at least a total value of 6, then you had to pick one method. i.e.: if you attack with a tank and an infantry, you would either have to roll 1@3 and 1@1 OR 1@4. If you did both, then you are essentially doubling your chances at hitting something because due to LL rules, you aren’t guaranteed a hit anyways, you have to roll in both situations.

SBR were conducted in the same way. If I did a SBR in Germany with two planes, the defending player could roll 2@1 OR 1@2, but not both. This does change strategy a little as you probably don’t want to go in with more than two bombers, but maybe I am less experienced and you never go in with more than two anyways. Also, another house rule we used was to calculate the SBR damage. We would roll two dice, add the total, then divide by two, rounding down. We liked this method a lot better as we felt it was more fair.

Preliminary Assessment: you can’t really play as if you were playing LL because there are some pretty good dice rolls. But no one really got upset at the dice rolls this time, because there was a minimum set on the number of casualties. For the most part, the results were the same with LL or dice. Only a few of the small battles were there any differences, and it was never more than +1. We haven’t had any MAJOR battles with massive stacks, but we will come back to it soon enough. Thank you EVERYONE for your input. The game is now more enjoyable for my group of friends, and I hope that someone gets something out of this thread that helps them make it more enjoyable as well.

I have played the lotr risk game. I love it! Very fun, though not really like AA. Cool pieces as well.

Each country has it’s own dice and this player is the only one that rolls badly. I think it has something to do with how he snaps his wrists?  :-P

IF one chooses to use “re-roll chips” (purchased or given at the start of the game) then I think that they should only be able to use those chips on THEIR bad rolls, not to nerf their opponents good rolls.

This is a really good idea and should keep the arguments down. The only place where I see this being bad is on AA rolls. When people SBR me at the beginning, I always miss. But when someone comes in with like 3-4 planes in mid-game, I will have one round where I take out 2-3 of them and they get very upset. If my opponent doesn’t like it, they can’t do anything about it? But then if they can, I will probably roll no hits, so that’s not fair. The person rolling for the AA guns could get no hits and think that is unlucky and re-roll, essentially getting two opportunities with the AA gun. One could really get out of hand with this, but I would think that having the chips cost money may keep this down.

I think of all the options presented, my favorites are 1.) each player can choose their resolution technique. Must be played for entire game, not each battle. and 2.) the ability to purchase “bad luck chips” for 5 IPCs. These can only be turned in to cause a re-roll of your roll, not the entire battle.

To a general who plays dice, the moves people using LL make look suicidal or extremely risky.  To him, it looks like a completely different game.  And it is a completely different game.

So is it really a good idea to allow the rolling player to choose LL or dice, as they are playing “a different game”? I like the idea of each general choosing their own dice resolution system to satisfy their own psychological needs.

One of my friends and I were discussing the idea of picking either LL or dice. You could choose for each battle, you are not limited to one style. Perhaps I am involved in a large naval battle and don’t want to risk losing my entire navy and allowing the opposing general to keep too much of his navy; I may choose to do LL. Though in almost all other cases, I would prefer to use dice. This looks like it adds an additional layer of uncertainty.

Also how do you handle sub shots?

What about tech?

What about SBR?  We are doing 3 IPC/damage plus 1@1 so it can be 3 or 4 damage.  With this in my AAR game Germany and Japan are SBR’ing Russia to death.  But I can’t do a one two hit in Europe due to infantry stacks.

Hammer out the details in writing with everyone’s feedback in the group before you have arguments in the middle of the game.

I hadn’t thought about these. Good points to consider. I will have to write these down and see how they work out in real play. We do normally get into arguments in the middle of big battles, and this could keep the flow of play concentrated on turns instead of interpreting the rules.

With regards to the SBR’s, I don’t completely get the damage calculations. Does it cost the bombing country 3 IPCs to do 3 or 4 IPCs worth of damage? If so, what determines the extra IPC? 1-3 roll equals one extra hit and 4-6 equals no extra hit?

This may work as a solution because friend A complains that he doesn’t hit enough, not that he gets hit too much. It’s worth a try.

you could figure LL by unit type (all fighters together so 2=1 hit 3=1hit + 1@3, then all tanks together, etc)

Don’t know if I like this, because unless there are multiple units, there really is no LL coming into play. This might be more feasible if it were done by attack/defense rating so that say attacking fighters and tanks were lumped together as LL. Or you lump together all naval forces, then air force, then ground forces. But i think that this is too much thinking.

another option is allowing each side to determine the type of rolls they want so the planner can go all low luck and the randomizer can go all dice

I really like this idea, but I am not sure how friend A will respond to this.

Thanks for all the input!

I have a group of friends that meet and play once a week. For us, we take this very seriously, but don’t get an opportunity to play more often. I have one friend that is adamant about never playing again with normal dice rolls because his best laid plans get destroyed by bad dice rolls. (In all honesty, he rolls dice VERY badly.) I have another friend who refuses to play with LL because he enjoys the randomness of the die roll, the tactile aspect of dice, and it feels less fun. NOT trying to start a flame war over this, but I want to find a way that both can be happy. We are considering having “bad luck” chips.

Another idea that was played with was for all battles, using both. This way there is a floor on how many units get destroyed, but there is no ceiling. The idea is that you roll dice and calculate LL. Whichever result is higher, that is the casualty.

What are your thoughts? Has this been done before and if so, what were your results? Can anyone that plays more games than I, playtest this?

I know that overall, more units will be destroyed. I know that it is more time consuming to use both systems. I also feel there is enough randomness because the defender could hit much better on defense than anticipated. And, I love rolling dice, because I am good/lucky at it.