Thanks, d/l’ing now.

I think unit bids have a yucky effect on the game - changing the set-up completely alters the dynamic of the game.

What I would prefer is bidding away an amount of cash - your opponent chooses how the pain is distributed among your teams.

I agree with this. I’ve never really liked the fact that bids alter the starting setup. If a new bidding system is introduced for AA50 I’d like to see strictly cash bids.

Although, I’m not sure a bid is necessary, at least not yet. There seem to be a lot of people claiming the Axis have the advantage in '41 with NOs, but there are also people convinced that the advantage belongs to the Allies. This is very good as far as game balance is concerned, IMHO.

@Cmdr:

Unknown Soldier:

My apologies, I don’t think I explained my analogy well, or at least, not well enough for you to understand what I was trying to say.

I was attempting to say that running an SBR campaign, mathematically speaking, and coming out way ahead on the cost ratio is akin to playing the lottery and winning significantly.

Ah, I guess I misinterpreted what you meant by “doesn’t make mathematical sense”. I agree that you need to get lucky with an SBR strat.

@Cmdr:

Also, yes, I do agree that bombers really shine in ATTACKING enemy navies.  They really SUCK at defending your navy. :P

I can’t argue with that. Although, I think it’s interesting to note that fighters provide the most efficient fleet defense. Aircraft > fleet for the most part in this game.

@Cmdr:

Honestly, I came up with a set of house rules for this game that raised the Cruiser to a 4/4 unit that sunk if it was hit once.  Effectively making it a 1 hit battleship and then upped the Destroyer to a 3/2 unit.

I’d love to run my personal house rule set by you and see if you can find some glaring errors and/or have a block of time you can dedicate to running a single play test (most issues come up in the first play test of a set of rules I have found.)

Interesting. Upping the stats of certain naval units is certainly one way you could approach things. Another would be to lower their cost, to make them more competitive with aircraft. Maybe even a combination of the two.

I’m not sure I really want to dive into house rules at this point though. I feel like I’m still pretty far from having the game “figured out”, so I’m sticking with the OOB rules for now, as far as actual play is concerned. I’ll certainly be willing to comment on idea ideas you have though.

Serious game flaw? Really? Maybe you should get a few more games under your belt. I don’t even think this is a good strategy, let alone game-breaking. Cmdr Jennifer outlined the reasons why.

You seem to think it’s a game ender if Karelia falls. I can assure you, it’s not. Maybe you could explain why you think it’s a “serious game flaw” if the Germans can take Karelia G1? I’m not seeing it.

Bombing an enemy complex makes no mathematical sense.  It’s like buying a lottery ticket…you could win, but if you average out the weekly results over your entire life, you’ll almost certainly end up losing more than any gain you make.

Well, you just demonstrated that this is false. The expected value of an SBR is positive (before considering techs), which makes it very unlike buying a lottery ticket, which has a negative expected value. Sure, tech can change things, but it’s not like you can depend on getting radar as a counter-strategy.

That said, I agree with you that SBRs are not overpowered. You average less than 1 IPC in expected value each bombing run, nothing to get too excited about IMHO. Of course, it is a high variance strategy and can be quite effective when those AA guns can’t seem to find a “1”, but on average its just not effective enough considering the time and money needed to invest in such a strategy.

I think when people say bombers are overpowered, they are talking about what you alluded to with your last point:

Now, what if we used that bomber to assist with other battles?

Assuming a ground battle (which would provide the attacker with the absolute MINIMUM return on investment)…

It’s true, bombers are quite effective in a ground support roll. But where they really shine is in naval battles. A unit which costs 12, attacks at 4, and has a range of 6 is extremely effective at taking out all those expensive boats. Especially now that you can’t use subs or transports as fodder. Bombers are the real Flottenmörderin in this game. Combined with their effectiveness in other rolls, and multiple techs which further increase their abilities, I think there definitely is an argument to be made about bombers being overpowered.

But are they so powerful that we need a rule change to address the issue? Well… I dunno. For me, the jury’s still out on that one.

@Cmdr:

That’s exactly the nice thing about Enhanced.  You don’t have any of those worries anymore.  (Which is what made SS too powerful, which, come to think of it, I think OOB should be changed to make SS be SD just to bring the tech back in line.)

Well, I see your point about how these long-shot odds can break the game, and I agree with you. After all, that’s the point I was trying to make in that thread which got derailed and turned into a discussion of OOB tech rules.

Where we disagree is what alternative should be implemented. I feel that delaying tech rolls until the “place units” phase is the best approach, since it very cleanly strips away the “surprise!” element, which is the mechanism that break the game imo. Also, this approach is a relatively minor change to the rules, when compared to entirely new tech systems like the one you are proposing.

I understand that you think directed tech is more strategic, because you should be able to anticipate which techs your opponent will try for on their turn (if you’re paying attention :P). I just think that directed, guaranteed tech is a real can of worms to unleash on a game that, at this point, is very far from being solved. The fact that you felt it necessary to get rid of super subs because of this is huge red flag to me, indicating that there are likely many other avenues to break the game that you haven’t though of yet. That’s why I was on your case about the playtesting, I’m really not trying to be an ass.

@Cmdr:

I see what you are saying Unknown.

Thank you! Now we’re getting somewhere. :)

@Cmdr:

Does your rational work if you need that coin to come up heads on a specific day in a specific week and a specific month - keeping in mind, that once you get a head you can no longer get a head.  Remember, this is not sampling with replacement, once you get a tech, you cannot get it again.

Well, admittedly the coin analogy does break down when we start talking about tech rolls over multiple rounds, because, as you say, you can’t roll the same tech twice while you can flip heads on a future Friday even if you did the first time. I just wanted to illustrate the problem (i.e. the backwards conditional) in the simplest way I could think of.

What’s crucial is how the question is framed. Do we want to know, for example:

The chance Japan gets super subs on exactly turn x?
-OR-
The chance Japan gets super subs on or before turn x?

If we’re talking about the first thing, then all we really need to know is how many tech rolls Japan bought that turn, and what techs they already have (if any). Very straight forward to calculate, and the actual turn number is irrelevant. However, if we’re talking about the second thing, the turn number does matter, as does how many tech rolls Japan will purchase on each of the turns leading up to turn x. This question is much harder to answer. We’d end up with a probability distribution for the chance of acquiring super subs over the turns 1 through x, with the probability increasing over time due to more and more tech rolls and the possibility of other techs being acquired as you go. I think perhaps this is what you were getting at.

However, all that said, one thing we can say for sure is that the probability of getting super subs for any nation will never be more than 1/36, since this is the worst case scenario where no techs have been discovered and only one roll is purchased. Thus 1/108 simply has to be wrong.

@Dash_Riprock:

Uhh sorry I haven’t been back here in a while, I’ll look into that bug and try to fix whatever other bugs people have been mentioning and post an updated version whenever I get a chance.

Hey, that’s awesome. Didn’t think we would hear from you again.  :-D

OK, I’ll take one last crack at explaining this to you Jen. I know you don’t like me, but please try to actually listen to what I’m saying this time. And hopefully this post doesn’t get deleted. :roll:

Suppose I flip a coin. What are the odds it comes up heads? Well, I hope we can agree that its 1/2.

Now, suppose I flip a coin on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. What are the odds of the coin coming up heads on Friday?

Thus far you have reasoned like this: the odds of the coin coming up heads is 1/2, but we must also take into account what day of the week it is. There is only 1 “correct” day of the week (Friday) in which a coin gets flipped, while there are 2 “incorrect” days (Monday, and Wednesday). So there is only a 1/3 chance of it being Friday when the coin is flipped. Therefore, the odds that the coin comes up heads on Friday is (1/2)*(1/3) = 1/6.

Correct?

No. Here’s why:

What you’re trying to do is find the joint probability of two events using conditional probabilities. The problem is, you have the conditional backwards. See, we’re not deciding whether to flip a coin, and then assigning the result of the flip randomly to a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. So we don’t want to know the probability of it being Friday, given that the coin is flipped. Instead, we’re seeing what day of the week it is, and then determining if the coin gets flipped or not based on whether or not it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Thus, we want to know the probability of flipping a coin, given that it is Friday.

Of course, the probability of flipping a coin, given that it is Friday is equal to 1, since it’s stipulated that a coin always gets flipped on a Friday. So, the joint probability of flipping a coin on friday and flipping heads is: (1)*(1/2) = 1/2.

Do you see the difference? And do you see that you’re making the same mistake when calculating the odds of getting super subs?

We don’t want to know the odds of it being the “correct” nation, given that super subs has been discovered, we want to know the odds of super subs being discovered, given that it’s the “correct” nation.

@Cmdr:

It’s not a suicide run because they had a valid landing zone, but there’s no rule that says you must physically land them somewhere if circumstances change and you cannot or you don’t want to move the carrier.

Incorrect.

The rules clearly state that you MUST move the carrier to pick the fighters, if able.

Read page 27 of the rulebook.