brian brian
Posts: 3191
Joined: 11/16/2005 Status: offline
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I think today I might have given up on an Axis strategy I've been wanting to try. I've always thought if a strategy couldn't survive bad dice, it's not a great strategy. But I have to wonder…. On the first try, the Axis attempted to conserve both of their Offensive Chits for the real goal of the strategy, and not use them in France. They came to grips with the French and immediately fell apart. Missing 8 Ground Strike rolls with 5 or 6 point Stukas and then rolling 5 or less on the 2d10 four times in a row. I started the game over. The next game, the Germans rolled 3, 5, 2 against Poland on the 2d10; even with the CW stashing the HQ in the Pripets this bloodied the German army pretty good. They had already decided to use an Offensive Chit in France and promptly rolled a 17 and an 18 on the two attacks with it. Afterwards, they rolled 5 or less for 3 straight combats and came to another halt, meanwhile the French rolled a 20 with a crap plane model and shot down the well escorted German PARA. I have been playing a maximize-France strategy with the Allies, pumping in British resources and Build Points. Both games have featured things like four straight impulses of Storm in the North Temperate during the winters, and the obligatory one Storm and a short turn in May/Jun. In the second game the Allies have rolled a 1/10 split with their Swordfish NAV2 against both Axis SUB forces while continually slipping surface ships through a half dozen Axis naval bombers of various sorts in various boxes to sink Axis attempts to keep forces in Algeria in supply, though the Fleet Air Arm has been shredded in each game. All of the rest of the Axis luck goes to Japanese strategic bombing attacks, which hit their Chinese targets 5 turns out of 6, multiple times a turn usually. I might try again, I'm not sure. It is so easy for the Allies to thwart Axis plans by simply ordering their infantry to die over and over again in ways the historical commanders could not. I hope the electronic game can some day include a record keeping function that could help easily generate loss statistics and counter usage statistics to aid in writing a manpower rule to put a serious historical consideration on the players in a future edition of the game.
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