The IPC value of being the attacker

[UtzChips]

It's actually the AA gun and/or the IC that prevent a tank blitz in both Revised and 42. No blitzing through an enemy controlled captial since they all have IC's stuck in them.

So, no blitzin' to Moscow by Japan thru Kazakh that has England's aa gun in it, by attempting a 1/2 punch with Germany by air on 1 inf & then Japan, when Britain is unable to put any units in it b4 Japan moves.

Old offensive trick, old defensive setup.

Sarten, you win 81% of your games. So, you are either an expert [which is my bet] or you play nobody but novices or intermediates, which I doubt, because I find it hard to believe anyone would sandbag for 179 games just to get a good win rating.

I am not interested in a pbem, however, if you would like to play live [in other words "under real game conditions" just like 2 chess players would duel it out, with a 90/5 time limit] I am available most anytime.

We can play with a G6 bid, you are Axis. Or, we can play 2 games with 6G bid, each taking the Axis once. I don't care.

I fear nobody! Well, except, Ivanpelt, jkizzle, Fr3shPr1nce, Hitman95, bb82, Rockismyreligion [you have no idea how much it pains me to admit that!] demandred, Rem400, OoooohRah64, Ivanpelt, kbaldy_77, lukalion, hltn, AFatCat, ronsdoc & the list goes on, and on, yet I would not turn down a monthly challenge from any of them, because I could give a rat's azz about my win rating.

However, you, well you haven't proven yourself to me on the battlefield yet.

So come on with bad self! Hit me with your best shot! Try & add yourself to the long list of experts who have crushed me in 5 rounds or less. Prove to GTO that you've got the mettle to duke it out live with "The King of Chips!"

Enjoy & may the dice be fair! However, if the dice crush you on R1,G1 & J1's turn, be advised: I will take the "cheap win" so don't even try & get me to agree to a glitch. I'm that kinda guy!

I will take on the best, knowing I am going to lose all but those the dice gods give me, & pounce on the wins the dice gods offer.

However, I only brag about those wins I believe I won with close to fair dice.

The way I look at it, it's win/win for both sides. The expert wins the vast majority of the game & I get the experience & a win here and there.

[Fillmore]

This has been an excellent thread with 9 out 10 posts that were very informative. The above, however, has me confused, as I am not following you here

Where does the 50.000000001 come from? Is the 50 the gain from taking Berlin & the .000000001, your calc for how often 1 tank kills 30?

If so, I was unaware that you can blitz a tank thru a capitol?!

My tanks always stick like glue to the territory with the IC, but then, I only play Revised. I was unaware that was possible in 42.

The contrive scenario is taking away from the point I was trying to make which is that you can not calculate absolute value of a move and make that move if it nets a positive result. You need to always calculate the relative value of a move versus an equally valid move and see if it is worthwhile. Going back to the case of blitzing Karelia and then taking Archangel, you can't do the calculation of the move into taking Archangel based on the value of Karelia. Otherwise, if Karelia happened to be worth 100 then you would be saying that taking Archangel is a 103.5 expected gain, if Karelia happened to be worth 1 then blitzing the tank to Archangel would be -0.5 In both cases the move should be calculated versus the fact that you will be taking Karelia anyway.

Ah, well yes, if your point was that you should be making the move with the highest value and not just any move with positive value, then yes I agree, and yes, your contrived example failed to be relevant to that point.

All possible moves should be evaluated and then the best move made. Evaluation can take into account things besides just the IPC value of attacking units, defending units etc. One thing I consider important is what in poker would be referred to as your bankroll; Russia starts with a small bankroll and I believe it is this phenomena which results in Allied play revolving around prolonging the game rather than maximizing net IPC gains.

Conversely, I believe it should be factored into Axis strategy as well which is why I am an overwhelming advocate of G1 sub->SZ10 and basically maximum offense in general, i.e. make the Allies put a lot of chips in the pot as early as possible.

This thread has sort of migrated from the original topic though, probably my fault for throwing in that bit about the Karelia attack having positive expectation (which it does, just not as positive as an alternative move with that same tank).

[bb82]

I could do all this math in a pbem game & it's probably something along the lines of what bb82 does, [or at least something just as time consuming because he only does a max of 2 pbe games at a time in the ladder league] and I like just stickin' the units in the battle calc, pressin' run & lookin' for that magic number of 70+% success.

Huh? I'm not in the ladder due to time and since it's more about who can play the most. I pick my opponents and actually bid for sides.

Not many would bother with the above math when making their decisions. I certainly don't, even if I had the time. If I really wanted that sort of "busy work" i'd likely be playing LL. One of the reasons I don't play LL is because I wouldn't want to be doing that sort of analysis for a game. You would have to to play elite LL (very small pool). You don't have to in regular dice since it's relatively pointless, unless your trying to force the game to a conclusion relatively quickly with a well thought out pre-planned strategy.

Although in regular dice you do need to do more than just look at the %. But it's much more abstract than strict-set analysis.

I'm going to live play only in the ladder league for me from now on.

In live your main issue will be playing against players so practiced for live that you lose just as many, if not more. Not to mention the ones that practice throwing well-defined curve balls at their opponent to watch them squirm under time constraints.

Either way you might have trouble with wins. But at least in pbem you can better think, which will help you learn to "see" and improve slowly. Quality over quantity is the approach you should be trying. Live certainly can be fun, but especially in your case, it wont teach you much. Having 20 open pbem can be similar to live too. And don't get too involved in the numbers. Try to think of the flow of the game in more abstract terms. Thinking too much with set analysis will quickly bother you when things don't turn out the way you plan them. It is harder to adapt when your on edge due to your plan going down in flames. At the very least it can be hard to see what really went wrong. Rarely is it the dice. It's usually poor risk management or trying to put numbers (or the "wrong" numbers) to the incalculable overall map situation (i.e. R1 ukr/wr looks nice with numbers, but numbers only tell a part of it). The dice blind so many due to being caught up in basic %/analysis.

[Sarten]

Sarten, you win 81% of your games. So, you are either an expert [which is my bet] or you play nobody but novices or intermediates, which I doubt, because I find it hard to believe anyone would sandbag for 179 games just to get a good win rating.

I am not interested in a pbem, however, if you would like to play live [in other words "under real game conditions" just like 2 chess players would duel it out, with a 90/5 time limit] I am available most anytime.

We can play with a G6 bid, you are Axis. Or, we can play 2 games with 6G bid, each taking the Axis once. I don't care.

However, you, well you haven't proven yourself to me on the battlefield yet.

So come on with bad self! Hit me with your best shot! Try & add yourself to the long list of experts who have crushed me in 5 rounds or less. Prove to GTO that you've got the mettle to duke it out live with "The King of Chips!"

Most of my games are from years ago when GTO first opened so I am not even sure if I could be considered an intermediate player after my long hiatus so I will not proclaim any sort of expert status. I will however put my "advanced" ranking against yours and let's see who prevails. As for my opponents - I pretty much will play anyone who wants to challenge me; I always learn from the experience and it is always fun even if the dice don't go my way. I do know a good chunk of my games were in tournament settings so my opponents were chosen for me rather than me picking them. If you want to talk about me sandbagging then you should look at my 1942 stats - those are total sandbags since I can't seem to find anyone who wants to play a novice

I will play two games with you one one each side at that 6g bid. I'll be in the lobby tonight so I'll track you down; I will concede that I will not be crushing anyone in 5 rounds or less. I find that games that go that quickly are almost always decided by early dice.

[Sarten]

This thread has sort of migrated from the original topic though, probably my fault for throwing in that bit about the Karelia attack having positive expectation (which it does, just not as positive as an alternative move with that same tank).

My fault as well for taking one small part of the overall message and beating it to death. So back on topic. The IPC value of being the attacker also has some harder to calculate implications as well. Two off the top of my head:

The ability to retreat means that you can set up favorable trades where you average more hits than your defending opponent per turn and then pull back before taking the territory. The IPC value of that increases depending on the size of the battle.

Attrition values generally favor the attacker as well. Since defensive values are higher than attack values, when attackers die, they lose less punching power than defenders do. That is a hidden IPC advantage since the attacker can bring more fodder units to die.

[Fillmore]

Another advantage that only rarely matters is the ability to choose the order of the attacks; there have been a couple occasions where I got diced in an attack and realized that if I had known I was going to get diced I would have retreated from a previous attack; I did this once where I attacked Caucus and did very well, but when I attacked the UK fleet I got diced first round and had to lose my sub fodder and retreat; it was only later that I realised that the continued presence of the UK fleet meant that taking the Caucus was actually an overextension, when Russia countered Caucus I couldn't counter back because doing so would leave me exposed to the UK. SO while it rarely matter which order you resolve the battles, when it matters it matters. Sometimes you have no safe location to retreat to and then you have to continue the attack no matter how diced you get.

I myself have yet to master the art of knowing the best order to resolve combats.