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A decisive win for Axis against AI is actually very easy:)

My first WaW game was as Soviets, a little too easy to defend and push back German forces.[>:]

Then I tried my second game as Japanese under normal difficulty level, since I felt playing German or WA would be too "complicated" for me. [:(]

But I got a decisive victory in 1946 and was once very close to auto victory, how?[&o]

The trick is simple: Don't let your German ally decide the Barbarosa D-day. It's you, the mighty human Japanese player, should tell when a combined Barbarosa attack against Stalin should begin![:D]

So I DoW on russia at late 1940, the Germans were unprepared then and had to move half of the needed forces to the front. But russians were even MORE unprepared: they didn't have a single plane ready then.

I sent almost all my land air force and several infantries (tech level just caught up the average), I even built an armor unit for a quick production area catch. While Germans attacking on the west, russians could hardly defend my serious push along the Siberia rail line ( I kept repairing them, never minded the "100 supply" for Pearl Harbor ). My air attack damaged many russian factories just relocated from West, which severely weared down russian war production.

Finally, my troops captured several key regions with 3 factories each (after soviet relocation from West) and even went into Caucasus. So Soviet Union lost most of the production and could only defend Moscow using remaining forces. My German ally never
seriously attacked Moscow but German plane already reduced Moscow to only one factory, which meant russians could not even produce enough supply to start a single counter-attack against thin German defense around Moscow.

In the meanwhile, I repaired all the resources I captured so my factories could almost run to the full extent. This is extremely good to a Japanese player, since russian resources are much much easier to defend until 1946 (no need for fleets, garrison and transports, no worry about American sea superiosity).

Yes, the American finally DoW on me with a much more powerful navy and push me to the "inner defense circle". Yes, WA got all North Africa & even invaded Italy and France.Yes, even Chinese now could take many of it's coastal provinces back with a sizable land/air force ... However, Axis still have great "russian motherland" in behind, so on 1926 Axis still has more than 50 production points and easily achieve a Decisive Victory (once Axis reached 61 production points, but my stupid ally didn't repair factories). What's more, the Germans could still hold the front and even re-occupied Italy and re-invaded France![:D]

I think this strategy worked since the ONLY chance for axis in WaW is a coordinated attack against USSR. This attack itself could not only destroy USSR as a formidable player, but also solve the resource problem for Japanese player once for all. Considering the latter point, of course it's better to attack russians early since it would help Japan to win more high productivity turns. Also, Japanese could never increase her land force size as fast as USSR, so an early Japanese attack is more logical here.[8D]

Of course as German player, you can hardly expect a co-operative Japanese AI. So if you want to win with a single Axis side, choose Japan instead of Germany is a must[;)]

I hope 2by3 could tweak WaW in the future to give Axis players more feasible strategies. In Clash of Steel a German player could try North African - Mid East strategy and gain a lot, or he can give Sea Lion a serious try. But it seems in WaW it's very hard for a German player to try alternate grand strategies without suffering (because of the formidable russians, that's why the only winning strategy here is knocking USSR out first).

I agree - I'd like to see some "alternate" history possible.

Although, currently I am playing Germany and have 4-6 u-boats with above average evade and attack and they are devastating the transports of the WA - this is allowing me to gear up for an invasion of Russia and I have already taken Cairo and pushed into the Middle East. I probably won't invade Russia until 1942, but I also won't have to worry nearly as much about the south/Italy b/c I took Gibraltar and Spain and have a heavy bomber/fighter force in France....

It will be interesting to see if I *still* lose as Germany....

Your strategy is excellent - I am just hoping either a) there are more ways to win with Axis than 1 and I just haven't discovered it yet or 2) they patch it to allow a bit more in the way of alternate paths to victory for the Axis besides always invading Russia

In my first game as Germany I pushed UBoots production to a grand total of 12 units. At a time the WA fell to 28 transports, which was a rather nice situation to exploit.

In another game I took Spain, Gibraltar, Egypt and England. Russia was harder to beat, but as I had the mediterranean for myself, it eased quite much the defence of festung europa.

=> Germany has many alternative. Dont rules that you have found all of them, thats too soon [;)]

Pocus, please read my post in AI and Axis thread and, if willing, offer suggestions, critique?

nice strat reznap!

Yes, squeezing Russia, as you did, will work.

If you want to see some details on how I beat them as Germany on my first game, I posted it to the AAR section. I did only get a marginal, but being my first try I made some bad mistakes.

Amusingly, my "perfect strategy" that won me a decisive Axis victory in my first game was to delay attacking Russia until '42. I played Germany, and left Japan to the AI (again amusingly, my reasoning being that Japan was too complicated for a first game effort).

After using my extra pre-Barbarosa year to snag Gibraltar and Egypt, plus to tone up my tank tech for Russia, I was able to achieve slightly better than historical results in Russia, but the Wallies were sucking wind, compared to their historical performance. By '44 the initiative was definately in the hands of the Allies, but all those Middle-Eastern resources feuled the German development of secret super-weapons. I was mass producing Me-262s, Porsche 901 Mauses, and working on wire-guided missles for my infantry. The game ended with me holding only three provinces with the Germans, but I could have held the two German ones for several more turns, at least, and the Japanese had never been pushed back at all.

I've loved the 2-fronts-in-Russia strategy since my early days with WiF, so I'm not surprised it's a good strategy here. I am a bit concerned that it sounds like it's disproportionately effective because the current AI has a melt-down when confronted with it. Either way, it appears that the game designers have done a fine job of balancing the strategic options for the Axis--the problem appears to be that, regardless of strategy, a human mind can find holes in the AI to exploit, to produce consistent victories. Since I've never seen a computer strategy game that wasn't true of, I don't fault this one for it. (Furthermore, I note with approval that the game appears to have been designed from the ground up to be a play-by-email game, and yet still features a strong-enough-to-be-fun AI.)

I like taking Gibralter and Egypt before taking on Russia.

The russians have a tough time defending if you can move a strong force up through Persia into the caucas area.