Strafing

[lenzls]

When you strafe you will only roll 1 or maybe 2 rounds of dice rolls before retreating to safety. You DON'T want to actually take the territory. The trick to strafing is the concept of "Punch". On average, the number of hits you inflict will be equal to the hit value of all your attacking or defending units divided by 6. For example an attacking infantry has 1 punch, a defending infantry has 2, a tank has 3, etc. An attacking bomber has 4 but a defending bomber has 1.

So let's say you are Germany and you want to strafe yugoslavia on the first turn with 1 infantry from Romania and the 6 inf and 2 art from Southern Germany. Yugoslavia has 5 infantry so the number of units you an expect to lose on average will be 5x2 / 6 = 1.7 or 2 units give or take. You can expect them to lose (4x2 + 5x1) / 6 = 2.2, or 2 units give or take. Now why not do a second round of dice rolls and actually take Yugo? Because after you attack a territory from more than 1 direction you can retreat all your surviving units to any one of the places they came from. In this case you probably want to retreat your survivors (2 art and 5 inf on average) to Romania. You also got to soften up Yugoslavia a bit so it will be easier for the Italians to actually take it.

Some people have strafing down to an art on the Eastern front for mobility and to nibble down the enemy's infantry while not leaving your own stuff exposed. It's nice when you can strafe and then retreat into a territory where a new bunch of infantry move into at noncombat movement, so then your enemy will have to attack all that with his infantry already gone because you strafed him. Russian players are often good at doing that. Some people also do strafes with navy units but that kind of thing can be hard on the high blood pressure.

You also mentioned using planes to strafe. Two things: 1) be careful of AA guns, and 2) make sure you have more infantry than the enemy's units so even in the unlikely event that all his units hit all you will lose is infantry and there is no risk to your valuable planes (except those AA guns!). Planes bring a lot of punch too so be careful you don't actually take the territory you want to strafe.

from http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=30079.msg1083039#msg1083039