Just throwing my two cents into the ring on what I take to be the original post’s question on how each Allied power should approach the Global '40 game. The answers above have been great, but I like the question, and I wanted to participate!
USSR: You generally have enough spare resources for one projection of power away from Moscow. You can either build tanks to delay the German advance into eastern Europe, or invade Norway/Finland, or hold your ground in Siberia, or reinforce China, or send troops to the Middle East to pick up the Spread of Communism national objective. You probably can’t afford to do two of those things, and you definitely can’t afford to do three of them or build a carrier. About 90% of Russia’s resources should go toward building infantry to hold Moscow – not much more, and not much less.
USA: As other commenters have noted, you’ll need to focus on one side of the board or the other for the first few turns in order to have a meaningful impact. One option is to build just enough of an Atlantic fleet to liberate North Africa, and then put the rest of your cash into the Pacific. Another option is to build just enough of a Pacific fleet to protect a 2 infantry-per-turn delivery to Honolulu, and put the rest of your cash into the Atlantic. Submarines can be a useful part of an anti-Japanese strategy because Japan has so many convoy zones and can’t quite afford to build enough destroyers to protect them all, but you can’t rely entirely on submarines – you have to also build loaded transports and carrier groups in order to protect Sydney and Calcutta.
UK: You start the game with only 2 transports in the Suez / India region, and 5 worthy goals to accomplish: attack Tobruk, attack Ethiopia, activate Persia, reinforce Greece, and claim Java from the neutral Dutch. This is a tough choice, but my current opinion is that the 2 most urgent goals are activating Persia and claiming Java, because those are the goals that help the UK Pacific the most, and the UK Pacific is fragile – once Japan eats Malaya, the UK Pacific can easily go down to single-digit income, so having a factory in Persia cranking out mech. infantry to support Calcutta, or even just having the extra 4 income per turn to spend on infantry in Calcutta can definitely turn the tide. Tobruk, Ethiopia, and Greece can all be dealt with a little later in the game. Another point to keep in mind is that rebuilding the UK Atlantic fleet is optional, and that it’s an all-or-nothing kind of activity – if you sink 100% of your income in South Africa and the Middle East, that’s fine. If you build a carrier group and a couple of loaded transports and start seriously threatening France, Norway, and Western Germany, that’s fine. But if you build transports only to have them be sunk by the Luftwaffe, or if you build a small fleet that can’t force Germany to re-assign significant assets to the Western Front, then you’re wasting the cash that you would need in order to fully succeed in the Middle East without actually accomplishing any goals that are worth the trade-off.
France: Not that relevant in a typical game. Your destroyer near Madagascar should patrol the Indian Ocean in a Balanced Mod game to help UK-Pacific protect its national objective for not having any Axis subs in the Western Indian Ocean.
China: Accept that you’re going to be eliminated, and just try to cause as much trouble as possible for as long as possible while you bleed out. Sometimes the threat is mightier than the execution – if you attack a Japanese stack in Yunnan and win, but then you have no more infantry and Japan can ignore you for the rest of the game, it’s probably not worth it. Better to force Japan to commit aircraft to the Chinese front for 5+ turns, even if Japan is constantly advancing.
ANZAC: I recommend against building a factory in Queensland. It does very little to accelerate your naval deployments, because on the turn when you spend 12 IPCs to build a factory there, you could have instead built a cruiser in New South Wales, and that cruiser could have moved to Queensland on the turn that it otherwise would have been built at the Queensland factory. The factory buys you a bit of flexibility (you can choose your exact mix of ships on the turn you want them, instead of having to plan a turn ahead), but it doesn’t really help you deliver ships to the front line any faster. A Queensland factory lets you build more than 3 infantry per turn, so that you can defend against a serious Japanese invasion…but it also puts one of your factories that much closer to Japan’s fleet, gives you another space that you have to defend, and is unlikely to pay for itself in the time available. Let’s say you have 16 IPCs per turn, on average. If on turn 1 you build 1 infantry and 1 minor factory, then on turns 2, 3, and 4 you can build 5 infantry each, for a total of 16 defensive infantry (16 HP, 32 punch). Alternatively, on turns 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, you can build 2 infantry and a fighter, for a total of 10 infantry and 5 fighters (15 HP, 40 punch). The second option is more flexible, requires Japan to come further out of its way to come get you, and gives America more time to help defend you.