Hello Creeping Death (Metallica fan?)
You are right to assume that OOB rules are unbalanced, which I suppose you could say launched the Alpha modifications. The designer of the game, Larry Harris and his team of playtesters, began fixing the problems with a series of modifications called Alpha, and whenever they made significant changes to their earlier modifications, they would add (+) a new revision.
There is a split between the members on this and Larry’s site (where the Alpha revisions are posted by Larry himself @ harrisgamedesign.com) as to weather or not the rule changes were effective in fixing the problems, that is something you will have to figure out on your own.
It is safe to say that the majority of us feel that OOB is the worst version of Global 1940 available, for many reasons including the few that yourself mentioned. One example would be: the changes made in regards to scrambling air units from bases, like……
- Air units can scramble from any air base on the board and not just island bases
- Only a maximum of 3 fighters / tac bombers can be scrambled from a single air base at one time
This is only a small example of the many changes made. however, this is a good one as it helps with the Itallian situation you mentioned. Some are arguably not so great, and it is up to you and your group to decide what modifications you like, and which ones you don’t. However, any version of Alpha is significantly better than OOB, so I suggest trying it.
I myself prefer Alpha+3, and Alpha+3.5 which was a term I created in referring to changes they made to Alpha+3 without the title Alpha+4 (confused yet?). If you would like a complete copy of a rulebook with only Alpha +2 modifications, PM me with an e-mail address and I will send you one. If you want to jump right into the latest Alpha+3 revisions (which is 99% the final version of all the Alphas, before it goes to print as the new Global 1940 rule set) than you will need to visit Larry’s site , and print them off.
Cheers,
I hope this was helpfull.