Ah, yes, one of my favourite types of subjects: inter-game sculpt compatibility. I don’t have a comprehensive answer to your specific question, since preferences will vary greatly from one person to the next regarding what role in game x can be assigned to piece y from game z (example: I think the old-style Panther tanks from the older A&A games would make neat German Jagdpanther tank destroyers in the newer games), but here are a few thoughts.
As shown by the pictures I posted in this thread…
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=30440.0
…the main problem with using the 1914 sculpts in Global is that some of them are a great colour match but others are not. The way I summarized it was:
“The new Americans come closest to the old Milton Bradley Americans, but are a little more green. The new Germans come closest to the old Milton Bradley Germans, but are a little darker. The new Russians almost exactly match the old Italians. The new French are a little darker than than old French. The new Italians almost exactly match the old Japanese. The new British, plus the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians, don’t come very close to matching any of the existing shades – even in the case of the lime-green British sculpts, which aren’t the same shade as either the pale green British pieces from Revised or the light green Chinese pieces.”
(By the way, on that last point, note that there are 9 factions in Global rather than 8. Or, to split the difference, let’s say 8-and-a-half, since the 9th faction, China, has no equipment pieces.)
So anyway, the basic problem is that if you use 1914 sculpts to create new unit types in Global 1940, only a few countries will have them…unless you overlook the colour incompatibilities. On the other hand, using sculpts from 1941 creates the same problem (since only 5 colours are available), so that’s probably a situation in which you’ve been treating the 1941 sculpts as specialized units that are limited to a few countries (a method which also applies to the German bunkers from D-Day and the German and American trucks from Bulge).
Some more possibilities for the 1914 sculpts:
- Use the blue ones to represent the Free French
- Use some of the others to represent neutrals
- Use some of the others to represent an Axis Minors block
- Use some of the others to represent the minor Allied nations (as a group)
- Use some of the others to represent the Netherlands (in the Dutch East Indies
