Russian Fighter Sculpts?

@surfer

Yeah, you’re right.

@hengst

This only works if there are only Italian aricraft scrambling. I usually use two fighters from the United Kingdom terirtory, and the fighter from Malta-the fighter from Girbraltar should be used along with the cruiser off of Girbraltar (it takes three submarines to have more than an 80% chance to kill it, my normal standard to win a battle, so the submarines are usually used for easier prey in the north, especially if Germany attacks the Soviet Union in the first turn, which will nessecitate one submarine in sea zone 125) to destroy the Italian navy off of Malta. If a German aircraft lands in Southern Italy, I usually will call of the attack, as there is a less than 80% chance to win. All of this assumes Germany invades the Soviet Union in the first turn.

We have a name for this maneuver. It’s called “The Russian Cheezewhiz”

@Arthur:

You might as well issue an R1 DoW against Japan; at our gaming group we generally assume that Russia is at war unless stated otherwise.  So far I haven’t seen any reason in non-BM games to not opt for immediate war.

This makes perfect sense with experienced players, but I do remember a game where I, playing Russia, managed to delay a Japanese attack for quite a few turns by claiming that we had always been on good terms and that I had never done anything at all to damage Japan’s interests.  :-D

I take this idea further and use my bid to add 3 artilleries to the Russian stack.

It makes it a serious offensive force and a harder defensive force to deal with.

It allows US to project more power in the Atlantic because it shows Japan down.

Another thing you could do for the Chinese fighter if you would prefer it to be the same color as the Chinese troops is get one from Historical Board Gaming. They have these Allied Supplement sets in several different colors. One of them is called Celery Green which is the same color as the British pieces in old copies of Revised. This color is very close to the same color as the Chinese infantry pieces. The Allied supplement sets include P-40 fighter planes. You don’t even have to get the entire set because HBG sells these pieces individually. You can pick up 2 or 3 P-40s and there you go! Your very own Chinese fighter unit.
As for Artillery, HBG also has these Neutral sets in several colors and one of them is a yellow-green color. That color is a little brighter than the Chinese infantry, but it works okay with them and certainly is different from the US artillery. The Neutral sets have an artillery piece called a “75 Veld” which I think is Polish or Belgian but works fine for Chinese since they mostly had older stuff anyway.

If you take Southern France, don’t forget there are two surface ships in z93 that convoy raid it.

In my experience so far a good Russian player playing conservatively can make Moscow close to impossible to take.   The way Russian territories are set up allows them to fall back and shadow any approaching German army until the Russians have reinforced their stack to the point where it can turn around and chase out or destroy the invaders.  There’s no real downside to this vs standing and fighting as you’re only giving up 1-2 ipc provinces as you fall back and you’re continuing to preserve and grow your Russian stack at a rate faster than the Germans can hope to reinforce theirs (assuming, of course, that GB and the US are putting any sort of pressure on the other side of Europe).  I’ve pretty much given up going for it and instead have resolved to find some way to take Leningrad and Stalingrad.  I’ll admit that Germany and Italy, given free reign to attack Russia can eventually bring them down if they focus all their strength on it but how are they doing this while preventing or counter-attacking allied landings?  There’s just not enough IPC’s available for them to effectively do both.