The worst is when you take Karelia & STILL can’t take Moscow! This happens to me all the time whenever the Japan player hasn’t made signifigant inroads against Russia in the East. That’s where I learned to not bother to take Karelia (barring extremely favorable circumstances) until Japan is really wailing on USSR. If you take Karelia while USSR territory is still basically intact, USSR will turtle in Moscow and just keep cranking out INF until another Ally comes along to even the odds. They move before anybody, and so they will almost always be able to build more guys in USSR than you can move into (or build) in Karelia. The only way to prevent this is to cripple USSR economically BEFORE the final assault on Moscow–and the only way to do that is by Japan seizing a LOT of USSR territory.
See, the problem is that Karelia is always a vast USSR fortress. After you take the fortress, your assault forces are greatly weakened & must be reinforced in order to take Moscow. Therefore, USSR usually has a 1-2 turn “build-lead” on you from the start of the campaign. That’s fine if you’ve got say 46 IPC’s income and he/she’s got only 18-21, but you’ve first got to build the units, and then move them to the battle front. Then you’ve got to maintain your humongous income lead for several turns in order to win the buildup race–to do that you’ve got to defend all your territory in Africa & Europe from the Western Allies–that means some of those 46 IPCs have to go to defense. Usually it takes 2-3 turns AFTER you take Karelia to build up sufficient strike force to take Moscow–all the while the Allies are doing their best to prevent this.
There are two basic ways to win this campaign & seize Moscow–combine them and you’ve got an effective strategy: 1.) You’ve got to slow down USSR’s buildup. The way you do this is by taking as much USSR territory as possible & holding it–Japan is the obvious player for this job since he’s got the best access to USSR’s soft underbelly. Strategic bombing also helps a bit, but the 2 Axis powers need to work together for this to be successful since neither can afford to buy a fleet of bombers. 2.) You’ve got to plan ahead before you attack Karelia so that you can move the maximum # of troops in the turn after Karelia is taken. One way is to build all INF the turn BEFORE you attack Karelia so you can move them into Eastern Europe as soon as Karelia is taken. Then you build all armor so that the turn after Karelia is taken ALL the INF & ALL the ARM can move straight to the front. To do this you’ve got to be able to envision the situation up to 3 turns in advance–if this is you, you can call yourself an “advanced” A & A player. :D
Ozone27