I must say that the pact of steel is the perfect game for my crew and I
I guess we haved played about 20 times and i am sure that luck is reduced to win the game
It is a great thing that South Africa is increased to 3 ipc and if you use NA britain could buy a IC in round 1 and then have IC in Britain , India and South africa. The War in africa between Italy and Britain is perfectly balanced and Britain has to balance its IPC between the three areas. US has a greater fleet that means it can split to fight in both pacific ocean and atlantic ocean. In most of our games we have mayor wars between Bri/US vs. Ger in northern europe, Ger vs. rus in eastern europe, Bri/US in Africa - both fronts from west and south against italy, Bri/US vs. japan in india and china(now 3 zones), US vs. Japan Naval battle in the pacific ocean with british support.
In almost every game all these battles are mayor important battles and therefore 5 mayo important battles. Not just like revised where you mostly have 3-4 mayor important battles.
The result is a perfectly balancd game that mayby is 50% longer but much more fun because you cant point the winner early like in revised where you almost guarentiet can point the winner out in 4th or 5th round.
Some of our games run for 10-15 rounfs before you can see who are winning the game.
Just my opinion
you can say that it is a long game - sure! but lot more fun if you like to win a tactical win with less luck involved.
In triple A you can find pictures of markers to print and buy a color and paint pieces from the old A&A to make italian pieces sacrifice 2 destroyers and a few artillery (mayby from D-day) to italian pieces also.
It took me about 3 hours to print the map(60x100), painting pieces, creating markers and write a setup chart.
kind regards
Niels