What set up favours each one for the axis?

@sala33: *Battleship/Cruise bombarbment: If you have only ONE transporter, and in support 7 Battleships and 5 Cruisers, do all Battleships and Crusisers take place in the shore Bombarbment? And if your transporter has your infintry and a friendly tank, do all the units get off loaded in that turn? If so, does the friendly unit then fight with your attack on the land, or does it stay out of the battle till that players turn When a shore bombarbment takes place and the attacker hits defending shore units, do the shore units get a chance to fire back, or are they taken off the board straight away? 1.  No.  The number of bombardments you have is limited to the number of ground troops you bring. (One transport = 2 bombards MAX). 2.  No.  Only your infantry can unload this turn.  You have to wait for your friendly ally’s turn for him to unload. 3.  Yes, they do get to fire back.

Clever thread title… +1 karma. Edit (title is completely relevant to your post - sorry, was reading very late at night) I second Dondolee’s thoughts.  When starting out bear in mind how the game is ultimately won - for the axis, by taking Moscow before the allies can take either Rome or Berlin.  It’s a race to see who holds out longer. Japan should efficiently grab land in the first two or so turns, build up factories in South Asia (rounds 1-4) and then ply tanks and infantry through India > Persia > Caucasus > Moscow.  Send enough troops through China and Siberia that you’ll have enough to punch through, but sending the bulk of your force on the southern route.  As you play more games, take note of which strategies allowed you to occupy territories faster and get a better flow of troops to russia. Italy and germany’s role is to stay rich and keep russia poor.  They generally don’t have enough power to crack russia without some early luck, so you just need to treat 'em rough and keep 'em honest.  Never let russia get their 10 IPC objective - this is a death knell.  While you want to deny and pressure russia as much as possible, your main task is to not let UK/US kill you - a tough balancing act of agression/defence.  There are many ways to skin this cat, but piles of infantry and scattering of tanks are the best place to start from a learning perspective.  You’ll soon find the limitation of infantry - while extremely cost effective, they can only be in one place at a time.  It’s hard fighting two wars that are 5 spaces apart. While boats and planes pack less punch for the money, they can threaten a much larger area.  Once you get a handle of the flow of the game, you’ll find many ways that german planes and boats can improve your effectiveness.  As dondoelee points out, this is playing with fire and you expect to get burnt a few times while you figure it out - start simple. Cheers

@marechallannes: @Driel310: To add to that, putting in an extra DD in SZ15 makes a shitload of difference since Germany is now unable to attack Egypt on G1, making life hard on Italy as you described. Of course you have all the liberty of the world to guess the correct setup as we don’t know the whole true one, but this change is so big impact on game balance is very substantial.  p.s. trust me, if Japan wants, India will fall on J2. Only the Russians can prevent that, but I doubt they can spare the troops. Did you play it with this DD in SZ 15?  When did you take egypt? I am not shure to sacrify the german bomber for a landing operation in turn 1… No we did not. We used the R9 version of the map Bluestroke made. We believe that is the only setup that has some basis, the pictures from GenCon. Any changes to that setup (although we got confirmed there are some) are pure speculation. And unless you are unlucky, Germany should not push the Egypt attack until the bomber dies too.

Long live tech!

The wood board are 40 x 96 ! I can move them by myself, but it’s pretty heavy.

The main Problem is, the game isn’t fun for every player, if you can only win as allies by almoust complete neglection of Japan. The Japanese Player will have a poor gaming experience. On the other hand, you won’t win the war in the pacific. I recently invested loads of Russian troops, a UK factory in India and the US heavy into the pacific (1941 scenario) and didn’t come close to a win in the pacific and lost to europe. Eventough the Japanese player made a major mistake and i got lucky when he attackt some groundforces with mainly planes. The best I could achieve was a stall with Japan earning somewhat 50 IPC a turn (playing with NO). While Germany on the other hand was playing extremely conservative, but finally crushed the USSR (rolling really good dice), so the US Invasion froce stationed in the atlantic. Whats missing in this game? I guess a industrial complex in India to start with could slow the japanese advance, while still saveing IPC for UK (doesn’t have to build one). This would make the game more challanging for the Japanese Player (otherwise there is no opponent on the continent) and gives the UK player more action on the pacific side of the board, while still able to build up some fleet to fight the Germans/Italians.

So Italy really wasn’t a large factor? Did they conquer all of Africa? What were their builds? Italy built 1 trs and 1 CV and then mostly land units, adding 1 DD later on. Africa wasn’t important, Germany sent a tank down there which manoeuvred to avoid 2 UK infs (landings in West Africa were not done but probably would have been a good idea). Italy was a factor in that it distracted from attacking the Germans and I think a balanced approach by the US and the UK is probably more effective, i.e. landing in both Norway and Algeria, having fleets both in North/baltic sea and West Med, SBR against both Germany and Italy, and this necessitates a lot of US involvement. For such things as India IC, this is a detail which o/c we just have to try and fail to see if it can be held, more than 4-5 rnds? In this game there was no India IC, India survived because Japan focused on China and Australia. In an other game an IC was built and defended with the help of some Russian troops but the jury is out on if this really is viable if the Japs really go all-out vs. India. I hope there’s more UK ships to start with since that would make defending a built IC so much easier! We’ll see very shortly when we get the UK set-up.