This is all such a joke now!
I agree! We (battle group of five experienced players) have played both Global and Europe with the Alpha +2 Rules and have found them to be quite biased, except for the first few rounds, towards the Allies (the Allied states winners have gotten their way). With very few exceptions we have found that the unit setups are adequate for the most part but all the rest of the stuff, NOs, SBRs, special Rules, etc., either force you into a specific strategy or are so complicated as to make the game slow and uninteresting. Our next game we are going to scrap all NOs, use the setup changes, and apply a few of the special Rules (Scramble, AA gun cost, and a few others) just to see if we can’t make the game a little more user friendly and faster. We will most likey add a FEW NOs as we go. For all you that want to disagree with this, that’s fine, but each group plays a little differently and you can’t ‘balance’ a game for everyone and all player groups. IMHO, just generate a somewhat balanced unit setup for a variety of scenarios and let House Rules balance the game for each different group of players. I’ll now shutup. :-)