IPCs in the bank don’t win the game; units on the board do.  Every turn you wait to purchase a unit that you can afford is one less turn that unit will be on the board, one more turn it will take to get it where you want it to go, and one less turn it can spend taking territories to get you more IPCs.  It’s like the time value of money, a dollar today is worth more than the promise of a dollar tomorrow.  A piece of armor this turn is worth more than that same piece of armor next turn.

Every time you save IPCs, you’re sacrificing valuable initiative.  More time in the bank means less time on the board.  If you’re going to sacrifice that initiative, I can only think of two good reasons to do so:

1. You are saving up for something that costs more than the IPCs you have on hand, and whatever you intend to buy with those IPCs is worth the cost in initiative; or

2. The value of keeping your opponent guessing what you’re going to buy is so great that it outweighs the sacrifice in initiative.  This is likely to work best if your industrial complexes are close to the front - the farther your industry is from the front, the worse this strategy becomes, since you’re essentially making getting your units into action take longer.

It didn’t achieve independence from the UK until 1961.  It’s not like having it neutral will have an appreciable impact on game play.  Maybe it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but that’s a bizarre little mistake to make.

I know I’ve brought up several geographic quibbles lately, but this isn’t just a minor gripe.  Aden had a great deal of strategic importance to the British during the war and was a major staging ground for operations against the Italians in Somalia and the Gulf of Aden was a major supply artery between India and the Suez Canal.  A naval base there (like the one that actually existed in real life) would make it easier for the British player to move units from India to the Mediterranean.  This isn’t an inconsequential omission.

IPCs in the bank don’t win the game; units on the board do.  Every turn you wait to purchase a unit that you can afford is one less turn that unit will be on the board, one more turn it will take to get it where you want it to go, and one less turn it can spend taking territories to get you more IPCs.  It’s like the time value of money, a dollar today is worth more than the promise of a dollar tomorrow.  A piece of armor this turn is worth more than that same piece of armor next turn.

Every time you save IPCs, you’re sacrificing valuable initiative.  More time in the bank means less time on the board.  If you’re going to sacrifice that initiative, I can only think of two good reasons to do so:

1. You are saving up for something that costs more than the IPCs you have on hand, and whatever you intend to buy with those IPCs is worth the cost in initiative; or

2. The value of keeping your opponent guessing what you’re going to buy is so great that it outweighs the sacrifice in initiative.  This is likely to work best if your industrial complexes are close to the front - the farther your industry is from the front, the worse this strategy becomes, since you’re essentially making getting your units into action take longer.

Having the Vichy regime in the game doesn’t make a lot of sense to me for historical reasons.  Vichy played a negligible military role in the war and was completely occupied by Germany in 1942 anyway.  The terms of the armistice with Germany prevented the Vichy regime from producing anything other than infantry (at severely capped numbers).  The only French colonies of any importance that the Vichy regime managed to hold were the North African ones (sub-Saharan Africa, I believe, very quickly joined the Resistance), and those forces defected pretty quickly to the Allies after Operation Torch.

Adding Vichy rules would give the regime significance in the game that it didn’t have during the war.  Of course, you could argue, who cares, it’s just a game, but isn’t historical accuracy the only reason anyone is talking about this in the first place?

What would make more sense (from a historical, if not necessarily gameplay perspective), would be for Italy to be eliminated after Allied capture of Sicily or Southern Italy, all its units removed from the board, and a certain number of German units added to Northern Italy to reflect the fact that the Germans were the ones directing the fighting against the Allies at that point.

I want to put one together when I have the time and I’d like to know what you guys estimate the average number of turns to be and the average number of hours so I know how much time to budget.

Including it was a nice gesture, but seriously…

It didn’t achieve independence from the UK until 1961.  It’s not like having it neutral will have an appreciable impact on game play.  Maybe it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but that’s a bizarre little mistake to make.

Mexico didn’t enter the war until 1942, only a few months before pro-allied neutral Brazil entered the war.  Mexico had a foreign policy independent of the United States during this period.

It’s not like there aren’t a lot of roundels in these games for non-playable countries.  If they’re going to give Canada a roundel even though it generates British income, why not do the same for Belgian Congo?  Also, does anyone else think it’s ironic that the only Dutch possession that doesn’t have a Dutch roundel is the Netherlands itself?  I suppose it makes sense from a practical standpoint, but it is kind of strange.