I have a hunch that most of you who are worried about play balance either play very good players online, or play a lot of two player games, one player Axis and one player Allied. We have been using Axis and Allies Classic in our historical gaming class for the past 5 years, and my cohort in crime, Chris Freeman, has been using it a while longer in his War and Diplomacy class. We always have at least 5 players, and more normally 5 two-person teams, so no person or team controls more than one country. During that period, our experience has been that the Allies have a tough time winning. My view is that the Classic and Revised games are more biased in favor of the Axis than the Allies, primarily with respect to limited IPCs for the US and bias in the relative force sizes, particularly with the US and UK navies. In several of the games, we have had to introduce our home rules for Lend-Lease to bail out the Allied players. Looking at Revised, which we have not used as yet, I do not see that much difference in play balance. Based on what I have seen in the pictures of the initial set-ups, and some of the rule discussion, I fail to see any strong bias for the Allies in the Anniversary Edition. The key is playing a true multiplayer game, i.e. 4 to 6 players.
I was working on adding Italy to the game already, since the change in color for the Japanese between A&A Pacific and Revised gave me the necessary units. I am looking forward to seeing what the rules are for the Anniversary Edition, but probably still will go forward with adding Italy to the Classic game.
As for Variant’s comment: “How how about these realistic or historical sensibilities. Great Britain was weak. Germany had it beat into submission and would have been stomped it out of the war completely if it wasn’t for the United States propping it up. What is the 30 IPCs that the U.K. gets? The annual welfare check from the U.S.?”
By 1941, Britain was producing as much military equipment as Germany, and maintained that rate throughout the remainder of the war. In 1944, Britain managed to devote 60% of its Gross National Product to military production, a rate which could not be sustained, and left the British post-war economy in shambles. I am not making those figures up. If you wish, you may consult Klaus Knorr’s War Potential of Nations, which is the source of some of my information. If the aim of the game was to really bias it in favor of the Allies, all they would have to do is give the US its true military production capability in late 1943/early 1944. To do that, you take the sum of the total production of all of the non-US players (Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, and the UK) and give that to the US. In the Revised Game, that would be 124 IPC, not 42. And to that add the US should automatically be producing somewhere between 2 and 4 transports per turn. The US was also feeding a large portion of the world at the same time.