Well, not to butt in, but the people I’ve played with call this “the English gambit” because the idea is to make England cashless as fast as possible. It only makes sense to put the factory in the country worth 2 IPC’s, (Egypt?) not the 1 IPC country.
The strategy goes like this: T1 Germany, factory on Egypt. The rest of the game, buy 1 tank & 1 inf for Egypt, spend the rest on inf to buy time in Europe.
Japan T1, ignore US fleet, take Australia, put two factories on the mainland. T2, pump tanks & inf on mainland and pull all navy back to Japan to defend.
Basically Germany goes all defense except for Africa and Japan does all the work trying to kill Russia. Russia can’t really take advantage of Germany being so passive because they need to keep sending forces east… which is pretty far for allied support.
Also the US player must decide whether to roll up the undefended islands around Japan (bad idea generally) or attack Africa (better) or keep with the plan and attack W.Europe (best). Often a less experienced US player will choose wrongly, faced with a strong start for Japan.
Makes for an interesting game. It only seems to work about a third of the time against good players, but even when it doesn’t, at least it’s not the same old game as every other time.