This is my first time posting here. I can see that a lot of thought and creativity has gone into this effort. This team has done an excellent job of making the game more realistic in a tactical sense.
That said, very little has been done to correct the strategic historical inaccuracies of Axis and Allies Revised. Which is fine, but if you’re calling this rules set “historical” it may as well live up to the name.
During World War II, the Allies produced over four times as many tanks as the Axis, over twice as many military aircraft, five times as many artillery, over three times as many mortars, over four times as many machine guns, and over six times as many military trucks. In the pivotal battle of Kursk (1943), Germany had 900,000 men, 10,000 cannons, 2,000 aircraft, and 2,000 tanks. They’d denuded their forces elsewhere along the Soviet front to achieve this concentration. The Soviets had 1.9 million men, 20,800 cannons, 2,000 aircraft, and 5,100 tanks. They achieved this without accepting weakness elsewhere. The Axis and Allies Revised map dramatically understates the scale of Soviet and American military production. This inaccuracy is not corrected in the AARHE rules set.
An additional problem the Axis faced is this: in the real war, Japan’s army was engaged in an unwinnable land war in China. Japan simply didn’t have the available men to launch yet another land war against the Soviet Union, or to take India. In A&A Revised (and AARHE), Japan can mop China up quickly and relatively painlessly; and India typically gets abandoned.
Finally, making Italy a separate power is a bit of a stretch. The Italian military lacked proper equipment, training, motivation, leadership, and morale. When Italy declared war on France, a large Italian force was defeated by a French force only a fraction of its own size. The same thing happened again when Italy attempted to invade Greece. In North Africa, massive Italian forces surrendered to much smaller British groups. The Italians lacked the proper equipment to fight a desert war. Italy’s obsolete tanks couldn’t even damage British tanks! By 1943, the Italians had lost whatever willingness to fight they might once have had; and eagerly surrendered to any available Allied force. Including Italy as a separate power implies that Italy was more useful to the Axis than were nations like Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, or Hungary. This simply wasn’t the case.
I realize the changes I’m suggesting create game balance issues. If you bog Japan down in a painful and largely unwinnable land war in China, and if you accurately portray Soviet/American military production, the Allies should always win. But I’m sure that this team is clever enough to find some advantage to bestow on the Axis that will balance out what you’ll be giving to the Allies. Just about anything will be more historically accurate than sweeping the Allies’ industrial advantages or the China war under the rug.
