@timerover51:
I am using the game to teach history, and as I have indicated before, I could not care less about game balance, or appeasing the gods of game balance. You want game balance, go play chess or checkers. Second, I suspect most of this discussion of game balance is based on two player games online between expert players, where even a small advantage can be decisive. I am running 5 player team games around an actual board, with kids who are not expert gamers, and for some, this is the first board wargame that they have ever played. Under this situation, any kind of a good Axis player is probably going to defeat the Allies in very short order. We have been using 2nd Edition, and I will likely be using 2nd Edition when I work with my son’s high school class. Either that or a combined Europe-Pacific game, if I can figure out how to merge the IPC values of the two games. I have been tweaking the rules now over a 4 year period, to insure that the Allies can stay in the game under the circumstances under which we play. National Louis University, where the classes operate from, is in the middle of a heavily Jewish area. Any game which gives the Germans a very high chance of winning is not going to fly.
Have the kids enjoyed the games? Yes, enormously, as the class has grown from 15 to 46 in four years, and we still had a waiting list. Another telling point is the number of games sold on the open house night at the end of the class session, when we have been selling 4 to 6 copies of the game for the past two years. We have also been selling the kids on Mayfair’s railroad games, and the various Eagle games still available. They have also been learning an enormous amount of history in the process of playing the games.
US production superiority was a FACT in World War 2. Lend-Lease was a FACT in World War 2. The kids see very quickly that if the US had not gotten into the war, that the world would now be a very different place. Without Lend-Lease, US production ability would have taken longer to have an effect, with the Germans being far harder to defeat. Some of the posts have mentioned IPC values for the US assuming the US full production was in the game. Calculating what the full US production value would be is actually quite simple. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Division, calculated that at its peak, Japanese production was one-tenth of the United States production. Take your value for Japanese production and multiply by 10. You then have the US production. Germany and the UK/Commonwealth were about equal, Russia a little behind Germany.
Give the Japanese 25, the US then gets 250 by the end of the game, the Germans get 80, the Commonwealth gets 80, and the Russians get 65. Part of the Commonwealth production was in Canada, so that is not immediately in the game. Same for Australian production. Give the Germans 80 to start with, give the Japanese 25, add the captured territories as they occur, start the UK at 60 and the Russians at 45. To get the additional production, the UK needs a industrial center in Canada, and one in either India or Australian, or both. The Russians need to build IC in order to get their increase in production. The US simply goes up 10 IPC per turn until 250 is reached. The Axis player either wins early, or get crushed. Game balanced.
You completely misunderstood what A&A is all about. And revised is quite pro allies, for all decent players.
In the triplea lobby many players won’t take axis for a bid less than 8.
There are also custom maps in the triplea version that is more historically accurate than the revised version.
If A&A was historically correct, then it would be utterly impossible to win as axis, unless allies delibaretely let the axis player win….!
Fun for the kids that they enjoy the game, but for history lessons u should stick to books and movies ;-)
