Well, you guys might be missing something here. You do not need to agree that the game is imbalanced, or have a consensus on what bid is necessary to balance it, to have a consensus on what I am talking about.
Example: Person A may think the game is already balanced and that a bid is not necessary, Person B thinks an Allied bid of 6 ipcs is needed when you play with NOs, and Person C is nutty and thinks that 21 ipcs are needed for the allies with NOs. But all of these three people may in fact agree that a bid of 2 infantry in europe would be equivalent to a bid of 2 naval warships off the coast of america.
Agreeing on what to do to balance the game is not a pre-requisite to agreeing on certain bids types being equivalent.
Or, to think about it in a different way, lets think of this as a Ratio.
I’m just going to throw this out there, but lets say you have a Bid of X.
If you use it on the “front line” in either Europe or Africa/MiddleEast, then all you get is X.
If you use it not on the front line in Europe/Africa/MiddleEast, or you use it on the front line in China, then you get X1.5
If you use it not on the front line in China, or you use it in the Atlantic on Navy, UK main island Air/Land, then you get X2
If you use it on Pacific navy, or American Continent Land/Air, then you get X*2.5.
Now, as you can see, if you think X should be zero, then they all end up as zero. If you think X should be 6, then you could either get 2 europe/egypt inf, or 3 chinese inf, or a cruiser in the atlantic, or a DD + a sub in the pacific. If you think X should be 10, etc, etc.