These look fantastic!

That sounds like a really fun game to play.

Yeah, how Germany pulls it off is certainly not resolved.  And like I said, I’ve only played once.  But in my mind it seems its going to take 10-12 rounds for the Axis to reach 14 cities.  And if they don’t do it before then, America will have made too much progress fighting back.  Even if Germany doesn’t attack Russia until turn 4, the first minor complex can likely be built turn 6, and the 2nd and 3rd on the 7th and 8th, respectively.  This gives you 3-5 rounds of being able to pump in up to 9 infantry right on the front line, with the tanks rolling in from western Germany.  This should enable the conquest of certainly Stalingrad and likely Moscow, especially with Japan picking up all the scraps in eastern Russia.

This is certainly not a guaranteed path to victory, but I think it could be a decent idea in the right circumstances.  I tend to not have enough urgency in my thinking though, so maybe America is nipping to far into France by round 12 for this to work.

Has anybody tried building multiple minor IC’s in southern Russia as Germany?  It seems like Germany could build one in Western Ukraine, then Ukraine, and then even Rostov.  All of these territories are only two spaces away from Moscow.

I’ve only played one game, as USSR, I was admittedly playing defense not very aggressively, giving up some territory and waiting for Germany to overextend herself so I could strike back with my stacks of infantry and artillery.  But Germany didn’t attack until G4 and was advacing very efficiently herself.  But it seems like there are too many territories in the south to defend, and it occured to me after the game that it would have been a good idea for Germany to build multiple minor complexes in the southern territories to drastically shorten her supply lines.  Ideally Germany will have some transports in the north from the sealion/fake sealion action to deal with Leningrad, but the south is further away.  Three minors can produce 90% as much as a major, only cost 6 more, and don’t cripple the rest of your builds quite so much in any given turn.  Thoughts?

Thank you guys so much for the clarification.  It really helps to move the parenthesis to before that sentence.

I have a question regarding landing fighters on a newly built carrier.  I read through this thread and did not see it previously answered.

This was the situation in our game the other night.  German had built some transports in sea zone 113 and did not protect them with any surface ships.  The only way that UK could possibly destroy them was to build a carrier and fly a fighter from London to sea zone 113, and then land the fighter on the newly built carrier outside of London in sea zone 110.  Is this a valid move?  I thought it was, but the line in the rules that we found would seem to indicate otherwise, and the group voted me down.

“Any air units that are not in an eligible landing space by the end of the Noncombat Move phase are destroyed (note that this can include a sea zone in which a new carrier will be placed during the Mobilize New Units phase” -pg 28 AAE.

This phasing is confusing to me.  I know that right above this line it says that ‘Landing doesn’t actually occur until the Mobilize New Units phase’, but then it follows that by saying that air units are destroyed if they are not in an eligible landing space at the end of noncombat move.  I would appreciate a clarification.

Great game and rulebook otherwise so far.  We loved it.

Huh, I thought with six copies you could just string them end to end and play an unfathomably epic version of the game.