The Japanese are great, but you have to be super aggressive with them.  Their snipers and mortars crews are outstanding and give lots of long range firepower.  Once you get in close the imperial sergeants and arisaka rifleman are something to be truly feared in hand to hand combat.  Tanks just need to be swarmed with enough infantry, and in my experience, if your opponents takes too many tanks, he doesn’t have anywhere near enough infantry to slow you down on your way to the armor.  Banzai!

I completely agree that lack of transport units creates some real logistical and realism problems with the game.  I’ve been considering creating 2 1/2 ton trucks for the Americans & Opel Blitz trucks for the Germans.  They would just be regular “soft” vehicle units.  Similar in movement to a jeep, but would be a little more expensive and could carry 2 infantry units.  They would also be able to tow field guns using other rules I’ve created for that (www.aaminis3d.com)

Excellent question.  I do not have any historical evidence of widespread tank vs. tank ramming, and I don’t really expect that it went on.  I included the rule more for sake of gameplay with non-armored vehicles (jeeps, halftracks, etc.) The rule represents a sort of last ditch option available to a player with nothing left but jeeps who is trying to face down a tank.  I’ve people ask to be able to ram on a number of occasions, so I decided to come up with a rule for it.  The attack itself is pretty anemic (need 6’s to hit) so I can’t think of why a tank would ever choose to ram another vehicle instead of using it’s short/medium range armor attack roll instead.  Now a jeep, on the other hand, really wouldn’t have any other attack against a light tank.  With the ram you might be able to damage a tank, but you are certainly going to destroy your jeep trying.  Let me know if you end up using the rule and if it works for you or not.

I’ve recently finished compiling and documenting a set of 3-D rules for Axis & Allies Miniatures that my group has been playtesting for some time now. All modified rules along with pictures from several of our games are available at:

http://www.aaminis3d.com/

The basic premise for the ruleset is 2" conversion, in other words 1 hex = 2" on the 3-D terrain. Everything else follows from that.

Please take a look if you are interested. I’d appreciate any comments or questions anyone might have, as we continue to refine the rules every time we play and the more input we get the better.

Thanks,
Astifas