The Nationalist Chinese are unfortunately very difficult to make an effective army with. They have almost no anti-tank capability, low overall firepower, and are very fragile. There’s little point of playing a game against late war armies, as a Tiger or similar heavy tank can simply wade through most of your units. Simply put a competitive Chinese army is nearly impossible to achieve.
The Italians have a handful of units to pick from, most having some fairly significant drawbacks. Their units are sufficient at killing enemy infantry, but only the Carro provides any significant AT support.
;Avalon Hill has released the latest preview of Axis & Allies Miniatures: D-Day a couple of days early this week. In this preview we get the stats card from the first "Hero" unit of the game.
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If you have played Axis and Allies D-Day before you probably suffered or gloried in an Axis Victory before due to first-time-played-syndrome. I lost horribly the first time I played as the Allies because I didn’t know how to structure my attack around the Fighter advantage. But after 2 or 3 plays the game play started to change; Allied Forces gained dominance of the “Cherbourg” Sector; Air Power was allocated properly; and Blockhouse threats were removed faster then a Grognard breaking out a counter sheet on Christmas Day.
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This week’s preview of Axis & Allies Miniatures: D-Day is now up on the Avalon Hill website. This week’s stat cards are for the Russian SU-76M and the German Sandbagged Machine-Gun Team. This week we also also introduced to a new game mechanic: Heroes.
The French Army provides some interesting units, with some tanks that are very powerful in early war games, but quickly become obselete. Their infantry ranges from good to bad, and they have a decent commander. So far of the minor nations I’ve reviewed the French seem to be able to the best balanced army.
Like everyone here, when I first opened my Contested Skies boosters and pulled some planes, I slapped a force together using them and proceeded to … Get spanked.
The planes were very vulnerable, and didn’t do what I thought they should. However, they look really cool, so I have kept using them even though at first I felt they were pretty useless.
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Avalon Hill just released this week’s preview of Axis & Allies Miniatures: D-Day to be released on June 2. This week we get a preview of the stats for the Defiant Paratroopers and the Jadgpanzer 38 Hetzer.
Avalon Hill has recently published two new scenarios for Axis & Allies Minatures.