@The_Good_Captain I’ve watched your first few videos about A&A: Europe (1999) and your comment about the game being a 6-round affair sort of struck a chord with me.
I think E&W is similar, except that it’s “1d6 rounds” owing mainly to how soon the USSR can get the first nuclear bomb tech. Granted, their economy needs to be strong enough that they can afford to build a bomb while maintaining parity in terms of land units.
The issue is that NATO generally can’t counter-attack anywhere on rd1; if the Soviets spread their Pacific fleet properly, they can insulate Korea as well as Kamchatka. The only place that’s usually left open is Yugoslavia. The adjunct to that is generally the USSR spends all of rd2 attacking neutrals, which NATO can do nothing about; since there is no “Pro-neutral” type of mechanic within the designs, NATO can’t lend support/deterrence to neutrals that are vulnerable to attack (i.e. on the Soviet border.)
If the strongest weapon in NATO’s arsenal is the US attack in the far east (which takes til rd3 to reasonably get new transports involved in a landing) you’re at least halfway along the doomsday countdown by that point.
Even if NATO is splitting their fleets to mitigate the effects of a nuke, I think that having to rebuild, say, 3 transports in the Pacific is more cost-intensive than the USSR having to crank out another nuke – particularly if their income is anywhere in the 70 UPC range. If India is bottled up, you end up in a situation of the UK basically throwing good money after bad, just to maintain the status quo, with no real potential of ever swinging the momentum, from that position. Never mind the costs NATO is going to incur trying to keep up on spying.
I think the Kamchatka landing can absolutely work, but it’s a lot easier if NATO can sway China (hard, if not impossible) and they absolutely need to be pushing past Eastern Siberia within “1d6 rounds.” Otherwise the game just deteriorates until NATO slowly dies to nukes. Even when I’ve had NATO making grand offensives to try and keep the economics of the game from stagnating, they either can’t sustain it because the USSR absorbs and counter-attacks everything, or they’re forced to pivot off of one position to bail out another, and all momentum is lost in the process.
NATO has time in which to gamble, but they don’t have the economic edge in this game – and they have all the drawbacks of the Allies, always needing to build up their logistics chain (and spying!) before they can really even act. They’re on the back foot from the word ‘go’ and they have only a handful of rounds to do something decisive.
