@simon33 The thing about the neutral crush is that if the Allies can pull it off successfully, then they’ve probably already set themselves up for victory anyway. There’s 6 infantry in Spain, 8 infantry in Turkey, and 2 in Saudi Arabia. The US is limited in the opening in terms of how many loaded transports it can afford to send across the Atlantic, and the UK is limited in the opening in how many units it can build up in the Middle East, even in a Middle Earth strategy. If you’ve overcome these limits and managed to build up both a US force and a UK force each of which can successfully kill off 8 defending neutral infantry, and those forces aren’t urgently needed for defense anywhere, then (a) you probably could and should just successfully kill off 8 defending Axis infantry; there ought to be some target that’s worth taking that’s not so well-defended, and (b) you’re probably doing so well that you will win no matter what you do as long as it’s not insane.
On the US end, one of the challenges is that the coast of Spain is not necessarily a safe place to park your ships – it’s typically in range of German fighters and tac bombers flying out of West Germany; to block this attack, you would need to hold Morocco and Gibraltar strongly enough that Italy can’t take them back on its turn – which is hard to do if the Allied infantry headed for the western Med are all going to Spain. You need to crush Spain’s 6 infantry hard enough that your survivors can resist an Italian/German counterattack from France; you have to take and hold Spain so you can build facilities and land planes there; otherwise you’re just trading territory that’s far enough away from the German core that it’s not really a threat to them.
On the UK end, there’s nowhere reasonable to put a third factory in the opening – you can use your starting factory in South Africa and build a new one in Persia on UK2 after activating Persia on UK1. However, it’s not safe to put a factory in Egypt against a competent Italian player, and it’s not reasonable to attack Iraq any earlier than UK2, because you need time to activate the Persian units and bring them into the fight, as well as time to contain the Italians in east Africa. So the earliest you could build an Iraq factory is UK3, which means you don’t get any new units out of that factory until UK4 – and even then, the British economy is usually too weak to fuel all 3 factories reliably. You might be earning 42 IPCs if you’re doing very well. If you want a reasonable mix of land units, so you can, e.g., put fast movers in Persia and keep them involved in the action despite their relatively long walk to Cairo, then the buy looks something like 4 infantry, 2 artillery, 2 mechs, 1 tank, which costs 34 IPCs. You probably also need to buy at least a destroyer in the Atlantic to cope with German submarines, so that’s the full 42 IPCs. If you get hit with a successful convoy attack or strategic bombing run, or if you’ve lost even one original territory anywhere (e.g. Alexandria, or Gibraltar, or British Somaliland), then you have to make some painful cuts somewhere.
So as the British, you can’t reliably crank out 9 units per turn every turn in the global South – for the first few turns your factories aren’t all online yet, and then even after that sometimes you won’t be able to afford it. Let’s say you manage 7 units per turn. OK, but Italy can typically unload at least 2 transports a turn into north Africa or Syria, so you need 4 units per turn just to counter that…which means you have something like 3 units a turn to build up to a force that can sack the 8 units in Turkey at a profit. And that assumes you’re not diverting units east to save India from Japan, or buying fighters to send north to save Moscow, both of which are often a higher priority than a neutral crush. Maybe you can build up an uncommitted striking force of 12 British units by turn 7 or 8…but most of the time I’d rather use those units to retake Cairo, land in Greece, push into a German-occupied Caucasus, etc.
Yes, it can be annoying to wait until you have enough British transports to support a landing in Greece, but it’s also annoying to gift Germany 2 infantry in Switzerland, 6 infantry in Sweden, and the loss of whatever Allied units take hits in the first round of combat against Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. On average, even a perfect attack that ends in 1 round will cost you about 5 Allied units. So if the Allies are going down 5 units, and the Germans are going up 8 units, that’s a swing of 13 units. In return, the Allies gain 6 IPCs per turn – it will take them 7 turns of collecting that income to build 13 infantry and show a tiny profit, plus another couple of turns for that profit to be converted into units that can be built and transported to the front lines. If the neutral crush happens early – say, round 5 – then you’re not really breaking even until about round 14, by which point the game’s outcome has usually been decided.
It’s not that a neutral crush is never the right answer, I just think it’s rare, and I wouldn’t want to plan ahead for it by making an early investment with the US by making an otherwise-unjustified early move to French West Africa.
Of course, if you want to do a neutral crush because it’s fun, or because it’s surprising, or because you think your opponent won’t know how to defend against it skillfully, have at it! Those are all good reasons to do a neutral crush. I just think it very rarely makes sense in terms of this game’s economy, even assuming Britain is running Middle Earth.
