Rank the weapons developments from best to worst.

Death Head, I think you are discussing Revised, not the original version of Axis and Allies.

There is a house rule somewhere that claims,

Pay 10 IPC to gain a tech that another nation already has developed

maybe if you play with a rule that lets germany build naval units for half off. I’d be willing to do that as allies as long as otherwise it’s standard rules.

I agree this is something I’ve never seen in a RL game. Maybe vs. the comp but even then…

Any invasion of North America proper with the exception of Alaska can be sniffed out pretty quickly. If the Germans are buying transports also that tells me they aren’t buying lots of inf, which means they aren’t worried about the Russians which means Russia is kaput which means the entire Allied game plan is pretty much kaput (economic victory usually follows caputre of Russia).

As was said above this, if you can somehow get things going and time a joint Japanese/ German assault where it would split the American ability to defend, but even then you would have to have a lot of troops since they can pile up 7 INF/ turn with only W and E USA.

i’ve tried teching with the UK for a bit.
kind of fun . . . .

Well as Britain I bomb Germany constantly to lower their IPCs.
But I see what you mean, whichever game I play like this Germany gets really strong, but once Japan falls, America and Britain have it in the bag.

Why would you need to roll against the heavy bomber specifically? That’s not fair, because the attacker gets to choose his casualties from all the hits, whether it be during a battle or picking planes to die from AA fire. The attacker should get to “guard” his Heavy by escorting it with other planes.

Well I can agree with you on Japan if you want to play the Axis, but when I was sent to play England (and this was actually my first game), I was sent back home with a stinging defeat. The main problem, is that even with US support, chances are that England is going to have the socks knocked off them. I went to Africa, I lost. I built a navy, lost that to the Luftwaffe. I tried building an IC in India and the Japanese managed to take that over. By the end of the third round, I had almost lost all my territories in Africa and SE Asia. For the rest of the game, I mainly sent forces to Russia to help them defend against Germany – not very fun.