Allied Playbook - G40 Collection of Essays - Compiled by jacobgeo24 Nov 18-19 2023

@andrewaagamer

Thank you! That was very helpful!

YG, I haven’t seen Low Roller’s document (BGG requires a person to register in order to download files), so I can’t really comment on it – but here’s an idea that you might want to consider for your own rulebook project, since it may save you a lot of work and may perhaps also be safer from a legal point of view.

I imagine that your project to rewrite the entire Global 1940 ruleset as a combined document will require you, as a first step, to create an outline of the document that you want to create – basically, a plan for the structure of the whole document, arranged in whatever way you think will be best from the point of view of clarity and ease of use.  I also imagine that, as another preparatory step, you’ll need to make an inventory of all the parts of the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks that you wll want to use, with page references to those parts of the two rulebooks.  One way to make that inventory would be to plug the page references into your structured outline, to give yourself a complete plan of where in the rulebooks you’ll need to go to write each section of your projected document.  (This may not necessarily be the way you were planning to prepare the project, but for the sake of argument I’ll assume that this was going to be your methodology.)

Anyway, what occured to me is this.  Having prepared a detailed outline of the type I’ve described, and having inserted into the outline all the required page references to the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks, you might not find it necessary to re-write anything at all.  The document I’ve described would serve as a kind of sophisticated index – a conceptual one, not an alphabetical one – to the Europe and Pacific 1940 rulebooks that treats them in a combined way and that provides access to their content according to whatever logical structure you think would be most convenient for use by players.  The players would still have to go from your document to the rulebook page to which you referred them, of course, but the point is that you wouldn’t have to spend any time actually rewriting the two rulebooks, which would save you an awful lot of work.  Furthermore, since you’d neither copying-and-pasting the rulebooks (which would be questionable from a legal point of view) nor re-phrasing the actual content of the rulebooks (basically trying to get around potential copyright problems by putting the rulebooks into your own language), you might be on safer legal ground.  Essentially, you’d be providing people with a structured and easy-to-use way of accessing official rules, rather than either reproducing or rephrasing the rules.

Im glad we agree on some problems, I just want to find a way to take out Japan without either completly abandon Europe or commit to Europe.

A 60 - 40 economy split should work for the US at the bare minimum

70 - 30 might be better depending on the threat level

UK middle east factory is always a great idea for support
A Norway factory is good for the Allied Power who controls it(Unless it is Russia, because Leningrad Factory)

For the Spanish Beach head what if the UK hit Sweden and/or Norway to contain it , just like we do with Turkey

Going through the med is just impossible in pretty much any game. Either Italy or Germany is going to sink that transport with planes.

So with that reasoning, you must hope for a J1 declaration of war on the US, and then you could do this:

US 1: Buy 5 fighters. Sail your single atlantic transport 1/4th toward Saudi (SZ 87)
US 2: Buy 5-6 bombers. Sail transport 2/4ths to Saudi (SZ 82 or 69). US 1 fighters to French West Africa.
US 3: Transport now 3/4ths to saudi (SZ 71). US 1 fighters to Egypt. US 2 bombers to French Equatorial Africa.
US 4: Go time.

Hit Saudi with your transport. Send in 5 fighters and 5-6 bombers from Africa, taking bomber losses.

US 5: Build factory (and an air base couldn’t hurt), land your planes on it or near it. If Iraq/Persia are still available, take those if possible.
US 6: First turn you can purchase units in Saudi Arabia. Buy factories in other middle east countries, if available.

This is about the time Moscow has gone to hell or the Germans are coming into the middle east. Not enough time to really get any ground units over there. But you could build fighters on US 3 and 4 that would arrive US 5 and 6 for a respectable plane stack. With a bit of UK help, probably enough to shut down any hope of Moscow or the middle east being seriously threatened. A huge problem with this is that you’d have +8 Germans or Italians coming from Turkey.

This is a 100% Atlantic buy for the first 2 turns turns and a significant drain for US 3, 4, and 5 as well. Very dangerous. Japan is going to go nuts because, remember, they J1’d you.

Seems like a crazy damn idea–one that is too crazy to work well, probably. Not only that, but it’s completely obvious what you’re up to. However, I think it’d be pretty easy to have UK prevent Japan from killing/blocking your transport J3. And if Japan invested too much in the Indian ocean to stop you for sure, then they’re ruining some of their J1 momentum, so maybe that’s not entirely awful.

edit-
I guess you could also send your pacific transports through the panama canal, building a naval base there. This would give you four more units in the middle east shortly after your first transport arrived.

Better alternative, with nearly the same effect:
Don’t do Saudi, just have UK save you Persia/Iraq. This saves you from having to violate neutrality, and both are reachable on the same turn as Saudi. If you do hit Saudi, do it the next turn, saving the neutrality violation for one round later.

Those are some good ideas. I think to make this game balanced, I do need to make some adjustments. Just giving Italy the Axis NOs and ANZAC the Allied NOs doesn’t quite work. It seemed to be working for a while, but once ANZAC got the upper hand, it just gradually got worse and worse for Italy. I know that happens even in some games of regular A&A, but I don’t think there was any hope of Italy turning things around once ANZAC started getting ahead.
We just finished this game tonight. It took 15 rounds before Italy surrendered. For the first three rounds, Italy really grew and just about closed the gap between them. Rounds 4-8 were somewhat even between the two. If Italy did well on one front, ANZAC was doing well on another front. From Round 9 on, Italy was more and more defensive. ANZAC managed to take Japan and pretty much ruled all the Pacific and Asia within the next 2 rounds. Once all other Italian presence was eliminated, all ANZAC had to do is keep pounding on Europe until something gave way. Between amphibious landings every turn in Western Europe and a flood of tanks, mechs and planes rolling in from Russia, Italy was finding it harder and harder to maintain any kind of border.
For a while, whenever ANZAC would land somewhere in W Europe, Italy had enough to take it back. There were a few sparks of good for Italy, like when they sacrificed most of their European air force to kill the ANZAC fleet outside of England, including a stack of transports. That delayed ANZAC for a couple of rounds, but soon they were making landings again and Italy couldn’t afford a whole new air force to risk against the navy.
While playing the game this way makes each round go somewhat faster, it is pretty hard keeping track of all the different fronts. You literally have attacks going on in every point of the map on some turns. It’s a little easier when Germany is dealing with England and Russia, Italy is dealing with the Med and Japan is dealing with China and the Pacific. Still, it is kind of cool to be able to carry out ALL your ideas in the same turn.

Oh yeah, and isn’t INVADING RUSSIA!!! actually an invasion of a True Neutral country by Germany due to their NON-AGGRESSION PACT they had signed with them in 1939???

HERP.  A.  DERP.

Dumb rule is dumb.

The colored major and minors are people’s own creations. And I find either 2, 4, or 6 players is best (6 is a stretch b/c of you could get knocked out). And, for example, if i play a 4 player game i divide the powers

Germany and Italy
Japan
US and Russia
UK, Anzac, France, China

6 players
Germany
Japan
Italy
US China
Uk France
Russia Anzac

If you’re new i would either recommend the allies for a two player, probable UkAnzacFranceChina for 4 player and either italy, USchina, or UKFrance for a 6 player. Whatever you do, don’t play as Japan (and probable not Germany either). I’ve played my fair share of new players and Japan is disastrous. At least with Germany they know to go in the general direction of moscow. But with Japan i’ve seen people ignore the DEI. Game over.