Okay, the first thing I want to say is everything was intentional. Matt and Larry had a great base to start with but as we play tested, we found we had to change a great many of the parameters to make the game work.
Game Flavor: One of the main goals was to make the focus of the game a land campaign which was heavily influenced by logistics aka supply.
Broken Strategy: We soon found out that the players wanted to fight for the Med. By controlling the Med, it denied the opponent any reinforcements so he who controlled the Med won. We were having epic sea battles and a water-based arms race between the combatants. Since we did not want this to be a sea battle game, but a land battle game, that is where the limits on the number of sea units came from.
Broken Strategy: Another problem we discovered was air power was too powerful. One of the play testers invested heavily in axis fighters and bombers to take Cairo. Since none of us could figure out a counter to that strategy that is when we decided to also limit the number of air units in the game.
Only land units can be chipped out and now you know why.
Broken Strategy: Originally, there were more convoy zones, for example Tobruk had one. We found that, once Tobruk was taken by the Axis, that made it too easy for the Axis to bring up reinforcements quickly and overwhelm Cairo’s defense so we removed it. The whole idea was we wanted there to be a logistics problem for both the Axis and the Allies to fight over Cairo.
As for game balance we had to constantly make revisions as we improved our strategies:
The stacking limits of Tunis and Cairo are directly related to how many units we decided it would be necessary to have a reasonable chance of holding. Originally, those territories had much lower stacking limits.
The number of reinforcements coming through the Suez Canal. That was adjusted multiple times until we felt we had the right balance that Cairo had a chance to hold against an axis Rush versus giving them too many units to push the Axis back easily. This was determined by multiple playthroughs were Cairo first fell and fell again and then after revisions couldn’t be taken at all so more revisions were needed.
The stacking limit of Malta was brought up as a solution to the problem of the British simply stacking it with so many units the Axis dared not attack it and limiting the number of supply tokens available to the island to force a need for constant resupply. We wanted it to be difficult, but not impossible, to keep Malta supplied to get their income booster.
I think every unit had a change made to it either by cost or abilities. For example, we would increase the attack firepower of a unit and then play test it to see if it was too powerful. (BTW, we purposefully made the German 88 gun a great weapon to match historically its capabilities but had to be careful it was not too powerful.)
How scout cars worked, how targeting worked and which units received it was constantly changed. One, Broken Strategy was to bomb the heck out of supply so we had to change how many units had the ability to target supply and how often to remove that strategy.
How the US entered the war and how the US convoy zones worked was changed multiple times too.
In essence, every aspect of the game as you see it now was brought about by multiple testers playing hundreds of games to test its balance. I am pleased you like the game and feel it is the most balanced Axis & Allies game out there. I do to.