Slitherine

Howdy,

Played a few AI games as Axis and won handily a couple. Playing my first human opponent as Axis and, of course, it's much different.

From what I've seen in the AAR forums, it seems like the best that the Axis can hope to achieve is some kind of semi high point
by 1942 and then they're just defending from there.

If you're playing with oil on - it seems like it's a no brainer that you have to go for Egypt. It'd be nice to have England knocked out, but if you conquer them, you get no oil.

As the Axis - you have to invade Russia at some point. I don't think there's any question about that.

Had a fairly good game as Axis. France fell in July (could have done better - like I said, my first human game).

Thoughts?

The most important thing for the Axis player is to be decisive. You have to choose one strategy soon after France falls and commit everything necessary to achieve that objective.

1. Option 1: Sealion OR Middle East. You can almost never do both against a reasonably skilled Allied player. Both campaigns are difficult and failure can be disasterous. You must remember that even if you conquer Egypt, the oil fields of Iraq and Persia are your main objective.

2. Option 2: Do nothing after France except conquer the small neurtral countries. Then launch an early and massive Barbarossa. The upside of this is that you can really take a lot of Russian territory this way. You might choose to build up your sub fleet or strategically bomb England with the extra resources in 1940.

There are countless other ways to play this, of course, but these are the main ones I've seen in the vanilla game. You could go for a capture of Spain combined with a campaign in the Med/Middle East. But that is even riskier. I've learned that the most important thing (in all versions of the game) to achieve before 1942 is a good Barbarossa. Anything beyond that is just gravy.