Deck 5 Opening Salvo - HMS Implacable and MI Akagi

waratsea4 (and Fear God...) You have a right to your opinion. And I think those opinions should be expressed. Critiques have always had a useful influence on future deck development as they should.

RB (and a lot of others) thought the first Set would be the only set ever produced. WaS turned out to be a surprise hit, and it took almost two years to get Set 2 out. There is no question that RB made some "stat adjustments" to ensure the game was balanced with Set I. However, several of those "adjustments" went on to haunt him (and us) in the future. From Set II onward it has only been necessary to maintain balance between Axis and Allies across all sets. No individual set after the first one is balanced if you try to play with one exclusively. You can make a balanced match out of any set, but you have to work at it. Set I had to stand on its own.

Although I wasn't one of the team to vote for an Operational Akagi, I also don't mind it. The alternative was to do a "what if" sister to Taiho (which I favored) that would have been hated on by the "anti-fantasy" faction. So there is no winning at this point. We are out of "capital ships" and those drive the game - like it or not. RB already felt it was necessary to do operational variants by Set VI to maintain interest. We are far beyond that now and I think we have done a good job of 1) minimizing the creation of operational variants to areas where we are out of alternatives and/or 2) focusing mostly on variants where the original units were little used for one reason or another. The original Akagi clearly had the wrong hull points by the guidelines worked out from the first six sets, and that provided a hook to do a variant. With the appearance of USS Midway and a bunch of Essex class sisters for the US there was an identified need to help the IJN out in the CV area. As I stated above, in this case we knew the existing Akagi was already a very good unit so we went out of our way (with a very, very long development thread and playtesting thread) to make sure this was an "alternative" rather than a replacement. I think we did okay..

Cannot see the cards, links seems broken