TwoShedsJackson wrote:
There are no hard and fast rules, but a fairly standard convention is if the US is awarded any extra IPs at the start, that they may place them in any country where they already have influence (after placing their influence in Western Europe), but may not place them in a way that leads to 'over-control' of a country e.g. dumping 2 into Iran to make it 3/0 there etc.
If you are playing with the Optional Cards I'd recommend trying it without any extra ips to see how you find it, the consensus is that it is more or less balanced with that setup, and statistics from wargameroom and the ITS league here seem to bear that out.
If you are playing with the Optional Cards I'd recommend trying it without any extra ips to see how you find it, the consensus is that it is more or less balanced with that setup, and statistics from wargameroom and the ITS league here seem to bear that out.
Yeh I'm aware that the game is fairly balanced with just the Optional Cards in but I was asking mostly because there is a disparity of experience between quite a few of the players in my group and while it would be easy to just let the less experienced players play as the USSR then they might want to experience the game from the US side at some point and giving them as much of a balance as possible would be nice.
Also, while there is a copy of the Deluxe Edition circulating in my group then there are times when we have to use my copy (which is 2nd Edition with a Deluxe Edition board but without the Optional Cards) and it'd be really helpful to know what the extra IP rules are when we have to use that.
I generally just play as the US without any bonus points, optional cards or no, I like the challenge :p