Playing as the Axis is always fun, since you are certainly for the first 100 weeks (=50 turns) the agressive civ. After that the Allied get their heavy bombers and you get trouble in Russia. The key to success in this scenario is fast research, which can become difficult because you have to build up defences (Air Defence, Coastal Battery) against the Allied and troops against Russia as well. The amount of turns as the Axis depends on your tactic: it will be a quick game when you choose to go all research (either you win early, or loose early), and if you play save it will be a longer, more difficult and more interesting game. A wise thing in about all single player games might be taking over the minor Axis territory or at least Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria: they are an extra side for you to attack Russia from. And if you think it's not enough you can take Turkey as well: just be sure to have a strong border with Spain. You can expect attacks from there when taking Turkey. Believe me: taking over their cities is better than giving them all your techs.

A very nice effect of the Axis, wanted or not, is that everything is very real. In the beginning you will conquer Europe with ease using the Blitzkrieg tactic, but later on when the enemy has better tanks and air defences, the Blitzkrieg won't work anymore. In real history the Blitzkrieg wasn't used anymore because there weren't enough planes and because the enemy Airforce became too dangerous.

Playing as the Allied means a bit boredome in the early stages. You see how the Axis takes over Europe, and all you can do is research and rule the seas. Once again research is very important, you should get good tanks and long range bombers as soon as possible. Without them you shouldn't even think of taking one Axis city. The place were you should be able to act first is Afrika, besides the Northsea and Atlantic. In Afrika you have the Minor Axis in front of you. They're weak and with little research you should be able to take over their bases there, helped by the Minor Allied that can approach from the other side. Once you have researched enough, you can build up forces: first a lot of bombers followed by cargo ships filled with Shermans. Then operation Overlord can begin.

Playing as the Russians is really fun in my opinion. If you wait until you are attacked by the Axis, you can get pretty frustrated. My tip is to attack the Neutrals and maybe Minor Allied early. They are weak, and even though your forces are just little better, you can gain a lot of influence by taking their cities over, and besides that you stop the German expansion for at least a while. Once again Turkey can be the key. If you have Turkey you can take over the Minor Axis from a good starting point. You should not move too fast though: you have to balance the building defences at the border with the Axis and building forces to take over Turkey. After taking Turkey you should become friends with the Independants and turn them against the Axis. Give them a few useless techs, ally with them, make them declare war to the Axis, and give them and obsolete T-34 tech. This way you force the Axis to spread forces. Axis troop concentration will weaken near your border, or at least lost units will be replaced far too late. Make sure you act quickly, and give the Independants better techs when you see they're losing. Hopefully the Allied are acting the same moment and invade the Axis from somewhere else. Now you should slowly retake lost cities and begin taking Polish cities. Your final attack should wait 'till you have traded some techs with the Allied (that really helps!) or even with the Minor Axis. As soon as you can build the B-29 you should launch your attack towards Berlin. The Russians are most fun after the Axis and it is certainly the civ with the most changes if following the above tactic.

All of the units used in Civilization II are changed and adjusted to fit the scenario. Kobayashi even had a shortage of units: in the readme you can read that some units are meant to be used as other units as well. For example the P-51 counts as the Bf 109K as well, and the Lancaster can be seen as the Halifax, B-24 Liberator and Short Stirling as well.

The scenario had no unbalanced units in it. All units that are meant to fight eachother have about the same strength, and you often don't know how things will go. Only the B-29 is a bit stronger than its opponents, which is only good because it's the 'crowbar' needed to decide the war. It's like a goalgetter or pinch-hitter in football: someone that can decide the match.

I could not find any errors in the tech tree at all, and I didn't disagree with the relation to new units. The only thing I think could've been different was the fact that the Panzer IV doesn't get obsolete. In my opinion it should get obsolete after the Panther comes available, or maybe after the King Tiger does. The Panther is really the better version of the Panzer IV in this scenario, with the only difference that it cost 10 shields more.

The tech tree is of high complexity. Techs are either 'Allied-special', 'Axis-special', 'Sovjet-special' or available for all. All the special techs come available with techs available for all, though need an other special tech as well. Just take a look at the pics of the tech trees kobayashi included and you see that it takes time to make such a tech tree. It's an almost perfect tech tree without disfunctional or useless technologies.

I can only make a comment on the non-event messages. When you save and quit, it says 'No, Cry Havok! Let slip the Dogs of War' and 'Yes. I'm needed in a Galaxy saving mission'. Now either kobayashi made a mistake and thought he was working on an other scenario, or he really thought about this message and is refering to his Star Trek scenarios when talking about the Galaxy saving mission. Maybe the message is a build-in text to the ones that know his other scenarios.

The map used in Zweiter Weltkrieg came from the scenario 'Third Reich', which covers World War II as well. The map is well chosen: it has Europe, the important places of Afrika, a part of the Middle-East, Russia, and the north-eastern coast of North-America. I can only say that maybe the map should've gone further to the east, so Russia would be even larger. The terrain was properly adjusted for the scenario, though I would recommend to make mountains unaccessable for all units. Ofcourse the Wehrmacht was able to go through the mountains in real-life, but a super-heavy-weigth tank as the Tiger couldn't. The same could be said of the swamps, but that is more difficult though, since Hitler did make use of the swamps for his early tanks (e.g. Panzer III) in his attacks against Poland and Russia.

The eventsfile for Zweiter Weltkrieg is something special. For example: when the allies conquer Ploesti, the oil supply for the Axis is cut off, and the Guderian wonder becomes obsolete meaning Axis units aren't 'veterans' anymore from the start. On the other hand, when the Axis conquer Port Said, the Suez-canal is closed, and the Allies must start paying maintenance for all the buildings that cost 1 maintenance. A third example is the disappearance of the French Maginot-Defence line after Paris is conquered by the Axis. The Maginot line forces you to take Paris as oon as you can, via the Netherlands and Belgium, since you will loose a lot of troops of you want to break through the Maginot-line. Texts appear when certain things happen to inform the player what effects something has on the game and what really happened in history.

Last I'd like to point out the music files, kobayashi included in the scenario. Both are used to 'support' the in-game messages telling you something special has happened. It's a nice add to the game, though I may say that sometimes the music goes on too long. Especially when you have 3 or 4 special happenings right after eachother it can be a bit too much.