I recently played a game as the Commune in which I managed to beat the Germans. It did take a fair amount of effort - almost a year - but I managed to get it done (war went from spring 1940 to winter 1940-1). It was basically a series of massive pockets: first trapping all of Flanders-Wallonia in one pocket, then bagging the Lorraine defenses in another pocket (probably the hardest and bloodiest fight of the game; my troops took forever to close the pocket in Nancy and almost didn't manage it), then breaking through in Pfalz and swinging around into Bavaria to bag Alsace. At that point, the Austrians entered the war, but the Italians did a decent enough job of holding them off while I broke through on the Main and pushed to Wilhelmshavn, creating a massive Rhenish pocket that contained basically the rest of the German army. At that point, it was basically all over, and the rest was clean-up.Is facing Germany a lost a cause to all but the most skilled player? Can the other nations, such as the Internationale, Japan, the Entente, Russia/Soviets, or any other power beat Germany? Germany seems to start with so much, a large army, navy(though its horribly out of date to begin with) a good size air force in comparison to the others, puppets that can can be useful for extra bodies, and possibly other stuff I have not seen. Is it resonably possible to compete with/beat Germany without too much effort?
It helped that CNT-FAI won the Spanish civil war (so I didn't have to worry about Carlists or the Kingdom rolling into my rear) and that the Germans wiped out Vietnam quickly (so they couldn't stay at war-production levels for very long in the runup to the war between the two of us). By contrast, unlike in other games I've played in which UoB sends useful support to the French, my British allies sent me a massive wad of nothing and frittered away their entire army in the Caribbean in their dumb Icelandic war. And once I'd driven the Germans off the Continent, the British promptly invaded Marokko and snatched it right from under my nose. If military control weren't such a pain in the ass with the Brits, I'd have stopped it, but...uuuugh...
Anyway, point is, Germany is eminently beatable. Wasn't a pushover, wasn't trivial, but put up less fight than I'd thought it was going to, going by their army numbers. I was particularly surprised that my army - which was severely undersized compared to Germany's, to the tune of thirty divisions - was able to hold its own. Germany never really put a whole lot of pressure on my troops, except in a few tense moments when I was attempting to slice-and-dice some pockets. And their air force seems to have been completely distracted by my (useless, NAV-bait) navy; my fully-modernized interceptors cleared the skies pretty quickly, and tanks capturing airfields did the rest.