What made Kohan one of the all-time great real-time strategy games is only partly carried over into Axis & Allies, a World War II-themed makeover of Kohan's basic gameplay. The most notable through line is the way you build and manage your forces. You build regiments rather than individual units (in Kohan, you could design your own regiments, but they're fixed in Axis & Allies). You then manage them as groups, setting their formations and moving them around the map. During combat, the A.I. controls the individual units on a tactical level. They fight battles until they've won, until their morale breaks and they flee, or until you give them orders to pull back.
As Kohan demonstrated, this works great for infantry battles. But when Axis & Allies throws the machinery of modern war into the mix, it becomes a messy goulash of combined arms. There's a soft-pedaled paper/rock/scissor interplay between infantry, armor, and artillery that basically comes down to damage modifiers buried under the hood. It gets hopelessly jumbled up once you introduce mechanized infantry, machineguns, recon teams, anti-tank weapons, anti-infantry guns, and various weight classes of tanks, often into the same regiment. It's particularly messy during the actual fighting. This is not the sort of game that lends itself to positioning your anti-tank weapons in the trees while covering your infantry's advance with artillery and armor. Instead, it comes down to just scooping up a whole mess of units and telling them where to go.
Geronimo!
However, by virtue of the game design, the particulars of unit interaction aren't your concern, so your strategy is a matter of choosing what to build. And here's where Axis & Allies veers away from Kohan's clean elegance and hurtles headlong into the realm of bad game design choices with bad interfaces. Axis & Allies organizes its regiments into divisions attached to headquarters. Based on centuries of military history, this obviously works great in the real world. Based on how hard it is to keep track of everything in Axis & Allies, this doesn't work so great in an RTS, especially when the interface is so stingy with vital information.
The result is a sprawling base building sub-game, whereby you have to (1) unlock a headquarters by building its prerequisite headquarters and brigades; (2) then build it; (3) then drive it somewhere to deploy it; (4) then wait for it to unpack; (5) build its component regiments one at a time. It's just as rigid and obtuse as real-world military hierarchies. It's hard to believe these are the same developers who single-handedly solved so many of the traditional problems of unit management and base-building three years ago with the original Kohan.
The resource model is also tied into this sprawling base building sub-game. You earn gold from your headquarters, but you build ammo and oil depots to support your units, peppering the map with the mobile equivalent of Warcraft's farms. There are fixed cities on the map you can control for additional resources, but these are more significant for extending your supply.