Yeah, I guess it’s okay that they’re “improving” the game (at least in trying to make it somewhat balanced), but… damn. There’s just SO much more you could put into this game that would make it more awesome. For instance, people argued that the current scrambling rules were stupid (i.e., England is considered NOT an island, yet somehow Japan was; plus you could scramble EVERYTHING you wanted too off islands, leading to inbalances in the Pacific involving the US/Japan) in the original OOB setup. We now have revisions to where EVERYONE can scramble a moderate 3 planes now, and the game is much better for it, adding another layer of strategic interaction. So… why can’t we change the nonsensical True Neutral rules?
We have pro-Axis/Allied countries, which everybody has no problems with, even from OOB. We then have the untouchable True Neutral countries. The current True Neutrals rule doesn’t make sense, in that if the Japs invade Mongolia, the government in Argentina thinks the sky is falling in and practically BEGS the US to occupy it, conscript the entire standing army, and mobilize their entire economy to a war-time footing… I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t make sense, for an attack on a country on the other side of the world (the US didn’t even care that much about the UK or the SU getting attacked by the fascists in the first place, for crying out loud!) to send ALL the neutral countries in the WORLD into the other side’s camp. Now IF the Japanese DID send a carrier fleet along with a couple transports over to Chile and invaded that country, Argentina asking for assistance from the US WOULD start making sense. We need True Neutral blocks for more historical realism!
Why can’t Germany honestly develop a strategy invading Spain and/or Turkey? Even IF we change the rules so that attacking these True Neutrals doesn’t turn every other True Neutral country in the world Pro-Allied, the burden of taking the True Neutrals is still on the attacker, especially for Germany/Italy, with 14 infantry to chew through between Spain and Turkey (and possibly 6 more inf in Sweden to boot, if we have a True Neutral European block)! I think the attackers cost of taking the True Neutral countries in the first place is MORE than enough deterrent to keep the game balanced in the first place.
If people are still want the old T.N. rules, why don’t we add a caveat that you can only attack True Neutrals w/o repercussions until the turn the US enters the war? The US goes to war if Germany takes England, so if Germany pursues a Sealion then they can’t (and probably don’t have the material to) attack the True Neutrals. If Germany attacks the True Neutrals at all, it makes sense that it should happen before the US and the SU enters the war; otherwise, their forces are just too spread out against the new opponents to survive. Same for Japan, attacking Mongolia before the round the US enters the war should be feasible as well (maybe have the SU be able to declare war on Japan early as a special case).