I’ve been having some discussions with SS by personal message about his above proposal, to revise and expand upon certain points. Here’s my understanding of the basic points for his revised China proposals, with a few additonal suggestions from me thrown in. I focused just on a few basic points about China, leaving out some other sections of the proposal from SS (like the part about the Burma Road). I didn’t leave them out because I’m against them, I just left them out because I’m undecided about whether they are desirable or not, and because they’re outside the scope of the issue that I was originally focussing on, which was the whole road-to-Moscow-via-China issue.
Without going into all the details, SS and I concured on taking out the sentence from his original proposal that says “For each territory China loses of the 3, their build reduces 1 inf for every territory they lose.” The new concept is that China receives 4 free infantry at every round of play (representing the equivalent of 12 IPC) pretty much regardless of what its occupation situation on the map is. Otherwise, China would easily have its income (or income equivalent) demolished: most of its territories are worth 0 in the proposal from SS, and the four that are worth 1 are too easily open to Japanese capture.
I said “pretty much regardless” rather than “regardless” because I’m proposing one revision to the new concept: the condition that China must hold at least 1 Chinese territory somewhere on the map to get its four free 4 infantry per round. There are two reasons for this. First, the Chinese infantry sculpts have to go somewhere (in terms of unit placement). Second, this gives Japan an incentive to try to conquer all of China; without such an incentive, Japan would have no reason to invest the required resources to attempt it.
One element I’ve added is an attempted rationalization for China getting free infantry even when it holds no territories; the concept of China getting free infantry is fine to me, but I just wanted to provide a plausible explanation for it rather than these troops just appearing out of thin air.
The components of the proposal are therefore:
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All the original Chinese territories in Global 1940 which start out the game occupied by Japan keep the IPC value stated for them on the map.
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All the original Chinese territories in Global 1940 which start out the game occupied by Japan remain that way, except for Kwangsi, which becomes a Chinese-held territory.
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The Chinese-held territories of Szechwan, Yunnan, Hunan and Kwangsi retain their IPC value of 1. All other territories which are Chinese-held at the start of the game have a revised IPC value of 0.
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As long as China holds a minimum of 1 Chinese territory anywhere on the map, China receives 4 free infantry at every round of play. These represent soldiers who are recruited from China’s vast population reserves.