@JimmyHat:
I don’t like the rule either, I think that so long as you have a factory you can earn and spend ipcs. After you lose your last factory then you hold onto your unspent ipcs until you or an ally liberates one of your factories. This seems more realistic to me, but I think the current rule is there more to prove that once your capital is captured you might as well surrender.
That’s an interesting idea. So all nations would be treated like China and keep their unspent IPCs with hopes of one of their factories getting liberated, even if it’s not necessarily their capital.
Actually, there is a kind of historical precedent for having to capture the Axis capitals. In the “Why We Fight” series, at the end of each film it shows a quote from the Secretary of War Henry Wallace that said “Victory can only be acheived by the complete and unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.” So, as far as the game goes, if you have Japan surrounded but your Japan player doesn’t want to surrender, then you just have to keep pounding him with SBRs until you build up a big enough invasion force and take him out.