Okay.
As far as I understand it, territories have 3 possible statuses:
- friendly: can be entered without combat
- hostile: can be entered with combat
- neutral: cannot be entered (without declaration of war, making it hostile)
Now in the FAQ/errata, Krieghund says that Axis ships are free to mingle with Allied ships (and vice versa), and share sea zones before war is declared. And yet, while the Allies and Axis are not yet ‘hostile’ powers in the Pacific in 1940, it is fair to say that they are not ‘friendly’ either.
My intuition is that they should be labelled ‘neutral’, and thus that you should be able to block the naval movement of other neutral powers by placing your own surface warships in their paths, and that neutral powers should not be allowed to have surface warships off of territories controlled by other neutral powers. After all, it would have been a BIG provocation to war if Japan just parked the IJN off the west coast of the US in '40, alongside American naval units…
So my question is: Is there no such thing as a ‘neutral’ sea zone? And if not, why not? It would certainly seem to make a good deal of sense…