@Vendetta said:

I feel like we're at risk of derailing the thread here if we keep going back and forth on this

I agree.

@Cernel So your answer is "it probably works, I just don't like it?"

We're discussing game design here, not simulation design, and A&A is definitely on the casual side of the WW2 grand strategy genre - it's not World in Flames or The War or Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. The game abstracts and simplifies and overlooks a million different things to give people something that's straightforward and fun to play.

Yes, the objectives I wrote might feel arbitrary, even with the head canon explanation I came up with for you, but what's worse for the game - having those, or having US players cheese the game for easy wins?

If it solves a dilemma that you've said pretty much no other map has managed to address in a fully effective way, I don't think "it's not realistic" is a good enough argument to reject it, because I could point out a hundred things about Axis & Allies that are already unrealistic. If maximum realism is the main thing you're looking for, there's at least a dozen other games out there that will do a much better job of it than A&A mods ever could - at the price of being far more complex to learn and taking far longer to play.

I feel like we're at risk of derailing the thread here if we keep going back and forth on this, so I've said my piece.

@Vendetta said:

The whole major factory in India / UK Pacific economy setup is a legacy artifact from Pacific 1940 being designed as a standalone game, where they wanted the British to be able to produce a full range of units without having to write special rules where things like tanks, planes, and ships that were all built in the UK would have to be teleported in from off-map - and that model continues to be used in most people's mods out of inertia, just because it's something everyone's gotten used to playing with, rather than because it's a good representation of the wartime economics there.

Yes, that is terrible - and a very bad legacy.

@Vendetta said:

@Cernel And yet, Italy produced more war materiel than the two of them put together, and could engineer things that were completely beyond them like tanks, multi-engine bombers, submarines, battleships, etc. GDP can be somewhat helpful in comparing two industrial economies or two agrarian ones against each other, but very misleading for comparing agrarian ones with industrial ones.

I don't know why you keep arguing with me between Italy and India / China. I've never done that (or thought about doing that in here). As I've said, I've only compared India and China on the basis of GDP.

(I've just corrected you on the basis of the data which I've used because you mentioned them being "right behind Italy" in GDP, which is not what THEY say. Nothing else. I'm sure you can have other GDP data which give different results - even across different editions of Maddison.)