@Cernel said:
Well, it's not that splitting the United States in half is on its own certainly avoids focusing on one ocean only, especially not on the Atlantic. If you go with historical productions at the time (As I said, the western part was a lot more backward, underpopulated and poorer than it is now not only absolutely but also relatively to the eastern part.), on the account that in 1940 Pacific (meaning California + Oregon + Washington) had 9,682,781 inhabitants and Mountain (meaning Montana + Idaho + Wyoming + Colorado + New Mexico + Arizona + Utah + Nevada) had 4,128,042 inhabitants, for a total of Pacific + Mountain equal to 13,810,823 against a total for the entire United States (back then not comprising Hawaii and Alaska) of 131,669,275, your "West USA" will only have about 10% of the production of your "East USA" (and arguably less since Pacific and even more so Mountain was backward), meaning that "East USA" can still do KGF using directly the 90% of the total production power of the United States which it has and use the 10% of West USA just to produce bombers to go make bombing raids on Germany or some other things like that. Moreover, of course, whatever fleet is already present one side or the other can be sent through the Panama canal in either case, and doing so in a split USA scenario might even be worthwhile for can-openers.
All this means that, in order to go both oceans by splitting USA in two, you will not only have to take the historically wrong decision of having two USAs but also likely distributing production between these two made-up polities in a very unhistorical way.
All this said, I see your point, and I agree that seeing usually the United States playing only one ocean is lame, and I'm not able really to point at a game that fixed that at least amongst the ones I know. (I have not yet taken a deep enough look at @thedog's game, did you? Maybe he did.)
Good info about regional population sizes. There are two different ways to think about realism here. 1) Realism about the distribution of population and industry between America's East Coast and its West Coast. 2) Realism about how America allocated its war spending.
This latter form of realism would be 33 - 40% spending allocated in the Pacific theater, with 60 - 67% allocated to Europe. I'm more focused on this latter form of realism. In my map, America Pacific has an income of 99, which falls to 90 after Japan's initial expansion. America Atlantic has an income of 130. This compares to a starting income for Germany of 130, the Soviet Union of 200, UK of 149, and Japan of 89. Also, the Soviets have the most MP income, and they can gain still more conscripts by researching recruitment techs. I believe I have understated American income by perhaps 40% versus where it should be historically. This may be necessary for game balance.
Both America Pacific and America Atlantic get two research centers. In my example game they were using these research centers to pursue different research strategies. America Pacific was preparing for naval war; America Atlantic for an air and ground war. Things were trending towards America Atlantic getting Pershing tanks as its special unit, while America Pacific would have been getting fleet carriers. Technology was intended to give each nation its own flavor. It was nice to see the two Americas each get their own flavor, even though they were choosing from the exact same list of available technologies.
and allocate ships to theatres. Seriously though that would be a step to far, simpler to put ahistorical industries on the west coast to simulate/achieve the same.