Random WW2 Generation

[RogerCooper]

I am starting work on a program that generates random but somewhat plausible World War Two's.

I am taking as a divergence point the end of WW1 in 1918. Given the political turmoil after WW1 and the Great Depression, there were many possible ways internal and external politics could have developed. Almost any ideology could have come to power in almost any country and even countries with similar ideologies could have come to blows.

I am planning on writing the program in Excel VBA. Excel has many tools for managing data which should make this easy to write. If the program works well, I could convert it to some other language.

As a base for my scenario generator I will use World War 2 V3 (Anniversary Edition) because of that version's popularity, lack of complexity and a less distorted map than many other mods. If this mod is well received, I may try using other maps as a base.

The program will conduct the following steps

1. Write the non-changing part of the xml file
2. Assign each territory to a country based upon the 1918 situation
3. Resolve the military and political conflicts of the interwar years and reassign the country controlling territories as a result.
4. Align some countries with larger countries so they are considered to be the same in the game, like Canada being part of Britain. Others will be considered to be neutrals.
5. Assign the remaining major and medium countries to alliances
6. Determine the order of play
7. Add the starting units and resources
8. Try to balance the game by adding additional units and resources to the alliance that needs them.

I will post details about each of the steps soon.