neutral armies

[Koningstiger]

What always bewilders me with neutrals in a game is that the size of their armies tends to stay the same. I mean, the whole world is ablaze around them, so you would expect them to mobilize their forces. A very simple way of doing this would have been to add one infantry unit to each neutral each turn. How do you track this? Use a die to tell you which turn it is, so if you attack Greece on turn 3 and they start with 4 infantry they would now have 7 infantry.

[Koningstiger]

To add a bit more realism still and to prevent weird cases in which a minor neutral might end up having a larger army than one of the major powers would be to add caps to each nation:

Example: Sweden could never have more than 10 infantry, Turkey 15, Greece 7 etc. (symbolizing that all their forces have been mobilized)

[LHoffman]

That all sounds good to me. Logical at least.

However, in this respect (neutral armies), I believe the game could be less realist and more playablility oriented. For this reason I like it the way it is. Always having a set amount of units to be mobilized for that territory is a little easier and more playable (for the main powers) than growing larger neutral armies as time goes on. After 2 or 3 turns under this new system, no one would ever invade a neutral.

Since neutrals don't matter as much as the other powers, I think it allows for more robust play to make them less of a roadblock as opposed to more of one. Somebody could argue that giving Neutrals more forces would cause players to avoid them and instead attack each other, therefore moving the heart of the game along... While this may be true for the most part, it still limits one of the more interesting aspects of the game. And while we still don't know how much use will be made of the neutral countries, it may be best to find out how their inclusion as a new element affects gameplay... and then decide whether or not to implement a modification like you have suggested. But that is only the way I will approach it at first. You may choose differently.

Interesting House Rule for sure though.

[Flashman]

Even superpowers had a limit on the military establishment it could afford to maintain.

I don't like the idea of adding units to a small country not at war; however I think the assignment of units to the neutrals could have been more imaginative, for example giving the likes of Brazil and Spain small navies, or Sweden some armour.  But these should be a once only build.

Unless perhaps you'd like to give Sweden a minor complex.