@ Admiral Thrawn: Those are some good ideas, but most of them won’t work for various reasons.
#1 - this seems good until you realize that the BB, with its powerful bombard, would make Italian invasions along the N African coast too easy. Moreover, Italian mini subs (and other Axis submersible weapons) were responsible for a great deal of damage to Allied shipping and even managed to cripple portions of the British fleet during the early parts of the war. Therefore subs it is.
#2 - Netherlands-Belgium used to have Armies in previous versions but aside from the fact that historically they were small potatoes and did almost nothing to halt the Axis steamroller during playtesting it was decided that any Allied presence in the Netherlands-Belgium would ahistorically halt the German advance into Western Europe, forcing the Axis to wait a turn longer for the fall of France than they could really afford to.
#3 - Although the Germans may not have had much difficulty occupying Yugoslavia, the Italians did. Moreover, Yugoslavia was a hotbed of Communist resistance during the war, and so the strong Allied presence in this territory is meant to reflect all that.
#4 - The British are quite strong in this game and need no such help.
#5 - What, really, is wrong with having the USA start off when France falls? For all we know, had Hitler not actually controlled most of continental Europe when the Japanese attacked, the USA might have concentrated first on the PTO instead of the ETO, as the ETO wouldn’t have looked all that grim.
#6 - This is an uneccesary rule and does not reflect the early actions of Italy in the war.
#7 - This rule may yet be implemented if the USSR proves to be too powerful yet. Otherwise it would be best to avoid using this rule in order to keep the rules simple and prevent an ahistorical single infantry meatshield across the entire Soviet border. Granted this can still happen without the rule, but this rule would only aggravate the situation.
@Gewehr: Although it is true that it is ahistorical to allow Axis to occupy pink territories, it is allowed in this game in order to both simplify the rules and provide for yet another potential historical deviation - what if Hitler’s armies, more confident of their blitzkrieg tactics, rolled all the way to the Soviet border, not allowing Stalin to make good on his side of the treaty? Certainly it is possible that Stalin, both amazed at the ability of the Nazi war machine and anxious to avoid war before his own military was properly mobilized, might have backed down and allowed Hitler to take all that he had conquered? After all, this was the precedent set by other national leaders - to back down and hope that this was the last demand of Hitler.