I think there should be a reason for loser side to continue rather than surrendering in the middle of game anti-climaticly. Without another war aim other than total victory I can’t see any way preventing anti-climatic ends since games are cumulative and not much room for tidind the turn of the wars I would want having a draw outcome as addition do total victory which would be pursued as loser side.
Would you have any idea what could be draw’s conditions? How could it be occur?
Also I have to point that achieving “draw” should be harder than chasing total victory from the beginning of games. Assuming both sides have roughly 50% total victory chance in the beginning of war and one side is significantly losing its momentum and it appears that he/she will never achieve total victory. At this point draw should have roughly %25 chance to be occur by the loser side.
In a WWII context, I think that having a draw as a war goal is a concept that would only apply to the Axis, and that would only apply (depending on the game start date) after Germany and Japan had made the territorial gains that were in place by mid-1942: Western Europe, the western part of the USSR, and the Asia/Pacific territories which Japan initially overran. It can be argued that from this point onwards, the Axis could be satisfied by either defeating the Allies entirely (a win) or by simply hanging on indefinitely to what they’d conquered (a draw).
The Allies, on the other hand, could only be satisfied by winning. As Stalin said, the Axis powers weren’t going to jump into the abyss without being pushed. To the Allies, a draw would essentially have meant acknowledging that Germany and Japan has established a “new order” in Europe and Asia. Indeed, Japan’s overall strategy – if you can call it that – was the hopeful idea that the Americans would suffer some costly losses if they tried to attack Japan’s defensive perimeter, would lose their will to fight, and would simply walk away, leaving Japan in possession of its newly acquired marbles. That plan went out the window when Japan, to put it mildly, got the Americans really really angry at them by attacking Pearl Harbor. Germany had a somewhat similar goal of conquering the USSR roughly up to the Urals (the “A-A” line), digging in, and limiting itself from then on to bombing the Asian part of the USSR to keep it from making trouble. That plan went out the window when Germany failed to even get as far as Moscow.
