OK, let me go with this for a bit. Personally, I think the idea of a mandatory Russian Revolution at the end of what, turn 4, is wrong and potentially game-wrecking.
But lets assume for argument’s sake that it is a set rule, along with America coming in the previous turn.
The following difficulties occur:
1. It practically encourages Germany & Austria not to bother fighting on the Eastern Front. As long as they can hold Berlin & Vienna for 4 turns, they know for certain that the Russians will then vanish into thin air, allowing the CPs to simply walk back into any tt they’ve lost, and perhaps even into vacated Russian tt.
2. What happens to minor powers controlled by Russia - the map suggests this will include Serbia, Montenegro and Romania: do their armies (presumably represented by Russian units) also disappear? Romania would only have 2 turns as an active power before it AUTOMATICALLY becomes, in effect, part of Austria. Or are these minor countries handed over to another Allied player, in which case how do you decide which are their units, and which are vanishing Russians?
3. I’ll assume that other Allies are not permitted on Russian soil before the revolution, otherwise they’ll be encouraged to move French/British/Italian units into Russia simply to hold the tts after the Russians are gone.
At the very least, I think Russia should be able to delay the revolution by winning battles, holding/capturing tt and keeping casualties down. But then, I think the same system should be applied to EVERY country; after all it was fear of revolution that forced the CPs to sue for peace.
I’ve drawn a border on my map reflecting the Brest-Litovsk treaty line. If we assume that the revolution automatically leads to the treaty, then Germany & Austria should be allowed to enter into every Russian tt west of this line; that is Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, White Russia, Ukraine, Crimea; and Turkey into the Trans-Caucasus.
That’s a lot of tt for the CP to get simply by waiting for an unavoidable Russian collapse. If this is the rule, then I would suggest that the CP must physically occupy each one of these Russian tts with a land unit in order to exploit (collect income) from it.
In fact, I think this should be a general rule - in a tt not originally your own, you should have to hold it down with units. Consider that all the tts listed above are not ethnically Russian; the inhabitants were more concerned with setting up their own governments than what was happening in Russia. So, if such a tt is vacated by Germany, it becomes independent.
What I guess the official rule will be is this:
The CPs get to keep only the Russian tt they hold when Russia collapses. In other words, the revolution is set in stone; the terms of the treaty are ignored. This is as far as I can see the only way of keeping both sides interested in fighting the war in the east on a relatively normal basis before any mandatory Russian drop-out.
Another treaty condition to consider is that of returning POWs. About 2 million Austrian and 1/4 million Germans returned home under the treaty, many to be redirected into the army depots. Make this a set number, or dependent on the number of casualties suffered? Again, it seems wrong to enforce the exact historical conditions of 1917/18 on a game starting in 1914.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk