ORIGINAL: Jonathan Pollard
I think it actually would have been nice for the game if it had given the Japs at least the option of delaying their Dec. 7 attacks in order to keep the US/Brits out of the war in order to try to clean up China/USSR first. Maybe a scenario like that could be set up with the editor, and playable in a human vs. human format with house rule prohibitions on the Allied player until the Japs decide to strike.
I don't understand this thinking. Japan had been at war with China (and only China) since 1937. After a spectacular start, they had pretty much been bogged down by 1940. China was vast, it's population huge, and whole divisions were swallowed up just trying to hold the major population centers they had already seized. Japan made virtually no gains in in China during the final 18 months before PH. One of the major reasons the IJA agreed to the attack to the South was in the hopes that it might finally cut China off from outside aid and perhaps bring Chaing to the peace table..., something they couldn't achieve military.
Any game which makes a military conquest of China a possibility for the Japanese is simply not representative of the reality of the time. Tackling Russia simultaneously is an even greater stretch of the imagination. Not to mention that the Allied embargoes were strangling Japan daily, and neither China or Russia offered a solution to those problems. The SRA was a necessity if any military activity was to be maintained anywhere.
