Eastern USSR zones need additional unfreeze opportunities

[Willy Liao]

In the manual, it's noted these only unfreeze if Germany falls or Japan declares war on the USSR. What if Germany is so successful that I control all Western & Central zones? This is certainly not likely to come up in most games, but the freezing represents the fact that Japan & the USSR did not really engage until very late in the war. If Germany should do so well that the Central zone is heavily taken/seized, I feel USSR should have opportunity to unfreeze simply to react to the German threat, regardless of Japan's status. Otherwise the German player can simply march through each Eastern region, and the USSR cannot use any assets in other Eastern regions to counterattack. This is exactly what happened in a game I played.

This is difficult because it gets more into the what-if territory, but I definitely believe if I run a single tank east of the Urals and am driving around looting factories & cutting rail lines, Stavka is not going to sit. Remember, Stalin SR'd 10 Siberian divisions west in late 1941 after Soviet intelligence informed him the Japanese would likely not attack; these guys were used around Moscow. If Stalin is told "the Germans are past the Urals and are threatening the trans-Siberian railway directly", I think he might OK tactical movement out of the Eastern zone to directly engage the enemy!

Propose to add some rule(s) to reflect this. Examples of some potential rules:

1) If Germans attack any Eastern zone, the entire Eastern zone unfreezes (obviously).
2) If Germans have more than (x) units or control more than (y) regions in Central zone, entire Eastern zone unfreezes.
3) If Germans have more than (x) units in any adjacent region or control more than (y) adjacent regions, entire Eastern zone unfreezes. You need this rule because any German presence in China is going to ring alarm bells at Stavka, even if there are no Germans in Central Zone. Yes this is improbable but still needs to be covered--a German player on Easy level might invade China via India.

Some combo of these rules have the net effect of putting more pressure on Germany. This is not the highest priority fix perhaps and I don't know how difficult it will be to program the AI to recognize and plan for this unfreezing. This might strain the German AI, but it's just ridiculous to have the German player pick & nibble at the Eastern zone from the west, while the USSR is helpless to counterattack from that zone.