One problem that I see with the Japanese army and their battles with China is that divisions are individually too strong.
I think that the use of artillery brigades is too commonplace in the 1936 Japanese army. I am aware that this is done to represent the use of Square divisions (4 regiments instead of 3), but it makes each of their divisions too powerful.
The addition of the artillery brigade to most Japanese divisions results in the following change of soft attack
From 7, it increases to 10. This is almost a 50% increase. They also have 55 Organization.
Chinese regular infantry start at 6 soft attack, but 75% of Chinese units are militia, at 1. Chinese regular divisions have 35 organization.
The Chinese regular infantry represent the best units in their army, which did historically do fairly well against the Japanese (given a fair 1:1 situation). The main problem was that the majority of units were worthless, and could not effectively support this core of units. The Japanese also used a comination of air and naval superiority to smash these good formations at Shanghai (i.e., they were not defeated just by divisional strength alone).
I think to better represent the larger Japanese square divisions, is to give them ENGINEER brigades instead of ARTILLERY brigades. This will still give them a qualitative advantage over the regular Chinese forces (by 1 soft attack and 20 organization), which are only in small numbers anyway. Plus, the Japanese divisions were fairly mobile, but not mechanized.
There was a reason Japan, and everyone else, switched to triangle divisions. This was because the firepower of a square division was not 1/4 more than a triangle division, even though it was 1/4 larger. The addition of the artillery also means that a Japanese 1936 square division, in HoI terms, is 1/3 more potent than a Japanese 1940 triangle division (which is why I think that the Japanese were given artillery brigades). I say, remove the artillery, give them engineer brigades, and China will not fall as fast.
The various coup events etc add 12, 24 or 36 WE in the different options (ie 1, 2 or 3 years closer to war) and there's a DOW on US event. I've also added an optional DOW on ComChi is NatChi is annexed or a puppet of Japan. This gives some options both for AI and human player, but there's still a lot of issues in the Far East.
