Faction Issues

[aono]

I'm not really ready to make some actual suggestion about it, but I love to hear some thoughts from fellow forum people.

I'm doing mod about communist USA now, and so I looked closer to faction mechanics. You see, Comintern is actually bad faction. First of all, it had bad rep - everybody knew it's just a political mean for Stalin who tried to control world communist movement. Stalin, in his turn, knew he don't like all that speechs and non-controlled delegates. So in 1937, in Great Purge, a lot of Comintern functioners was repressed, no congresses was happen since 1935, and in 1943, in the middle of WW2, he just dissolved Comintern (not the last thing it was gesture of good will to his allies - "look, I don't want to replace you to puppet governments").
The second thing... Comintern never was a military alliance between countries. It was, actually, international organization of parties, no matter are they in power or not. Fight between Axis and Comintern is the same thing that fight between NATO and Progressive Alliance. No known (for me) serious source named Soviets in WW2 as "Comintern" - they were "russians", "soviets", "reds", maybe "commies", but not "Comintern".

Other two factions are not better on start. Allies consists from UK and it's dominions. Axis actually contains Reich only (so it's faction where Reich allied himself I believe).
Mechanically it created high-power alliance blocks from the beginning with joining seems random and awful faction war unifications.
Historically it have no sense too - war against Germany wasn't three-sided. It was two-sided - Axis Powers against United Nations (from 1942). USSR was a part of UN from the very beginning (so it was when Comintern still existed, by the way).

I believe this three factions there on start are some kind of heritage from previous games in serie, when they were hard-coded. But today we have custom factions and some unhistorical factions by foci.
Must this three factions to be here for some kind of scripting means? Is it possible just to delete them from the very beginning and allow countries to create their own factions (or create historical factions by events and foci?), and won't it be better?
Also, if somebody checked, what happens if event/focus force you to join a faction that don't exist?

 

[Lord Dakier]

Makes sense to me. I'm no history buff or pretend to be, but the UK would seem more ideal to be known under the Commonwealth where France can then join and the faction is renamed to the Allies. This could also be incorporated with the should Japan be in the Axis thread only that they don't join until later.

 

[aono]

but the UK would seem more ideal to be known under the Commonwealth where France can then join and the faction is renamed to the Allies.

Thing is, you don't need a faction system to represent Commonwealth - Commonwealth consists from Britain and dominions, so they will be in a war together anyway. Actually until WW2 started, there was not any formal alliance between England and France - there was two different alliances, Franco-Polish and Anglo-Polish.
So I believe Allies (or said United Nations for more formality, and because I'm a fan of Edward Stettinius) can be created by event if two or more countries are in war against <s>Nazi Germany</s> any high-threat country. With their alliances (if created) dissolved and they all united on one branch. Of course, country can refuse join such UN, but then, well, no military cooperation.