Chapter 0: Modifications
Imagine Piłsudski’s dream of Intermarium still living. Imagine Dmowski not messing up his plans. Imagine the map of Polish advance after the battle of Warsaw...
Wait, I have it right here! But damn, that’s the map before it. Either way, Poles kicked the Soviet ass in the end!
And this is how Poland looks now in ‘36, yet the provinces are sometimes way too big for adjustments. Though the towns marked as Polish controlled are Międzymorzian now and Soviet controlled towns are still Soviet.
(Dammit game! Learn to write Czech and Polish letters!)
You also might want to ask about cores distribution. I’ve found a linguistic map of Poland, though a little a bit non-current, but the borders with Soviets were made 15 years ago and the other countries didn’t fall into the spiral of persecution just like the Soviets did, so I was confident about its usage.
And here’s my cores distribution according to the map above.
You might want to ask; why do I have cores on newly added portions of Belarus and Ukraine, especially when my territory modifications added only about a million of ethnic Poles into Międzymorze? Because the Soviets do so. If they had no cores there, I would go with non-cores as well. Sometimes the cores aren't just enough to describe the situation...
Both Ukrainians and Byelorussians wanted to have an independent state, yet the political situation in Poland didn’t allowed that. In my game, I don’t want to have two buffer states with 9 IC, which would be steamrolled in the minute of declaration of the war. Let alone these would be would be hard to mod in as well, though HPP has a basis for them already. Anyway, I’d rather chose Poland over USSR all day at those times and that's a pretty good excuse too
Speaking of cores, they’re pretty plausibly distributed, but I had a choice to make; add cores whenever the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth extended in the past, or do it simply the Polish way. Three days ago, you could’ve found that I had cores all the way to Daugava, cores on the territory of post-war Poland and even had ceded Trinidad and Tobago into Polish possession. As you can see, I’ve chosen the latter, “less-crazy” variant.
And what happened to all the Soviet army that is on the newly ceded territory?
It’s all mine now! Yet OOB files still remain as my greatest enemy...
Even with my best efforts, the Soviet army in Europe has about 380 thousand personnel and the Polish slightly above 190 thousand soldiers. I didn’t add the whole Ukraine and whole Belarus to Poland, since besides it would look ugly, it would also probably lead Poland to be on par with the Soviets in both IC and numbers. Combine that with me and you’ll get something like Międzymorze taking on Germany in 1940 with East already secured. This way, Poland (it’s just basically Poland at the moment, so I’ll call it that way until I’ll get my hands on some more territory, e.g. above) stays competitive, with the old enemy in the east and the ambitious rising power in the west.
Alright, I really don’t want to swarm you with way too much text, so I’ll separate this “modifications” chapter the real introduction chapter. Stay tuned!