- Its not represented in hoi4.
- I dont think it was really a concern for any nation in the war. UK got basically infinite loans etc. I cant find the quote by churchill atm, but basically win the war and worry later. Nobody is goign to pay anything back during the games timeframe etc (if the game started in 1920s I think money would have been a very important mechanic)
- carry on your interesting discussion
Technically, IC is a representation of money in some ways - money is a representation of wealth and purchasing power. IC was just another name for it, but an abstraction that was simplified as it didn't allow for accrual over time (one couldn't 'bank' IC and use it later). This is why HoI's traditional treatment of international loans has been a bit messy at best. Everyone in this thread is talking about how countries ran up debt, but debt isn't something that magically appears out of thin air. People need to be convinced to spend their wealth on war bonds, or save their money in banks that then spend their own money on the equivalent (bank savings given to the Government to invest in the war economy is close enough to the same thing in the context of this discussion). Sure, no player should need to worry about having to repay debt, but they still need to raise it, and a lot of effort was made during WW2 on all sides to this end.
So, on one level, unless HoI4 doesn't propose to have any value representation of production capacity (which we already know it will, in three pools of IC), a limited concept of money will be in the game. However, assuming that IC can't be 'banked', then this limits the capacity of any game to model the available resources of a nation to fund the war economy, as there is no modelling of the variable debt-raising capacity of nations - rather, IC levels are abstracted out to give more to nations that were better able to raise debt historically, but this takes choice away from the player and to a degree railroads production levels historically.
For example and as mentioned earlier not having 'bankable' money in the game means that the modelling of the vast wealth of the US, and the way it was used to bankroll the UK in WW2, has to be abstracted out somewhere else (or left out, but that would require some pretty heavy skewing of other factors to get a historically plausible result).
That said, I can see the concern over it turning the game into an exercise in accounting - so the approach of 'let's not worry about the value of money over time, or the concept of debt, but rather abstract it all through IC and/or events, and hope that nothing happens in-game to make the events too out of step with gameplay).
So the question is not "does money matter", as that's pretty obvious (although if people need more evidence, post away - but most of the concerns raised have already been dealt with), but rather "how do we deal with it in game" and, in particular "how do we deal with the concept of storing wealth over time" (debt), as the immediate value of resources in game is already there through IC as a money proxy for day-to-day stuff.
Now, it may or may not be worth doing, but if it isn't dealt with, then there _needs_ to be another mechanism which covers the variable levels of debt raising, and variable ease in raising debt, between participants, or the game would be missing a substantial proportion of the resources used to produce the war material that people are using in game.
