This is true, but doesn’t go against balancing because it deals with two things that don’t determine starting country strength: The players and the hypothetical.Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 7:30 pmThinking about this more, it makes sense that press can't totally overwhelm the strategic reality of the board.
If players are rational they can't just be talked into anything.
Moreover, press is itself competitive. If I'm in a ranked game with players who are just as good as me at press, then the board disadvantage really does matter.
If we made some extremely weak new playable nation on the Classic map (say, a one-unit Switzerland), I wouldn't expect that nation to have an equal chance of getting into the final draw in a genuinely competitive game.
The players determine starting country strength, and in that case, it is balanced/
Yes, if you made a 1 unit Switzerland, it would be weak (unless, of course, you are counting terrain) but, there isn’t a country that is THAT unbalanced. Russia has another unit, but it has been shown to not always help them.
All different arguments for country balancing go something like this:
“This country is weak because this CAN happen.”
It could even look like:
“This country is weak because this is LIKELY to happen because it’s a good idea for the other countries”
When someone says countries, they mean players, because the country, in this case, is a thing, so it doesn’t have any set intelligence. It may be a good idea, but there is no telling that they know what that idea is. Country balancing depends on the players.