Something I think is funny in Hearts of Irom games is how “oil rich” areas of the map are different from what they would be...
Something I think is funny in Hearts of Irom games is how “oil rich” areas of the map are different from what they would be nowadays like Saudi Arabia is unexpectedly modest while Romania and Indonesia are some of the most oil rich regions for that time
the indonesia thing i think is because they conflate oil and rubber - virtually all the natural rubber in the world came from indonesia at the time, but i don’t think there was petroleum extraction
Indonesian oil is how Royal Dutch Shell got its start. I looked it up and pre-war Dutch East Indies amounted to 4% of international oil production which was enough to match Japanese wartime demands in addition to Dutch infrastructure in the area being fairly well established http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/stra/w2j-oil.html
Ironically Imperial Japan had no idea it was sitting right on top of the massive Daqing oil field in Manchuria, which contained 16 billion barrels worth of oil when it was discovered in 1959
Can you imagine the North Sea fields running through the wars, tho? Shit woulda been bananas, submarine tankers and everything.