The sources that I am using for this post are:
1) The North Korean Revolution By Jerrold M. Post, Charles K. Armstrong (Cornell University Press) courtesy of Google Books
http://books.google.com/books?id=Di6NcxSxUPkC&pg=PA45
2)
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/target/industry.htm (Federation of American Scientists)
3)
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/2005/ksmyb05.pdf (US Geological Survey)
It appears as though North Korea is severely underrepresented in resources and IC. South Korea has 11 IC (based on 44 GC) but North Korea has only 5.
South Korea is properly represented as having greater population.
If you take the above seriously, then North Korea should have about 20 IC. South Korea was less industrialized at first and only industrialized later. When it did industrialize, it aimed for an export-oriented economy since it had no significant natural resources.
As a compromise, I'm going to give North Korea IC equal to that of the south in this scenario. When combined with the "free IC" bonus given to revolters by Paradox, this would give 17 IC, for either North Korea or South Korea.
With regards to resources, North Korea should have sufficient energy and metal to support its industry, but have no oil and be deficient in rares. This of course makes them trade with the Soviet Union for rares.
South Korea would be even more deficient in raw materials, and in HOI2 terms its play would be represented as trading supplies to feed its industry, with the US giving it good trade deals. In real life, South Korea depends to a major extent on nuclear power for its energy needs. It would actually be more beneficial to the South to end its puppetry with the USA as soon as possible, in order to strike trade deals with other US allies.
A good gameplay strategy for EITHER the USSR or USA would be to build IC in the sector of Korea under its control, so that upon release KOR (or PRK) can have two tech teams. All it takes is 3 extra IC.
I believe both North and South Korea should be puppets at first but freed later, I believe by the time Japan signs the treaty of San Francisco (which ends its own puppet relationship with the United States), or the Korean War ends, whichever comes first.
Plans for the next release are to fine tune the Korean and Japanese releases, as well as settle the Chinese boundary between the Nationalist and Communist sides. My research suggests BOTH Paradox and CCIP are partly right in their assessment. From what I've seen, the Communists should have a salient along the central east coast, and the Nationalists should have a salient into central Manchuria along the rail lines, which was actually agreed to between Stalin and Chiang Kai Shek.
HOTFIX
The packaged scenario files
0_1944.eug and
1945.eug have an incorrect list of included files. If you installed over an older version you would not have noticed any problem, but some of you may have a "missing database" hoi2plus.txt if you've never installed any of my products before. To fix it, change the line (near the bottom) of each of the files in boldface type:
The line incorrectly reads:
event = "db\events\hoi2plus.txt"
It should read:
event = "db\events_vl\hoi2plus.txt"
You only need to make this change if you get a "missing database" error on load. This will be fixed in 0.13
