Challenge: the most massive, and most balanced, world war 2 (or 3)

We all love a big fictional carnage.
So the challenge here is to come up with the most massive (in terms of total number of forces invloved) and most balanced (in terms of ratio between the opposing forces) world war you can think of.
I have said world war 2 because with a POD after 1900 I don't think there is much room to alter WW1 significantly. You can however alter the outcome of WW1 as a lead-in to the scenario. You can allso have a "small" WW2 (not necessarily the historical WW2) if it is followed by a WW3 meeting the challenge.
In principle there is no limit to how recent the POD can be, but the war should be (mostly) conventional, so I suppose it is not possible to have a POD after the advent of true MAD.
 

MSZ

Banned
A vanilla-fascist Germany rather than Nazi manages to make allies in central Europe with Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and has a war with an OTL-grade industrialized USSR. The USA, UK and France nominally stay out, but supply both sides to keep them fighting.

This might be further extended with Japan joining the USSR and starting a war with USA, with USA fighting Japan but not the USSR.
 
Well, my Up With the Star timeline has something like this happen. In WWI a two-year war leads the Central Powers to defeat the Allies in a process involving economics and industry versus powers denied it, outnumbered (in the West) and overextended (in the East). Then in WWII the Eastern Alliance goes to war against the Central Powers, makes major territorial gains, but the introductions of nukes and a new phase of gas warfare makes it impossible for either side to defeat each other, while the Eastern Alliance lacks the kind of large-scale navy needed to defeat the Central Powers as it was.

WWI was essentially a shorter replay of the Seven Years' War coalition, the UK-Germany-Japan group v. Austria-Russia-France, with the USA ultimately joining the Central Powers. Such an alliance ultimately produced a 2-year defeat of the Allies because the combination of UK, USA, and Germany was irresistible in WWI, but a White Stalinism made Russia nearly impossible to destroy, while Russia's calculated use of diplomacy made it look (at least) like negotiating a real, enduring peace with this Russia would actually work (which the Nazis enured the exact opposite mentality held with them and for good reason). Neither war shares OTL apocalyptic viewpoints, but neither war also has necessarily our OTL mentalities on the part of either coalition.
 
A vanilla-fascist Germany rather than Nazi manages to make allies in central Europe with Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and has a war with an OTL-grade industrialized USSR. The USA, UK and France nominally stay out, but supply both sides to keep them fighting.

This might be further extended with Japan joining the USSR and starting a war with USA, with USA fighting Japan but not the USSR.
That actually sounds "smaller" then our ww2, even with the introduction of the Pacific theatre.

Well, my Up With the Star timeline has something like this happen.
I'll check it out.
 
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