I've seen some real blood shed in discussions like this on other boards and for what? Sure, it's a lot of fun to speculate what might have happened if, but somebody always has to go and stop the fun by taking it all too seriously. The soon as you open this particular Pandora's box, you expose yourself to the truly fantastic world of utterly implausible outcomes. Sure, if the Germans had gone East instead of West in 1914, it could all have turned out so differently and our game can allow us what might have been if we exclude the implausible. But then the Kaiser might have choked to death on a fruit seed in May 1915 or Haig might have blown a major blood vessel in his brain pushing too hard to have a dump on 21st Sep 1915. 
Real history is replete with implausible outcomes that it should serve to remind us that cold logic and statistics compiled after the event don't always determine the final outcome. True, the general shape might be the same, i.e. the CPs lose WW1 but who knows, perhaps if Sergeant Welsh of the 1st Foot and Mouth had had enough toilet paper in the latrine that morning, he might have been more on his game and not missed the young Austrian soldier scrambling in no-man's-land that afternoon because his butt was itching and distracted his shot.
