Cary

Impressive....

Part of the problem (I think, I'm hazy here) is that the Russian cities only turn on your HQ's supply to level 8 when they've been rebuilt to level 5. (Check the manual on supply). The game's basically set up so that you can sling supply just out to Moscow but not much farther until you've held Smolensk for a couple turns. From my testing, stringing HQs out doesn't really work -- the wording in the manual's a little unclear, but basically they don't get an increase in supply level if they're supplied by another HQ, so there's no real benefit to having a chain of HQs -- you've got to capture and "develop" (let develop) railheads (cities).

Accept it, you've won. I'm not sure that defense scripts for the United States should be that high a priority in comparison with other projects... It may not look like it, but you're trying to word-process on an excel spreadsheet. Of course the US's defense plans are under-planned. And of course any A/I can be counted to do very stupid things when out of its range of expertise. Perhaps you should start PBEMing.... Or raise the difficulty level. If you're very concerned that the United States is a push-over once invaded, I'd suggest working on the A/I scripts yourself. For that matter, build an "Invasion US mod" -- the danger with scripting US defense A/I is that it's code that might get used once or twice. [ July 03, 2006, 07:31 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

For what it's worth, if we were to take the rockets seriously as they were, level 3s are V-1s, Level 4s V-2s. (any lower levels can't reach London from France). It's worth noting that Rockets' strategic attack value does make them representative of siege artillery in the game: often it is advantageous to reduce the value of cities on the front line so that the units within can't be reinforced.

It's true, Chicago's a great town; Wrigley field's a blast, but the long lakefront is beautiful; an asset few cities have. Interesting that you take these points as snap-shots at America, or comparisons of casualties as "whose cock is bigger." Admittedly, I took the thread off topic, but then the initial question was answered in the second or third post. I don't know that I'm "praising" the Soviets anywhere, particularly, though I am pointing out that the people of greater Russia sacrificed a lot. I am attempting to inject a bit of realism into the debate over the focus of the war in Europe. It is an interesting issue just how antsy people get at being confronted with the reality that the conflict on the East front was an order of magnitude larger than that on the West. And I find it interesting that this antsiness seems to extend to finding ways of emphasizing that Russian casualties were not "well spent." Certainly some truth there, but that is a truth of any war -- SNAFU is a well-chosen acronym. To bring it back to the original topic, if I must, the reality is that American contribution to the war in Europe was the pursuit of a "national interest" that was somewhat more distant than that felt by the Soviet Union, for example. Here I'm saying nothing more than that people fight harder to protect their own homes, and states fight harder to protect their own territory. Indeed, given that Roosevelt really did want to influence the European war, Pearl Harbor was something of an inconvenience, posing the real challenge from the Japanese against the somewhat more theoretical challenge from the Germans. I will grant you: the point about French "surrender monkeys" and Soviet profligacy is a bit snarky, but I have a hard time seeing it as unfair. Asking the French to win and not surrender in 1940 may well have been tantamount to asking them to sacrifice an equivalent tenth of their population. One has to ask first if that is a sacrifice one is willing to accept on one's own part. [ July 01, 2006, 11:17 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Wow!. I was low by an order of magnitude. That is actually a stunning figure. The US sent alomost as many trucks as soldiers. I think the ASL vehicle guide had a note about the Russian soldier's interpretation of the abbreviation U.S.A. -- "Kill that Sonofabitch Adolf" Evidently they saw the abbreviation a lot. Of course you can imagine there might be some acrimony after the war over whether the Russians owed us a debt or we them. "You never paid us back for lend-lease in World War II" doesn't go over too well with a Russian whose grandparents did not survive the war. [ June 30, 2006, 12:28 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Fair points, but I tend to think mildly colored by ideology. Note that Americans seem to laugh rather too quickly on applying the term "surrender monkeys" to the French but then diminish the blood-price Russians and Soviets paid to avoid the French "solution." I'd like to think the United States confronted by a Nazi invasion would be willing to pay as high a blood price for independence. Plenty of places to point out the incompetence of the Soviet regime (though for a dictator Stalin is remarkably flexible, getting rid of Commissars in 1942 and letting Zhukov basically run the show, to say nothing of reviving the Russian Orthodox church, at least for the duration of the struggle). And certainly Stalin should bear a LOT of blame for initial nRussian military incompetence -- the Russian army in the West, particularly, was disproportionately light on junior officers and NCOs due to the purges of the '30s (a casualty rate unmatched in Siberia, notably). But this only magnified the problem that the Soviet Union had -- given the initial losses in Barbarossa, their army was inevitably going to be a conscript army, trained under emergency circumstances, and tactically incompetent. Add to that the fact that significant portions of Soviet manpower reserves were not Russian, but a whole melange of nationalities, and you get a sense of just the challenge the Soviets faced. (Interestingly, the US/Western Allies saw saw a little bit of the crazy-quilt that made up the Soviet Army when trying to process prisoners taken from the Ost battalions in Normandy -- sprinklings of Turkic-speakers and others complicated issues significantly.) David Glantz and others make the compelling point about the Russian military of 1943-44: what is striking is not its incompetence, but how quickly it learned. The Russians/Soviets paid an absolutely horrific blood-price to repel the German invasion, no question, and some signficant portion of it was self-inflicted. But, ironically, much of the Soviet regime's strength and legitimacy post-war came from its ability to claim victory in the "Great Patriotic War" and, literally, to claim the loyalty of the veterans of the "Greatest Generation." This often devolves into a political argument, but it is worth being realistic about the Soviet war effort -- Stalin may have been hated, and there were signficant pockets of armed resistance to the Soviet regime throughout the war, but the Soviet Union survived and won against the Germans because the Soviet soldiers believed in what they were fighting for. Just to add to this, in presponse to Night's question a few posts down, one of the interesting questions about the Russian front is how much tension was there between what the Soviet soldiers believed they were fighting for and what the Soviet government wanted them to believe. [ July 01, 2006, 11:08 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Nice work. Particularly, I think you're right in trying to get a better handle on the "battle of the Atlantic" and make the confrontation between ships and Subs more attritional. I'm not sure about this: if you look at the unit graphics, B17s are level 3, B29s level 4, and something like a b37 level 5. This raises one question about your mod -- a number of the original techs seem to max out with postwar technology -- You may want to be more historical and not allow breakthroughs past a certain point, but if you're going to hold that variable constant, it seems you'd be under some pressure to make tech changes chronologically historical as well. Similar question here: in reality the US has produced the M26 and deployed prototypes into combat by April 45. British Comet raises similar questions. I'm not sure I'd want to script this. [ June 30, 2006, 11:29 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Interesting way of making up for too many visits to Yasakuni. Perhaps apropos, and certainly in response to the growing rancor in the thread, it is probably particularly worth it for Americans to remember that we won/stole a lot of space in which to sling our elbows around and swagger. Sadly, we seem only barely to be realizing that we don't have that much space any more -- if nothing else, Iraq is probably the most crowded political space on the globe, and it has been since Babel fell. The armed society is a polite society, but it helps if those armed can stay at some distance from each other. [ June 30, 2006, 07:14 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Much as I love bashing Bush, this BDS, not really news... Until about 37 or so, much of the US business community basically preferred Hitler to Stalin, probably for reasonably good reason. Moreover, the US had extensive business contacts with Germany throughout the interwar period. (Some of which would continue through the war -- I seem to recall that one of the improvements in the Sherman was that an American firm had managed to re-arrange for shipments of German optics). In terms of the politics of the thing; once you begin talking about Harriman money, you're talking about some of the basic seed money for the Democratic party from the 50s perhaps through the 70s.

But if you're going to be real about the 100x100km square, you've got to allow stacking. A certain suspension of disbelief is required to accept that the Germans had lines of troops 300 km deep waiting for Fall Gelb. Given that, why quibble about "rockets."

LOL.. yeah. By the way, the British and French were trying to cook up schemes to aid the Finns in '39. I think they put significant pressure on the Swedes to allow free passage for their troops. Mercifully, the Swedes stood by their neutrality.

Rolend, I think you're right on this. There's a lot of media chatter on Red-state/Blue-state stuff, but I have a hunch that our political situation is a lot more complicated now: indeed it may be that the very shrillness of debate may result from the political machines being very unhappy with the uncertainty they face. Isolationism, Globalism, Internationalism is a great example of just how messy things are. Abortion, and the possible/probable reversal of Roe V. Wade is another. Suddenly "State's Rights" take on a very different meaning...

We're trying to pass legislation to that effect. </font>

Could somebody mod the Russians so they look like Katyushas? As to the strategic rockets, true enough... But the Russian army, certainly, and the German army to a lesser extent did deploy corps level formations of artillery, in the German case to besiege cities, and in the Russian case to open the line. Sure, the scale's a little goofy... but...

Very true. The question is whether Overlord could have happened earlier, or the break-out quicker, had the focus been on Close Air Support from the start. A similar question might be asked about better CAS for Market-Garden (certainly the weather sucked, but it's also notable that 1 Para couldn't raise the flyboys by radio.) Of course the problem is that any change in strategy produces a lot of friction: over Normandy it meant using B-17s in a role they weren't really suited for. But even so, it seems to have been very effective. Interestingly I recall there was some discussion about CAS in this thread or another a while back -- it was possible to do it well, but it took organization and a true effort to pull it together. If I recall correctly the Desert Air Force was an organization that learned to do it right, and on Sicily and in Tunisia they were perceptibly better at it than the Americans. You're right, when you think about it: Direct Support is probably not all that helpful-- arty does it nearly as well, and at less risk of highly trained people. But close interdiction is another story.

My thinking is that the Russian rockets are Katyushas. It's an interesting little conflation of strategic and tactical, but they do have a nice morale effect even at two hex ranges.

That's probably a fair assessment. I do have some quibbles with the issue of the 88, though. Frankly as an AA gun it was doing what it was meant to do -- it just got a moderately deserved rep as an AT gun from the desert and from German desperation to stop the T34 in '41 and '42: there really wasn't much else in the German arsenal up to that task. I'm not so sure that more 88s at Kursk or Normandy would be all that bad a thing, though: they were AA guns, so they had a high silhoette, large crew, and poor mobility -- best way to deal with them was with artillery, and there was artillery aplenty at Normandy, or, for that matter, at Kursk. On the other hand, if airpower is not decisive in a strategic role, but decisive tactically, it seems reasonable to move as much of it over to a tactical role as possible: why fight for control of the air over Berlin when you could fight over Normandy? There are some weaknesses to this argument, but certainly from the perspective of grinding down the Luftwaffe, it would have made a lot of sense. (scrap the bomb bay and 6 crew from the B17s and convert them to a WWII version of the AC-130)... [ June 28, 2006, 04:10 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

The Panther was undoubtedly the best tank of the war, but it's a good question whether the Germans should have producted it, as opposed to continuing production runs on long-gunned Mark IV's, and Stug IIIs. The cost to retool for the Panther was high, and within some limits, any tank in an ambush is often better than a great tank in the open. Vis. the Israeli-refurbished Shermans in '67. FWIW, the T34 was a great tank for 1940, but showing its age by '45, even with the 85mm gun upgrade.

Agreed, but actually that seems to me a reasonable constraint on the use of American forces -- Roosevelt, Marshall, and Eisenhower were very concerned not to take too many casualties. In game it means that you don't commit the American troops until the German troops are thinned out, and you keep them at TO&E strength instead of attacking. Actually a very elegant way of differentiating American and Russian operational strategy.

We might mention Australians and MacArthur.

Camarón? Oh, but I guess they weren't French...

That is a cool feature, but you have to remember that it becomes the game by dwarfing in importance most other game mechanics. The double-move means, in essence, that you can effectively double (or more) the effectiveness of your forces at a given time in the game. At that point, winning the game ends up being little more than figuring out when you can take the double move to best effect. That said, there have been a number of neat ways to break the lockstep IGOUGO mechanics that are more subtle -- chit pulls, where you take turns activating random portions of your units, or card-based expenditures, where you take turns activating a certain number of units. Of course, it might help to think of a clear-mud-clear sequence as a less-dramatic version of the double move. Indeed, if you changed the term "mud" to "command paralysis" you could use a clear mud clear sequence to simulate the first month of Barbarossa, or the Soviet Winter counteroffensive. People just get hung up on the terminology sometimes. [ June 28, 2006, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Before people get caught up in a typical Internet trumor, HQs DO SUPPLY ACROSS NATIONALITY, even if you can't attach across nationality. Open the Fall Blau scenario as Axis, and note that the Axis minors near Rostow are being supplied by the Bock HQ. I don't know whether I'm convinced that Montgomery should add his leadership value to American troops, even f they can draw supply from him. I'd be more interested in seeing the ability to upgrade allied minor units -- the Canadians and Australians seem a particularly notable example.

An interesting point may be that English is so quirky because it is very easy to learn -- nothing like unsystematically mixing German, French, Latin, and Gaelics together to make for some Byzantine spellings and idioms. Then take it to the New World and start the process again! One might call it a language uncorrupted by any overt schemes to improve the human condition.