Cary

Janbo, thanks... As to how far is far.. well, I admit I was pulling that out of think air. OTOH 100 km is pretty small by Soviet scale. . Agreed. It sounds like Mannerheim was extremely shrewd, doing a very good job at keeping Finland from being crushed in the elephant's tussle.

Nice way of simulating the Finns' lukewarm commitment to the German war effort. Historically they didn't go far beyond their pre-39 borders.

Germany, Eastern Europe, and Soviet Union literally decimated by the war... That wiki page is quite useful.

Nice. A far better plan than Schlieffen's.

Hannut, in Belgium, in 1940 could be counted as a tactical victory. Two French armored divisions hit two German. Germans lost about 125 tanks, 15 more than the French. But then, these french armored divisions were in the wrong place if the other side was going to drive the rest of his armored down bad roads through the woods. Only nuts like Hitler and Guderian...

Hm.. so includes about 2 tank groups of 7 divisions each, 4 infantry armys of 9 divisions each, a para unit, and two corps... Strange, seems like roughly the American force pool. Wonder why that would be? By comparison, the Germans surrender 10-15 divisions at Stalingrad, and they have about 200+ divisions involved on the Russian front -- ballpark figures from memory. World War II may have been Detroit's war (something like x0,000 (*375,000, per Stalin's Organist's post below) trucks supplied to Russia via lend-lease I want to say 80, but I don't have the figures). But the war in the west was (*relatively*) a sideshow. The numbers below do a lot to tell the story of the war. (And reinforce just how horrific was the event that we recreate) Wartime Casualties: Soviet: 25 Million, 1/3 soldiers Poland: 6 Million Germany: 4 Million Yugoslavia: 1.5-2 Million Japan: 2 Million United Kingdom: 400 Thousand United States: 300 Thousand (From Gerhard Weinberg A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II Normalize these numbers by population, and one gets a signficantly different sense of each country's wartime involvement. Global: 60 Million, including 6+ million victims of the holocaust. http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/p4013coll8&CISOPTR=130&REC=18 is a detailed breakdown of US Army battle deaths, btw. http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm is, in general, anexcellent collection of digitized military history documents. [ June 30, 2006, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Look folks. No reason the weather shouldn't change over time. Your real complaint is that players take turns over different times. Fair. That's an odd aspect of the scenario design that I don't think I particularly like, mainly because it becomes harder to figure out how long it actually will be before reinforcements come in. (Note, not impossible, just harder -- playing the game well necessitates having a turn chart printed up for yourself). But overall, it's only a little odder abstraction than the IGO-UGO abstraction within a turn that's supposed to be the same time. (You think having the weather change mid-turn is bad, try playing OCS or old Third Reich, where the sequencing within a turn could flip... talk about a tough game mechanic.) It's not as if Real Time Sims don't come with their own batch of abstractions and weirdnesses. edit: I realize I'm restating Desert Dave's ninth stanza from 6/25 below. It's a game. The game designer has decided on three or four things he wants to capture about World War II, and abstracted much of the rest. My sense is that its a very good game as a result. Sure, the dream, world enough and time, is that we'd be able to play out every SC2 battle as a CM campaign of operations. But at some point that effort to avoid abstraction has its own cost (not least that the forest gets lost in the trees and weeds.) On weather, by the way, it's worth noting that there was a subtle advantage the Allies had: it was much easier for Brits and Americans to spot weather traveling on the prevailing Westerlies than it was for the Axis.... Should Hubert have simulated this? Probably not, but it's a neat bit of trivia, kind of the opposite of the Germans in World War I having good reason to attack at dawn.

Fair argument, but essentially wrong. "Just a speechmaker" was what the German elites thought the were getting in 1933. And he worked out pretty well too. Cured inflation, took back the Rhineland, killed off the brownshirts -- the real loonies in the Nazi party. Or at least so they thought until 1938 or so. (All of this leaves aside the increasing sanction for anti-semitism, and the slow bleed of (lucky) German Jews to France, England, and the United States (those lucky enough not to get turned back at the gates) though even there mechanized murder doesn't really get going until early in the war) But Hitler makes a lot of crucial decisions that go way beyond making speeches, not least the decision to attack France at even odds. Was it all Hitler's fault? No, clearly not. Would we be living in a different world today if Hitler had been shot in the Beerhall Putsch. Very likely.

I had to love one player's persistent use of corpses as the plural of corps on the Strategic Command board. Though funny, it turned out to be an ESL problem. English is an easy language to speak badly, but darn tough to speak fluently or idiomatically. That said, I do pay attention to spelling, consistent typos and grammar. Justly, or unjustly, I find myself biased against I-speak (du u want2play a game) and butchery of common usage. Enough slop, and I tend to tune out on a writer -- very few people's ideas are so good that this is a serious mistake on my part. Laziness. Been there myself, and the quality of student writing can be pretty horrific. But how do you go about correcting the errors of the teachers who preceded you? For -- if you're lucky -- twenty students in a quarter? Briefly, lest I step too far into social commentary, the school system in the United States is a mess. [ June 27, 2006, 09:23 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

My experience with a Brit upgraded air fleet in Malta has been quite good... of course my opponent only hammered at it for two or three turns with three air fleets, but he was taking a ton of losses. That's a signficant commitment to throw down onto Sicily, especially if one is trying to prep for Barbarossa. In general, I think many of these complaints about fortresses that are not impregnable miss the point-- if you're letting the opponent commit half or more of his airforce to a point away from the front, you deserve what you get: he has got to be made to pay with an opening of second and third fronts.

Of course they killed off a good portion of their own brightest minds.... How different would German policy in the interwar be if Rathenau had been brought back to deal with the depression and social unrest instead of Hitler? That all said, given enough pressure, any society can be afflicted with the kind of suicidal/homicidal mania that afflicted Germany. The banality of evil is one of the most impressive and depressing conclusions of many studies of the holocaust and Germany's march off a cliff.

Sadly, Wittmann didn't strap a bomb to himself on June 25, 1944, an outcome better for Germany, and not all that much worse for him.

AI seems pretty good. The basic engine is very nice. Get to playing it against a real person as quickly as possible -- it's a blast.

. Diplomacy, weather, editor, some changes to the rules. Mod-ability... But yes, it's pretty familiar. Though early 80s graphics may be a bit harsh -- I remember early 80s graphics... and in fact the game seems hauntingly similar to Empire, except Xs were carriers and Os were land armies...

When you think about it, that's actually a pretty big difference. Hitler was an aspiring artist whose aspirations ended in the gutter. Stalin's original job in the Communist Party was to keep the files of party membership cards in order (and to purge those cards that had become irrelevant). Two different flavors of the banality of evil... As to trying to avoid war with Hitler: he had just eviscerated the Red Army a few years previous, and he knew how World War I went against the Germans with the French still fighting.... Seems like it was a wise plan... The rumor is that Stalin was drunk and non functional from June 22nd through early July. On the other side, Speer recalled that almost the entirety of the Nazi government was drunk or high for the last six months of the war. Goering's drug rehab at the hands of the U.S. Army was pretty brutal. [ June 26, 2006, 05:44 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Yes, that's right, Hitler tried to keep Germany producing both Guns and Butter through 1943. Goering himself consumed a lot of butter. There was a lot of debate at the time. I've tended to discount the points you raise because they were made quite passionately by a lot of people with a large vested interest in having made the right decisions with the bombing campaigh, but who knows... The clincher, I think, is that regardless of these arguments, Curtis LeMay changed Air Force bombing strategy in Japan in response to the Survey's conclusions, dropping high altitude precision bombing for low altitude area bombing -- at some point, soldiers face a hard truth that civilians can "spin" around. Bombing had some effect, clearly, and made life more difficult for the Germans. It may also have pushed Hitler to make a number of rash decisions instead of good ones -- appointing Speer (and taking away control of the aircraft factories from Goering) was not one of these bad decisions, it must be noted. Your question, what production would have been in the absence of bombing sounds simple, but it's more complicated than it appears. History would have been very different had Germany actually stretched its economy to the extent that the United States did: the comparison between German and American tank production is amazing, to say nothing of the (perhaps more relevant) comparison between truck production. But then again history would also have been very different if Germany had refrained from exiling and killing its best scientists before taking on the rest of Europe, or , for that matter, if the German elites had decided in 1933 that Hitler was just a little too loony -- or, perhaps, that he just was sufficiently sane to be really dangerous. Sure, strategic bombing had an effect. Moreover, American mobilization gave us the luxury of wasting military resources, a luxury the German strategists did not have. Was it the optimal strategy? Well, a lot of the (civilians, particularly) who were involved in planning the effort were quite vocal in arguing that it was. The numbers, however, seem to contradict them. From what I can see, you raise what is the strongest argument for the strategic bombing campaign -- it was a low-risk way for the Western allies to continue attrition warfare against Germany, without actually having to commit ground troops. Germany pointed a lot of 88s up at the sky instead of using them in PAKfronts... There are two problems here: loss ratios in airplanes were ballpark 1-1 between the Allies and the Germans. But the resultant attrition of aircrews was extremely unfavorable. If an FW-190 goes down over Germany, its one pilot has a reasonable chance of flying again next week. Even if the the B-17 crew survived, the likelihood was that they spent the next year or two in a prison camp, perhaps being hit by their colleague's bombs. Not only that, the Air Forces' aircrews were A-1 draftees and volunteers who were sorely needed in June and July of 1944. Smart, literate, and motivated, they were the kind of soldiers who make the difference between a parachute unit and mediocre line infantry. Finally, by late 1943 the question is not whether Germany will lose, but when and to whom. For the Poles, the Czechs, and the Germans, the American decision for an air campaign instead of an early invasion may have had real costs. The Soviets paid the true blood-price to get to Berlin first, and they were the ones to dictate the settlement in in Eastern Europe. Long ago, Sun Tzu wrote that it is best to win a war by attacking the enemy's strategy, second best to win by attacking his alliances, and worst to win by attacking his cities. He seems to have been right. [ June 24, 2006, 11:53 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Terif, Nice piece on strategy. I think you've captured the strategic interactions that make the game fascinating. I'd add: it seems it might be a low-risk strategy to drop a French diplo chit or two on Norway -- all it takes is one hit to flip Norway over to allied leaning and cut the convoys. At this point Denmark seems a more worthwhile diversion for the Axis.

Diced, Simple explanation across the war: after a couple big raids, Hitler was talked into giving Albert Speer the ability to run the economy. Not a nice guy, and certainly not as nice as he tried to portray himself while he sat out his prison term. But unlike most of the Nazi leadership he wasn't a bumbler, a thug, or a drunk/drug addict. Speer brought the German economy as close as it ever got to full mobilization, and production of tanks and planes went up as a result. Hamburg: the British and the Americans leveled the center of the city. We killed a lot of people, but even more, we destroyed the restaurants, banks, clothes shops, etc in the city's commercial center. Net result -- unemployment, or rather lots of waiters and cashiers looking for work. But, what do you know, the heavy industry in Hamburg's suburbs (that produced tanks, guns, and planes) had been unable to fully use its capital because it didn't have enough workers. Bomber Harris' "urban renewal" did much to solve that problem, and with more labor they were able to produce more war-widgets. The bottom line, is that we were "cutting fat" not "meat" from the Germany war economy's "diet." The irony of American bombing strategy: we assumed that the German economy was stretched tight as a drum to support the war (as ours was -- the best measure of this was the rise in women's labor force participation during the war). It wasn't. We'd hit ball bearing production, or other economic sectors, and Speer had the ability to divert production from civilian to military to (over) compensate. It's worth noting that this was particular to Germany: the debate with Japan was whether the bombing was hitting (the metaphor gets gruesome here) "meat" or "bone" -- did production go down because they couldn't get oil to the factories, or because there were no factories left to receive the oil? As I mentioned before, the authoritative source for the above is the overall report (Europe) of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey -- a major, government-funded evaluation of the effectiveness of our wartime strategy. Key players in the Survey were George Ball, Paul Nitze, and J.K. Galbraith; Galbraith's memoirs describe his work in detail. A recent work on the subject is Robert Pape's Bombing to Win. Baron, in principle, agreed -- you gotta have boots on the ground. In terms of the game design, well, I'm not entirely sure what realism means -- my sense is that you can expect a game to get maybe three things "right" in portraying reality. Efforts to do more seem to wind up generating a lot of chrome and raise questions of what role you're actually taking in-game. Does it feel weird that you can't land paratroops on Crete or Malta if they're occupied? Sure. At a higher level of abstraction, though, do the allocations of resources to take a fortress seem about right? Probably, yes. If I want to take Leningrad, Odessa, Malta, or Gibraltar, I have to allocate a significant portion of Axis strategic resources for a month or two months just to that task. All in all, this seems in the ballpark, even if the exact force structure is way off. But, for the most part the game's not about composing force structures, it's about allocating resources -- it may be best to think about taking a fortress as a project that demands tying up 1.5-2k MPPs over a turn or two. Your point is well taken -- we agree over what we disagree. The nice thing about the state of computer wargaming is that there is (finally) some diversity in titles, approaches, and games that work. I'd be interested in what you think of Grigsby's World at War or SSG's Decisive Battles series, both marketed by Matrix Games. FWIW I like SC2 a lot because it accomplishes what Third Reich/AWAW accomplishes with minimal guff and in a game that can be played over a long day. Rambo: "Frequently wrong, but never in doubt." [ June 24, 2006, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Rclawson, not only that, it's interesting to note that pulling the fleet out into rough seas seems to net another 10-20 MPP loss on the Brits from the sea-damage. No sinkings, but even damage is expensive. I'm interested to game through Sealion a couple times (I just did it once solitaire). My initial impression is that it's a high risk strategy that could pay off really well, but could also leave Russians in Berlin in 1942.

It's true that the naval and air game is curious -- in essence a "design for effect" game -- but the effect seems a valid way of dealing with large "hex" size and no stacking. How else can the axis take Malta than by "carpet-bombering" ("bomber-carpeting") Sicily? Similarly, without the ability of air and naval units to entirely destroy a unit, 6-9 corps can entirely prevent D-Day with a carpet beach defense. Sure, the game could be redesigned to better simulate opposed landings and fortified positions, but this redesign would come at a significant cost. But the net result of the power of air and naval units is that fortresses don't hold against a determined allocation of resources for more than a month. It doesn't seem to me that this is ahistorical, though the way the game achieves this historical result is of course a little curious. Fair enought, but tactically, it seems, the best defense for a fort is a good offense. If you're letting a fort absorb a pounding from four air fleets and ground units, sadly, it deserves what it gets. That said, if the situation is less unbalanced, then that concentration of effort comes at a real price. Naval rules, of course, are similarly fishy, if you'll pardon the expression, but they seem to achieve the basic intent, which is to ensure that Britain is hard but not impossible to take down with Sealion. Part of the charm of the game is that it seems to model a resource-conflict pretty well with a minimum of complexity. It's entirely fair to want a more detailed operational or strategic level game, but I'm skeptical that SC2 can or should be modded into this game. As to Rambo-troll, the term "frequently wrong but never in doubt" comes to mind. Umm. An interesting misconception put forward with absolute confidence. Worth taking a gander at the United States Strategic Bombing Survey data on German war production. One of the highlights of their study: German military production from Hamburg increased after the big raids leveled the center of the city. The Regensberg and Schweinfurt raids intended to destroy ball bearings crippled the 8th Air Force for a time, while leaving German airframe production at near its normal levels. Sadly, of course, this note will only mark me for troll-spoor. [ June 23, 2006, 11:53 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

It's an interesting issue here because playing against an A/I opponent changes behavior significantly. It strikes me that the subs are best hidden away until after the fall of France, then it becomes a tough choice for the Brits whether to send their fleet chasing subs or keep it at home to drive off Amphibs. Sealion's an awful nasty threat. On the other hand, it takes head to heading against yourself to get a sense of how much the sub hits on convoys actually hurt: Britain's MPP budget is a nasty shoestring.

Seems to me that the allies might be well advised to play diplo chits in Norway. All it takes is one hit to shut off the convoy or force the Germans to invade. AFAICS not a bad investment of French MPPs, but maybe I underestimate the French.

As I recall, the German invasion of Norway was an off-the cuff reaction to Allied schemes in Scandinavia. (The most hare-brained of which was an attempt to get Swedish assent to free passage for Western European troops to aid the Finns against Stalin -- in this case the free world may owe the Swedes a certain unrecognized debt for their intransigence!) Perhaps it should be part of allied strategy to be forcing a German invasion? Checking the scripts on this now... [ June 23, 2006, 06:56 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

Useful to know: i'd always worried about friendly fire from tanks or troops: evidently this is only an issue with arty and etc, (or, evidently, MG grazing fire, however that works..)