Shaka of Carthage

Great picture of the Rock. I think I can answer the why to that. The British recruited manpower for a regiment within a specific area. Majority of the British soldiers would spend thier entire career within one regiment. Its one of the reasons that the smaller British units have superior unit cohesion than American units. So, a regiment suffering huge losses not only lost men from the same area, but had to obtain replacements from that same area. If you don't do it right, your civilian morale will drop badly. The closes analogy I can think of, is to imagine each graduating class from High School, being responsible for forming a combat battalion. Imagine if that battalion suffered 80% losses, the effect it would have on civilian morale.

Sometime back, I ran across a book that covered the German potential plans for an invasion of Gibralter. If you look hard enough, you can probably find something about it on the Internet. From what I remember, there were roughly three (3) German regiments and possibly a fourth one, which was a Airborne regiment. Airborne unit was suppossed to hold a beachead, so the follow on regiments could land. Unlike Crete, there wasn't an airfield large enough for gliders and transports to support the follow on regiments. So you had a amphib landing, being conducted by Paratroopers, not Marines. It got shot down, mainly because due to the inaccurracy of the landings, Germany wasn't willing to accept the losses it would have sufferred from Paratroopers being drowned. I used to wonder why they didn't use thier Brandenberg(?) or whatever they called the German Special Forces. Those guys were more like Rangers, but I guess they really needed Seals. One note about British forces... you have to be careful when you read about British "Regiments". Sometimes the are nothing more than a battalion.

Gibralter in most wargames has always been a problem in how to handle it, since its strategic importance is way out of proportion to its troop density. The biggest problem is that Gibralter doesn't have the space to hold a Corps worth of combat troops. I believe the garrison was no larger than an ad hoc brigade. What Gibralter was, was an unsinkable Battleship. And the guns of this battleship, commanded the straights. And since it was "stable", it had an easier time targeting and hitting naval ships that came within its range. The other problem, is the ability of a land side attack from Spain. In real life, that just wasn't something that was possible with any unit larger than a brigade. Restricted frontage, difficulty of water crossings, etc all put limitations on any one consider attacking Gibralter from Spain. Hence the problem SC/SC2 has, since any attacks on Gibralter would be conducted by forces much smaller than the smallest unit we have represented. There are alot of ways to "solve" the problem, but then you get back to the fact is the amount of work involved worth the result. Which leads to what most designers have done, which is shoehorn Gibralter into the existing game mechanics.

pzgndr, wish I had known you were at WBC. I was as well. Would have bought you a drink. I also saw the demo setup, but never got a chance to see the demo.

Hmmm.... P500 list for SC2? Interesting.

I agree with Curry. SC2 has a much larger market of PBEM players than TCIP.

Let me tell you why I think having an Atomic Bomb option is a bad thing. The only nation that has the resources to obtain a Atomic Bomb is the US. As I have mentioned before, Germanies research was for energy purposes, not weapons. So other than the US, no one else should have the option. Of course, all of you who believe Germany was able to build long range jet bombers and flying saucers will disagree with me. To be able to have a realistic and playable Atomic weapon is not an easy thing to design. Its alot of work to do it right, otherwise, you end up with a nation that doesn't have to pursue winning the war, it can just wait until it gets the bomb. If Mr H does want to add Atomic weapons, it should be something that happens in a future release, not the first one. There are more important things that need to be worked on to give us an enjoyable game.

Never really went away. Just not much to respond to these days.

There has been some dicussion about having an Engineer unit in SC3, designed to be more of an "construction" engineer unit, not a combat engineer unit (which are organic to our existing Corps and Armies). Mainly there so you can build fortifications like the ones that are already pre-placed on the map, but I would assume a weaker version of those fortications. Sabotage and Supply Depots, don't remember any talk of those abilities, though there has been some mention of river crossing abilities.

Hmmm.... I was under the impression he was going to the Corp. Either way, good luck getting thru boot. And if you end up going to Iraq, do what it takes to get home alive.

Alot of interesting points have been made about why it should be one way or another. What we are really discussing, is game design. I understand the design decisions that were made for a product like 3R. But we are talking about a design that is what, 20 years old now? And one that was made for a boardgame. Abstraction is necessary in some areas to achieve effects. Thats one reason that I have constantly argued that if we are not going to have a true representation of a 50 mile hex for the Atlantic, than abstract it. But in an age of computers, where the processing and caculations are done at a level that the user doesn't see, there are important areas that need that level of detail so we can model the effects of different high level decisions that the players are making. The effects of oil and manpower (IMHO), are two of those areas. If a computer can be used to provide eye-candy (which is not necessarily a bad thing), why can't it have a more sophisticated model of oil and manpower usage? I'm also not saying that SC2 should have these things. But SC has the foundations for designing a model using its basic components, so why not develop something that could be used by SC2?

ev I've got no problem with continuing research on a manpower model. But the goal should be completion of the model, not in producing a model that Mr H will use. Thats something that is outside of our control. Finish your OOB's than let me know when you want to get started.

The obvious solution has always been to utilize manpower as an economic unit when you build units. But those who make the suggestion, are either unaware or unwilling to do the work to model the system. What would the manpower levels be for Germany in 1939? And how much would be gained in '40, '41, etc until '45? Don't forget that a certain percentage of that manpower is not considered fit for active duty (what the Germans used to call "whitebread" units), but will be utilized if the prime manpower suffers enough losses. For the different military units Germany could build, what would be the manpower usage of each unit? Lets not forget, that we need to include in that number, a certain percentage of manpower that is assigned to a unit but not available to it (sick, on leave, training, etc). Then there is the non-combat support infrastructure. A ratio of so many non-combat support to combat would work fine, but it does differ for each nation. And its especially fun trying to figure out that number for Naval or Air units. Then there is the combat resolutions. How to handle the KIA, WIA and POWs? And at what point do the manpower losses in a combat unit effect its combat power? The above should cover the major points, though there are a huge number of minor points, that some consider just as important (ie women in the military). And don't forget that you need to do this for each and every nation. Is it any wonder, that almost every WWII wargame uses a force pool or countermix limit, since those can easily be obtained by looking at OOB's? Its a lot of work to do manpower correctly, and the end result is a system that very few amatuers can appreciate.

The German Paratroopers I was referring to where the ones called ... Fallschrimjäger. These are Luftwaffe guys if I remember correctly. I was thinking in terms of the ones stationed in Western Europe, there to oppose any invasion of Europe. They may have been jump qualified, but they had "heavied up" on equipment, making them too heavy to jump from planes anymore (even if there were enough of them). I am not familar with any jump qualified Army units, except the smaller commando type units. The Luftwaffe Fallschrimjäger divisions, even the ones in Italy, where Luftwaffe units, not Army. Agree the Luftwaffe Field divisions were not jump qualified. Whats interesting, is how they were formed. Instead of forming them from a cadre of experienced men, the entire division was a bunch of FNGs, Green weanies and REMFs. I can imagine the justification being that if the Russians could form units like that, over and over, why couldn't the Germans?

Ok, let me say this a different way ... German oil production (prior to the loss of the Romanian oil fields) was not sufficient enough to allow an expansion of the motorized forces in the Army or an expansion of the Luftwaffe. I do agree with you that having force limits, is not an accurate way to reflect the limitations. But this has been brought up over a year ago, and the decision for SC2 is to go with the ability to restrict the unit limits. Lets also not forget the flip side of this. For the latter war years, the Allies do not have enough Air units representing the aircraft they had. But that is more of a problem with having generic units and generic costs. The information you cited about the German manpower usage, by itself is correct. But it doesn't give the correct explanation. For political reasons, German manpower was allocated by percentage among the various armed services. So each service received that number of men, wheter they needed them or not. Thats one of the reasons the Waffen SS was so small in the early years. They were not able to expand until they got exclusive rights to recruit German "foreigners" (ie Germans who did not live in Germany proper). Statements that Hitler and his cronies "screwed up" show a 20/20 hindsight, not an appreciation for the realities of the time. Pilots were important, but so where the Flak defenses. The German Flak, in combination with German interceptors, was one of the reasons the British could not conduct successful daylight bombing raids into Germany. And once the advantages of the 88mm as a anti-tank weapon were well known, there was a huge demand for more Luftwaffe Flak units (meaning more manpower). Once combat on the Eastern Front had taken place for awhile, you now had the German Army taking huge losses that it couldn't easily replace, while the other services did what it could to protect itself from losing its manpower to the Army. Thats no different than what is going on today with the US military... the US Army doesn't have enough Military Police, but politically, it would be suicide for the Army to try and take away MP's from the Air Force or the Navy. So they end up doing some reorganizations and converting former artillerymen and others into MPs. In hindsight, we can say they made mistakes in forming the Luftwaffe field divisions or the Goring Panzer/Para (?) Division. But at the time they were valid decisions, which just turned out wrong. And no one critizes the German Paratrooper divisions, which belonged to the Luftwaffe and helped form the backbone of the defenses in Western Europe.

SoDak If the Germans were not better than everyone else, than why, after the war, did everyone copy them? Even some of the recent US military reorganizations, are doing nothing more than implementing things the Germany military did in WWII. And I am referring to the "run of the mill" German Army units, not Waffen SS units.

Someone else has already corrected your statement about the dates, so no need to go there. I don't want to look at each link you made to support your "everyone knew the war was lost" statement. All I asked for was the year you believed this to be true. So lets just leave it at us disagreeing. Lets concentrate on Hitler and the US. If I haven't made it clear by now, it should be clear that I don't support the "Hitler was an idiot" theory. He made mistakes, just like the leadership on both sides... my thing is to try to understand his mistakes and why they were made. Before Barborrosa, the German military was at the height of its power. Hitlers belief that he could convince the UK to join him against Russia (to fight communisim) wasn't quite as strong as before, but he still had hope. The isolationist movement in the US was very strong and led to the belief that though there will be some limited support for the UK, the German High Command didn't have to worry about the US becoming involved in Europe. Which leds us to what some of us believe was the number one mistake that Hitler made in WWII. He declared war on the US, Dec '41 or early '42. Question being why? Japan was not part of the Axis, so he had no treaty obligations. The Japanese and the Germans were not close, due to the race issue. What Hitler wanted, was a second front against Russia, so he could knock Russia out. He could care less about the effect it had on Japan, or that Japan having a three front war (US, Russia, China) was way beyond what it could support. Lucky for us, the Japanese had already realized back in the late 30's that the Russias were too tough for them. It was a caculated risk that Hitler lost. But if you look at the numbers, it wasn't such a bad idea if he hadn't underestimated the Japanese. The US needed two years to build up its Navy. And the US Army was a joke relative to the Russian and German military. No matter how fast it expanded, you would still have green units fighting combat veterans. Which is why the US Army was referred to as the "Allied Italians". And its performance in North Africa just proved everyone correct. My point being, no one in '41, expected Russia to survive beyond a year, let alone two years. And during that time, the US would have no effect on the outcome. So allied or not to the UK, Germany wasn't worried about the US.

How can you state that Germanies production of 8.9 million tons a year was sufficient? Look at what the other nations were producing at that time. Then look at what the consumption rates where. 8.9 was far from enough.

With Clusters & Lars You're correct, that to properly reflect the importance oil had during WWII, we would need to have another economic unit. Quite awhile back, I suggested that and even worked out a system using the Oil symbols on the map to represent the output. So far though, there is no indication that we will see another economic unit in SC2.

Retributar Of course those are my opinions. But I have studied numerous works regarding those issues and have been doing so for quite a few years. Regarding the ME-262, you have to realize that it was designed as a interceptor. A aircraft specifically designed to go after and shoot down enemy bombers. Interceptors are almost worthless in gaining air superiority. You need fighters for that... and the ME-262 was not designed as a fighter. Thats why having a thousand or so ME-262's would have had no effect on air superiority. Allied aircraft would have just shot them down when they were taking off or landing. You also seem to have a misunderstanding as to how aircraft pilots are trained. Its a very small percentage of the general population that can be trained as a combat pilot. As far as Hitlers decision making process and the status pre-Barborossa, you do realize that Germany was not at war with the US. So why should Hitler be concerned about the US? U-boats were economically squeezing the UK, so the UK wasn't a threat. So on and so on. One of the advantages we have is hindsight, so whats obvious to us, wasn't always an obvious choice back then. For clarity purposes, what year is it you believe that it was "common knowledge among most people who understood the situation" that Germany had lost the war? I'm aware that you belive the Strategic Bombing campaign was decisive and would have forced Germany to surrender. You remind me of the contemporary people who feverently believe that Precision Guided Munitions have made Artillery obsolete.

The comments about Canada not being a "minor" are taking my words too literally. The reference was within the context of SC. As others have pointed out, if the minor nations in SC were to become independent or get a new parent nation, you would literally be creating a situation where you would have to conquer every enemy nation to be able to win. Its also wrong in that Russia couldn't survive without US support. It would have survived, it just would have made it harder on its own population, probably resulting in more civilian deaths so the military could get what it needed. And let me summarize what ev is trying to statiscally prove to you... Russia defeated Germany, not the Western Allies.

The problem is that it is all a matter of interpetation. Thats why certain military historians don't agree, even after a lifetime of studying the same subject. And even if you agree on the interpetation, its a whole nother subject because of game playability. Anyway, everything that has been said or will be said, at one time or another, has been discussed in numerous other game designs. I even wrote a economic comparision between SC, Clash of Steel, Third Reich and High Command, to get a better understanding of what I felt where the problems with the economic units (ie MPPs) in SC. Over a year later, we are still having the same dicussions. Its much easier to pick a specific issue, open up a debate on it, and provide links to relevant detailed info if you feel the need. Thats why it wasn't obvious.

Its a design decision, to not have the minors produce. It can be solved by changing the code, so that if a minors "parent" nation is gone, is acquires another one. Hence, if the UK falls, Canada would get a new "parent", the US. But now you have a new problem... cause if you do something like the above, than all minor nations should be treated the same. And what have you gained by doing it?

Slapaho SC already has a mechanism to represent training... experience bars. I do agree with you however, that it would be nice in SC2, to be able to specify that the unit we produce is "trained" vs "untrained". This way, when you purchase a "trained" unit (ie one experience bar), it would be available in a month. While a "untrained" unit would be available immediatly. Something like this would go along way to being able to differentiate national differences. And since its somewhat related, having the ability to stipulate a "production" time for a unit would finally end the ability to create instant battleship groups.

As Liam pointed out, you are basically repeating what the future US Air Force wanted the politicians to believe. Realize that the people responsible for having the survey written were also trying to establish the US Air Force as a seperate service. The basic belief was that with Strategic Airpower and nuclear weapons, you didn't need a massive Army or Navy. The politicians of the time, ate it up, since no one wanted to think in terms of fighting the Russians man against man. I'm not saying that the strategic bombing didn't have an effect against Germany. But it wasn't decisive. Notice that I have very carefully tried to say "strategic" air above. Tactical air superioriy did give the Western Allies a decisive advantage in combat. But it didn't win the battles. Which gets back to the basic points that have been talked about for over a year here... Strategic Bombers need to have the ability to reduce the enemies production points. The problem in SC is that as soon as they do, all the enemy has to do is put a ground unit on that production target, and the Bombers can't get to it. The other problem, is no Allied player in SC will put the resources into Strategic Bombers, like the Western Allies did in real life. Its the same reason the Western Allies can invade Europe prior to '44. Tactical Aircraft provide armed reconnaissance once they have established air superiorty. Operational interdiction is not modelled in SC. Instead, SC has Tactical Aircraft acting as flying Artillery. It wasn't like that.