R.J.

I'm not crazy about province style combat either- the thing that drew me to Strategic Command was the old fashioned "Avalon Hill" feeling to the game (i.e. hexes). Still, I think anything that draws more attention to the Grand Strategy genre is a positive development. [ November 14, 2006, 02:00 PM: Message edited by: R.J. ]

Just came across some info on a new grand strategy game Strategy First is publishing in the spring called Making History: The Calm & The Storm. It looks more like HOI than Strat Com - risk-style provinces rather than hexes/tiles - and there's not a lot of info on it, but there are a couple of dozen screen-shots. Here are some links: http://www.making-history.com/home.php http://www.3dgamers.com/games/makinghistory/

Here you go.

It's the craftsman vs. mass production conundrum. If you sell a million or more copies of a game you can afford to sell it for less – and/or hire more people to give the game more glitz and glitter and sell it for more. War games, alas, have a much smaller market share, thus have smaller design teams and higher prices. SC2 (in fact all wargames) might look like a budget game, but it's not. You pay for the quality of the game design- if it also looks good that’s just a nice bonus. You can rest assured you're not being gouged. HC isn't blowing your hard earned money on Ferraris and supermodels. :confused: (Actually, if you are, let me know. I might give up my day job and go into game designing.)

I'd really like to see HQ's have two values under supply – one to list their actual supplied value, followed in brackets by their supply source value (or vice versa). Counting tiles in Russia gets so tedious.

Very true, but it also represents 2-8 weeks worth of naval operations in a rather abstract way. It would seem to me that if a nation has the will and ability to launch naval attacks against an invasion, it should be rewarded with more than a 20% decline in a corp's/army's fighting strength. Reducing the transported unit's supply a few points for each attack could be one option.

The French seductively removing their garrisons to get a rise in Italian readiness – it's not just gamey, it's positively immoral. To counter the Italian exploit, when Italy's readiness reaches 100%, it should not automatically enter the war, but rather the player should then be given the option of entering the war when they choose. Or at the very least, Spanish readiness should also go up.

My boys are fighting in rags and stuffing their boots with straw to keep warm... I'm a bad, bad Führer

A German unit being op moved from Northern Russia to Paris, Italy or Greece should have their moral rise by about 90%- cramped trains or not. Overall it makes more sense to drop readiness than moral, but as it affects readiness it pretty much comes out even.

You wouldn't get all 60,000 but you'd certainly get more than 10% of their foxhole strength, or their follow up supply ships. If a BB can kill 30% of an army on land, I'd expect they'd do a lot more damage to them when they're at sea.

LOL, actually I use a push mower- but that’s just to save my ears and lungs, not mother earth. I agree with you there. The concept of real sacrifice for a greater good kind of faded away when eat, drink and be merry for here and now is all there is became the national (indeed Western) ethos for the modern age. With morality (the domain of religion) giving way to ethics (the domain of philosophy) the gold standard for some will be us versus them, and me me me the standard for the rest.

Cary also wrote (p3): Because we generally accept that mixing religion and politics is a disaster. I'm afraid you're setting the moral bar too high for the strictly secular concept of the nation state. If you're going to ask for a sacrifice that grand you'd better be offering something more than the temporal. Politics (modern and Western at any rate) tends to play out in more pragmatic, alas even cynical, terms. 'Bomber' Harris may have to answer to God in eternity, but in the here and now (or there and then as the case may be) the idea of ending a war through terror bombing was believed (falsely as it proved) to have merit. And where does one finally draw the line in us v. them? My family v. the criminals who threaten them? My country v. the country that threatens to enslave us? The family of man v. the livestock that feeds us? All organic matter living in perfect harmony? Will some future generation condemn us for mowing our lawns as some now condemn Harris for trying to spare "his own" at the expense of others? It's an imperfect world. We need both our ideals and a good dose of pragmatism for such difficult questions as war.

I would assume he's sad because it's not working. P.S. I'm not sure if you need Freud or need to avoid Freud?

Sell it to whom? Rich industrialists who would simply raise the price of products and commodities to offset the capital expenditures on luxury goods? Money that would have better served the poor by being put into industrial expansion (i.e. creating jobs). Meanwhile the world is poorer because priceless art treasures are now in private hands and not on public display. Wealth isn't created by a simple exchange of paper money and/or property. Wealth is created by investment, labour and human ingenuity. And I'm afraid that opinion is the typical fuzzy logic of socialism that kills investment and personal motivation that creates real wealth. The other part of your post is spot on though. "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it." -Benjamin Franklin

Soviet dog mines. Fairly good in theory, explosive pack on the back of a dog detonated by a rod that was pushed back when the dog dived under a German tank. In practice, the dogs (who were trained by placing food under Soviet tanks) tended to make a beeline to the familiar smells and sounds of the Soviet tanks. The program was cancelled very quickly. (I suppose you could simulate that one by having Russian tank units randomly lose a strength point once and a while. )

I had an idea for a rule that would give the RN a shot at defeating SL rather than an outright ban on it. Amphib tech level squared = the number of tiles that can be moved before unloading. i.e. with level 3 tech you can move the full 9 tiles before unloading – 4 tiles with level 2, 1 tile with level 1, and with level 0 you have to start the turn adjacent to land. The axis could invest like crazy in tech if they really wanted to do it, but otherwise it would give the UK a fighting chance with their Navy. EDIT: or use Rolend's tech level system as a house rule: "I still think lowering the range is not the way to go. Now that a Amphib tec has been added it should go something like this. Level 1. Units must wait one turn next to land before unloading. No movement allowed after unloading. Level 2. Units can unload on same turn. No movement allowed after landing. Level 3. Units can unload on same turn. Units may move if enough AP's after landing." [ July 11, 2006, 05:34 PM: Message edited by: R.J. ]

There's the problem with using it for the West Front- it's obviously only good for launching Kamikazes.

Panzers not Panzies. Wasn't that Himmler's motto for the SS? [ July 10, 2006, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: R.J. ]

I think 'heavy mud' with 1 tile per turn movement would be appropriate in Russia, to reflect the fact they had mainly dirt roads there.

"Wartime Casualties: Soviet: 25 Million, 1/3 soldiers" And iirc some 3 million of those 8 million Russian soldiers died in German captivity (because in Nazi ideology Slavs were subhuman), and probably another 2 million died needlessly because of stupid Soviet tactics that essentially wasted human lives (because in Soviet ideology everybody was subhuman). I'm not arguing that the Russians faced the bulk of the German army, just pointing out that the numbers were higher than they had to be because of the inhumanity of the two systems.

But not as far as Poland this time. That English thing is hilarious. Mind you, at first I was having a fit – its not the sort of thing I'd put past Blair. All I could think was "Shakespeare must be turning over in his grave." It's Alberta's oil, paws off.

DD - Holden and Bogie were definitely two of the best and always fascinating to watch. My mother raised me on a steady diet of classic films - while most of my school chums were drooling over Cindy Crawford I was entranced by Audrey Hepburn and Gene Tierney - and for my money actors from that golden era had both more style and substance than the "stars" of today. I must confess I've never seen Cabaret. I remember in school all I knew was that it was a musical with the dark-haired girl from "Arthur," after that I put it so far out of my mind that I never even realized it had a connection to WW2. Thanks for recommending it, I'll definitely move it to my must see list.

Speaking of which, I recently saw the 1962 film The Counterfeit Traitor, the true story of Eric Erickson (played by William Holden) the American born Swedish oil businessman who was one of the most important spies in the war. He passed key information to the Allies about the location of German oil refineries and their synthetic oil production. It's also one of the best war movies I've ever seen, a great character study, well worth seeing.

Or to put it another way, hard build limits change depending on the year (and tech maximums too?) – is that what you're suggesting?

I like that idea. After all, from 1940 on minor nations aren't going to be just sitting around hoping Adolf respects their neutrality. They're going to be mobilizing and training. So if in 1940, Norway (and other minors) has only 3-strength corps, in 1941 they should be 10-strength with 1 experience. '42 – 10 strength armies, or something along those lines. Plus, if the Norwegian King got out with much of the treasury in 1940, plunder should reduce over time as well (as nations prepare for an invasion). And perhaps add some diplomatic 'drift' toward the Allies for both Norway and Sweden over time (so that the Axis lose the convoys) if they aren't 'threatened' – ie troops in Denmark or Sweden threaten Norway, troops in Norway threaten Sweden.