Air fleets & ships too powerful

[Retributar]

Interesting insightful point Rolend ...about...

the Allies had complete control of the skies making it very hard for the Germans to bring up supplys and reinforcments and I think that was a very large factor in the success of D-Day.

So... then, based on your assessment,...i would say that the German's should suffer a slightly diminished supply situation.

Perhap's modeling the supply problem in Russia?. This, of course would be based on the amount and type of Air resources that the Allies bring to bear...and also as to how often that they commit these resources!.. This, would then 'Force' the Allied player to invest in Air-Resource's in order to effect a negative supply effort for the German's as well as to reduce their MPP output for them!.

Keep in mind...that weather effect's such as cloudy/rainy or Snow Storm weather should allow Axis supplies to return to their full complement.

[ June 23, 2006, 11:04 AM: Message edited by: Retributar ]

[Lars]

Er, the Bombers do that pretty well already. Just keep Paris down and the Axis can't op move anything in to meet an invasion force.

[Rolend]

Yea if you keep the mines bombed and that one port that contorls German convoys you can really lower their MPP. I don't have a problem with how bombers work was just kind of responding to some of the coments about bombing. Now without a doubt Aitfleets and how they work against ground units IMO need some serious work.

[Lars]

Well, AF was toned down from SC1. Guess them buggers are still to powerful, eh? Although, for the amount of resources you've got tied up in them, and the fact that they only work half the year...

[Sombra]

Yepm, I dont think the Af fleets are to powerful per se but simply to useful to dig out cities and fortifications. (+ tanks should be downgraded in mountains , against fortificatiosn and cities too IMHO)

[jon_j_rambo]

It was bombs away on Germany in WW-2. The USA had more planes & bombs than pilot crews. You know what is UNREALISTIC: Leveling a city or target to supply 0, and having it spring back to life, that's UNREALISTIC. You don't rebuild factories in a month of game turns. It would take Wolfgang a year or more to fix a functional factory. Staffing, labor, specific supply/tool needs.

Also, what is screwed up is the MMP levels. German cities in the Rhineland area should be worth 30-50 MMPs while capture ones would be worth like 10% of that (3-5 MMPs).

In the words of "Fantasy Island (SC)"..."Zee Plane, Zee Plane"

"You know the truth, now do something about it" --- Rambo II.

[jon_j_rambo]

@SomeBunta --- "What we have here is a failure to communicate" -Warden from Cool Hand Luke. Son, we were nice guys to you in WW-2, and did you a favor. If we really got serious with the bombers, you wouldn't be here today typing. (See Dresden for effects on life, death, & morale).

[Lars]

Originally posted by jon_j_rambo:

The USA had more planes & bombs than pilot crews.

Gee, that must have worked well for us.

Think you got that reversed. We had so many pilots we cut back on training more towards the end.

[jon_j_rambo]

Son, you ready to start counting bombs?

[Lars]

Oh.

You're aware that works for the Luftwaffe too, aren't you?

[jon_j_rambo]

Son, you think? Of course, that's all you think about "is the LF". Where they (LF) at today? What happenend? Oh, that's right. No worship today, son, not on my watch.

-Legendary

[Lars]

Last I checked, they're still flying in Germany.

[Sombra]

Rambo you simply dont get it . Don´´t you? If the game follows the historic path, Germany is beaten already in 1942 in Rusia in Stalingrad . The US player has to be totally inept not to repeat the "historic" feats of the US. Right now IMHO the US is many times already stronger in 1942 then it had been in reality. Depends on your luck with IT and PT tech of course. You can discuss to add more units imply because in 1943 you run out of stuff to build.

[jon_j_rambo]

@Lars --- The only thing that we'll ever allow Fritz to fly is 99 Luftballons. We've had enough of you guys getting all worked up.

[Fartknock3r]

Originally posted by jon_j_rambo:

@Lars --- The only thing that we'll ever allow Fritz to fly is 99 Luftballons. We've had enough of you guys getting all worked up.

Look who's talking.

[Baron]

Having been on the receiving end of these nuisance attacks on several dozen occasions I can say with confidence that the biggest effect it has on the targets is that it pisses them off!

I like the idea of ground units not taking hits from air units until their entrenchment is reduced to 0. This would reflect that fact that units in the “open” were the ones that suffered the most from TAC air.

I also get very frustrated at the damage that the air and naval forces inflict on the ground units in this game, especially those that the navy inflicts. The weakest part of SC2 IMHO is the naval game. It is very abstract which is fine for a WW2 Strategic Level game but it doesn’t even leave the chance of repeating or expanding on what may have happened or did happen at sea during WW2. Sea Lion is a joke, and then some cruiser squadron can knock 20 -30% of an ARMY’S strength down by 1 bombardment! It is too preposterous to even imagine something like that happening.

I’d like to see naval units that are used the way they should be used - hunting and interdicting the sea routes. Instead with this game engine the Naval war is just not representative of what happened and with the cost of these units I’d be surprised to ever see anything like what happened in WW2. German surface ships don’t cause any damage to the Allies while loose on the convoy routes and subs are useless since the enemies ships point right at them even if they were seen or not. A bomber that can reach the sea lanes should cause convoy losses. They sank more Allied shipping than the surface forces did. Maybe these factors are abstracted into the current rules – if they are I’d like to hear that confirmed and hear the rational used in the decision making process.

In short since this is primarily a land centered game I believe that naval and air units inflict way too many casualties. Under no circumstances should a ground unit ever be eliminated by a naval or air unit. Sure they might be bombed into being combat ineffective but killed? Ask the Marines that fought on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa how effective months long bombardments were in destroying the enemy’s moral or just plain destroying the enemy. I love this game I think that the naval and air values are just too effective against ground targets.

Out

[Guest Mike]

You might find THIS interesting - the US Navy's account of the capture of IWO, including assessment of the effects of the naval and air bombardments.

[jon_j_rambo]

I played golf this morning with a dude who fought at Okinawa. He described the Kamakazis splashing roughly 200 yards short of his ship! They would fly right thru the anti-air, and they couldn't believe how hard it was to shoot them down. Every 4th round was a tracer round, so all the rounds you could see, times that by 4! A wall of rounds. This dude, isn't very fond of the Japs.

[Cary]

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.

It was bombs away on Germany in WW-2. The USA had more planes & bombs than pilot crews. You know what is UNREALISTIC: Leveling a city or target to supply 0, and having it spring back to life, that's UNREALISTIC. You don't rebuild factories in a month of game turns. It would take Wolfgang a year or more to fix a functional factory. Staffing, labor, specific supply/tool needs.

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 ]

[Baron]

Thanks for the link SO it was a good read.

"This operation clearly demonstrated that previous high altitude bombings and long range bombardment of Iwo Jima directed only into "target areas" achieved negligible damage to the very numerous defenses of the island, which were stout, comparatively small, and well dispersed. Photographic interpretation shows, on the contrary, that the defenses were substantially increased in number during December, January, and early February. The bombardment by this force on 16 and 17 February also had less than the desired effect, due to interference by weather, to the need for giving way to minesweeping and UDT operations, and by lack of thorough familiarity with the actual important targets, and distinguished from a mark on a map, or a photograph. It was not until after fire support ships, their spotting planes, and the support aircraft had worked at the objective for 2 days, had become familiar with the location and appearance of the defenses, and had accurately attacked them with close range gunfire and low altitude air strikes, that substantial results were achieved. This experience emphasizes once again the need for ample time as well as ample ships, aircraft, and ammunition for preliminary reduction of defenses of a strongly defended position. At the same time it is realized that certain defenses will never be destroyed or even discovered until after the troops land"

I think the AAR report says it all - bombardment from Strategic level resources had negligible effect on the defenses of the island. Incidentally Iwo was the only amphib operation in the Pacific in WW2 where the attackers took more casualties than the defender.

Cary, I agree that the game does a fair job for large hex no stacking. I still believe however, a more realistic approach would be too have air units/naval forces have a maximum effect of no more than halving a units strength(10 str corps could be lowered to no more than a 5 str).This way using multiple attacks from various units - be they air or naval, the best result you could achieve would be to lower a unit to str 1. This makes the unit a walk over by any other ground unit - but to take ground in war you need ground units to occupy the ground, that will never change I don't care how many JDAM's you put on target. Even the carpet bombings that preceeded Operation Cobra destroyed no more than a 1/3 of the German forces. They did however make another 1/3 combat ineffective and the last 1/3 were a walkover for the Allied ground troops that pushed through the area afterwards. I would also hazard to guess that had the Germans had 9 corps of troops in Normandy we would have landed somewhere else. Total German casualties fighting in Normandy were close to 200K (this figure does not take into account the Falaise pocket or the casualties taken during the retreat across France or the Dragoon landings). In game terms this amounts to about 1 Army. If there are a line of Corps defending the beaches -

1)bombard them down

2)land airborne to destroy the 1 str unit

3)land your unit destroy another adjacent unit

4)land unit in newly cleared square ect

I think that maybe SC2 concentrated too much on the Strategic items at the cost of the wargame side. With the editor provided I'm sure that a lot of mods will come about that address these issues. We whined and cried so much about getting the game to us that the playtesters didn't have time to see the forrest through the trees. The game is very enjoyable but its not quite done yet IMHO. I still think that HC is the man!

out

[jon_j_rambo]

WHAT? You guys talk tough sitting in your chair reading some crap on the internet. Bombing didn't have much effect? You're idiots. We bombed the crap out of Germany. Ask the Buntas themselves what it's like to sit under an air raid. Idiots.

[Baron]

Rambo, I've been shelled so many times that when we were getting shelled and they were falling far enough from us we didn't even stop what we were doing. It was a dumb thing to get that attitude because you can't be sure of where the next one is going to hit but I'd say almost our entire company reached this level of indifference. We could tell the difference in outgoing and incoming and could even tell you the size of the shell/rocket by its impact and noise.

I'm not saying that air power wasn't effective, what I am saying is that in WW2 time frame TAC air was much less effective than you'd like to believe. On the SAC side of the house German war production peaked in 1944 after being subjected to 1000+ bomber raids for almost 2 years. Were the Germans afraid of the bombers? Hell yeah they were,at least the civilians were, because we couldn't hit the broad side of a CITY using the tech at the time. That is why we resorted to carpet bombing as precision attacks were not doable at the time. Nowadays its different and I have several nice videos taken through NVG's to show what TAC air and counter artillery fire is capable of doing.In the time scale of this game though it is a no go.

out

[dicedtomato]

Cary, can you explain how bombing made German production go UP?

Diced Tomato

[Cary]

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.

Cary, I agree that the game does a fair job for large hex no stacking. I still believe however, a more realistic approach would be too have air units/naval forces have a maximum effect of no more than halving a units strength(10 str corps could be lowered to no more than a 5 str).This way using multiple attacks from various units - be they air or naval, the best result you could achieve would be to lower a unit to str 1. This makes the unit a walk over by any other ground unit - but to take ground in war you need ground units to occupy the ground, that will never change I don't care how many JDAM's you put on target.

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.

I think that maybe SC2 concentrated too much on the Strategic items at the cost of the wargame side. With the editor provided I'm sure that a lot of mods will come about that address these issues. We whined and cried so much about getting the game to us that the playtesters didn't have time to see the forrest through the trees. The game is very enjoyable but its not quite done yet IMHO. I still think that HC is the man!

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:

idiots

"Frequently wrong, but never in doubt."

[ June 24, 2006, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

[dicedtomato]

In other words, German production rose because there was excess capacity. So the question isn't whether German production was harmed by bombing, but what production would have been in the absence of bombing.

The Combined Bomber Offensive meant that the Germans had to cope with erratic production schedules. Building fighter airframes is useless if the engines are delayed because the factory was bombed or the rail lines were blocked. Then there's the cost of dispersion. The U.S. churned out all those Shermans and B-17s because it could build huge factories. The Germans had to disperse their plants and hide them underground. Then there's the effects of "de-housing " workers. Would you want your tank built by an assembly line worker who spent all night in a shelter, and emerged to find his house on fire?

Add in the cost of an gigantic air defense network with radars, searchlights, flak and fighters, and the indirect costs of bombing were considerable.

It's hard to say whether strategic bombing was the wisest use of Allied resources. For Britain, it was about the only way they could attack Germany before 1943. The problem isn't that bombing was ineffective, but that the Bomber Barons promised to win the war with airpower alone.

Diced Tomato