How Hitler Could Have Won WW2

[Petiloup]

ORIGINAL: Timmeh

I have both an Italian and a French WWII era rifle. both are in mint condition, never fired and only dropped once [;)]

Pay attention with those, there surely still are bullets inside [:D]

[christian brown]

Getting back to the header, this is a game.  As such, both sides must have a chance to win somehow for it to be fun for all players.  Germany does not have to conquer the World, nor does it have to focus on Russia.  As for the logistical problems originally referred to: controlling the Med/Middle East/Afirca/India requires a HUGE investment in transports and supplies to be viable.  Since in AWD, you don´t really know when (unless you invest heavily in spies against Russia) the USSR will unfreeze.  It´s a risk to take on the Med area because you usually focus solely on that to the detriment of the Eastern Front, but you can win this game by doing so if Japan performs very well.  There are Strategic points in Egypt and India (as well as the factories there) that all count toward the AV.  Remember the premise of the AV is simply to set a sort of victory marker whereby the Allies would concede and make peace, not that they actually acknowledge defeat.....

[Petiloup]

ORIGINAL: christian brown

Getting back to the header, this is a game.  As such, both sides must have a chance to win somehow for it to be fun for all players. 

Too make it fun for all players in one thing but once you do a game on an historical event you can't allow yourself to change history for play balance. In the case of WW2 it's of course difficult to estimate if Russia would have surrender even loosing Leningrad and Moscow. Would England surrender if Cairo and India falls? surely not. Would the US throw the towel if loosing Hawai? don't think so either.

Doing an Auto Victory make sense in WAW/AWD to push the Allies to try to contain the Axis but it should be in 2 phase I believe. 1 AV against Russia and 1 against the Allies with different conditions.

About letting the Axis win I think it would be more about seeing if they can loose less badly than in reality. Put a Victory calculation based on the time of defeat and concede that the Axis player did better than in reality which could be a victory of a sort.

True we can always say that Germany could have done better if organizing her industry since the start of the war, doing research more efficiently, killing Hitler, and so on as alternate history but then why not doing the same for Russia as Stalin doesn't do the Purge against his army, he build strong defenses at his border with the Axis, and so on. Or say France learn from Poland and organize better defenses against the Blitzkrieg.

This is the problem doing a WW2 global game, or you stick to history and the Axis is doomed or you allow some alternate history but it should go both ways.

[WanderingHead]

ORIGINAL: Polonthi
Doing an Auto Victory make sense in WAW/AWD to push the Allies to try to contain the Axis but it should be in 2 phase I believe. 1 AV against Russia and 1 against the Allies with different conditions.

That is actually a pretty interesting idea.

What could be done for a "No AV" setup is create surrender conditions for the Allied powers, rather than have them fight til the bitter bitter end.

Given the political rules, this could be implemented pretty well with surrenders similar to Vichy ... some Russian territories go German, some Russian territories become neutral (with freetrade then representing the trade/economic/reparations portions of any surrender agreement).

Given the very real possibility of Russian government collapse, this does not seem at all unreasonable.

Similarly, if England fell it is quite possible the Commonwealth (at least India) would not have kept fighting, unless Japan forced it. If I were to implement it, I might separate India from Australia, and have India go balanced neutral (hence feeding the Japanese factories with resources, if they can form a transport link, but leaving some motivation for Japan to attack India).

However, if such were implemented ONLY for Russia, this would be a strong encouragement for Germany to initiate early hostilities against Russia, in order to knock out the bear at the back door while it is still weak. This is something some testers have been strongly advocating for, a good motivation for an early attack against Russia, without actually forcing it.

If the code used to implement Vichy were flexible and mod-able, such that one could create similar rules for other nationalities, then this could be done by a modder. Unfortunately, I think that most of the Vichy rules are hard coded.

Just FYI - I am one of the testers, generally silent on this public board however.

[Uncle_Joe]

True we can always say that Germany could have done better if organizing her industry since the start of the war, doing research more efficiently, killing Hitler, and so on as alternate history but then why not doing the same for Russia as Stalin doesn't do the Purge against his army, he build strong defenses at his border with the Axis, and so on. Or say France learn from Poland and organize better defenses against the Blitzkrieg.

This is the problem doing a WW2 global game, or you stick to history and the Axis is doomed or you allow some alternate history but it should go both ways.

I've been trying to make this very point for some time now. History should be matched with history, but breaking history (especially radically breaking history) should result in BOTH sides having a lot more freedom. I have yet to understand why people can make tons of assumptions of how Germany can have improved over historical but are content to leave the Allies without the same benefits.

Currently though, the Allies are still pretty much confined to history regardless of German actions (within certain constraints). Perhaps that might change depending on how things shake out, but there is always a prevailing feeling amongst gamers to allow the Germans and Japanese more free reign (for better or worse).

[Forwarn45]

I agree with the last comments. Both sides could have done things differently from a planning perspective. Indeed, hindsight should be even more helpful from the standpoint of the Allies at the beginning of the war - the French and the British. Employing a different plan and simply responding differently to German moves could have made a big difference in itself! The allied "Dyle plan" played right into the German's hands -- after the Germans changed their plan (with Hitler's endorsement!) and decided to strike through the Ardennes. And of course French strategic doctrine could have been improved through concentration of its many tanks.

The fact that the Soviet regime stood strong despite the huge defeats in '41 and '42 is something we know now, but might have surprised us if we were just looking at history as it stood at the time. In WWI, the Germans never bested the French but domestic pressure in Russia and poor military performance finally toppled the Czarist regime leading to a peace ceding enormous territory to the Germans! The more recent Winter War with Finland also left serious questions about the ability of the Red Army to fight effectively.

Moreover, it is interesting how close the war actually was based on the campaigns Germany actually waged. Soviet reserves and equipment were not limitless. They were enough given the strategic decisions made by both sides, but I don't think that was a forgone conclusion at the outset. Every regime or government has its limits in terms of maintaining strength and cohesiveness! That's not to say there would not be continued violence or partisans (look at Iraq today), but Stalin and the Soviet government were not invincible. When things look the worst, people start to look for ways out of the situation that work for them. This might lead to a regime being toppled or it might lead to those running the regime to start to look for a way out (of the war or the government).

I guess what I'm saying is: (1) it's interesting to employ hindsight but important to think about the parameters under which decision-makers were thinking at the time; and (2) the war as it played out in Europe was an amazingly close (and scary) thing!

[Petiloup]

ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe

Currently though, the Allies are still pretty much confined to history regardless of German actions (within certain constraints). Perhaps that might change depending on how things shake out, but there is always a prevailing feeling amongst gamers to allow the Germans and Japanese more free reign (for better or worse).

I agree that it's not normal to look only at Germany and Japan to change history. Stalin wanted to get control of the Dardanelles and the Balkans. The latest was allied with Hitler but would Hitler go West to invade the UK couldn't Stalin used the momentum to send his troops to grab control of Turkey using the fact that Hitler couldn't do anything about it?

Would a Russia at peace help Mao a lot more if Japan did a full push against China?

Those are also "what if" and of course could prove very annoying to deal with for the Axis but with the Politics system it should be enable to do so by risking to delay the US entry or even Russia entry against Germany. Trading time against strategic interest should be a choice at least for Communist Russia.

The only one I'll gladly limit are the Democracies in terms of invading other countries and maybe in 1939 and 1940 against Germany to give her a chance or you'll see the French army attacking Germany during the Poland campaign and all should be over soon.