ORIGINAL: joelmar
ORIGINAL: MattFL
loss of 100 manpower... 15% of total rail capacity
First time I hear or see you bother about manpower! 100 is 1/40th of the manpower capacity of Soviet Union, so it's not that much of a big deal in itself, but still a sizable chunk that anyone will be happy to swallow!
I think many players do not realise how dispersed manpower is, and why we should stop thinking about cities as capturing manpower. Capture a lot of those size 3 and 4 towns and it really does add up. You can see for example the map I made which is uploaded to the library of WitE resources (see 2.4 1942 offensive plan
tm.asp?m=4317692 ). In it I started circling regions of the map that would commonly be conquered together and counting all the manpower centres including cities and villages (numbers in green) - and it changed my view of what is important. For example, although Baku is a big city there is not a lot around there or on the way there. So in manpower terms a summer spent attacking towards Baku is wasted. And similarly conquering regions with a lot of villages could easily add up to more than the big cities. Admittedly there are a lot of towns around Moscow too - but it also shows that capturing a salient up to and including Moscow is not the best manpower capture you could have made.
An old sudden death house rule was that it would be an Axis win if you captured 2 out of 3 of Leningrad, Moscow, or both Voronezh and Rostov. This has fallen out of favour. But it does show some players thought at least Leningrad, Voronezh and Rostov together was worth more than Moscow.
Wixit's game would have been a sudden death Axis victory by this rule, and yet Soviet forces are now in the Reich in 1944 with a good chance of a decisive victory. We can see the Axis player was good enough to "beat" his opponent in 1941, but the Wixit good enough to win a decisive victory later in the game. And the game probably has lasted the distance because both players have seen it as a competitive game to carry on with.
ORIGINAL: joelmar
And talking about rail capacity I realized this week that is where I should have hit you with strat bombing instead of Arms.
We started to pick up how susceptible rail was to strat bombing in the 8MP game - and how much easier it is to attack as does not necessarily have the flak of cities. I think this may be a strat of game to come ..
I suppose we can debate how important Moscow was to communist rule historically. The administration had already been moved to Kazan by the end of 1941 and the communist party had conducted a civil war where who held Moscow was not too relevant. So I think the same civil war experience would have been replicated in 1941 - the communists would have continued to hold power with or without Moscow. But I do think the game does not model well its importance logistically for instance in rail transportation.
