ORIGINAL: pasternakski
ORIGINAL: byron13
ORIGINAL: pasternakski
I agree with Ron on this one, with the following comments:
1. Submarines should not be able to carry anything but people.
I disagree. Submarines are a primary source of two kinds of abuse. First, they can rescue five privates from a hopeless situation, and these five dirt bags will later be used as the experienced cadre around which to build an entire division. Crapola. Second, submarines allow the player to take these same five privates and capture entire islands and bases. Double crapola. I don't dispute that subs were used to carry people, but not for the purposes that we see them in the game. I would limit subs to carrying only supply.
Byron, I'm surprised at you. The submarine would not "rescue" "dirt bags." The people we have been talking about in this thread are experienced aircraft servicers and mechanics. Their skills are difficult to replace, and these people would serve as the basis for reconstitution of the full unit, under new leadership and with new equipment (which, in the American scheme of things in WWII, was not difficult to come by).
I ask that you please not be insulting in responding to my posts. Groundless labeling of what I have to say as "Crapola" is not invective that advances any reasonable position of yours at all.
And some of you wonder why I quit posting here. I'm beginning to wonder why I ever started again.
Sorry you took offense. I respect your experience and previous postings too much to intentionally offend you. I hope you were genuinely surprised, because the offensiveness of my comments was not intentional at all.
I was addressing, generally, your comment about subs carrying men in point 1. I gather in re-reading your post that your issue with cadres is to try and counter the gamey knock off of base units. I, on the other hand, meant to crapola-ize stuff like saving a Filipino squad for rebuilding into the 1st Free Filipino Division and the capture of islands as big as Oahu with an infantry squad. In any event, I'm clearly in the wrong considering how many people reacted to my comments. Funny: my innocent gaffs (and there have been a few) seem to always raise more ire than what I consider to be very abusive and certainly intentional comments. Oh well. I do sincerely apologize to you and the forum.
That being said, I still have a big problem with subs carrying troops for the reasons I said. Whether you're withdrawing five privates or five skilled machinists, you simply don't rebuild a unit around five people or five squads. There has to be enough critical mass there to build around, and I don't think the subs carry sufficient critical mass.
Maybe our disagreement is over the wealth of materiel and men. I agree that the Allies - or at least the Americans - had a wealth of supplies and materiel. But I disagree that they had a wealth of trained men. My general contention is that for the entire war, the Allies only formed enough major combat units that they believed they could keep at full strength with replacements. It took 18 months to two years (from enlistment) to form a combat unit (ground or air) and have it deployable. If they lost an entire division (except for the five privates), they did not have enough slack in the system to divert 12,000 men to reconstitute it. If they would have, it would have been doing nothing more than re-designating a division that was going to be formed anyway. As it was, they didn't have enough trained people to keep the existing divisions at full strength, and the tanks in Europe were short-crewed and manned with cooks and clerks by the fall of '44. British strategy and tactics began to be driven by shortages of replacements. Where would they find an additional 12,000 trained men to reconstitute an entire division? I think the U.S. even de-flagged units during train-up and sent everyone to the replacement depot. Regardless of what period of the war you're talking about, General Smith would not suck thousands of troops out of the replacement depot to reconstitute a regiment or division around five squads. Formation and round-out of units was planned long in advance of anything more than a skeleton staff being assigned to it. To suggest that, just because five guys from the destroyed XX division get back to the States, the Army is going to decide to, in effect, add another division to the force pool, completely change its allocation of trainees, and build a new base to house them that was not in the expansion plan is completely, uh, unsound in my mind. Even if the five guys are the division commander, his assistant division commanders, and his regimental commanders, they're not going to reconstitute an entire division around them; they would be reassigned to other duties. But that is what the cadre thing allows people to do. Submarines are, in my opinion, the worst (or best) example of this problem because they necessarily carry an insufficient number of people around which to reconstitute a unit.
Now, of course, this is the extreme example because I'm using five squads to build an entire division. And when the five privates are Filipinos and you somehow manage to reconstitute a Filipino division around them even though the Philippines are occupied and two thousand miles from the nearest Allied base . . .
The problem, as in all things WitP, is that no one fix is perfect. If the problem is that gamey play can leave the Allies with too few base units - at least early in the war - I don't have an answer. Maybe respawn some of them and the engineer regiments. But in general, the fix to a gamey tactic is not to add (or keep) a separate gamey feature.
Tell you what. I have no idea whether the units that surrendered in the Philippines were ever reconstituted. If, historically, any of them were, then I'm wrong and I'll shut up. If they weren't, I think that's a strong indication that it should not be done in the game. Or another test: what happened to the 106th Infantry Division after the Battle of the Bulge? I don't know, but I would be interested.
As for the sub assaults, they just carry too few men to "capture" an island. As rtrapasso referenced, we leave bases ungarrisoned. Considering the scope of WitP, and the amount of supplies, fuel, and other stuff that may be at an "ungarrisoned" base, I think the game assumes that there are some people there - just not enough to fend off a battalion of SNLF or Raiders. But probably enough to prevent five squads from capturing (as opposed to destroying in a commando raid, which the game doesn't account for because of its scope) an oil tank farm here, the supply depot there, the port facilities over there, and the airfield two miles away. (I would also say that you should garrison bases. Not providing rear-area garrisons is part of the reason we see hyper-accelerated play)
Bottom line: I believe the subs carry numbers of men too small to have an impact of any kind in a game of this scale. Therefore, I believe that subs should not be able to carry anything but supply.
Bottom bottom line: the 15% rule is a good start, but there are a lot of problems that would need to be worked out. Better to not do anything than to do it half-baked and cause more problems.
