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ORIGINAL: Orm

I doubt that Canada had enough rail capacity from Vancouver in order to transport such amounts of raw materials. And I suspect a shortage of freight wagons would occur as well.

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

The rules of the game allow resources to be transported through neutral countries. Wargamers are optimizers. If it is thought that sending two Aussie resources to Canada so that two Canadian resources can go to the UK (and save a grand total of 4 CPs for other uses), then prepare yourself for some horrible shocks in terms of other things that can happen in the game that indeed really are gamey.

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

ORIGINAL: Orm

I doubt that Canada had enough rail capacity from Vancouver in order to transport such amounts of raw materials. And I suspect a shortage of freight wagons would occur as well.

It is the US rail net that gets the resources to Eastern Canada.

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

Pick up a copy of "Rail Baron" sometime, if you can, it's a pretty good game in and of itself. (Edit - or check out the version on Vassal.)

But from that game I recall there were 10 U.S. rail routes across the Rockies - the Great Northern (to both Seattle and Portland); the Northern Pacific; the Union Pacific (to both L.A. and Portland); the Southern Pacific (to both L.A. from the southwest and San Francisco from the west); the Western Pacific; the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific.

Canada has two transcontinental railroads that cross the Rockies.

All these rail lines existed in the 1940s.

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

Pick up a copy of "Rail Baron" sometime, if you can, it's a pretty good game in and of itself. (Edit - or check out the version on Vassal.)

But from that game I recall there were 10 U.S. rail routes across the Rockies - the Great Northern (to both Seattle and Portland); the Northern Pacific; the Union Pacific (to both L.A. and Portland); the Southern Pacific (to both L.A. from the southwest and San Francisco from the west); the Western Pacific; the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific.

Canada has two transcontinental railroads that cross the Rockies.

All these rail lines existed in the 1940s.

ORIGINAL: Orm



Do you have a book to recommend about the US railroads creation and early history?

ORIGINAL: Zartacla

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

Pick up a copy of "Rail Baron" sometime, if you can, it's a pretty good game in and of itself. (Edit - or check out the version on Vassal.)

But from that game I recall there were 10 U.S. rail routes across the Rockies - the Great Northern (to both Seattle and Portland); the Northern Pacific; the Union Pacific (to both L.A. and Portland); the Southern Pacific (to both L.A. from the southwest and San Francisco from the west); the Western Pacific; the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific.

Canada has two transcontinental railroads that cross the Rockies.

All these rail lines existed in the 1940s.

Rail Baron isn't bad, for a beer and pretzels game. Not the kind of game that's going to satisfy the kind of player that enjoys games on the scale of WiF, for the most part, but fun to play with friends who can't get into strategically complex games. Unfortunately my own copy has been lost and it's out of print. Hard to find at a reasonable cost now.

Try the 18xx games for a Rail game that satisfies on a WiF level.

The US rail network was in fact quite well developed by 1940. But that's not the point. The convoy system is an abstraction, not a realistic simulation of logistics. As an abstraction, it does a good job of forcing players to make the types of strategic decisions that the main players faced during the war. How much of our navy do we devote to convoy protection? How much production needs to be funneled back into the merchant marine? Do we use shorter convoys through more dangerous waters, or longer convoy routes that are safer? How much of our war effort should focus on disrupting any convoys and supply lines? How much do we invest in ASW/sub production and technology? If you think it's unrealistic that Australian resources are sent to Canada and Canadian resources are transported to the UK, or that the US rail net would be used to ship them, ask yourself how realistic it is that Canadian and Indian factories build ships that appear in British drydocks on the other side of the world. It's an abstraction - the only two important questions are "does this abstraction do a good job simulating the strategic level decision making during the war, and is this fun to play?"

ORIGINAL: brian brian

I haven't looked at the numbers but my change to using the Australian resources in Canada feels like it frees up more than 4 convoy points, but that is probably because I am now simply using the Venezuelan and Port-of-Spain oil resources in the UK factories. I know I have never played a game where I could use the New Caledonia resource in France before. The stronger the French are, the better.

Moving the resources this ways just flows from the abstractions of the game. In Real Life©, there would be trade between Australia and Canada based on the economies of those countries and what each needed. Froonp did a lot of great work sorting out what each resource hex on the map represents. I don't know the results for Australia, but I would imagine it would mostly be coal. I know that today Australia is a major coal exporter. Would Canada need Australian coal in WWII? Probably not. Plenty of coal in Canada and the USA that would be far cheaper to get to Canada if they needed it.

I think one of the Australian resource hexes might simply represent agricultural production, as the one in Holland does. Using that is somewhat modeled by the Food in Flames optional rule which has always been interesting, but too powerful to give the Allies, who don't really need any help in the game.

But with generic resources, you will see results like this and I don't think a few House Rules could really fix much, nor are really needed.

The other way to go would be to increase the detail of the resource hexes. So then the Finnish resource hex up near Petsamo would be a Nickel mine. This was very important for the Germans, and Hitler issued military directives accordingly. But it is a level of detail that would turn off many potential players. Without X amount of Nickel coming in, you can only produce so much armor plate and then only build so many tanks and thus only place so many ARM/MECH counters on the board. I think in Real Life©, by the time the Finnish Nickel supplies could no longer reach Germany it was all a moot point in terms of German production.

And that kind of stuff can go on in far too much detail for most. Germany got some supplies of the mineral compound Wolfram, which was also very important for various weapons, from occasional Japanese blockade runners docking at Bordeaux, iirc, as well as rubber supplies. Do you want to game individual merchant ships?


I did see a magazine article on a computer game of WWII that did model the individual mineral supplies of various countries. I forget the name of the game. The article detailed how the best USA strategy was to invade Mexico in September 1939 to optimize their mineral supplies. This was coming from the publisher of the game I believe, and the article turned me off from the very idea of the game. It seemed like they were very interested in the economics of WWII but had no concern for the political realities.