ORIGINAL: janh
Yes, I agree, it is right, and the other is too complex for little benefit. Amusing, I wonder whether a similar discussion has taken place in the early WitP days, especially since the contest is there so much more uneven for the Japanese.
I wouldn't be surprised. The whole point of using the A-bomb of Japan was to settle the issue decisively without confronting the losses a conventional campaign would entail (or that was the argument for Truman, I think).
ORIGINAL: janh
If I read your table correctly, the accumulating VP's (VLs) for holding cities are very minor compared to the VPs gained by inflicting losses (like 1:10 ratio or so). Maybe this is going to flatten off as the character of the fighting changes, but this way it would seem cities are even more unimportant to hold in this variant. I suppose you could easily tune up the 0.1 factor you set for weighing it, depending on whether you'd want to shift more strategic focus on strategic locations (i.e. on increased importance on offensives), or on Army destruction (i.e. defensive). Is the present factor not a little low?
Good points. I see two ways to adjust this scoring scheme. One is to tweak the loss -> VP conversion rates (notice the boxes on the far right of the table, they allow you set the ratio at the value you want, and differently for the Axis and Soviet player). The other is to make some towns/cities more valuables than others. I know this is already the way it works (Moscow hexes more valuable than the Kharkov hex), since it has been discussed/hinted at by testers, but I'm struggling to extract a full listing from the stock GC 41 scenario.
Right now, the 200 VP's the Axis easily gets by September 1941 (that is all the way to the east including Leningrad, Orel, Kursk and Stalino) are 20 VP/turn. Those are equivalent to 100,000 losses per turn, without risking into a major offensive operation. And here is where it becomes apparent that strategic locations and losses are locked in a feedback loop. They're not independent variables at all. Your opponent should inflict to you enough losses each turn to compensate for those 20 VP's and his
own losses, which become VP's for you.
Say you're the Axis, and you get to April 1942 with 3.5M men in the ranks of the Wehrmacht (this is not an unrealistic proposition at all) and you're gaining 20 VP/turn. Your loss ratio is something like 5:1 or better. What should you do? Tip the balance even further into your advantage, or just tank your gains?
If you don't tip the balance further, you're giving the initiative to your opponent. Literally, you're putting yourself in his hands. However, if you try to get more advantage, since your opponent has become somewhat stronger - in numbers, in quality it will be a worse army than that one faced in summer 1941 - and your units have lost some of their fighting edge - not the motorized units, whose morale is preserved no matter what happens during December 1941 to March 1942 - you're risking to suffer losses you can't afford, and lose the initiative but with an inferior strength and position.
I'm not a WitP:AE specialist, but this sounds as a similar decision the Japanese player has to do once he achieves the historical objectives: Burma, New Guinea, etc. Should he stop there, fortify, and wait for the Allies to come to him? Or he should go after Australia, India or New Caledonia?
Going back to WitE. The problem perhaps lies in that there aren't enough "immobile" strategic assets - manpower, resources, oil - at the reach of the Axis as to cripple the Soviet Union in a decisive enough way as to render further Soviet offensive action futile or harmful. We need to look at this in a honest and comprehensive way. For instance, is the SU fracked if the Axis, for instance, get the Caucasus? The answer should be either yes or no.
I don't have an answer myself. I wonder how effective (or uneffective) would be a Red Army with a long-term shortage in Fuel. I need to check off-map production as well. Perhaps reducing certain off-map resources things might become feasible if they already aren't.
People in these forums say that going after the Caucasus is "far-fetched".
I would like to remind them that the most celebrated WitP:AE AAR's usually show Japanese players that, after emulating very efficiently or more efficiently than historically, Imperial Japan performance, they embark on operations which were only seriously considered by pulp sci-fi writers. Such as invading India, Australia or crushing Nationalist China once and for all. Some of them even get away with that (for some time). It could be argued that even just by
trying they just made Allied decisive victory unfeasible.
My opinion is that, on 1.05, with VP scoring schemes similar to that in my spreadsheet, and the hindsight on what failed regarding 1942 Summer Offensive, the Axis can get to Baku with reasonable logistics while inflicting cataclysmic losses in the process. I'd like to note that the worst trimester for the Red Army, in losses, for the entirety of the war was June-September 1942 with over 2M losses. Maybe they'll have abandon it eventually, but destroying the production there would -
should - have a catastrophic effect on the Red Army ability to fight effectively for a extended period of time.
Again to WitP:AE. What if the Japanese raids Brisbane and Sydney? Or NZ? Or Ceylon? Would they be able to hold them? Probably not. But the damage they would have done in the process would be terrible.
EDIT: Edited for clarity and better English.
Not trying to be mean here, but this is a discussion for another thread.