National Proficiency Ratings?

[Mgellis]

Okay, cool, Command lets you set the proficiency rating of individual sides.

So, how do you decide where each country should be set? Who is an Ace? Who is Regular? Who is just a Novice? Obviously, these ratings can be tweaked endlessly for subtle variations within a scenario, but are there sources, "established wisdom," etc. that talk about which navies and air forces are the best in the world (not just in equipment but the quality of the men and women who sail the ships and fly the planes), which ones are average, which ones just are not very good, and so on?

Obviously, this is a topic about which some people may have some very strong feelings. Please, everyone, let us try to treat each other, and our allies, and even our adversaries, with respect.

[SSN754planker]

the main argument i have for this feature is a libyan mig 23 in 1986 is not the same thing as a soviet mig 23 in 1986

[Dobey455]

I don't think you will ever find a "definitive source" for the quality of nations armies, its too subjective and too broad.
Even within armies the quality varies significantly, and more to the point often varies over time.

[Anathema]

I think the best and least controversial approach might not neccasarily be trying to rate every single country or service overall in comparison to each other, but rather just compare the sides in each specific scenario and unless there is some major difference in training or proficency, make regular the default setting. That does at least allow you to narrow it down to a specific time frame and circumstance, since these things change over time and might even vary between units from the same country or service, as well as actice duty and reserve forces.

So for example say in one partocular scenario you have a western country with a modern, professional military vs a developing country with a poorly trained conscript forces. Assuming you start off with everyone being regular, you could then either raise the western country to Ace, or lower the developing country to novice to reflect the difference in training or proficency, probably depending on whether you want the deveoping contry to perform poorly, or instead perform somewhat more adequately, but still not well enough to match the western country.

EDIT: Plus of course for the sake of challenging a player, a scenario designer might want to send you up against an enemy of evil geniuses who are ace pilots and masters of naval warefare.

[CaptCarnage]

From Woodwards book, it seems he deems Arg navy as not so well trained as the Brits. He doesn't say much about their airforce so that may be decent.

[ART11]

Look at winspmbt game. There you have such factors per country. Of course it rates whole country military forces (land/air/navy) but tells sth.
Regards
ART

[JCR]

Should depend on the timeframe of the scenario, instead of national cliches

[thewood1]

A lot of groud warfare games have side and unit settings for experience, training, motivation, etc. Naval games have always seemed be about comparing tech.

[JCR]

Naval warfare is tech centered, and often it is simply the question of wether a country is able to operate blue-water missile armed warships or modern submarines or it is not.
If it is, it can be safely assumed its crews know what they're doing, otherwise they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.
Any idiot can put a bunch of people in uniforms and AKs and call them an army, while the same doesn't work with a navy (at least one more sophisticated than a few machine gun armed boats)

[jdkbph]

ORIGINAL: JCR

Should depend on the timeframe of the scenario, instead of national cliches

Agreed.

We just need to think about this in terms of one more factor for research when building a scenario.

Also, I'm guessing this system is just the first pass. Hopefully at some point in the future it will be expanded to allow application on a force by force (Navy vs Army vs Air Force) for any given country, and perhaps even on a unit by unit basis (with all units initially inheriting a base value from Force or Country level, then flavored to taste). This way you could account for elite units (or relatively so) such as the Republican Guard, and/or differences between front line and reserve units (eg, Soviet Category A, B and V formations)

JD

[JRyan]

This is a great addition and gives great flexibility to the scenario designer....kudos to the development team.

[Mgellis]

ORIGINAL: SSN754planker

the main argument i have for this feature is a libyan mig 23 in 1986 is not the same thing as a soviet mig 23 in 1986

I think in a case like that you could have the Libyans and Soviets as different sides, although you could simply average proficiencies if you wanted to use them as part of the same side (e.g., Ace + Novice/2 = Regular).

[incredibletwo]

Hopefully in a future interation it can also be disabled if the player so chooses. Other than that, I'm happy

[Apocal]

ORIGINAL: incredibletwo

Hopefully in a future interation it can also be disabled if the player so chooses. Other than that, I'm happy

Don't need to disable it: if the scenario designer leaves them both at default, you get what we have now.

[mrfeizhu]

Experience is what makes a military as with most other things in life, the game should also have experience for ships crews. People will talk about how you can't model experience, but you can't really model weapons either, who knows how they will work and what the hit rate will be, but you need to go on some thing so its an estimation. When you play any game on the computer you are living in the programmers' reality , if your reading a novel you are in the writes reality. Its a game, and the more settings you have on it you can do what you want to with it.

[incredibletwo]

Post --DELETED--

[incredibletwo]

ORIGINAL: Apocal

ORIGINAL: incredibletwo

Hopefully in a future interation it can also be disabled if the player so chooses. Other than that, I'm happy

Don't need to disable it: if the scenario designer leaves them both at default, you get what we have now.

That was my point. Say the scenario designer doesn't leave them at default, but has one side at Novice and the other at Ace, and a player wants both sides equal, then they should have the option of disabling the proficiency ratings. They shouldn't be forced to accept somebody else's subjective view/opinion of a nation's ability to wage war. I, for one, am more interested in how the platforms/systems/weapons, etc operate, not whether some AI sailor has been trained properly or is PO'd because he didn't get his ration of grog the day before. [:)]

[thewood1]

The scenario editor is so simple that it isn't that much more effort to change and save it. Granted it is probably 5 clicks vs 2/3, but I would hope the devs prioritize some fixes above that.

[mikmykWS]

Yes it very easy to change but perhaps we can look at it as a scenario option.

I'm actually curious to see how players start scoring certain countries etc.

Mike

[mrfeizhu]

First of all it would be good if ships had Proficiency Ratings too. I do not know how difficult that would be to implement. I would rate Russia, NATO , Japan, South Korea and Australia as regular. The U.S. as veteran They have more operational experience. Israel as Aces, The Israel air force may have the same or even less operational experience than the U.S. but they cant afforded to lose. China I would rate as Cadet, I have been living in China for the past 10 years, The way to succeed in China for party members ( all PLA officers are party members) is not to take risks. ( other than ways to make money) Party loyalty is the most important thing, if you are loyal to the party than you are loyal to your superior. Training is along party lines, no friendly fire accidents no damaged equipment. The closest thing China had to a war was deploying the PLA in after the Szechuan earth quake. The army despite the severity of the disaster did not fly at night ( but western and Russian pilots did) . I live near an Army helicopter base at night they don't fly, in bad weather they don't fly. India I would rate the same as China. The other countries in the developing world would be novice.
This is a game players should rate things the way they feel like and Proficiency Ratings are a very good feature the games has now.