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Map changes ...

* Gibraltar now has a one hexside border with Spain (the border is actually less than a klick wide, a two hexisde border is ridiculous) and the beach has been removed (there is no way anyone could have launched an amphibious assault against the sheer cliffs on one side and the tiny beaches backed by slightly less sheer cliffs on the other in anything resembling reality).

* The southern railway line that connects the Portuguese system with the Spanish line south of Seville and the Guadalquivir didn't exist as far as my 1939 reference maps indicate, so it turns south to a new Port on the coast alongside the mouth of the river, Faro, terminating there.

* The southern border between Spain and Portugal runs along the Guadalquivir to the sea, with the river forming the border ... the Spanish hex on the actually Portuguese side of the river has been returned to Portugal.

* All rail connections remaining between Portugal and Spain have been turned into roads on the Portuguese side of the border to represent the logistical problems of the limited capacity of both countries rail nets AND the fact that there was a gauge change at the border necessitating all cargoes having to be unloaded and then reloaded.

* Rail connections between Spain and France have, likewise, been turned into roads on the Spanish side of the border to, again, represent the different rail gauges the Spanish RRs ran and the need for unloading/reloading.

* Minefields along the English coast which seem to be placed alongside random coastal hexes for no obvious reason have been moved to protect Aberdeen, Hull, Newcastle and Edinburgh and Wick (and I am considering replacing them with appropriately placed coastal defence installations) and new ones placed to protect Bristol.

Southampton and Plymouth are given Coastal defence installations on their approach hexes to represent the actual coastal guns etc that were historically located around them.

Note: The Niehorster OOBs give the UK many more units, some of which seem to have been located near to where random plain terrain coastal hexes were protected by Minefields, so if they were placed to represent that, now the Brits have actual units to do the job.

* The two hexes SW and S of Oslo now have Coastal Defence installations, as they did historically ... since Mines seem to prevent movement entirely (so far as I have checked) this seems to represent historical reality better than no defences at all.

* Brest Litovsk is now an all round Fortress hex using the Fortress type found in Tunisia near the Libyan Border ... I am not sure whether this should be upgraded to a more effective all round fortress, but, historically, it was a much harder nut to crack than just level 2 entrenchments represent.

* The Belgian hex South of Liege has been given a Maginot fortress along the NNE and SNW hexsides to represent the Belgian river fortifications.

* ALL the hexes surrounding Bern are now fortress hexes, representing the Swiss national redoubt.

* Geneva,a 1 Green circle city with AA defences like Bern is now corectly placed in 148, 45, SSE of lake instead of where (I think) Besancon should be (and that hex has been renamed from Geneva TO Besancon).

A RR line now runs through Geneva to connect with the line between Lyon and Turin.

* Istanbul is now a road hex between the RR lines on either side of the city, to represent the delay in shipping over the Golden Horn. I'd like to turn the single River hexside into one facing each of the land hexsides, but there isn't a suitable one in the palette.

* There is now a coastal highway running between Istanbul along the Black Sea coast to the Russian Border.

* The RR line hexes on the Turkish side of the Syrian border have been replaced by road hexes to represent the EXTREMELY limited RR capacity of the Syrian RR net.

* The RR line hex connecting the Iraqi RR with Syria has likewise been changed, for the same reason.

* The RR line running up the eastern side of the Tigris has been changed to a road, as my 1939 maps indicate the only RR in Iraq was the one running alongside the Euphrates.

* Hex 212, 15 has been made British territory with an airbase and one point of AA as Habaniyah, the major British base in Iraq, which held out against the 3? 4? Divisions of the 'Golden Square' when the Iraqis tried to go over to Germany. It is connected by road to Baghdad.

* The road to Amman in Jordan now runs from Haditha to the Jordanian/Iraqi border, the correct historical route.

* Aquaba is now connected to the RR line that terminates in the middle of nowhere to the NE on the Saudi border. The connection is a road one.

* I am considering whether the RR through Port Said connecting the Egyptian RR net with the one running through Palestine should be converted to a road hex to represent the delay in trans-shipping across the canal.

* The RR line hexes south of Damascus in Syria connecting to the Transjordanian and Palestinian lines are now road hexes, representing the EXTREMELY limited capacity of the Syrian RR net.

There are probably other changes I have made that I have missed listing, and I will probably find more that I wish to add as I go along.

Phil McGregor

Wow...
You are investing a lot a time and effort here.
Obviously you see great potential in WarPlan and love the concept. (As I do).

Alvaro, you have done something right. [:D]

WoW +1

Yep. I think Alvaro has done an extremely good job with the bones of Warplan ... all I am doing is modifying things to meet my preference for an as close to historical situation as possible.

It will not be everyone's cup of tea, but, as I said elsewhere, victory in WW2 European games should be determined by Victory Conditions that measure how much less badly the Germans and Italians lose (or how much longer they survive than they did historically before they lose).

Reality Check is that from August 1945 mushroom clouds start to appear over German cities and the Germans had no chance whatsoever of matching that.

But, like I said, not everyone's cup of tea.

Phil McGregor

A "Reality Check" cannnot be made from historical situations, when you see that as your present time.
There are a lot of "what ifs" involved and the prognosis to see atomic explosion in Germany is very vague.
If Stalin had made peace in 1943, if the battle of Britain went otherwise, the allied intervened in Finland, etc., etc., then no D-day would have been occured and the stategic bombing would have ended fast. 80% of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe in the west would have changed anything.
Maybe, probably...who knows.

Therefore it is quite understandable, that Alvaro tried to make a wargame without to much interferrence from diplomacy or special events.
Otherwise, Pandora`s box would be opened. [8|]

But nevertheless I am a big fan, of seeing accurate maps, historical resources and developments. [:)]

Thus why I made things moddable.

I am also tinkering with the map, just for kicks. More specific the Netherlands and Germany (North Sea coast). It now looks something like this:



Not pretending this is the ideal layout for this area, but I think it resembles reality a little more. All very rough ofcourse, but still.

I'm guessing that both players (multiplayer) have to be playing with the same map modification …..

What about weather display changes ? Hoping not …..

ORIGINAL: Meteor2
A "Reality Check" cannnot be made from historical situations, when you see that as your present time.

Well, depends on what you mean by a 'reality check'.

If you mean that, inevitably in a wargame the players have 20:20 hindsight and will not make the same 'mistakes' (or what they consider to be 'mistakes') as those originally involved, sure. There's no way to entirely represent that short of railroading things ... and I am not trying to do that.

However, that said, placing the players in the exact same initial deployments (perhaps with some minor variability) and creating the exact same geographical, physical and diplomatic constraints they historically operated under is, I believe, something that should be done.

A classic example of what annoys me was with HoI ... there was an oil resource placed in Yugoslavia. And when I questioned the devs about it, they simply said 'Oh, it's needed for game balance ... otherwise the Germans would run out of fuel.'

On that sort of basis I could reasonably have replied, 'Then you should place extra food and oil resources in the UK because otherwise the Brits might run out of food and fuel!'

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, in effect.

ORIGINAL: Meteor2
There are a lot of "what ifs" involved and the prognosis to see atomic explosion in Germany is very vague.

Actually, if you study WW2 history, especially the economic/logistical side of it, then, no, there are really no 'what ifs' that make the likelihood of atomic explosions over Germany 'very vague', but which do make them certain if the war had continued.

See, the US B-29 program (needed to deliver the Atom Bomb, though, of course, they didn't know it at the time) was a pre-war program and the aircraft was intended to be able to bomb mainland Europe from bases in North America (heck, even the B-17 was intended to be able to do that, but with a smaller bomb load, not enough for an A-Bomb, than it carried from bases in the UK and North Africa). So the planes were always going to be ready.

Then there's the reality that the allies managed to create and run three programs of approximately the same size (economic/resource allocation) as the Atomic Bomb program - the A Bomb program (running several parallel programs to see what best worked, including different refining methods and different bomb types), the Liberty/Victory Ship program and and the B-29 program.

How did they manage this? Easy - the US economy alone was several times the size of the Germany economy, and more advanced overall to boot. With the Commonwealth economy added, which was bigger than the German one by itself, they had the resources to throw at these sorts of things.

The Germans, on the other hand, managed to commit equivalent resources to only one such program ... the V Weapon program. They simply didn't have the spare resources to run more, so, for example, I suppose they could have tried running an A-Bomb program but then they would have had no way of delivering it (having no suitable aircraft with the bombload).

And, of course, the Allied A-Bomb program was signed into law on 6/12/41, while the German atomic research program had been sidelined since way before the start of the war because the resources were needed, oh, to build the tanks and trucks the Wehrmacht needed and the planes the Luftwaffe needed to attack Poland and the France ... and, more interestingly, to produce the munitions needed for the expected expenditure during those campaigns.

So the Allies were always going to have the A-Bomb and the means to deliver it before the Germans even had an inkling.

ORIGINAL: Meteor2
If Stalin had made peace in 1943, if the battle of Britain went otherwise, the allied intervened in Finland, etc., etc.,

Under the circumstances, unless the Germans had, say, taken all of Russia to the Urals (and maybe not even then), Stalin ... or, frankly, any Soviet leader, wasn't ever going to make peace with the Germans. There was no survival in doing that ... remember, right from the get go the German plan was to provide Lebensraum in the east by exterminating the existing population, and they began implementing those plans from the get go of Barbarossa.

The best the Germans could hope for was some sort of armistice ... which would, from the Russian perspective, have only been to give them breathing space to rebuild ... the Germans simply didn't have the resources to conquer all of Russia and never did.

As for the Battle of Britain, the British won handily, and that victory was never in doubt. Never.

The RAF committed only 55% of its fighter strength to the areas of SE and SW England the Germans were able to reach with escorted Bomber forces. The remaining 45% remained outside of the range of said German forces and could have been committed at any time, but wasn't because it simply wasn't needed to be.

Pretty much every month during the BoB the Germans lost more aircraft and, more tellingly, more Pilots, than the RAF and the RAF strength (in Pilots and aircraft) was increasing more rapidly than German strength ... and was always going to because they had more resources to commit to producing aircraft than the Germans and more resources committed to training aircrew as well.

A lot of myths have arisen around the BoB, but the British actually won handily ... and they even knew it by 1941, but the full extent of the level of their victory wasn't known till German data could be accessed after the war.

(Tooze's book cited in the Warplan manual is interesting here, as are several of Overy's books on the air war).

As for Allied intervention in Finland, well, that was a sideshow at best. The Allies had no real way of intervening and, even if they had, there was not likely to be a much better outcome than was the case historically. The Finns simply outmatched the Russians and there was no real way of changing that short of killing off Stalin before he stages the Purges ... and, if you do that, there is no reason to believe that his replacement would be as stupid as to emasculate the army or to ignore his intelligence sources that kept him informed of German intentions.

ORIGINAL: Meteor2
,,, then no D-day would have been occured and the stategic bombing would have ended fast. 80% of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe in the west would have changed anything.

Well, no D-Day in the way that happened historically, or at the site that it happened at historically.

Did you know that one of the variations of Olympic-Coronet (the invasion of the Home Islands of Japan) was for the US to carpet bomb the region around the chosen landing sites with multiple atomic weapons and then have their invasion forces steamroller through the affected zones in halftracks and trucks 'protected' by canvas tarps?

(Yeah, we know now this would have been ... bad, in the long term, for the allied soldiers ... but no-one knew that at the time)

So, yes, something like D-Day would have occurred somewhere, with A-Bombs involved if necessary ...

ORIGINAL: Meteor2
Therefore it is quite understandable, that Alvaro tried to make a wargame without to much interference from diplomacy or special events.
Otherwise, Pandora`s box would be opened. [8|]

But nevertheless I am a big fan, of seeing accurate maps, historical resources and developments. [:)]

I understand the attraction ... while I am quite happy to 'win' by simply losing more slowly as the Axis powers, I understand that many less serious players (the vast majority of the likely audience!), want something more like a 'victory' ... even though it was historically impossible.

Phil McGregor

Mr. McGregor,

Fascinating summary. I would add the Enigma and multiple Bombes the US built for the Allies, plus 2 million motor vehicle, 200,000 planes and I was just looking at the ship construction numbers. What amuses me about there are soft factors. Einstein wrote FDR a letter about an A bomb which FDR took seriously because of FDR's assessment of Hitler's derangement. If WW2 doesn't happen without Hitler then that determines the nature of the Allied reaction. (I don't know that the Japanese would have attacked Pearl Harbor without the Western Allies being distracted by Nazi Germany). Alvaro's game seems potentially flexible enough

Perhaps the game needs the drama that the Axis could win even if that wasn't the case. so gamers need to be immersed in a state of disbelief not merely presented with a historical version and a balanced version, which would seem the obvious way to present starting points.

I would like to have these maps thank you very much.

I'll make the map available when I have things down more finely ... I think I will probably change the Netherlands to conform to *some* of the changes done by PanzerMike shown above, for example, and I haven't yet looked at the USSR and Finland for anomalies that may need to be corrected.

Phil McGregor

Well, been tinkering some more with Benelux/NW German coast. This is the latest version:





Mind you, I do not think I will do a grand map mod. Just a a little exercise.

Hello aspqrz02,

thanks for the unexpected and long answer to my post.

With an age of 59 I have read enough, to fully understand your answers, but the only thing I was trying to say was, that we are often very quick in seeing only
one way in history, because we have enough facts now to judge the past.
But beside all the hard facts (e. g. lack of oil for the Axis), there are always political judgements and decisions which may have lead to other outcomes, if decided otherwise.
In our present time the future is made by the decisions made today and they are based on our current knowledge and assumptions.
If Churchill had not been elected for Prime Minister, maybe Britain and Germany had negotiated a peace in 1940, with all the unknown consequences for the future...
If Hitler had not invaded Poland in 1939, maybe Europe would be dominated by Germany today or by the SU, if Stalin had invaded western Europe in 43...

Therefore I said, that I am fine, that Pandora´s box was not opened in WarPlan and your plan to modify some basics is a welcome alternative (for me at least).
I really am looking forward to your mod.

That said, I have to confess, I love SC3 with the event system, that allows some "flexibility". [:D]

Antwerp wont work as a port in the above picture it is land locked now. You need a non-full tile to touch an ocean tile or another non-full tile for it to work as a port. Right now it looks like a full tile.

ORIGINAL: Meteor2

Hello aspqrz02,

thanks for the unexpected and long answer to my post.

With an age of 59 I have read enough, to fully understand your answers, but the only thing I was trying to say was, that we are often very quick in seeing only
one way in history, because we have enough facts now to judge the past.
But beside all the hard facts (e. g. lack of oil for the Axis), there are always political judgements and decisions which may have lead to other outcomes, if decided otherwise.
In our present time the future is made by the decisions made today and they are based on our current knowledge and assumptions.
If Churchill had not been elected for Prime Minister, maybe Britain and Germany had negotiated a peace in 1940, with all the unknown consequences for the future...
If Hitler had not invaded Poland in 1939, maybe Europe would be dominated by Germany today or by the SU, if Stalin had invaded western Europe in 43...

Therefore I said, that I am fine, that Pandora´s box was not opened in WarPlan and your plan to modify some basics is a welcome alternative (for me at least).
I really am looking forward to your mod.

That said, I have to confess, I love SC3 with the event system, that allows some "flexibility". [:D]

Well put, hindsight is always 20/20 and the outcome predetermined - at least on paper.

ORIGINAL: Alvaro Sousa

Antwerp wont work as a port in the above picture it is land locked now. You need a non-full tile to touch an ocean tile or another non-full tile for it to work as a port. Right now it looks like a full tile.

I think you are right. Besides that little problem, do you also think the position of Emden (port 4?), moving Germany's border slightly to the west and the introduction the Eems estuary (at which Emden is located) is an improvement? If not, please tell me why.

Emden seems to have an historical inclusion as a viable seaport so its addition would be accurate.

ORIGINAL: PanzerMike

ORIGINAL: Alvaro Sousa

Antwerp wont work as a port in the above picture it is land locked now. You need a non-full tile to touch an ocean tile or another non-full tile for it to work as a port. Right now it looks like a full tile.

I think you are right. Besides that little problem, do you also think the position of Emden (port 4?), moving Germany's border slightly to the west and the introduction the Eems estuary (at which Emden is located) is an improvement? If not, please tell me why.

It's all a matter of your taste. Just look at a map and do what you think is best for your mod.

ORIGINAL: Meteor2


If Churchill had not been elected for Prime Minister, maybe Britain and Germany had negotiated a peace in 1940, with all the unknown consequences for the future...

Churchill wasn't elected in 1940, he was appointed, partially because the other possible choice, Lord Halifax, did not press his case.

Another credible what-if is the failure of the Dunkirk evacuation, which was very likely if the Panzer Halt order had not been confirmed by Hitler.

It is possible that Britain may have negotiated a peace with the Axis in 1940, but without that event German defeat became inevitable, especially after the unnecessary DOW against the USA.

There are credible 'what-ifs' for the early war years to avoid stale repetition and this game has the flexibly to allow for them.