WAllied Production

[Uncle_Joe]

On the whole, the game does a wonderful job of recreating the various Power's strengths and weaknesses. Japan has a terrible time fielding a large enough Army and the WAllies tend to have Supply and Research coming out their ears!

But one thing that I have noticed consistantly is how huge of a ground force the WAllies build up by 44 and on. The number of tanks, guns, and infantry they have is usually more than the Russians! To me, that seems fairly out of whack as the Russians had an order of magnitude more actual troops in Europe than the Allies did.

I believe the culprit in this case is the Population system. The same two pop points that would put a Transport unit or a Fighter unit in the field can also be an Infantry or an Armor, although I believe the manpower requirements for the latter two would be significantly higher. The Russians are bottlenecked in Production Points most of the time (unless they only want Militia, which seems incorrect for the '44 on Russian military). The WAllies have lesser Population (but not by much when including US and UK), but essentially unlimited Production Points. In the end, the WAllies are fielding more actual ground troops than any of the other Powers.

I would have no problems with the WAllies having absolute dominance in numbers of Aircraft and Fleets (especially Transport). But the huge numbers of Infantry and Tanks seems out of place.

It is most likely far too late to change something this much, but would it be possible to experiment with altering the pop costs for various units? I'm thinking that even if only Transport were lowered to 1 pop, the WAllies could have their pop levels lowered a tad without unduly straining their 'historical' production capacities. Ideally, I think Air units in general should have lower pop requirements, but its already quite possible as the WAllies to have 20+ Heavy Bombers leveling Germany's infrastructure and defenses every turn. I dont think it would be a good idea to do anything to allow even MORE bomber production...

At any rate, this is just some food for thought. Is there any rationale for why the WAllies end up with more troops on the ground than the Russians? I suppose you could always think of each WAllied unit as a Division or even a Brigade-level force while the Russians are Armies or Corps. That helps explain some of it, I suppose, but it still feels a bit strange.

Has anyone seen many games where the WAllies DONT end up with nearly the most Infantry/Tanks?

[Graymane]

I think with the level of game we are playing (less detail, more generalities) that you have to accept some tradeoffs. I don't think fiddling with the production figures is going to give you what you want. The only way I can think of is to artificially cap the number that is buildable each year. That way you can at least show the ramp up.

[PeterF]

The off/def value of the Russian inf units, for example, is only a bit less than the German ones and roughly equal to the Allied unit through 1943. IIRC, the historical casualty rate in Russia was 3-1 or greater in favor of the Germans during most of the war. Therefore, one might suppose, the Russian inf icon represents more men, perhaps an army versus a corps.

[Uncle_Joe]

Yeah, thats the way I've taken to rationalizing it.

I'm just curious if that was the intention or if (as Graymane mentioned), its simply beyond the scope of what the game is intended to be.

[Dalwin]

While I agree that it does seem that the WA has too many ground units when compared to the Russians historically, "an order of magnitude"??

I don't think the Russians had anywhere near 10 times the Allied force in Europe at the end of the war.

[celebrindal]

Don't forget the numbering system of army/corps size russian/u.s. are off by a factor of 10 or 100... historically speaking.

[Graymane]

The Russians had approximately a 5-1 advantage over the WA by the end of the war (roughly 500 to 140 divisions give or take). This doesn't include the roughly 15 billion given in lend-lease (mostly in the form of supplies and food) that allowed the Russians to concentrate on infantry and armor. We can argue about the exact numbers and what they mean, but the major problem in modelling ANY WW 2 game is how to treat the US since it is very, very hard to make a good war game that is also historically accurate (the US, for example, had roughly 5x the industrial capacity of Europe by the end of WW2 and produced/used 50% of all weapons/bullets/arms/etc during the war. That is a very big distorting effect on any modelling). The major problem is that the US contributed relatively little to the war effort (little in percent terms compared to what an all out effort would have been) compared to what each of the major countries contributed so it throws off everything. But they DID contribute in the weapons of war (supplies, food, tanks, planes, bullets, bombs, artillery, etc) but only field roughly 90 divisions by the end of the war.

[Uncle_Joe]

Yeah, I seem to recall the Russians having 500+ Rifle Division alone. That doesnt include Armor, Corps level Arty and independent Brigades. And this was all in Europe at war's end. They had a lot more on the Manchurian front as well.

The US had considerably less in Europe at the end of WWII. Between them, the Brits, Canadians, Free French and what not, its still probably not much of an exageration to say that the Russian had nearly 10x as much in men on the ground. Again, I dont remember the exact numbers, but the Russians had an awful lot more tanks and guns as well.

Of course, as Graymane stated, Russia didnt have to produce anywhere near as much in the realm of Trucks/Jeeps/Prime Movers and supplies because of Lend Lease. That left them to really only need to produce actual combat units.

I think all of this is well reflected in the game except for the amount of WAllied ground troops which just seem inordinately high. Again, this is not a game-breaker, but an oddity that I thought might be worth asking about.

[Dalwin]

One problem of course is that with so much industry, the U.S. can really distort things if they change the balance of how much air/navy they are building vs land units.

I think the original poster put his finger on it when he mentioned population constraints. It is a nice simple game mechanic to have every unit cost 2 pop points. Is it reasonable, however, for 2 capital ships plus their escorts to require the same amount of manpower as an infantry corps?


EDIT: Also, I don't like to put too much stock in numbers of divisions for making the comparison. Soviet divisions were always much smaller than their Western counterparts. I am sure that the game takes this into account by a Soviet infantry point representing more divisions that are represented by other nations units.

Furthermore, toward the end of the war, Stalin was playing some of the same numbers games that Hitler was. Keeping horribly depleted divisions on the map as divisions even though their effective strength was much less. Propaganda was not exclusively a Nazi tool.

[Graymane]

Yes, it is definately the MP doing it. In a simple model like this though, it will be hard to change since it is also tied to resource points for construction. Maybe a solution is to double the MP for infantry and double the Russian MP and no one elses.

[Delphinium]

Were the supposed 500+ Rifle divisions all full T+OE "Division" sized formations? This game is only giving a representation of the "fighting strength" of an army/front sized force. I've played the Russains more than any other nation and I don't have a problem with the absolute size of force I can deploy, the biggest problem I often get is getting it all into Germany in time given transport bottlenecks.

[Uncle_Joe]

No, as mentioned above, a number of those divisions would not have been at full strength (or even near it).

However even accounting for that, there were still MANY more Russia ground troops than WAllies. And by '44, they were a more or less cohesive, battle-hardened force. Sure the tactics were unflexible, but operationally, the Russians were pretty advanced.

But the more I play, the more I'm convinced that you really just have to consider units as different sizes. I mean China probably had quite a few men under arms, but in the game the actual number of units is quite low.

So, a 'unit' might represent 20000 Chinese troops or 10000 Russians or 5000 WAllies. Who knows?

At any rate, I suppose its not really all that relevant. The game works as it is, so I guess its just a matter of rationalizing the units.

[PDiFolco]

I think the problem is what is meant by "population points" ... Obviously it should represent the pool of draftable people, but it doesn't depend only on pop count, but also in the "draft ratio" each country could afford according to its regime !
USSR, Japan and Germany drafted any possible man to keep up the biggest army they could. OTOH the WA -particularly USA- were much less "effective" and had a lower draft ratio.
So why just not lower the WA population points available, particularly in USA ? Overall they will build less units, but no less research or supplies. As they need a good number of transports , naval and air units, they will eventually field much less infantry/tanks, that's what we want [;)]

[paullus99]

Well, historically the Western Allies did not draft as many men as they possibly could (Hilter & his Generals were thinking D-Day would be on the scale of landing 90 Divisions, not the 9 - 12 that actually were used initially) & that would have been the case if the US had mobilized to the extent that it could have.

The US & Britain put a lot more resources into the Navy & Airforce in real life, but this game allows you to break that mold & build more ground forces if you want. I do find in my games as WA to always have less tanks & infantry than the Russians, because I know I need seapower & airpower to fight against German subs & the Japanese navy.

[carnifex]

Edit the data files and reduce the WA population a little bit. Now the WA will have to be more careful what they produce.

[Uncle_Joe]

Well, I dont think simply reducing the WAllied pop is necessarily a good idea without other changes (which at this point arent likely).

The WAllies should be able to churn out near unlimited amounts of planes, fleets, and transports. Reducing their pop means less of all of the above and instead, even more research...That would possibly mean earlier A-Bombs or earlier 'invulnerable' units simply because they have nothing else to do!

Part of the problem also seem to be that playing against the AI, the need to constanty replace mass numbers of transports is much lower. Against a human player, the WAllies WILL have to replaces them in mass numbers, so that should be the 'overhead' on the US pop that reduces the number of ground units available.

Overall, I was just looking to see if there was an 'easy fix' to cause the US to want to build more planes/fleets/transports rather than tanks/infantry/guns. I dont think their unit output in general is too high, just lopsided as to what is being produced. But since what they produce is going to be dependent on what the enemy kills, I think its probably OK as is when talking games between humans.