The Stalingrad Withdrawal Decision

[cpt flam]

Hi RCH
as you i think that moral rather then changing by date would be better to fluctuate by losses
i don't know if this would be simple but anyway we are leaving stalingrad there
this méthod would be great for war in europe
excuse my words but not a native [&o]

[Tarhunnas]

ORIGINAL: Aurelian

Sounds like an Axis what if to me.

Better than a "what if".

So much for the "screw the Axis" refrain.

In normal play, those shells are unimportant by then, they are almost a disadvantage, as the Germans will have plenty of formations but not the ARM and manpower to fill them. OTOH if the German have suffered a major encirclement and need new units, those shells might come in handy.

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: RCH
Moral is very important.

I agree that morale is important but am not really sure how it should be dealt with in the game, because morale is a funny thing--usually it probably goes down when you are getting beaten, but on the other hand, when your back is to the wall, your morale might increase. Also, IIRC in the game morale is not just morale but a proxy for combat profiency, etc. How should all of that be reflected in the game? Personally, I have no idea, but I don't think it is as easy as suggesting that morale should be based on "battlefield resultts".

[Panzer Meyer]

If the game is intended to be historically accurate, then why allow the players to deviate from history at all. Personally I prefer when a game aims at historical probability instead. Allowing players to make their own decisions within the realms of reality. All that being said I do really enjoy this game and look forward to WiTW with baited breath.

[janh]

ORIGINAL: Panzer Meyer
If the game is intended to be historically accurate, then why allow the players to deviate from history at all. Personally I prefer when a game aims at historical probability instead. Allowing players to make their own decisions within the realms of reality.

As with any model, being meaningful (plausible, historical, whatever you want to call it) requires it to take "causality" into account. Neglecting possible implications as much as offering options that exceed a certain framework will both lead to a fantasy game. This is where both the freedom of design as well as the art of properly approximating things come in.

The catch is, that whenever speculating about history (aka playing the game), there are no unambiguous, undoubtable conclusions about such possibilities, one way or another. There is some leeway there as to your personal opinion. Just imagine for a moment Midway hadn't happened, but it were in outcome in WitP-AE, however small the possibility. We'd have terrible discussions on whether this is plausible, accurate or even historically possible.

Alternatively just imagine you'd break causality and restrict the Soviet side to a fixed reinforcement scheme including "new builds" of units that were historically destroyed. You might think that would be historically accurate, but given that you in principle can't know what units were destroyed in a particular game, you would be adding "doubles of existing units" without taking account the fact that they were rebuilds for a reason. For all decisions there are reasons, and you have to use your judgement to recreate these reasons, or approximate them, if necessary. If things happen out of nowhere or even contrary to the original reasoning, for example if ToE changes happen that were originally a consequence of shortages, but these shortages don't apply to your particular game, you are entering fantasy as much as you would with allowing the player to build the Me-262 by hundreds before the jet-propulsion was developed. A good model takes into account causalities in some way or another. The only catch is that devs have limited time and resources, so they have to make a cut somewhere. It is their art to find the right balance, or right approximations. So far aside from a few aspects such as the ToE changes late war, the devs seem to have done their job quite well.

[TulliusDetritus]

ORIGINAL: janh
Alternatively just imagine you'd break causality and restrict the Soviet side to a fixed reinforcement scheme including "new builds" of units that were historically destroyed. You might think that would be historically accurate, but given that you in principle can't know what units were destroyed in a particular game, you would be adding "doubles of existing units" without taking account the fact that they were rebuilds for a reason.

I guess to avoid "double" units you could have scheduled withdrawals. In fact in WitP AE you can have the CV Yorktown (first one) and then the CV Yorktown II (Essex class), if you manage to preserve the original ship. In the real thing the II would have been obviously given another name.

Let's say the 122 Rifle Division was historically destroyed during august 1941. On the game the unit should be witdrawn let's say in august or september or october (to keep flexibility and not tie the player). Then it would come back at its historical date of recreation. If this division fought during the whole war, then it should be auto-magically rebuilt (just like the German units).

In WitP AE there are hundreds of units that have to be withdrawn. Not that they were destroyed though, right.

[TulliusDetritus]

Here it is more clear: a withdrawal date AND when they will be back. As per history that is! [8D]

[janh]

ORIGINAL: TulliusDetritus
I guess to avoid "double" units you could have scheduled withdrawals. In fact in WitP AE you can have the CV Yorktown (first one) and then the CV Yorktown II (Essex class), if you manage to preserve the original ship. In the real thing the II would have been obviously given another name.

Let's say the 122 Rifle Division was historically destroyed during august 1941. On the game the unit should be witdrawn let's say in august or september or october (to keep flexibility and not tie the player). Then it would come back at its historical date of recreation. If this division fought during the whole war, then it should be auto-magically rebuilt (just like the German units).

In WitP AE there are hundreds of units that have to be withdrawn. Not that they were destroyed though, right.

Yes, you are right, sure, you can do that and you could certainly also develop other solutions. # But it wouldn't be the same as the flexibility the Soviet player has there now, i.e. rebuild if and only if it were to be destroyed, else option to build a new one at a cost later. Sounds more logical to me, and would match the Yorktown example you mention. In principle you could also develop a withdrawal schedule with certain conditions attached; ideas would surely be plentiful.

Certain "events" or "changes" have an underlying history, or logic that governed them, and you got always to question whether this thinking still applies or whether it is secondary in nature ("chrome"). Else you might start to enforce things that lead off somewhere else, but to a somewhere that would (likely -- as usual) not have occurred. I

[Aurelian]

ORIGINAL: Tarhunnas

ORIGINAL: Aurelian

Sounds like an Axis what if to me.

Better than a "what if".

So much for the "screw the Axis" refrain.

In normal play, those shells are unimportant by then, they are almost a disadvantage, as the Germans will have plenty of formations but not the ARM and manpower to fill them. OTOH if the German have suffered a major encirclement and need new units, those shells might come in handy.

If the game goes the way it did in history by the time they show, sure. But the point is that the Axis player gets them regardless. Plus the fact that they get to keep, as Trey says, scores of units that were disbanded in history.

Which goes to show just how baseless the oft repeated claim of pro Soviet bias by the disgruntled minority is.

[AFV]

ORIGINAL: Treale

So, if you want a "Fantasy" game why aren't you into SciFi games?

Just asking?

Options to increase playability do not make a game SciFi. WITE is still new, and still does not have options like this, like WITP-AE (you know, that other grand scale SciFi game?) Perhaps after a few years there will be options within WITE to increase playability, and the fun factor, for both sides.

[glvaca]

As explained, the problem with adding options is that they did not foresee the code to do so in the current software. Changing it costs time and effort which they rather spend on WITW.
It's not that they wouldn't want to add options, it's currently not possible.

[AFV]

glvaca:
I understand that, and agree with that. Again, perhaps in a few years they will be able to put more resources into WITE- which likely will become WITE-2 (and I would buy it). In no way did I mean I expected this to happen, for free, immediately.
My only point is that when (and if) it happens, WITE-2 would *not* be a Sci-Fi game. Just a divisional level eastern front game with options to increase re-playability.

[heliodorus04]

ORIGINAL: el hefe

First of all, before I go into the specifics, I am not going to get dragged down into a mud slinging heated debate over this. I am simply presenting the facts of this contested issue and the factors behind it.

1. Why is the German player punished by having the entire 6th Army withdraw when it was destroyed around the end of January 1943?

A. The German player is not being punished for the 6th Army being destroyed. The German player has to deal with the siphoning off of combat resources to the Western and Italian Fronts. It just happens that these resources belonged to units that were rebuilding from the shattered 6th Army and sent to Italy in the summer of 1943. There are numerous other examples of units destroyed in pockets that are not withdrawn. The forces destroyed in Bagration and The Rumanian Iasi-Khisinev operation are also not withdrawn from the game because they were destroyed. The ONLY reason for a unit being withdrawn from the game is if that unit got re-deployed to another theater. If there is a unit in the game that gets withdrawn and it should not be, by all means let me know. I think it is a reasonable design decision that the OKH player have resources withdrawn as part of a multi-front conflict. Now the method in which this has been implemented is debatable. I personally prefer the holding box method which is being implemented in WitW.

B. Not all of the 6th Army units destroyed are withdrawn in the game. Here is a list which shows seven of the twenty divisions get withdrawn to other theaters. Notice that the 6th Army does not go *Poof* on 31 January 1943.

44th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
71st Infantry Division - withdraws 12 August 1943 to Italy
76th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
79th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
94th Infantry Division - withdraws 15 April 1943 to Italy
100th Jager Division - no withdrawal
113th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
295th Infantry Division - withdraws 22 July 1943 to Norway
297th Infantry Division - withdraws 17 June 1943 to Serbia
305th Infantry Division - withdraws 11 March 1943 to Italy
371st Infantry Division - no withdrawal
376th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
384th Infantry Division - no withdrawal
389th Infantry Division - no withdrawal

3rd Motorized Division - withdraws 27 May 1943 to Italy
29th Motorized Division - withdraws 20 May 1943 to Italy
60th Motorized Division - withdraws 27 May 1943 but rebuild as the FHH PzG Division so really not a withdrawal

14th Panzer Division - no withdrawal
16th Panzer Division - no withdrawal
24th Panzer Division - no withdrawal

C. The "Replacement Army Assumption". There is a circulated belief that if these units were not destroyed at Stalingrad, then the replacement army would have shipped other formations to the West and Italy with manpower that was not used to rebuild the shattered 6th Army. This is an assumption at best and one that is clearly an unknown. Germany was loathe to make any manpower adjustment unless a crisis forced the administration to make changes. You can look at the Barbarossa Plan - 250k replacements planned for the operation with over a million sustained losses through January 1942. It wasn't until December-January 1942 that Hitler agreed to move a portion workers from the factories and into combat units. Losses dictated that homeland defense flak units were manned by teenagers. It took the diasters of Bagration, Iasi, and Normandy in the Summer of 1944 for the Germans to finally ruthlessly comb through their bloated Armed Forces manpower to get the needed manpower to the combat units. This is obviously a highly debatable topic with merits on both sides of the argument. The fact is that it is unknown what would have happened if the Stalingrad diaster did not occur. Would Germany have sent other units? Don't know. Would Germany have sent even more units in an attempt to utterly crush the landings since it had the extra assets available? Again, dunno. In the end, the developers choose the rout in which the German player would have to feel the strain of commitments to other fronts and I don't feel that is unreasonable.

Trey

Any single decision removed from the full scope of gameplay becomes an exercise in biased historic discussion.

When you ask a-historical questions, you get conjecture. We can never know what Germany would have done in 1943 regarding creating units without the surrender at Stalingrad. War in the East is forcing Germany to do the exact thing it did historically. The Soviet side, by contrast, is never forced to keep its Corps HQs, it's not forced to a set number of cavalry corps (and these have a dramatic impact on the game in 1942 onward). But Germany is FORCED to remove specific units at specific times that match a history that varies as soon as one starts a game.

It's not the major point of this issue that Germany withdrew stuff from the Eastern Front. It's the major point of how those withdrawals are designed.

The point is that specific units must leave the game on a set schedule, and the loss of specific units can have a much more dramatic effect on the German player than people are discussing. I pick the Stalingrad divisions as a point of discussion because it becomes easy to see the handicap you're forcing on Germany. Well, it should be, but for many, it does not.

The point of debate in gameplay is this:
Germany can be forced to remove its best morale units, forever changing the nature of its fighting ability.

The superior design decision is to allow Germany to remove units of his choosing. Another superior design is simply to affect the reinforcement levels available to the eastern front, which more accurately represents the abstract western front stuff that is to be represented by withdrawals.

This game forces Germany on to rails that ensure its Army's degradation can be predicted irrespective of in game performance. The German player is not in control of his army's capabilities to the same degree that the Soviet is. The Soviet side can optimize his army at every step of the way. Meanwhile, if the German player is out-performing his historical predecessor, he is forced into things that make sure his superior performance is blunted.

Whether it is the withdrawals of units that surrendered at Stalingrad, which is an easy point around which to crucify the unequal treatment of the two sides' gameplay, or whether it's the January 194x drops in National Morale, or whether it's the TOEs that change at arbitrary points, removing hundreds of armored vehicles and/or artillery pieces from the map and putting them into pools, Germany is hand-cuffed. Germany fights with handcuffs. The Soviet fights with NATO levels of organization and command.

I'm sorry you don't understand my point. I feel it's very simple to understand.

War in the East forces the German player to fight with historical handicaps while it frees the Soviet from terrible inefficiencies as soon as the game starts. The Soviet can improve his force dramatically over his predecessor. Germany will have a superior force (over history) slapped down arbitrarily.

It's that simple.

There are other ways to handle it. Rather, there were if Matrix were interested in supporting War in the East, but it's made its money from the product, and it's moving on.

If you feel German gameplay is 'fair' then by all means, ignore my points of debate. But if you feel German gameplay is fair compared to the Soviet, then I conclude your biases impugn your ability to debate.

You want to talk about history.
I want to talk about gameplay consequences.

The problem with trying to found any of YOUR points on history is that the a-historical stuff in War in the East is easy to highlight (cough: Soviet airfield bombing capabilities), and any discussion founded on history can be undermined by the unequal treatment of other historical points. You can never win an argument of this type. I can match any point of history by two points of abandonment of history.

[heliodorus04]

I guess the question that comes to me is this:

What reason would you have to oppose an alternate system to German unit withdrawal?

Why would you oppose giving the German player the choice of which unit to withdraw, even if you force withdrawals at the specific times for things that may not happen, like Demyansk (totenkopf withdrew much later than the other SS) and Stalingrad?

If you don't oppose it, you should advocate it.
If you do oppose it, odds are you're biased at forcing Germany downward arbitrarily even if that side's gameplay justifies a superior Wehrmacht at that time and place in the time continuum.

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: heliodorus04
If you don't oppose it, you should advocate it.
If you do oppose it, odds are you're biased at forcing Germany downward arbitrarily even if that side's gameplay justifies a superior Wehrmacht at that time and place in the time continuum.

Would you please give it a rest? There are lots of reasons why people might oppose this, or not.

I do not oppose it, but I see no reason to advocate it either, because it would take programming effort from things that I consider much more important, such as re-programming the combat and logistics mechanics.

Similarly, if I did oppose it, there is absolutely no reason to think that I--any more than the developers--have a problem with this particular game design decision.

[Flaviusx]

I'm plain indifferent about this whole brouhaha, but admit to not understanding why people are so het up about it. Units are fungible. If the withdrawal schedule were changed to some generic form what material difference would this make? The change would be purely cosmetic.

[heliodorus04]

ORIGINAL: 76mm

ORIGINAL: heliodorus04
If you don't oppose it, you should advocate it.
If you do oppose it, odds are you're biased at forcing Germany downward arbitrarily even if that side's gameplay justifies a superior Wehrmacht at that time and place in the time continuum.

Would you please give it a rest? There are lots of reasons why people might oppose this, or not.

I do not oppose it, but I see no reason to advocate it either, because it would take programming effort from things that I consider much more important, such as re-programming the combat and logistics mechanics.

Similarly, if I did oppose it, there is absolutely no reason to think that I--any more than the developers--have a problem with this particular game design decision.

Note, I did not start the thread.
You only tell ME to give it a rest. There were two pages of posts you felt fine reading and ignoring.
Biased.
Next...

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

I'm plain indifferent about this whole brouhaha, but admit to not understanding why people are so het up about it. Units are fungible. If the withdrawal schedule were changed to some generic form what material difference would this make? The change would be purely cosmetic.

The difference would mean that you can hand-choose which units leave the map and which stay, ensuring high morale units stay in theater. If you do not understand what difference this will make to German gameplay, you shouldn't be entrusted to beta test such products as these. I mean that in all seriousness. If you are so fallow-minded that you can't think through this very simple exercise, then I was wrong to place any esteem in your opinions.

[Flaviusx]

Okay, so what you want is a withdrawal system that allows you to cherrypick and keep the best divisions on the east front and send the trash somewhere else. Sounds a bit gamey to me, but whatever.

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: heliodorus04

You only tell ME to give it a rest. There were two pages of posts you felt fine reading and ignoring.
Biased.
Next...

haha, brilliant response...the reason I told you to give it a rest and ignored the other posts is that you are the only one that goes on and on and on about bias this or bias that. Earth to Heliodorus--not all poor game design decisions (or forum posts) stem from bias.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I don't consider myself to favor one side or the other in the game, so I don't have an axe to grind in this debate. After giving it some consideration, it seems to me that this was by in large a reasonable design decision/compromise by the developers.

While I agree that more flexability would be better, I have to agree with 76mm that this improvement would be rather far down on my wish list.

With regards to the complaint that this forces the Germans to give up some of their best units (as opposed I suppose cherry-picking from the worst units), isn't it the case that the Germans generally deployed a higher concentration of "better" divisions against the western allies? Presumably, this was to counter the better quality of the western armies as opposed to the Soviets.

The Eastern Front does not exist in a vacuum. While the Russians have no second front to worry about, we have to presume that no matter how well the Germans are doing in the East, historical events are going on in the West forcing depoyment of similar quality assets from the east or from the pools. WADR I don't see the exact source of these redeployments as that hugely important.