SMK-at-work
Posts: 3396
Joined: 8/28/2000 From: New Zealand Status: offline
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Some more thoughts: 1/ as I mentioned above, bombers should probably not be able to destroy bridges as they can in the game - rail repair was not something that was done by large groups of military engineers - it was done by gathering local resources - there would have been rail repair "units" across the entire map to cope with breakages. 2/ Moreover the importance of bridges completely undermines the importance of the rivers themselves as arteries of industry - the big rivers - Rhine, Elbe, Don, Dneipr, Volga - they were at least as important as any major rail line & it would be good if that could be factored in somehow - perhaps allow cargo ships to "work" along major rivers? 3/ I think level bombers are representing the wrong thing, and they and "dive" bombers should probably be rebadged as heavy and tactical bombers respectively. Then heavy bombers can be made very expensive to start research on, and Germany, Japan and the USSR should have to pay to get to level 1 - IMO something very expensive - 200pp might suffice. Tactical bombers are assumed to include light and medium level bombers - which if course must also make up most of that is in dive bomber SFT's now, since hte LW gets no LB's to start! 4/ The Nomonhon incident is totally a-historical - the real one was over before the invasion of Poland! I am sure we all know that it resulted in the discrediting of the "look north" faction that represented mainly Army interests, and the favouring of the "look south" that was mostly a Navy idea. I guess it is in there to ensure the Soviets devote some resources to the Far East as they did historically. Of course in the game if the Soviets are not restrained in some way they can just send their far east army westwards, which is not historical - they did send some troops, but overall kept over 20 Divisions in the far east - although in some respects they seem to have treated them as training cadres. They also took a lot of troops from the central Asian military districts who are usually also lumped in as "Siberians" in the popular literature. Of course we all know now (or at least I hope we do!) that the troops from the East were sent to various parts of the front, many of them were in action as early as October or November 1941, and the men who fought at Nomohon were discharged by the time Barbarossa started and were called to the colours in the Ukraine I think it was, quite early. The actual divisions that fought were never sent west. anyway - I digress.....of course the Soviets did not know that Japan was not going to invade, and possibly had they thought there was a chance of success the Kwangtung army may just have taken matters into heir own hands....or at least that is a vaguely reasonable hypothesis on which to base a game mechanism. However we also know that it was never going to happen! So I suggest that the output of the 2 cities over that way - Vladivostock & the other one I forget the name of - should be limited by the amount of troops on the border - that way the Soviets can be forced to devote something to the area, whether they want to or not. Similarly the Japanese should be forced to garrison Manchuko with the Kwangtung Army - and the output of, say, Mukden and Seoul can be penalised if they do not. If you want them to be able to declare war on each other it should cost a small fortune - say 200PP's...maybe 300. 5/ Lend lease - 50% of LL to the USSR came through Soviet Asia - mainly Vladivostok - US ships with Russian crews and flags carried it from the US East Coast, and aircraft were flown via Alaska. 25% went through Persia Only 25% went through the Murmansk convoys. So for every point you allow to arrive at Murmansk, you should allow 2 points to arrive at Vladivostok and 1 through the Caucasus! And if Murmansk & the Caucasus are taken chances are it could all come through Vladivostok anyway! 6/ I wonder about railways - it seems to be too easy to have 100% supply along a long railway, when of course the effort of shipping along that railway would take up a lot of the supply carried. I don't know if this is reflected in the game or if it can be. 7/ German oil - supply is just too generic. Increased supply usage by mechanised units does not reflect reality. For example if Germany conquers Spain it gets the ability to increase supply production, and use that for more motorised units. But in reality Spain was an importer of oil - most of it from the USA, and when Hitler met Franco one of Franco's demands was for 900,000 tons of oil per year for the Spanish economy......and that just wasn't available. Also Spain required food - grain - it was a net importer - again it could not be supplied as German/Axis resources were already fully committed - German grain stocks dropped from over 3 million tons in December 1940 to just 460,000 tons in December 1941. But in the game Spain is a net producers of supplies - a total reverse of history. And when the Germans did actually capture Maikop, and held it for almost a year how much oil did they get from it? Nothing - zilch, nil, zero - not one drop of Caucasus oil was ever received! They did get some oil from other Soviet sources for a total of about 4.7 million barrels - apparently as much as they would have received from the Sov's had they not invaded! Any WW2 game that does not factor in oil can never really simulate the war IMO.
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