neuromancer
Posts: 627
Joined: 5/30/2002
From: Canada
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Production was - and is - a really quite complicated affair, and couldn't really be changed just because Stalin or Hitler suddenly said "make more of X!" I'm sure they tried.
I'm equally sure they influenced production but hardly had total control (Guderian complained that Hitler allowed to many varieties of panzer to be constructed, meanwhile Hitler didn't like the original MP-43 for some reason, but they were made in some numbers anyway). You can order a certain number of things, but getting them when you want them is very much open to debate. And in war time, beggars can't be choosers - particularly the Soviet Union.
And that is before getting into the huge nightmare known as bureaucracy, and both the USSR and Third Reich had a nightmare of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy does what it wants to; some middle manager someplace makes a decision for whatever reason (he's an idiot, he's a genius, he's on the take, he's out of the loop, he got memo A and B confused, whatever) and whatever El Grande Fromage wanted is no longer part of the program. And should you try to find out who made said decision, good luck! There is a mountain of paper that is supposed to provide accountability but in actual fact masks it because you have to find the right papers first, and with so much paper in play, that is no mean feat. Not to mention the original decision can be obscured behind levels of bureaucracy.
And that is just one level, the ordering of the weapons themselves. Now throw into the mix that there is the production of parts for the weapons, and below that the materials for the parts, and below that the resources for the materials. Everyone in a war is clamouring for their necessary inputs, and odds are there isn't enough to go around, and what does all too often goes to the wrong place. Factory A needs ten thousand widgets and twenty thousand doo-hickies, but while they have enough widgets, they are far short of doo-hickies. Meanwhile factory B - 500 kms away - needs five thousand widgets, and twelve thousand doo-hickies, but while they have enough doo-hickies, are really short on widgets. Now neither factory can make enough of what they are supposed to be making, but at least if their materials had been shared they could have both made more than they did - but that isn't the way it works.
Plus a lot of regular stuff isn't ordered by the head of the government, nor by the minster of defence, nor by the General staff, nor by even anybody with a commission. Its by some clerk in supply who is buried under his own mountain of bureaucratic paper and conflicting verbal orders and trying to do the best he can without just deciding to see how big a boom all the grenades in the bunker would make if he pulled the pin on one and left it with the stack.
THEN you get to add in enemy action, accidents, and everything else that can possible go wrong, and what you want has nothing to do with what you get.
I'm rarely surprised anymore by things going wrong, I'm more surprised things work out as well as they do!
Frankly, I think it more appropriate - and realistic - that weapons production should be fixed for all sides and simply declared as outside the scope of the game, move along, nothing to see here. Even then a little randomization should be occurring to account for all the random factors (and yes, that means sometimes everything lines up and they have a good month which exceeds projected production).
Now, what you do with it is another matter. What units the army assembles is really up to them, and more than a few units existed mostly on paper for years. If you have the manpower and the equipment, go ahead, make a XYZ division, and if you don't have enough of something for it to be battle worthy, that is your problem.
Or just do the typical game thing - These are the reinforcements you get, they show up at this time, if you don't like it, feel free to go back in time and complain to the people in charge back then. You get this many replacements (which is very generic; manpower, light tanks, medium tanks, fighters, light bombers, medium bombers, etc.) they will replace lost units of that type out of your combat formations, if they aren't adequate, tough.
Hell, that sounds more like the military in the real world.
"What do we have?"
"What they gave us."
"Is it enough?"
"Its going to have to be."
But nobody asked me...
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