aspqrz02
Posts: 1024
Joined: 7/20/2004 Status: offline
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Since it is generally agreed, by people who study logistics (rather than general historians who rarely have more than a vague graps of it, at best), that German *operational level* decisions (i.e. divisional level) were influenced *from 1939* by POL availabilty, a more strategic level wargame such as ToF should, indeed, have POL availability as a major factor in the game. There was really nothing, historically, that could be done in the ETO/Med/Middle East to hurt allied POL sources (the Americas and Caribbean had all you could possibly need, so, short of Germany taking the Caribbean and Texas, and Japan California ... no possible way!) as the production there was actually quite tiny *in the 1940s* compared to world supplies and US/UK/Allied needs. Germany, however, was in a bind ... and things got worse as the war progressed. By late 1944 Speer later admitted that German POL "reserves" actually ceased to exist ... only fudging the accounting to include POL in transit to end users (i.e. on trains, barges, ships or petrol tanker lorries) did they have any "reserves" at all. Hence, for example, all those Panzers that simply ran out of fuel in the Battle of the Bulge ... and the scene in "Band of Brothers" where they're riding along the autobahn towards the end and the defeated German soldiers are walking, riding horse carts down the middle, and one of the US characters (Matt Damon?) screams out "What were you thinking?" in reference to said Horse Carts As far as I can tell from several 25 turn play throughs of the GC, ToF doesn't seem to have any obvious problems here, but I'll probably need to play much more, or play through 25+ turns for the 1944 scenario before I have a better idea. HoI3 did a more obvious job of dealing with this, but it was such an abortion that I have no idea how it worked long term, as the game simply couldn't be played long term. MH1/MH2 also tried to deal with it, but the trading/economic model was so broken and the game so ridiculous for a whole variety of reasons that I have no idea how it worked long term. Grigsby's WaW and WaWaWD ... its quite ba while since I played, ISTR that it did model POL vaguely, but it was more in the realm of Grand Strategy, a step above even ToF, so its hard to tell at that level. Phil
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