HMSWarspite
Posts: 1401
Joined: 4/13/2002 From: Bristol, UK Status: offline
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More or less. VPs are there to enable people to tell who has won the game (otherwise it isn't a game!). Germany is going down, and hence you cannot have a Chess like win condition which is the same for both sides. Otherwise Germany needs to capture London to win! So, in an asymmetric game you need a 'did you lose (historically) less badly than average, and hence in game terms have you won?' mechanism. Once you have this mechanism, you can use it to allow for things that are not in game as you say, like the effect of Uboat production on Atlantic freight, or the effect of V weapons landing on London on a major democratic government. This is what most of your examples are. However, you have misunderstood one. The manpower issue is key. The UK did not run out of manpower - the casualties did not significantly affect the number of able bodies in the labour pool - deaths were less than 1% of prewar population for the whole war. Whilst this is obviously higher as a % of working age adults, roughly 50% of the workforce was on war related work by late 1944, so it is a good order of magnitude figure. The US was even less limited by casualties, yet they transferred technical stream recruits to the infantry in late 1944! The issue is the available manpower was fully allocated, that is any further increases required some other critical activity to give it up (not necessarily war related). Previously, undirected resource was still being taken up (more women to the services or the land who previously didn't work or had non-directed jobs such as domestic service, completion of the call up for the affected ages etc). The Army could have been kept at full strength for a while past 1945 at the cost of other projects; the UK knew the war was won and were allocating resources to post war efforts. Did you know that the British welfare state is dated to the Beveridge report, which was presented to Parliament in Nov 1942! Much government effort went into planning the reform of education in 1944. Significant change was started from mid 1945 (i.e. as soon as the European war was over). Thus managing the desire to limit casualties solely on the manpower pool would be very unrealistic. If the war went pear shaped, manpower would have been made available, and the situation would have been reversed. But, allowing it to go pear shaped to the extent that manpower needs to be made available must be seen as poor play by a WA player...The game must allow the manpower be available to reverse the situation, but needs to penalise (lose points) the player for needing to use it (i.e. having high casualties). There is also the public opinion effect on a democratic government of high casualties, but in my opinion, the UK would have accepted it as long as the war was going well and an end could be seen. Thus the reason for the VP loss for causalities is (IMHO) not what people usually think it is... Public opinion/morale would not be the issue, the disruption of plans for after the war is key.
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I have a cunning plan, My Lord
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