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Nikademus -> production options (10/7/2002 3:51:47 AM)
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I am personally wary of giving too much control over production to the players, though i am not adverse to having it as a player "option" on the same scale as IJN sub doctrine in UV.
My reasoning is two fold.
1) first and most importantly, i believe this is arguably the most abused player option in strategic/operational games that cover historical periods. The reason is simple hindsight.
The players know which weapons work, which dont, and if they do work, what weapons soon wont (due to enemy advances in tech)
I've already seen examples of this in this very thread.....complaints about being forced to use yuky P-39's, or advance knowlege that A6M's will soon become a liability etc etc. Personally i "like" being forced to, like the real life commanders, use what equipment is dolled out to me to the best of my ability. How boring would it quickly become to switch to all P-38's up to six months before they became available. Sure its fun the first couple of times....after a while it becomes boring. Playing with the tools i am given convays to me a sense of being in the real commander's shoes vs, mass converting all my squadrons to newer planes deployed early which makes me feel like i'm playing Code Red instead of a historical wargame.
I would also disagree that theater commanders had that much say in the economic choices of their respective countries that they could alter massive and/or large scale build plans, at least when it comes to warships.
Specific weapons i can see......theater commanders can and did voice the complaints of soldiers who would complain about needing better weapons systems such as better guns, better tanks, better planes etc etc.
Sometimes their voices were listened too, often they were not. Such is the realm of politics, personal realms and differing viewpoints.
2) The above said, another argument is due to the time factor when it comes to warships, depending on types.
Major warships cannot simply be ordered as the demand warrents, not if one is expecting them to be available at the time of need. Not even the US can do this. It requires advance planning and the necessary securing of funds, workers, dockyard space and resources, all in the hopes or expectations that the ships will be "available" at the time that the perceived need for them comes around. As things happened, war came sooner than hoped for to the US so the first half of the war at sea was a study in fighting a limited war with the tools onhand at the time, hoping to hold out until such time that the new construction becomes available
Some warships are also specialty/unique specimens that would not be repeated because they were the products of their times, built and/or converted due to unique circumstances.
Yamamotto's desire for more "Akagis" highlights this. Akagi was orginally designed as an Amagi class battlecruiser and was 2 years on the stocks when she was slated for conversion to a carrier. Like all carrier conversions, she was not in all respects ideal for carrier ops due to her not being originally designed for this task, thus for her size and the effort involved in building and then converting her, no sensible nation would ever attempt to repeat this procedure, instead they would build a new class, designed from the keel up to be a carrier. Same goes for Lex and Sara.....also converted from BC hulls.....better to build a purpose built carrier, complete with all the lessons learned from decades of carrier ops and designing.
Rev Rick's post also highlights my concern and match my thinking. Most major warship types were already planned for and laid down according to naval expansion programs set and defined before hostilities started. The simple reason being is that no nation can simply snap it's fingers and build enough warships and expect them to be readily available in a short period of time whence the need suddenly arises. Doesn't work that way.
There are exceptions of course......merchant ships, once the operation was laid out and organized (again before the US at least was legally at war) could and were mass produced, but there is a huge difference between a liberty ship and a battleship. Escorts and Destroyers can be mass produced but again, only after advance planning and organization, as attested by the destroyer/escort shortage experienced by the US after it's official entry into the battle of the Atlantic. It was also an example of prioritization....one key reason the escorts, the "tools" of the trade were not onhand at first was the priority given to other warship and support types given pre-war. This could not simply be altered at the snap of a finger unless one was willing to deal with delays and disruption.
Large warships are even more constrained. Big battleships in particular cannot be laid down on the fly. They take on average a minimum of two+ years to go from keel laying to commissioned warship in time of war, more like 3-5 years in peacetime. For example every single modern US battleship, and of course the two Yamato's (+Shinano) were all laid down before the war began, and even despite the gear-up to total war economy, none of these ships were completed in under a two year period. Many had to be slowed and cancelled due either to other wartime priorities or resource shortages (to which even the US was not immune too..........high grade steel is costly and doesn't grow on trees!)
Smaller or less steel intensive warships are a better case.....the US, being the banner-carrier of mass produced war machines, was able at it's peak to complete an Essex carrier in about 1.5 years time....but more often it was closer to two years.
and this with a mass produced carrier, designed before the war, and planned out in a large class that exceeded 25 specimens (yeek!) CVL's suprisingly, about the same at 1.5 years
Cruisers, again about the same, averaging 1.8-2 years (the fastest at around the 1.5 year mark)
The gist of all this is that even were the players to have complete control over production, and the player decides, after a disaster say in 4/42 that costs him a large chunk of his carriers and battleships, to lay down more of that type....he (or she) is still looking at around a 2 year or more waiting period to recieve these ship types, by which time the situation that called for them will have either evolved into something else or passed entirely. The original war of course was only a little more than 3.5 years in actual length. The slow nature of major warship contruction was such that the decisive battles fought in the first half of the war had to be fought with the tools that were on-hand. By the time the majority of new construction became available, the war was already resolved.
I am not adverse to player designed warships, but not in a production environment. More in an editor type situation, where with the appropriate tool, players can create either historical or hypothetical warship classes that did not find their way into the standard game either by choice or by necessity. (an example would be putting German warships into the OOB as part of a hypo scenerio involving more close cooperation between the Axis or putting ships cancelled by the Wash treaty into the OOB to see how they would fight. Such an editor also is of benefit for correcting stats on existing historical designs too!)
Putting that ability into the standard game would turn WiTP and UV into Command and Conquor.....yukko :)
If implemented (hopefully as an option, not as a standard feature) production altering would need to be balanced heavily in terms of consequences of one's action. By that i mean, if you wish to tamper with your production schedule, expect heavy penalties due to the disruption caused by the shifting and re-prioritizing of resources.
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