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HMSWarspite -> (6/11/2003 5:14:00 AM)
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The thing with flexibility of production, is that the more you allow, the more modelling of things outside the 'pure wargame' that you need. If you stick to historical production, you run the risk of not supporting the needs of the war. To use the example above, heavy bombing of the homeland, not resulting in an increase in AA, and heavy bomber destroyers.
If you allow typical 'wargamer' production, you get the player wanting to build nothing but the best fighter, or bomber, or whatever, based on knowledge of game stats, history or both. In reality, it did not happen. Why? Well, obviously, RL production directors don't have luxury of stats, so they don't know that the P4F has a manoevre of 34, which is one better than the Spiteful Mk 4.5, so they should build more of them. But more importantly, no one person (even in Germany) had full control of production. Even Speer, or the USSR, had constraints. UK aircraft production is a case in point. Spitfire better than Hurricane? But Hurri was in prod til 1943 (at least, Sea Hurri, 1944 IIRC). I know it changed role, but there were better aircraft for ground attack by 1943. Lancaster was the best British heavy bomber. Halifax was in prod til the end of the war. Need I go on? And why was this? Because there were constraints on changing production - both physical (tooling etc), and political/human (company jealousy, inter service rivalry etc).
I suggest that until you include all these constraints (or simulations of them), the production system has to be held on the inflexible side, if you want a reasonably realistic game.
Final question (relative to the Oscar/Zero question earlier. What do you think would have happened if the Emperor (or someone) had ordered the IJA to adopt the Zero, and licence it to Nakajima? I don't know, but my guess is that an army special version (probably inferior, maybe a different engine, or armament or something) produced late, would stagger in to limited service, and get a bad press in the army bosses. Maybe I am a pessimist on human nature, but thats my 2p.
Look at how many countries post war adopted what is often described as the best all round tank of the war (Panther). Or even a development of it. Remarkably few. France briefly IIRC, maybe a few others. No one put it in production for long, if at all. T34 was more successful, but only because USSR cloned client state armies.
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