ColinWright
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Joined: 10/13/2005 Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay quote:
ORIGINAL: ColinWright You seem to be ignoring the point that fuel supply and ammunition supply usually move in tandem. Indeed, often if there's no fuel one can't get the ammunition, so any distinction becomes academic. But they're not expended in tandem! Actually, they often are. More to the point, at the level TOAW works at, they usually are. Your approach would lead to us trying to decide if that 25 pounder still has AT ammunition left, or only HE.quote:
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I see this as something that wouldn't actually be harmful but is a pointless complication that wouldn't address much of anything. It addresses the need to be able to move without blowing off all your ammo and fight without blowing off all your fuel. And, as I said, it could justify stiffer consequences for 1% fuel to movement and 1% ammo to combat strength than 1% supply now does. This just isn't something that has been a common phenomenon. I have no doubt that there was some instance of a force having plenty of ammo but no fuel -- just as I can find examples of infantry units marching 50 km in a day. However, we need to look at what usually happened -- and what the impact is at TOAW's scale. As a rule, forces that are low on ammo are also low on fuel, and vice-versa. What's more, those that are low on fuel are impeded in their ability to fight -- even to bring up whatever ammo they may have in plenty. In a way, it's like the wadi/river thing; at the scale TOAW operates at, they tend to present as the same problem.quote:
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...and infantry movement rates aren't particularly dependent on readiness. Well disciplined infantry will keep slogging along even if their tongues are hanging out. In the Battle of the Marne, the French captured trenchfuls of German soldiers that had literally slept right through the attack -- about as unready as you can get. Yet these same soldiers had been logging their thirty km a day right up to the time of the battle. It's not like they crossed the Belgian frontier doing fifty km a day and then slowed to ten km as they got tired. The variation in response to 'readiness' would have been sharply limited. Because they recovered their fatigue each night. Had they been force marching - moving day and night - their rates would have plummeted. See the scale thing. Also -- unless you are planning to allow for foot movement rates of 50 km in a day -- it's irrelevant. The stock foot movement rate isn't force marching in the first place. The current TOAW rate and mechanism for foot infantry actually works pretty good -- if one takes care not to put so many trucks in the unit that they wind up accelerating the infantry. As I recall, a pure rifle unit with high readiness will do 35 km a day over plain, already converted terrain. As it falls to low readiness, it'll go to about 25 km a day - but no lower. That's not bad. I'd go with 'fixing' something else, personally. quote:
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One thing I find disturbing is that most of your ideas seem to bear little direct connection to historical reality. They usually seem to have passed through some medium such as an SPI game. In short (vide the wadi as trench thing) you don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about. So right now, we appear to be in some peril of getting a mechanism for reducing foot movement rates that not only won't reflect reality, but will never have even referred to it. It's like the early Bush administration's plans for Iraq or something. I don't believe in re-inventing the wheel. And, I'll take SPI over you any day. Then you're making a mistake, to skip the false modesty. I have a hell of a lot of good ideas, whatever my other shortcomings. However, let's leave me out of it. I've pointed out the flaws with your reasoning about wargames before. But I'll do it again. First off, it gives you zero access to the raw data. You just have to accept SPI's ideas of how to represent the terrain, the OOB, etc. Second, someone designing a wargame -- unlike someone designing a book -- has to fill in the gaps. He can't just not specify how many tanks the 23rd Armoured Brigade had on whatever the start date of the scenario is -- he has to put his money on some number. This renders all 'information' in the finished game suspect. You have no way of discerning just how well-documented any 'fact' presented in the game is. This is part of the nature of the beast. See the problems with 'Fire in the East.' Your approach essentially says, 'all Soviet units were up to TO&E and ready to go on June 22. It's right there in the game.' Third, I remember SPI. They were five-six guys cranking out a wargame in the magazine every month or two months plus another game on the side in about the same interval. More power to 'em -- but I wouldn't assume the results were researched with any great care. Read a book, come up with a mechanism to simulate whatever struck you, grab an atlas, and get with it. Not really reliable material, to say the least. I could play their 'Fall of Rome' game and have a fine time. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about what actually happened, how things actually worked, or what the possibilities were on that basis. Similarly with their 'France 1940' game and 'Panzerblitz,' (which began life as an SPI product) incidentally. Great fun -- the actual correlation with reality is completely problematical. Now, when you're designing a scenario, you can 'reinvent the wheel' or not, as you please. One realizes what the foibles of various designers are, and takes their work with the appropriate grain of salt. In your case, I would assume I'm getting a reasonable cover of an SPI game. Great. However, that you base your notions of military reality on such stuff and then modify the system itself accordingly is distressing, to say the least. It's like discovering that your brain doctor takes pride in the fact that he didn't read a book all the way through medical school.
< Message edited by ColinWright -- 2/4/2010 1:15:24 AM >
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