Chris10
Posts: 114
Joined: 6/7/2011
From: Germany,living in Spain
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Empire101
You have a point.
But surely one of the primary reasons for launching Barbarossa was to secure the vast resources of the Soviet Union.
Put aside all the bogus and frankly crazy Nazi ideas of Race etc, and you are left ONLY with the economic and military reasons for Barbarossa.
Surely there should be some mechanism in the game to allocate a percentage of rail capacity to transport these vital resources back to the Reich.
After all, oil was probably THE strategic resource of WWII, and this is admirably recreated in WitP, so why not WitE ?
Its not that easy as it sounds and the war in the east can not be compared to any other war theatre in WWII as it had its own very special rules and difficultys.
Let me recall some facts.
1. The where various reasons for Barbarossa, not necessarily in that order but the german leadership wanted to kill various birds with one stone mainly due to the following thinkings:
a. To gain living room in the east
b. To secure the huge ucranian agricultural land (also called the "Granary of Europe" cause of endless fields of grain)
c. To forestall an unavoidable attack from the russians which sooner or later would have taken place anyway (5 Million
Russian Troops in non defensive formation on the border in summer 1941 without making efforts to garrison or fortifying or start building winter quarters to camp properly over winter is speaking for itself...)
d. The huge coal and iron ressources of the Donets Basin and industrial areas and the possible taking of the oilfields in Maikop..
e. Communism was anyway the natural enemy of national-socialism and it was declared goal of Hitlers filosofy to get rid of
the bolschewiks at some time once and for all
There is the so called Göring Atlas (published in 2004) which was a series of maps showing possible important ressources for germany outside germany itself as well it contained some sort of plan how to push the german industrial production in order to prepare for war (but that was for the time before 1939)
I drift away...however...
various factors made the usage of these captured ressource-areas in the east very very difficult and it turned out that they never really helped the german war economy in a way that some may expect cause of the following reasons:
A. Lots of the so called war-important ressources and production plants the german war economy was longing for were located in the area of the Dnepr, the Donets-Basin, the Sea of Azov and on Crimea but on their retreat in late summer 1941 the Russians dismanteld all industrial plants and equipment down to the last bolt and made the existing ressource stocks which they could not carry away useless. So Germans captured empty industrial parks, mines and useless ressource stocks. Material and machines had to be brought over from Germany to reinstall some sort of production but when the first Fabrics and Mines went online again in April 1943 the advancing Red Army already threatend these areas again.
All in all the captured ressources and industrial areas where useless and had cost Germany more then it could profit from them.
B. The coal from the Donets Basin is another of these storys. It was highly energy efficient and very demanded for steel production in the Reich but soon we found out that it was unusable for German locomotives due to its composition so we had to spent truckloads of good German brown coal to transport the Donets-Coal back to the Reich which turned out to be unprofitable and a waste of time/ressources with no gain as the used brown coal for transport was needed elsewhere , lnot to mention the logistics to provide the additional needed brown coal for the additional ressource trains along the entire track from russia to germanys industrial centers.
C. The same goes for the oil fields in Maikop. Iam not sure right now if the Russians made the installations useless or if they had made preparations to make them uselss in case German forces would capture the area (I would have to dig that up in the books but the point remains the same). So even if finally we would have captured those oilfields it would have taken years to reinstall oilmining and refining let alone the immense engagement to supply large german troop contingents so far away from home. It only could have worked out if Stalingrad would have been totally taken and the Russian Armys around Stalingrad had been counter-encircled and destroyed during their attempt to encircle and destroy the 6th army...but this is another story
PD:
Additionally it is to say that there was not enough transportation capacitys to supply troops and transport huge amount of ressources at the same time as due to patisan activity since 42 lots of supply was destroyed and the food production in the room of Heeres-Group Center went down considerably so they had to sent food from Germany which additionally needed transport capacitys.
Just to imagine how much really partisan activiy harmed german efforts here some numbers.
In 1943 german authoritys accounted:
11.000 rail explosions
9.000 derailed trains (that doesnt mean lost !)
40.000 destroyed wagons
20.000 destroyed vehicles
Not to mention the fact that for the so called Rail-War large contingents of valuable german combat troops were required who would have been needed on the front.
As a sidenote I may say that the rail war cost probably hundreds of thousands of casualties as german commanders where desperate to get rid of the sabotage and annihalated entire villages cause they expected them to collaborate with the partisans. Especially in Ucrania I doubt this to be true as entire divisions of ucranian boys joined the german army during the campaign to fight along them against the hated russian communists.
If we put down the arrived supply trains and the needed trains in 1941 it turns out that from beginning there was a deficit which became even bigger in 42 and 43.
Granted, the figures are for a winter month but the summer figures did not look much better
Daily need on supply trains for Army-Groups, Eastern front, Nov 1941
.................................needed....arrived
Heeresgroup North........20........19
Heeresgroup Center.......32........16
Heeresgroup South........22........15
Total............................74........50
Max size for supply trains where:
550 meters long
500 tons net transport weight, 850 tons total weight
*I always use original Wehrmacht archive material and numbers.
Hope this answers the topics question why captured ressources are not and should not be used to any bigger extend. A belivable timeframe to retake production of material and mining ressources would be about 1,5 years but this would requiere huge investemnts in bringing material over from Germany as Fabrics and stuff have to be rebuilt and reinstalled practically from scratch but after then there is still not a lot more transport around which would requiere an even bigger investemnt in expanding the rail net and build a lot more locomotives and wagons and that only works if the hinterlands are under real control.
What does this info mean in terms of game mechanics ?
well...there a various considerations to make
1. Germans never captured huge ressource depots and even less the russians would have allowed for capture us important stockpiled oil or fuel ressources around Maikop.
2. Production capacity of captured areas (does this exist in the game ?) has to be reduced to 0 on capturing to simulate the dismanteling of industrial plants by russians
3. Re-start production should take at least 1,5 years for simulating the real time needed to rebuilt fabrics/mines etc and restart production-mining-refining----whatever
4. Capturing enemy HQs should only provide some local supply and fuel restock (if its not already like that... )
long post...puuuh
< Message edited by Chris10 -- 6/10/2011 9:00:06 PM >
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Printable Version
RE: Why are captured resources not being used? - 
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Fuel is only captured from enemy units. It isn't really stored in cities in the game model as far as I know. It's just a 'pool'. 
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