Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mehring

Morale in WitE is a fudge between what it is usually understood to be and also a measure of a unit's training and doctrine. There is no clear distinction between the two but national morale drops ostensibly to reflect hastily trained troops and other consequences of losing as the war went on. So yes, losing the war or the effects of high casualties is hard wired into the game.

quote:

ORIGINAL: STUCKER868

Too bad it's hard coded. Because if I am winning, it's somewhat unfair to me that my morale should drop because it's coded to reflect what was going on historically.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mehring

Morale in WitE is a fudge between what it is usually understood to be and also a measure of a unit's training and doctrine. There is no clear distinction between the two but national morale drops ostensibly to reflect hastily trained troops and other consequences of losing as the war went on. So yes, losing the war or the effects of high casualties is hard wired into the game.

If a player wins but at great cost, there's a rationale for lowering national morale. It might work better if national morale was raised or lowered according to volume of replacements taken in a given year. I'd also like to see replacements graded for quality, with a ceiling on morale/experience increases for lower quality troops.


< Message edited by Mehring -- 1/2/2015 9:46:08 AM >

_____________________________

“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.”
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(in reply to STUCKER868)

quote:

ORIGINAL: vandorenp

Design decisions like this are a curiosity to me. [not the only game with something like this] Here we have a designer sitting down and considering overall morale and its effects. You know some German players are going to have wins. You know some are going to do very well as they achieve their win. You know in such cases the attrition will be lower than historical. You know unit experience will be on average higher than historical. You know about the tremendous effect victory has on morale. Yet you hard-wire a game effecting decline in morale to occur regardless.

I can understand programming requirements versus resources contention can put off implementing a "realistic" algorithm but you might think something would have eventually been implemented in a game of this sophistication.

Nevertheless, I happily play on.

quote:

ORIGINAL: morvael

Yes, the term is quite confusing. I see it as a combination of quality of manpower and availability of experienced junior officers, NCOs and veteran soldiers. In case of Germany these go down, since they maintain too high recruitment rate for their manpower base, thus the quality decreases from year to year. At the same time they suffer unsustainable casualties (even for their increased recruitment rate) reducing the number of experienced men in the ranks. This reduces the maximum level of fighting efficiency their units can achieve (which is all that "morale" being a ceiling for "experience" and these two factors influence on combat is in WitE). Sure, it seems too harsh this is hardcoded, but actually there is no escaping the brutal math of manpower "income" and "expenditure" unless relative player skill difference is too great and the Axis can achieve totally impossible victories. There should be a parameter that would let to influence whether a player want quality or more manpower, but choosing quality would mean a very rapid decline in numbers. And that path would be as fatal as the opposite one. So treat the current settings as compromise, a golden mean. The Red Army learns on the go, as the weakening Wehrmacht is not able to inflict enough casualties for the core of experienced men to disappear (and the recruitment base is larger). Note that the armies (German and Soviet) "meet" at a value of 60 only as late as 1944. I think it's very reasonable.

quote:

ORIGINAL: morvael

I agree, a game simulating entire war economy and demographics with the ability to influence it would be great. Even though WitE has a base for that (a lot of numbers everywhere) certain parts are just for viewing pleasure and no changes can be made to them (for example the production system). Sometimes it's easier to hardcode something to follow a historical path (in case of German military power a decline) than recreate all the factors that resulted in the same. How do you turn a loss of 200 junior officers in a division during a week of heavy combat to absolute numbers? There is even no distinction between junior officers, veteran infantry NCOs, branch specialization (you can have 10000 trained artillery crews, what if you need to make them tankers asap?), soldier health and hygiene problems, horse diseases (there are actually no horses at all, except some increase in supply consumption). The list goes on an on. This is simply not part of simulation in WitE.

quote:

ORIGINAL: GamesaurusRex




Grognards : "Grumble... grumble... grrr !"

Morvael : "Well... game design can get as deep as a designer wants to wade into it..."

(Ah, Morvael... the Angel of Patience !)