ORIGINAL: Rasputitsa
If you give the Soviet Union an accurate OOB (10,000s of AFV) and any standard of command and control which a human player would expect, then they become unbeatable. Then you have to fudge and twist the rules to keep some balance. No human player would be prepared to suffer the historical level of command and control that the Soviets had in the early years, but an AI will.
As for sensible behaviour, the historical record is full of not so sensible strategies used by, or forced on, actual commanders. The AI will simulate this, as how sensible were the Allies in 1940, the Axis at Stalingrad and many more.
In a gaming world of 20/20 hindsight, I am happy to have some uncertainty thrown in, however it comes, whether cheats, difficulty levels, etc., but an AI can be programmed to provide those WTF moments that real warfare has in abundance. [:)]
This is a great post, but it reveals why we all play World in Flames. The Allies held a huge numerical and industrial advantage, yet there are ways the Axis could have won the war. (Though the most likely one would have been if Nazi ideology wasn't so extreme). There was another good recent post on here somewhere about Russian production vs German production and how the Russians probably pulled ahead already at the end of 1941, even in all the chaos of massive defeats at the front. (Where is that post? It might have been on the Yahoo mailing list discussing upcoming changes to Production Multiples though, sorry)
So to simulate the war, you can't just say Germany attacks Russia with 2 million men but he Russians have 3 million men so the Russians win. Whether with paper and cardboard or pixels and mouse, subjectivity has to be involved to rate how much each of those men are worth. The German was worth more than the Russian, in large part due to Stalin's purge in the 1930s. I think Stalin and Hitler, each as the head of a top-down Dictator system, hampered their countries' war effort quite significantly (well modeled in the game), but Hitler didn't mess up his army's tactical capabilities the way the Communists did to theirs.
I think I settled on World in Flames because it does such a good job of that subjective rating of each country's military affairs. For the Russians, their units continue to improve - IF the player is smart enough to manage their military output well.
The first AI I ever played was a simulation of the first year of Barbarossa. The AI was given the cheat of permanently increasing combat factors. The AI units just always got stronger and stronger. The fun wore off playing it almost instantly. I seriously doubt Steve has any plans to put in any cheat at all in the AI he will write.
