WitE 2

[Balou]

ORIGINAL: PyleDriver

We would need a new color outline and key for it.

Jon

minkbrown [:D]

[Flaviusx]

I can actually get behind the idea of NM gains for Sovs based on losses. My main concern over using NM as a reward mechanism has always been on the downside, because the base NM is so low that there's not much room here to play with before the Red Army becomes combat ineffective. But a reward on the upside? Yeah, bring it on.

[RedLancer]

I wonder whether a direct linkage to Soviet NM and losses would encourage a run away strategy in 41.

[morvael]

If reversed, then no. They should start at NM 40, and every ??00000 lost should increase morale by 1 point

[Flaviusx]

I don't see how it could encourage runaways. It practically requires you to stand your ground somewhere and be willing to take some serious lumps. And the further west you do that, the better.

There's some point where this tradeoff yields diminishing returns, to be sure. Good play will require you to determine the optimal point here between losses, NM gains, and replacement and reinforcement. Nice dynamic.

Think of it as an exercise in controlled bleeding: you must feed the Nazi beast so much over time to reach your target NM without completely wrecking your army in being.

[MechFO]

ORIGINAL: morvael

If reversed, then no. They should start at NM 40, and every ??00000 lost should increase morale by 1 point

Or even let them start at 50 and give locations one can reasonably expect the Germans to hold Spring 42 maybe 5-8 (Kiev 2, Smolensk 1, Minsk 1, Rostov 1, Kahrkov 1, Dniepro 1), then give another few for possible Summer targets in 42 (Moscow 4, Leningrad 2, Stalingrad 2, Baku 2, Gorki 4, Sevastopol 1).

This should prevent the Germans from just running away in the Blizzard.

Following historical casualties and frontlines NM should stabilize in the mid 40's Summer 42, and then build up with the losses of Summer/Fall 42. If the Soviets lose one, maybe 2, of the 2nd line objectives it is still recoverable given some time, if he loses more he's toast anyway.

Germans start at 75 in 41, drop to 65? around Blizzard, and from depends on territorial and casualty mechanic.


Also give NM points in Germany that helps the Soviets in 44-45.


As for economic mechanics, I would consider giving certain locations bonus Arm modifiers. For example AIUI Kerch, Nicopol, Stalino area all had valuable deposits of critical resources. Gives the Germans extra incentive to fight for them in 42 when he should be tight on Arm.

There were economic considerations as well in the German propensity for chronic overextension.


An idea for using German PA points might be higher % of production going east (if that is still in) or lowering casualties in the West until 43 (idea being that Hitler decides to put AK on a back burner, one still needs to maintain a certain force level but the objective is no longer taking Suez).

[EwaldvonKleist]

@chaos45

Perhaps having NM tied to total losses for the Axis powers/Germans?

There might also need to be some tie in due to how things are going on the western front as well. 1943- wasnt only a bad year for the Germans because of Stalingrad surrendering in January, it was also bad for them due to Tunisia and Sicily and the italians leaving the war---all these had affects on the German military outside the eastern front. You listen to some interviews with German Soldiers that were fighting during that time period, and I remember one specifically saying once they realized they were fighting Americans they knew the war lost because Germany couldnt fight the whole world. So keeping things isolated to just the eastern front will be hard to do IMO as the whole war effort is what brought down Germany so some timelines maybe could make it quicker or slower but fighting on several fronts drained the Germans massively over time.

Production wise the Germans made up for in after the massive 1942 drafts by using more and more forced/slave labor from occupied territories---however quality of equipment was prolly alittle worse off when they began to use more and more massed slave labor. The German economy and war effort was never as unified or seamless as what the allies managed to do and one of the big reasons they lost. Everything they did was a rob peter to pay paul effect, not to mention the extreme amounts of political in-fighting Hitler instigated to ensure no-one else could challenge him in power. Basically the Nazis system helped to cause its own downfall with in-built in-inefficiencies. The German army did an amazing job of the term "doing more with less" but that only works for so long before your system breaks under the strain. Soldiers arent machines and the longer you stress them no matter how effective or highly trained they eventually snap. You see this as the war drag on for the Germans in many ways. You make the same guy fight for longer and longer periods of time and watch all his friends die around him and eventually he doesnt care as much anymore and gets himself killed through not caring anymore.....Allies studied this effect extensively and its one of the reasons they rotated and tried to rest units more than the Germans...not to mention the allies usually had the units/men to spare for these rotations.

Production: Problem was that Hitler feared a revolution like the one that ended WW1 for germany. Therefore he did not went for total war before the battle of Stalingrad. On the opposite, soviets did since 06.41.
In essence every war economy is robbing Peter to give Paul. Problem is that Peter was quite poor in Germany and other axis countries.
German war economy was of course inefficient because of political fights.

I have no idea where you have your points for the war exhaustion of german soldiers from <<<<Edit: What i mean is: Where it drastically reduced fighting power? I especially mean psycological breakdowns>>>>. Please give me a source for this.
Martin van Crefeld is saying exactly the opposite at least for the American army what you state. Germans (as a lesson of WW1) were very good to keep unit cohesion and to rest soldiers. US Army had far less intense fighting then germany but had more psychological breakdowns then the Wehrmacht. Why? Because they did not emphasize the psychological side of war that much and saw the soldiers like a machine while the german Whermacht was very aware of this. Again, read Crefeld for details. It was of course difficult to give vacation to US soldiers if they have to cross the atlantic for this....
In addition, german units hardly broke apart, especially on the eastern front. They were able loose a lot of TOE percentage and still continue the fight at a degree western military never expected to be possible reasoned by an organization supporting unit cohesion.
This is especially true on the eastern front because becoming a POW of the soviets was a feared fate while being a POW of the Wallies is no death-in-gulag sencence. On eastern front there was no option except for continuing the fight for the soldiers: Surrender=Gulag, Refuse to fight=Wehrkraftzersetzung (difficult to translate, fighting power undermination or so)=being shot.


National Morale and all this stuff:
First i don’t see the sense of national morale including combat proficiency and all this stuff. Suggestion:
1) National Combat proficiency: Level of low level tactics and soldier training and low level leadership: Something the germans excel until the end even though the advantage is decreasing over the time because Allies getting better and quality of german personnel replacement (intelligence, physics, psychological aspects) lowered to replace losses
2) National Morale: Will to fight. Can drop for reasons to be defined but does not influence the multiplier explained above
3) Unit Experience: For every unit. When unit is filled up with new replacements, it loses some of the experience. This means that german unit experience will decrease over the time because of rising losses and armies which have high loss rates will never come over a particular experience level.
4) Unit morale: Unit will to fight. Final unit morale is a combination of unit morale based on past battles and national morale.
On this way everything can be separated and is not thrown into one big pot.


But lets assume the current system remains in place:
NM getting better with losses makes hardly sense IMO. You of course learn from mistakes but you also lose experienced man when taking losses. Both factors counterbalance. At least only take losses from fighting into account because how did the Kiev encirclement really improved the tactics of an infantry squad?
When only combat losses are taking, this could make players to do some thing historical soviets did: Attacking without any sense into MG fire with normal infantry during the first month and stuff like this. Then the suggestion sounds better but still contradictionary.

[SigUp]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

NM getting better with losses makes hardly sense IMO. You of course learn from mistakes but you also lose experienced man when taking losses.

You are confusing something. National morale is on the macro scale encompassing the doctrinal proficiency of an army. The experienced men you are talking about are on the micro scale and don't affect the macro scale all that much. One can easily diffuse the issue you raised by saying:

Soviet national morale (would prefer to alter the term): increases with losses
Soviet unit morale/experience: decrease with men lost

[MechFO]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

I have no idea where you have your points for the war exhaustion of german soldiers from. Please give me a source for this.
Martin van Crefeld is saying exactly the opposite at least for the American army what you state. Germans (as a lesson of WW1) were very good to keep unit cohesion and to rest soldiers.

This is all arguably correct, but there was a constant bleed of experienced officers and Noncoms, which couldn't be compensated for. An infantry division in 42 was very different from 44.

http://forum.panzer-archiv.de/viewtopic ... d258d9ae3a

later pages have Werturteilungen which shows the tendency.

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist
But lets assume the current system remains in place:
NM getting better with losses makes hardly sense IMO. You of course learn from mistakes but you also lose experienced man when taking losses. Both factors counterbalance.

The problem only comes when losses outstrip the ability to replace them adequately, this was the long term problem of the Wehrmacht which couldn't be compensated for, or there is not adequate time/space to absorb the lessons, this was the problem of the French.

Otherwise, they are necessary learning experiences, especially for the ones starting out with lower quality/organisations.

The Wehrmacht going into France without the experience of Poland would have been much less effective. UK/US army without NA and Sicily as a training field would have been very different creatures in 44.

[EwaldvonKleist]

@SigUp: Thanks for the clearification, but this has no influence on my main point: Losses through pockets (surrenders) should not be included in the calculation. The function NM(losses) should also be something like Sqrt or LOG/LN but not linear.
National morale should be renamed it is completely the wrong word how i understand it.
@MechFO: What is your point? I never questioned that german units were decreasing in some aspects. But the link is very interesting!
To express different what i mean: Experience and doctrine come from fighting and to some extent from losses. But by far not linear. It is enough to attack hidden AT guns 50times with your tanks to realize it is not the best idea. Doing it 1000 times does not help to improve tactics nationwide.
Soviet doctrine improvements did by the way not only came from unit experience but also because Stalin was forced to shot people for failure instead for no reason like he did before by the dramatic situation. Or less placative: He had to become a bit more rational and less paranoid during the war, leading to the release of imprisoned senior officers, engineers, more freedom and less purges etc.

Edit: About war exhaustion: I am not saying that they were not exhausted, both physically and mentally. But the german army was better in managing the war exhaustion, especially the mental exhaustion so they had few psychological breakdowns compared to the US army and most other armies too i think.

[Capitaine]

I think it's not actually "losing the men", or casualties. It's all about combat experience. And perhaps the best way to measure aggregate combat experience in the game is through the level of losses sustained in combat. A running away "defense" means far less experience in combat and by implication far less casualties, so there wouldn't be as many cases to examine combat proficiency and how to change it.

[Flaviusx]

So far as pockets go, you'd be surprised how many Red Army big names made their way out of pockets, sometimes multiple times. Including the guy I have in my picture. They seemed to have learned something from the experience.

[EwaldvonKleist]

@Capitaine: The suggestion was that losses-->more NM My point is that it is not that simple and high losses does not have to lead to improvements. Please explain how Kiev Pocket changed doctrine of lower level commanders? Maybe of high level commanders but this is players business anyway so not influenced by NM.
@Flaviusx
And?
I can only repeat it: I agree to some parts that fighting on divisional level and below and the casualties coming from mistakes improve NM. Houndred of thousands of POWs taken in the big pockets in RL and ingame don't contribute to this developement because they result from mistakes done at levels not influenced by NM (high command levels).
Flavius your soldiers who escaped from pockets maybe learned to escape from taken POW and have gained some combat experience. Fine. Their ten times greater number of comrades who did not escape are just lost, nothing else then lost as people wearing a gun as well as people who can share their experiences to improve NM.

Just and example:
First case: German player grinds its way into Russia. Means a lot of fighting and therefore many possibilities to practice combat tactics for soviets divisional leaders and lower levels. Of course losses will be comparable low for soviets because no pockets just grinding, mostly dead or damaged but not POW.

Second case: German player makes super big pockets. Few fighting, few dead/damaged soviets but many POWs. Better play, more success=more soviet losses. Many soviets hardly see a fair battle because they are encircled most cases (yes you can fight in a pocket too but it is an "unfair" fight and your experiences will be lost once you surrendered).

Second case means higher NM aka better combat proficiency for soviets because of more. This makes zero sense but actually is what your suggestions will lead to.

[Flaviusx]

My point here is that command staff made it out of those pockets, and that contributed directly to Soviet doctrinal improvements. The rock stars of Stalingrad onwards did not appear out of thin air. They were there in 1941 learning stuff in the school of hard knocks and constantly improving. The disasters of 1941 were not barren of results for the Red Army.

You're missing the big picture here with this excessively tactical focus. NM isn't about rifle squads or whatever.

[EwaldvonKleist]

@Flavius: What you are saying is correct they improved over the time from bitter lessons. Never questioned this.

NM: There is no big picture because NM in the end influences whether a division loses or wins a battle ordered by the player and some other stuff but all related to levels on or below division/soviet corps size. The performance above this is a question how the player shuffles his units around. Correct me if i am wrong you have more WITE exp. as a tester Flavius but this is how i understand the manual.
NM indirectly influences the combat strength and some hex entering costs and stuff like this of single on map units nothing else. Therefore, it can only represent the performance on and below divisional level, nothing else. So the tactical focus is what is needed here. I don't think big picture here because the big picture is our job as a player.

My main point is that the improvements on exactly this levels (division commander down to rifle squad) come from combat experience. Well, this can be measured to some extent by combat losses.
The millions POWs did not improve anything for the soviets except high command operations (better run then get pocketed...) but this is players business. I just want that if there is such a losses=more NM system only combat losses but not POWs are included what is that bad about this?

The guys who escaped from the pockets took the experience with them to build Red Army 2.0. The experience of the POWs was lost nothing else this is in essence what i want to say.

[chaos45]

@ewaldvonkleist

My reading of WW2 literature is quite extensive over the years, and in that there have been several studies of the psychological effects of long term exposure to combat---that has in turn guided how modern military still fights and acts. Sorry I dont remember the exact book/research articles but if you dig enough im sure you can find them.

One of the big findings of all sides was a correlation between time in combat and its effects on a Soldiers--these are studied facts.

The Facts are-3 Phases basically
1) A unit suffers very high losses when it first enters combat- due to lack of actual combat experience- These losses then quickly drop off after the majority of the unit has experienced actual combat.

2) the unit/Soldiers then become more and more proficient at combat and do a better and better job for awhile- I cant remember the timeline but it was around 6 months if I remember right.

3) Soldiers start to get careless- either because they havent been killed or wounded yet and feel invincible or they begin to break down psychologically and dont care if they live or die anymore due to more or less depression or other mental faults from loss of friends/comrades/daily death around them.

An yes even the Germans knew this and used a 3 regiment system for that reason---its the reason almost all modern type armies in WW2 used a 3 regiment/3 battalion system for 2 up 1 back rotations. As it was found that R&R even just behind the lines reset this cycle. Soldiers didnt need to go home although this did help morale tremendously--the key thing to the cycle was a period of rest weeks not in immediate danger where they could relax, let their guard down and be like normal people for awhile more or less.

However as the war went on and losses mounted with no replacements the Germans had to throw away this system and go to almost everyone on the line system- at that point their military really began to truly decline. The US Army's replacement system was horrible and one of its biggest failings I agree. However the rest cycle is pretty much a document psychological effect of war on Soldiers that was learned both before and reinforced during this period of human warfare.

I can tell you it still applies to this day in modern war, Soldiers get tired and burned out you can only operate at 100%+ go mode for so long before you run out of give a shit--US Army during the "surge" in Iraq with units deployed longer than 12 months and the demoralizing effect it had on the force is a perfect modern example of this. Also casualties showed the same trends- units usually took higher losses at the beginning and end of deployments...beginning due to learning combat and end due to carelessness.

[Capitaine]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

@Capitaine: The suggestion was that losses-->more NM My point is that it is not that simple and high losses does not have to lead to improvements. Please explain how Kiev Pocket changed doctrine of lower level commanders? Maybe of high level commanders but this is players business anyway so not influenced by NM.

Re: pockets, I would argue surrender =/= combat loss, like you, so perhaps a way to only count losses from direct ground combat. The learning of high level commanders, though, would be significant too in increasing tactical proficiency across the board as NM reflects. You learn something from all experiences in conflict like this, at all levels, I would say.

There would need to be terms for these effects hammered out. For how long and/or how much would combat experience continue to increase NM? At some point NM would be normalized and losses would cease giving increases. So.. some terms to consider.

[Flaviusx]

All this nitpicking about pockets is losing sight of the purpose for doing this in the first place: to keep Sovs from running away. Speaking bluntly, we are right back to square one here if we decide arbitrarily that pockets don't count here. Okay, I'll just go ahead and run then when it becomes clear that I'll get pocketed.

So let's do stop being turbonerds about this, please. Some degree of abstraction is unavoidable and even helpful.

[Capitaine]

I don't disagree with you Flaviusx, but if there are reasonable exceptions to the general rule, then at least it should be entertained. But by all means we shouldn't be hypertechnical on this either. I don't recall if the game's stats reflect prisoners vs casualties (I never paid much attention to the spreadsheet stuff), so I can't say how much a problem distinguishing them would be. I'm not overly concerned though. The principle of using losses is good enough to develop a proper mechanism in any event.

[rainman2015]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

All this nitpicking about pockets is losing sight of the purpose for doing this in the first place: to keep Sovs from running away. Speaking bluntly, we are right back to square one here if we decide arbitrarily that pockets don't count here. Okay, I'll just go ahead and run then when it becomes clear that I'll get pocketed.

So let's do stop being turbonerds about this, please. Some degree of abstraction is unavoidable and even helpful.

I agree with Flaviusx here. All of this is an abstraction and intended to guide us into more historical constraints/results, we are getting lost in the weeds now. If you put in this rule, but only for non-pocketed losses, then the Soviets would be even more inclined to never let themselves get pocketed, another non-historical downstream effect.

I am starting to see that using NM (or whatever better word gets used for what NM actually means) tied to both combat losses and to city losses, and also combined with Victory points tied to city losses (where VPs accrue turn by turn rather than just be added up as to who controls what at game end) could create a game that feels far more historical, preventing runaways from either side and causing Soviet counterattacks (to pump up the losses).

I realize that NM is a tricky thing and, if allowed to get too low/high, can have a huge snowball effect, spinning the game out of control. So, if it is used this way, it would have to be fine-tuned, probably with us as guinea pigs to get it really right once the game is released.

It seems that WITE2.0 also, in its game system, makes Soviet counterattacks a much more viable strategy for the Soviets early on, so combining the above with this and other WITE2.0 improvements could make a game that feels a lot closer to history.

Randy