morleron1
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Panama
quote:
ORIGINAL: Fungwu
I think the existing german fighter production values in FITE are already accurate, however the relative quality of the two airforces I don't think is represented well. From what I have read the Soviets did not have the kind of crushing air superiority in 1943 that they have in the game in the beginning of 1942, despite their superior numbers. So I think some change is in order. The most straightfoward would be to reduce soviet production and increase german production, I haven't tried playing it with shock changes, that could possibly work.
Yes, Soviet production is far too high. even if the Axis did as well as they did historically AND they take Leningrad Soviet tank production is STILL higher than it was historically.
Does anyone have a source for production numbers for Soviet aircraft production or, since the historical rates may be too high for our purpose of developing a well-balanced scenario, suggestions as to what they should be? I'll be glad to make changes to the production rates in the mods I'm making. One thing which needs to be kept in mind here is that it is not possible, AFAIK, to change production numbers in mid-stream, as it were. That means we'll need to massage the numbers in order to come up with reasonable rates for the scenario as a whole.
That brings me to a point that I think we all tend to forget sometimes: the limitations under which scenario developers must work. Not being able to change production rates during the course of a scenario is one of these. Another is the inability to change victory levels in the game. In other words, the designer can set the VP values however he wants, but the game decides what VP levels match each victory level. The only way around this that I know of is to use the "Player # Occupies" event types to set up sudden death victory conditions. I suspect that is one of the reasons that cities which had no real production capability in real life are given them in the game. I think this was an attempt by the original design team to force the Soviets to defend the western portion of the country. It's why I've increased the VP point value of most of the western cities in my mods. Based on this discussion, though, I may take a look at eliminating most replacement rate losses and concentrate them in a few cities of consequence. Taking Leningrad from a 10% loss to 40% and doing the same for, say, Smolensk, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, and one or two others forward of the currently fashionable Soviet stop line might make a Soviet player think twice about simply retreating out of reach of the German supply lines. Selecting the cities and determining how much to value each one will be the trick to this.
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ORIGINAL: Panama
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ORIGINAL: Fungwu
I don't think making soviets use fighters from the beginning of the game would have any difference at all. I-16 production is base 170 per turn. I think if the soviet player flew missions on turn 3 for example they would take some losses, and then go into reorg until turn 8 or 10, so you would really not be flying much, and replacements are so high losses don't matter. In fact as a soviet player I use my planes pretty quickly, I just put them far back enough so that only He-111s on interdiction are intercepted. I don't understand why it is unrealistic or unreasonable to have the soviet player withdraw his planes anyway, why not let them fight the war however they please?
I-16 was used until 1943. Some Soviet pilots prefered it over the more modern models. Once again, I feel the Soviet should have to fly all the time. Anything less and you are throwing facts out the door. The Soviet army would have been extremely upset if the Soviet air arm did not attempt to do as much as was physically possible to keep the Axis air off their backs and help with ground support.
There are two issues here: is it our goal to force the Soviet player into a particular course of action as regards the Air Force?; assuming we do want that, how can we ensure that the Soviet player is abiding by this house rule? I'm not sure that requiring a player to adhere to a particular course of action is the way to fix some of FITE's problems. And there is still the issue of assuring compliance. AFAIK, there is no way for the Axis player to review the moves made by the Soviet air force. Simply looking at the map will not give him this information, particularly with my mods in which I've cut down the Axis player's recon level (as suggested by Panama some time ago). If anyone knows how to get around this I'd be interested in hearing it. Personally, I tend to trust that my opponents are abiding by house rules, but we all know players who aren't trustworthy in that regard and something like this is a large enough issue that I would be more comfortable with a "trust but verify" setup, if such could be arranged.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Panama
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ORIGINAL: Fungwu
When considering history there is alot of what ifs. What if the Soviets did much better in 1941 and they held the Germans comfortably at bay. Would the allies then send them so much lend lease? Maybe not, they didn't like the Soviets, they probably would have only sent them enough to keep them in the war, if there wasn't a big threat they might have not sent anything. What if the soviets produced twice as many tanks and planes, which can easily happen in FITE? Would they also produce twice as much fuel and ammunition and crews for them? Maybe they wouldn't so it might be better to fix production for those things at a lower level. What if the Germans didn't do well at all in 1941? Maybe they would have gone to full war production right away, instead of only after Stalingrad a year and a half after the campaign began. So right away you see that things can vary alot. One way to model things would be to tie the escalating event variable to capturing territory for either side, so if one side is doing worse they get more reinforcements, and if the other is doing well they get less, but that is complicated so I think something simpler would be better.
The Soviets were incapable of keeping the Axis at bay. They had no training, no weapons, no supply, no leadership, no communications, no transport and no time. The only thing they had in any measure was the will and some didn't even have that. In fact in the game I don't understand why they have a proficiency of 60. Also the Soviets had far fewer resources than the Germans. You would be shocked at the numbers. They were extremely efficient in using what they had. I sincerely doubt they could have done better than they did production wise. The production in the game is so far off as to be laughable.
I've got to agree with Panama on this one. The Red Army in 1941 was not a force capable of simply stopping the German attack at some point significantly west of where the Panzers did stop. The Soviets got lucky when Generals Mud and Winter proved to be better at stopping the Germans than was the Red Army. A milder winter or a shorter period of fall rains and the Germans probably end up partying in the Kremlin for Christmas.
However, I have to think that the 60 proficiency level for the majority of Soviet forces is the result of yet another compromise more or less forced on the original designers. Given the size of the OOBs involved it is not possible to define what amounts to two different Red Armies: the one which fought in 1941 and had problems getting out of its own way at times, and the one which fought from roughly mid-1942 on. I think that the post 1942 Red Army (and certainly the 1943 and later force) was more capable than the 60 rating shows. But given the impossibility of doing a mass force change (and I know of no other way to change the proficiency levels of units) a compromise had to be made. Given that, I do think that Panama's point, which he's made in several threads, about the initial Red Army forces being far too well provisioned needs to be addressed. Again, if someone can point me at reliable resources, I'm willing to make such changes in the mods I'm doing.
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ORIGINAL: Panama
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ORIGINAL: Fungwu
Here is something to think about. In the game city whatever is 5% or 10% of replacements. So lets take Sevastopol. In real life it was captured, but in a evenly matched game it is impossible. Taking the base production of rifle squads of 3492, not taking Sevastopol gives the soviets rougly 200 extra rifle squads per turn. Over say 250 turns the game might last, that is 50,000 extra rifle squads or 500,000 extra men. Is the population of the city even that high? In the real war the city had a chance of being evacuated, so any men could have gotten away and then joined the red army. Any who were left had a chance to join the partisans or join the red army after the city was liberated. So if you used real manpower for the red army the citizens of sevastpol should be counted the same whether the city falls or not, because in history they all eventually got a chance to fight. In the game not taking the city gives a huge increase in the number of soldiers which is unjustified.
Even worse is when you consider tanks and planes. The effect on tank and planes production for not taking Sevastopol is also to increase the red army's strength in those things much higher than their historical output, which is only reached if the German player takes the city and many others. But..wait for it... Sevastopol doesn't have any tank or plane factories! or atleast not both or not enough to make 10% of the countries weapons, or not ones that couldn't be moved. So in effect the Soviets get many more tanks and planes for defending a city that didn't matter one ounce in their tank and plane production, and if you provide the names of some factory there, i can just as easily name any other city that didn't have any.
Will someone explain to me exactly why Sevastopol has a 10% production hit? They had no factories. As far as I know nothing was produced there. It most certainly was not the type of production center Leningrad, Kharkov and Moscow was. Seems rather arbitrary. The only reason it had so much importance to Hitler was bacause Soviet bombers could reach Ploesti from there.
As with several aspects of FITE I suspect that this was the original design team's attempt to encourage the Soviet player to defend further west than the outskirts of Moscow. As both of you have noted the current replacement rate system needs to be re-worked. Given that the question then becomes which cities will we concentrate production in and what values will they have. While we're at it we might take a look at coming up with a way of simulating the Soviet movement of a huge amount of their production capacity from European Russia to east of the Urals. I can see that being a Soviet Theater Option which would greatly lower Soviet replacements for some period accompanied by a reduction in the replacement rate loss per city. Failure to exercise the option to make the move would result in greater replacement rate losses. Not being an event editor expert (as evidenced by the problems I've had getting it right to date) this may be a significant "programming" effort; not that that should stop us if such a change is thought worthwhile.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Panama
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ORIGINAL: Fungwu
So therefore I suggest just finding a balanced and historically close number for soviet production and stick to that, and removed the system of cities that give a % loss, or only add production loss for a select few cities that won't dramatically sway production either way.
And to this I heartily agree. If Leningrad falls the Soviets take a small hit since most of the factories didn't get evacuated in time. If Moscow falls a big hit since hardly any factories were evacuated. Stalingrad, small hit, still had some factories. But the rest of the production cities should be done away with and historical numbers should be used.
What the Soviets did lose was manpower, chemical production and food production. Reduce infantry type units and supply as more territory is lost.
I'm open to suggestions for which cities to make the changes to. Let's try to take the law of unintended consequences into account when/if we make these changes. I think that what we'll end up with is still a scenario in which most cities have VP values higher than they are in the stock FITE (for those west of some more-or-less arbitrary line) and only a few with replacement point losses - though those will be much higher than the stock losses.
Just my $.02,
Ron
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RE: FITE MOD 2010 - 
In any case, I'm with you on hoping that TOAW IV will avoid this problem by not setting arbitrary limits to force sizes, equipment lists, etc. 
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