Warplan 2 wishlist

[AlvaroSousa]

When it comes out just apply for beta and PM me.

[RocketMan]

When it comes out just apply for beta and PM me.

Will do.

I also want to make another suggestion for Warplan 2 - Forced March.

Infantry units Operation Points are normally 5. This equates to marching 10 of the 14 days in a turn and marching for 12.9 miles a day (see calculations below). This is a pretty accurate figure over extended distances according to period sources, if a little low (kudos for getting this right, a lot of games don't).

However, it was by no means the maximum an infantry unit could walk 14 days. According to an article (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/a ... id%20they.) titled "The Rise of the Panzer Division" on The National WWII Museum website and written by Robert Citino:

• Even well-trained infantry could usually make no more than 15-20 miles per day, with frequent days off in between the heavier marches. Few officers would have considered these distances to be a limitation—it was just the way things were on campaign. Their men walked to work, and so, by and large, did they.

But infantry units could march further as pointed out by the statement that "Few officers would have considered these distances to be a limitation".

What I propose is allowing infantry units to double their action points by using a "Forced March", which would equate to marching 18.4 miles/day over 14 days at the cost of a large increase in effectiveness loss (maybe 1.5%-2% per action point used for movement instead of the normal 1%). These distances are just outside the 15-20 miles/day range, but no breaks are taken during the 14 day period, which would result in a lot of fatigue, cohesion loss, and wear and tear on equipment. Forced march couldn't be used if starting the turn in an enemy ZOC, moving into enemy territory, or to enter an enemy ZOC at any point in the turn (or in areas where the enemy has Air Superiority with my Air Superiority suggestion).

Calculations: Distance from Warsaw to Paris in hexes = 33. In miles 950. 950 miles /33 hexes = 25.8 miles/hex (well within the manuals stated 25-50 miles/hex).
Normal movement: 5 Operation Points/turn * 25.8 miles/hex / 10 days marched/turn = 12.9 miles/day.
Forced march: 10 Operation Points/turn *28.8 miles/hex / 14 days marched/turn = 18.4 miles/day.

[toddtreadway]

Naval system question:

A while back, Alvaro put up a poll as to whether players wanted a hex-based naval system, similar to what Warplan currently has, or a zone-based system. I really prefer zone-based systems, but I'm curious where you ended up?

Looking forward to WP2!

Todd

[ncc1701e]

In TOAW, there is a penalty to exit an enemy ZOC too. I wonder if this is good or not to add here. I am really puzzled and not sure about it.

[RocketMan]

TLDR: Increase Infantry (Infantry, Marine, Paratrooper, and Mountain) Operation Points to 6 and Motorized (Mechanized, Armor) Operation Points to 20 to make the units move a realistic distance each turn.

One of things that bothers me in WWII Grand Strategy games is how unrealistic movement rates often are. For instance, in Advanced Third Reich (the first big WWII Grand Strategy Game), it took 3 turns at 3 months/turn to move from Warsaw to the western front, a distance of around 650 miles, which equates to a movement rate of less than 2.4 miles/day. That’s the worst example I know of, but it’s something I check in all games I play to see how good the simulation is.

Bad movement rates are not a game killer, but having more realistic movement rates makes for a more realistic and enjoyable simulation as long as the rest of the game mechanics can support it. If movement rates need to be kept unrealistically low to make the game system work as intended, then that is understandable, but realistic movement rates should at least be evaluated when designing a game.

Assuming the scale of Warplan 2 is the same as Warplan what are realistic movement rates based on actual average movement rates of units in WWII?

As stated previously in this thread, infantry movement rates averaged 15-20 miles/day over extended periods (more than a few days).

Tank divisions could travel very long distances over roads and in rear areas, but an often-cited numbers for normal movement rates is 50-100 miles per day (they could of course travel even further in a day, but would have a hard time maintaining that over a 14-day period).

For this analysis I will use the lower movement rates values for normal operations and the upper values for forced marches (double Operation Points (OP) at the cost of increased effectiveness loss. See https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 6#p5110596).

The chart below shows how many miles/day a unit moves by OPs and days marched. Two days/week numbers are shown, 10 and 12 (2 and 1 days off/week respectively). 10 would be the nominal number of days an infantry would march, with 12 being a forced march. Motorized formations needed a couple of days/week when travelling long distances for maintenance and repairs, so their movement rate is over 10 days/turn for both regular movement and forced marches, they just drive further/day instead of travelling more days.

Green colors are for Infantry and red for Motorized. The lightest shade is the current values in Warplan, the middle shade are the proposed normal values, and the darkest colors are the proposed forced march values.

The hex size in the main combat areas of Warplan, the Paris to Moscow corridor, is around 25-27 miles/hex (1545 miles between Paris and Moscow/59 hexes from Paris to Moscow = 26.2 miles/hex (manual states game scale is 25-50 miles/hex). I will use 25miles/hex to make the math easier.

Movement Rates.jpg (170.51 KiB) Viewed 1019 times

For Infantry with 5 OPs and clear weather/terrain a unit moves around 12.5 miles/day. This is a pretty good movement rate, but I feel it should be increased to 6 mainly to fix the unrealistically slow movement rates during weather turns. 6 OPs also brings up the normal movement rate to around 15 miles/day, which is the exact low end of the consensus movement rate for infantry in WWII, but that is a secondary effect.

Weather impacts the OP cost for movement (+1 or +2). With only 5 OPs and each hex costing 3 OPs to enter, a unit can only move 1 hex/turn, which equates to a movement rate of 2.5 miles/day. A number similar to the ludicrously slow Advanced Third Reich Infantry units mentioned earlier. Even with each hex costing just 2 OPs to enter a unit is only moving 5 miles/day.

Increasing the Operation Point allotment of an Infantry unit to 6 allows it to move one extra hex, changing the 3 OP weather to 5 miles/day and the 2 OP weather 7.5 miles/day. Still slow, but not ludicrously slow.

Increasing an Infantry Units OPs to 6 also allows it to attack one more time during a turn which would have some impact on gameplay and would have to be evaluated for impact. The additional hex moved in clear weather/terrain shouldn’t have any real impact.

For Motorized units, I recommend doubling their OPs from 10 to 20, which equates to 50 miles/day travelling 10 of the 14 days in a turn. This is the low end of the consensus movement rate for Tank formations in WWII. Double the OP cost for Motorized units to attack and they can still attack the same number of times/turn.

The doubling of the number of hexes a Motorized unit can move would have a large impact on gameplay and would have to be evaluated for impact.

Forced Marches would allow Infantry units to move 25 miles/day when marching 12 days out of a 14 day turn (1 day off/week). This is higher than the consensus movement rate for infantry in WWII, but it is still reasonable and would be short term. The effectiveness loss should be severe enough that nobody but the desperate would do it two turns in a row (effectiveness loss for Forced Marches would need playtesting).

Forced Marches for Motorized units is just the unit driving more miles/day and equates to the top of the consensus movement rate for Tank formations. Effectiveness loss should be greater than moving the same distance using normal movement over 2 turns, but the effectiveness should be less than Infantry).

I think Forced Marches benefit the defender more than the attacker (and mainly in the USSR). If an attacker moves his units by forced march frequently, it will seriously impact their ability to carry out offensive operations due to the large effectiveness loss. There will be situations where that makes sense, but they will be few. The defender however can get his reserves further in a turn and thus respond better to breakthroughs.

I won't go over all the math, but I recommend 10 OPs for Calvary, which equates to 25 miles/day using normal movement and 50 miles/day using Forced March.

[ncc1701e]

Interesting, did you perform the same study for naval movement?

[canuckgamer]

The movement tables you displayed would be applicable for a operational level and even more so, a tactical scale game but not War Plan. For example I play Combat mission which is a tactical level game, individual tank, vehicles and squads. Let's say a scenario covers an area of 4 miles by 4 miles. Since a Tiger tank has a top speed of about 25 mph and each turn represents 60 seconds it is easy to scale it's movement to the map.
War Plan is a strategic scale game only because it covers the period from September 39 to September 45. The actual play mechanics are a blend of operational and tactical scale. You are moving ground units as small as a division, naval units that represent 2 ships. You conduct individual attacks and then decide whether to attack again with the same unit or send in a fresh unit etc. Any game that covers the entirety of World War II is going to have some abstractions or it will be unplayable.
Strategic Command doesn't even allow you to stack an air unit in the same hex as a ground unit. I played a lot of Advanced Third Reich and at the time just like when Panzer Blitz came out it was considered a revolutionary game design. I also played a number of monster games like War in the East, Wacht am Rhein and Terrible Swift Sword. We had 3 players per side for this games because of the number of units and the size of the mapboards. We tried a game that covered the entire desert war but didn't play for long because we had to keep track of the spaghetti rations for the Italians!
A game has to abstract some aspects to be playable. I wouldn't want weekly turns in War Plan because now there could be almost 300 turns if the game went to September 1945. Using your movement scales this would be more "realistic" but I don't want to play a game that takes at least a year in real time to play.
German tank and mech units with 10 op points now do most of their damage by surrounding Russian units. I can't even imagine what they could do by punching a hole through the lines and then having double the ops left. It is only 22 hexes from Brest Litovsk to Moscow. It also means that they could conduct double the number of attacks not taking in to account the reduction in efficiency. A couple of patches ago Russian mech had their ops increased from 5 to 7 in the spring of 42. I haven't played a PBEM to that point yet but I've read comments where posters considered it significant and this is only an increase of 2 ops.
If you are going to change the number of ops for land units what about air and naval? An interceptor in the game now takes one turn or two weeks to fly 12 hexes to another base which is 360 miles in War Plan.
Basically, your suggestion would in my opinion mean developing a completely new game system for War Plan. I certainly don't want it to be as complicated as Grisby's War in the East which has a 520 page manual.

[RocketMan]

The movement tables you displayed would be applicable for a operational level and even more so, a tactical scale game but not War Plan. For example I play Combat mission which is a tactical level game, individual tank, vehicles and squads. Let's say a scenario covers an area of 4 miles by 4 miles. Since a Tiger tank has a top speed of about 25 mph and each turn represents 60 seconds it is easy to scale it's movement to the map.
War Plan is a strategic scale game only because it covers the period from September 39 to September 45. The actual play mechanics are a blend of operational and tactical scale. You are moving ground units as small as a division, naval units that represent 2 ships. You conduct individual attacks and then decide whether to attack again with the same unit or send in a fresh unit etc. Any game that covers the entirety of World War II is going to have some abstractions or it will be unplayable.
Strategic Command doesn't even allow you to stack an air unit in the same hex as a ground unit. I played a lot of Advanced Third Reich and at the time just like when Panzer Blitz came out it was considered a revolutionary game design. I also played a number of monster games like War in the East, Wacht am Rhein and Terrible Swift Sword. We had 3 players per side for this games because of the number of units and the size of the mapboards. We tried a game that covered the entire desert war but didn't play for long because we had to keep track of the spaghetti rations for the Italians!
A game has to abstract some aspects to be playable. I wouldn't want weekly turns in War Plan because now there could be almost 300 turns if the game went to September 1945. Using your movement scales this would be more "realistic" but I don't want to play a game that takes at least a year in real time to play.
German tank and mech units with 10 op points now do most of their damage by surrounding Russian units. I can't even imagine what they could do by punching a hole through the lines and then having double the ops left. It is only 22 hexes from Brest Litovsk to Moscow. It also means that they could conduct double the number of attacks not taking in to account the reduction in efficiency. A couple of patches ago Russian mech had their ops increased from 5 to 7 in the spring of 42. I haven't played a PBEM to that point yet but I've read comments where posters considered it significant and this is only an increase of 2 ops.
If you are going to change the number of ops for land units what about air and naval? An interceptor in the game now takes one turn or two weeks to fly 12 hexes to another base which is 360 miles in War Plan.
Basically, your suggestion would in my opinion mean developing a completely new game system for War Plan. I certainly don't want it to be as complicated as Grisby's War in the East which has a 520 page manual.

The movement rates are for Strategic movement. Operational and tactical rates would be much higher. The numbers are taken from period sources and are the consensus rates among current military historians for extended troop movements (multiple weeks to months, the scale of Warplan). If you have a different source, I would be interested in seeing it.

German Panzers could travel around 300 miles without needing to refuel which equates to 12 hexes. Tanks could move at speeds over 20 miles/hr, which equates to moving 200 miles on a long days drive (10 hours), equating to 8 hexes/day (or 112 hexes/14 days). Obviously moving a column of units 200 miles/day was only possible tactically and sometimes operationally, but not strategically for a lot of reasons. However 50 miles/day only equates to driving about 6 miles/hour over an 8 hour period in a day, easily doable over extended periods even in hostile territory.

Regarding attacks, if you had read my proposal you would have seen that I proposed making Motorized attacks cost 2 OPs per attack, so the number of attacks is the same.

Deep drives behind enemy lines should be suicidal like they were in the war. Everybody knew you could drive your units deep into unprotected enemy territory, but nobody did it because it was suicidal. Use the existing game systems to simulate the same impacts in game. Tweaks to the supply system (like huge OP and Effectiveness decreases if Motorized Units get out of supply) solve this problem without unrealistically decreasing movement rates. You could also increase the OP cost for a Motorized attack to 4 to simulate the need to stop and resupply after major combat actions, and/or increase the ZOC cost for motorized units (and/or get rid of the no ZOC cost for captured hexes in a turn "The hex of the retreated unit loses its ZoC"). There's plenty of existing parameters in the game to use for balance.

Long movements would also be extremely hard on equipment. A Motorized unit starting at 100% effectiveness and moving 20 hexes in a turn would need 3 turns of rest at 9 supply to get back to 90% effectiveness, which is probably too short. You could make each hex traveled after half a Motorized units movement cost 1.5% (or even 2%) effectiveness instead of 1%, simulating wear and tear from extended operations. According to the Armored Directorate of the Red Army, the average T-34 in World War Two lasted less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) before requiring major repair or overhaul. That's just 5 hexes of movement. Soviet Motorized vehicles should suffer at least 2% and maybe up to 4-5% effectiveness loss per hex moved. Again, give the players the same problems that their real world counterparts had using the parameters in the game system.

I have been playing war games since the 1970s and don't want a game like The Campaign for North Africa either. I want a playable game that simulates the real world as close as possible while still being playable. I believe Warplan achieves that balance quite well. Changing movement rates adds zero complexity to the game but makes for a more realistic simulation. If additional realism makes the game unplayable, then that's fine. But the goal should to make the game as realistically a simulation as possible while still making the game playable and enjoyable. There's plenty of games that simulate what ifs or even fantasy situations. While those can be fun, they don't simulate WWII, which is what Warplan does.

For Air units, the time it takes for an air unit to move bases is not how far or fast the planes can fly, but how fast the ground support can move. I don't have good numbers on that, but they were all motorized and should be able to travel long distances in 14 days like Mechanized units (50-100 miles/day or more since they are small formations).

Naval movement is necessarily abstract. They only way to realistically model the naval war is hour by hour as War in the Pacific does, which would make a game like Warplan unplayable. I have some ideas for a better simulation of the naval war that I might propose if I have the time (unit stances in ports (e.g. intercept, rest, etc.) and sea areas).

BTW, I'm playtesting increasing the operation points in Warplan to see how it impacts play. I currently have the default rate for Motorized units set to 15 with +5 for the Breakthrough advancement and I'm limiting the number of attacks to 10 max/turn using house rules, although attacking that often is going to wear out a unit so bad it will need 4 months to recover back to 90% effectiveness and result in a lot of causalities, so I can't see it ever being a realistic option.

[AlvaroSousa]

That's the lovely of it. You can change the main scenario to your liking. That is what got me into Strategic Command. I made my own 1939 scenario.

[ncc1701e]

Such as land units could be divided into 2 or 3, why not allow the same for air units? This way, you could split your air units on the many Pacific islands covering more sea hexes but with less density of course since you have less planes in each units.

[AlvaroSousa]

that will be next game. Cant do this with this format

[ncc1701e]

that will be next game. Cant do this with this format

Well, this is the Warplan 2 thread. If by next game, you mean Warplan 2, then I am fine with that.

[ncc1701e]

I can understand that this is not the cup of tea of everybody. But ww2 was a war of production, supplies and logistics was very important.

Nowadays, everybody is speaking of ammunition. In case of a full scale war, the depots will be empty in two weeks, it seems. And, ammunition is not really covered in the game.

Also, maintenance is an important thing. Repairing vehicles after combat usage or intensive use is a must. Effectiveness covers this a little but not supplies.

About logistics, I can quote this sentence and see immediately in WPE that nothing prevents German army to invade Yugoslavia and Greece in 1939-1940 just in time to invade France in summer 1940. Something I will surely try next time.

The bulk of the German armed forces had to be committed to overcome the Poles, and the expenditure in ammunition, gasoline, and materiel was such as to preclude concurrent German operations on a similar scale in the west or elsewhere.

In the Russian campaign, this is only the weather the limiting factor to prevent any operation in the east. Never there is a need to build up supplies for an offensive. Never there is a choice or a trade off to do because your army don’t have enough ammunition and supplies to attack on two axis in parallel.

Without adding too much micro management, I think supplies should be reworked in WP2. The supply system of AWAWAWD is elegant and honestly the best I have ever seen. Supplies, that we can assimilate also to ammunition, need to be built in factories. Supplies consumption is not the same in defense and offense, higher in offense. Supplies must be transported, on ships or railroads, and build up for future offensive. Sea transportation of supplies can be intercepted. If one unit is not involved in combat, it won’t spend supplies. This is allowing to have Japanese units on Pacific Islands for months if not attacked. I don’t ask to copy the system but it would be great if WP2 could add a similar supply aspect.

I think Pacific islands is where supply system must be tested and validated first. If it works there, it works everywhere. On an island, supplies are needed for any units, land, sea, air. If an air unit is doing an interception or an air mission, it consumes supplies. If a sea unit is leaving from this island, it consumes supplies. If a land unit is defending or attacking, it consumes supplies. To replenish the supplies amount on the island, transport ships must be used. Transport ships, escorted or not, that can be intercepted by planes, subs or ships.

We can also enhance the system by allowing an army to capture supplies dump if the enemy is retreating after a battle leaving plenty of supplies in an area.

Anyway thanks Alvaro, you gave me the idea to create my own design rules.

[AlvaroSousa]

The supply system will be better. As I learn to code better.

With building up supplies there needs to be a consequence in building too much supplies. Players have to weigh how much to send. I remember in SPI's ETO/PTO as the Italians you could fill all your ports to the max prewar with supplies and the Med Convoy would be meaningless to attack for the Allies.

Production to supply could be the fix making it not significant but meaningful enough where oversupplying has a cost. The more complex I make it the easier it will be to break. As is in WPE I had to make some manual adjustments for Germany late war in production and manpower to balance out the game due to the Allied overwhelming production.

[scout1]

The movement tables you displayed would be applicable for a operational level and even more so, a tactical scale game but not War Plan. For example I play Combat mission which is a tactical level game, individual tank, vehicles and squads. Let's say a scenario covers an area of 4 miles by 4 miles. Since a Tiger tank has a top speed of about 25 mph and each turn represents 60 seconds it is easy to scale it's movement to the map.
War Plan is a strategic scale game only because it covers the period from September 39 to September 45. The actual play mechanics are a blend of operational and tactical scale. You are moving ground units as small as a division, naval units that represent 2 ships. You conduct individual attacks and then decide whether to attack again with the same unit or send in a fresh unit etc. Any game that covers the entirety of World War II is going to have some abstractions or it will be unplayable.
Strategic Command doesn't even allow you to stack an air unit in the same hex as a ground unit. I played a lot of Advanced Third Reich and at the time just like when Panzer Blitz came out it was considered a revolutionary game design. I also played a number of monster games like War in the East, Wacht am Rhein and Terrible Swift Sword. We had 3 players per side for this games because of the number of units and the size of the mapboards. We tried a game that covered the entire desert war but didn't play for long because we had to keep track of the spaghetti rations for the Italians!
A game has to abstract some aspects to be playable. I wouldn't want weekly turns in War Plan because now there could be almost 300 turns if the game went to September 1945. Using your movement scales this would be more "realistic" but I don't want to play a game that takes at least a year in real time to play.
German tank and mech units with 10 op points now do most of their damage by surrounding Russian units. I can't even imagine what they could do by punching a hole through the lines and then having double the ops left. It is only 22 hexes from Brest Litovsk to Moscow. It also means that they could conduct double the number of attacks not taking in to account the reduction in efficiency. A couple of patches ago Russian mech had their ops increased from 5 to 7 in the spring of 42. I haven't played a PBEM to that point yet but I've read comments where posters considered it significant and this is only an increase of 2 ops.
If you are going to change the number of ops for land units what about air and naval? An interceptor in the game now takes one turn or two weeks to fly 12 hexes to another base which is 360 miles in War Plan.
Basically, your suggestion would in my opinion mean developing a completely new game system for War Plan. I certainly don't want it to be as complicated as Grisby's War in the East which has a 520 page manual.

The movement rates are for Strategic movement. Operational and tactical rates would be much higher. The numbers are taken from period sources and are the consensus rates among current military historians for extended troop movements (multiple weeks to months, the scale of Warplan). If you have a different source, I would be interested in seeing it.

German Panzers could travel around 300 miles without needing to refuel which equates to 12 hexes. Tanks could move at speeds over 20 miles/hr, which equates to moving 200 miles on a long days drive (10 hours), equating to 8 hexes/day (or 112 hexes/14 days). Obviously moving a column of units 200 miles/day was only possible tactically and sometimes operationally, but not strategically for a lot of reasons. However 50 miles/day only equates to driving about 6 miles/hour over an 8 hour period in a day, easily doable over extended periods even in hostile territory.

Regarding attacks, if you had read my proposal you would have seen that I proposed making Motorized attacks cost 2 OPs per attack, so the number of attacks is the same.

Deep drives behind enemy lines should be suicidal like they were in the war. Everybody knew you could drive your units deep into unprotected enemy territory, but nobody did it because it was suicidal. Use the existing game systems to simulate the same impacts in game. Tweaks to the supply system (like huge OP and Effectiveness decreases if Motorized Units get out of supply) solve this problem without unrealistically decreasing movement rates. You could also increase the OP cost for a Motorized attack to 4 to simulate the need to stop and resupply after major combat actions, and/or increase the ZOC cost for motorized units (and/or get rid of the no ZOC cost for captured hexes in a turn "The hex of the retreated unit loses its ZoC"). There's plenty of existing parameters in the game to use for balance.

Long movements would also be extremely hard on equipment. A Motorized unit starting at 100% effectiveness and moving 20 hexes in a turn would need 3 turns of rest at 9 supply to get back to 90% effectiveness, which is probably too short. You could make each hex traveled after half a Motorized units movement cost 1.5% (or even 2%) effectiveness instead of 1%, simulating wear and tear from extended operations. According to the Armored Directorate of the Red Army, the average T-34 in World War Two lasted less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) before requiring major repair or overhaul. That's just 5 hexes of movement. Soviet Motorized vehicles should suffer at least 2% and maybe up to 4-5% effectiveness loss per hex moved. Again, give the players the same problems that their real world counterparts had using the parameters in the game system.

I have been playing war games since the 1970s and don't want a game like The Campaign for North Africa either. I want a playable game that simulates the real world as close as possible while still being playable. I believe Warplan achieves that balance quite well. Changing movement rates adds zero complexity to the game but makes for a more realistic simulation. If additional realism makes the game unplayable, then that's fine. But the goal should to make the game as realistically a simulation as possible while still making the game playable and enjoyable. There's plenty of games that simulate what ifs or even fantasy situations. While those can be fun, they don't simulate WWII, which is what Warplan does.

For Air units, the time it takes for an air unit to move bases is not how far or fast the planes can fly, but how fast the ground support can move. I don't have good numbers on that, but they were all motorized and should be able to travel long distances in 14 days like Mechanized units (50-100 miles/day or more since they are small formations).

Naval movement is necessarily abstract. They only way to realistically model the naval war is hour by hour as War in the Pacific does, which would make a game like Warplan unplayable. I have some ideas for a better simulation of the naval war that I might propose if I have the time (unit stances in ports (e.g. intercept, rest, etc.) and sea areas).

BTW, I'm playtesting increasing the operation points in Warplan to see how it impacts play. I currently have the default rate for Motorized units set to 15 with +5 for the Breakthrough advancement and I'm limiting the number of attacks to 10 max/turn using house rules, although attacking that often is going to wear out a unit so bad it will need 4 months to recover back to 90% effectiveness and result in a lot of causalities, so I can't see it ever being a realistic option.

if I'm not mistaken, what the panzers could do in a day (300 miles) and how many of them would make it were too different things .... this kind of adventure would have resulted in horresnous breakdown rates ... different vehicles had different thresholds as to wear and tear to failure needing rest and repairs ..... and god help them if they didn't have good supply throughout this ....

[battlevonwar]

During the war supply bottlenecks really killed certain armies.

Rails, Roads were essential during Barbarossa/Russian Counter Offensives, North Africa, the D-Day Drive. Getting cold weather clothing, ammo, fuel to the front was so hard during Typhoon. The Russians lost nearly double the men to exposure(meaning that cold winter troops ability not always a gift was it?) than the Germans cause they were out in the elements fighting. The Germans were hunkered down on the defense where you're less likely to be exposed to the elements.

Supply is a tricky business and stockpiles aren't always possible. Planning ahead is a tough business and expensive. Knowing where and when is rough!

The supply system will be better. As I learn to code better.

With building up supplies there needs to be a consequence in building too much supplies. Players have to weigh how much to send. I remember in SPI's ETO/PTO as the Italians you could fill all your ports to the max prewar with supplies and the Med Convoy would be meaningless to attack for the Allies.

Production to supply could be the fix making it not significant but meaningful enough where oversupplying has a cost. The more complex I make it the easier it will be to break. As is in WPE I had to make some manual adjustments for Germany late war in production and manpower to balance out the game due to the Allied overwhelming production.

[ncc1701e]

In AWAWAWD, supply transportation is limited by the number of ships available for usage. It is also limited by the size of the railroads if any. For example, railroad network in Russia is limited compared to Western Europe.

Since your factories need to produce units as well as supplies and that offensives are costly in term of supplies, there is not a lot of opportunities to do stockpiles.

[RocketMan]

For Warplan 2 I would like to propose having Force Pools for units. The Force Pools would represent the maximum of that unit type that can be built in one turn for the standard production cost. Force Pools could include the following: Tanks, airplanes (maybe by type), firearms/guns/artillery. A player could go over the Force Pools but at some penalty. This penalty could be linear increase (200% over = 200% cost) or an exponential one (lots of good equations for this).

Force Pools would start "historical" and could either increase in a historical manner or the player could be given the option to tweak them slightly with production (would be expensive as it would simulate building new factories).

I know some games use a "gearing" mechanic and something similar could also be done.

[RocketMan]

A lot of games struggle or even ignore the different levels of intelligence between the Axis and the Allies. Currently in Warplan there is no mechanic to simulate this asymmetric level of intelligence gathering.

I propose having Asymmetric FOW in Warplan 2 to simulate this.

FOW would be handled exactly like in Warplan, but there would be an additional Parmenter for intelligence. This parameter would have some level of variability, from no additional information to a lot of additional information, and would vary throughout the waw. There should even be the possibility of false information.

Edit: Meant to mention that intelligence information should include stockpiles, build queue, convoy escorts, research.

German Intelligence should be abysmal with Allied Intelligence getting better and better as the war goes on.

This would simulate the vastly superior allied intelligence in the war without adding any player overhead. There would, of course, be programming and testing overhead.

[ncc1701e]

Could we have transport ships on map and not abstracted? The reason I am asking is that abstraction is creating a distorsion of the reality. German transport ships are allowed to operate in the Med whereas they can't pass Gibraltar or Suez. Same thing in the Black Sea, with the exception of small ships/subs were able to come with the Danube (again major vs minor rivers could do something here).

Still linked to the way, supply will be implemented in WP2. DAK was supplied only by the Italian ships. But if by chance you are destroying any transport, German ships are there, no problem.

If this can be solved for WP2 by abstraction, why not. But, a fleet cannot flight.