Failure of the Will - GR (allies), loki (axis)

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GloriousRuse
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RE: T35 - Spying on Bristol

Post by GloriousRuse »


Loki may face some real life delays, so, as per tradition - analysis of something we've been chatting with over e-mail.

Truck Bombing - The Final Frontier?

There is a bit of conventional wisdom in AARs that bombing trucks is a high pay off strategy, cutting the legs out from under the Germans sometime in '44. And while the underlying logic that less trucks = bad news for the Heer is pretty incontrovertible, the question is whether strategic bombing is the means to do it. Somewhat unintentionally we've set up a one experiment on the matter by how Loki and I have approached the truck problem.

We'll be using T38 files for each of these; I'm on a different computer, but found the old e-mail from last game for comparison.

Anyhow, lets start with production:

Production

The Germans have a theoretical plant based production of 539 truck points (each is, in fact, 10 trucks if all goes well; talk about confusing my initial estimates) a week as of T38; given major foreign plants start falling in '44, this 5,390 is a reasonable enough per turn estimate. Or that's the theory at any rate - but does it hold up in practice? Between T38-T48 in my old game the truck plants were running at an average 93% undamaged. This produced 18.5k trucks in 10 turns.

WOAH. Not at all what pure theory tells us to expect. That'd be 19.9k trucks every 10 turns if left unmolested, or just under 2k per turn. Hence my delay for editing.

In addition, the German repair services funnel many trucks back. Back of the napkin says that as of T38 they were sending in 1,500 a week.

So, 3,500 trucks a turn and only 2k of that is bombable. This is pretty close to what I built last game, though that number is a bit lower than it could be, because of course Loki bombed trucks up front. In comparison, with Loki's truck offensive in full swing, the first 9 turns of the last game saw 13k trucks built in plants (not repaired) as compared to 18k - a state which existed through fall '43 - so there may be another ~10k built over the course of the game I'm not seeing. Still, it's a helpful guide if not 100% reliable.

And if you are playing with the EF off, only 40% of it is routed west by default. So a true per turn production of 1,400 (possibly 1500?), of which 800 is bombable.

In other words, even if not one truck factory ever got seized (they will be) there'd be ~144.4k west bound trucks in a game, and only ~86.8k of them are up for being bombed out of production.

What can strat air do to that?

Bombing Campaigns

Let us run three possible bombing campaign scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Wildly Unrealistic Perfect Campaign. Let's say you crushed every truck plant for all 95 turns of the game that matter: 86.8k trucks of westward production would be stopped. That's a lot of trucks. Vast amounts of trucks. And if my tactical losses last game are a guide, a little over half of the tactical losses the Germans suffer. Completely unobtainable, but that's the upper bound.

Scenario 2: Ruthless bombing of the core. The top 6 factories cover about 50% of German truck production. If you made their constant attack your highest priority in the air campaign while still earning VPs, maybe you could keep them at say, an average of 75% destruction at the cost of less VP focus and ignoring many other materiel targets. At some point your recon is going to fail you or weather will intervene, so 75% is nicely optimistic. That's 33.2k trucks. Hmm. That would be quite a chunk - but both games have shown higher losses in Italy.

Scenario 3: Partial priority. By contrast, Loki had less than 10% (7.9%, specifically) of the truck production off line by T38 in our old game, with some higher numbers in good weather and the early game less and less focus as the game progressed. What started as an initial bomb out the core effort got swamped in the realities of V-weapons, tanks, VPs, and trying to break the German depot network. I think we can agree that Loki is quite good at bombing things, and paid a fair amount of effort to trucks when he thought he could afford to. I had produced (not repaired) 61k trucks by that point - against a theoretical max of 76k. Applying the old "Russia gets everything" effect, that means 6k trucks never made it to my brave pixeltruppen in Italy.

As the game progressed, this fell off because there are lots of calls on the bombers. If we say he held at 7.9% (he didn't) for the rest of the game by sending what he could when he could, he'd destroy another 2.8k trucks headed west. For a game total of 8.7k denied production.

What IS a lot of Trucks?

For comparison, in our old game where I was the baddies, I had lost 48k trucks by T38. I had an active pool of 8.5 trucks and another 10k in depots left at the time, for 18.5k ready to go.

In our current game, Loki has figured out much better than I how to commit mech to Italy, and has lost 58k trucks. I'm also running some interdiction experiments that may affect that, but it's a pretty consistent given that when the Germans move heavy units, trucks suffer. We might extrapolate that the 6k trucks I never received, well, he did. So lets call it ~14.5k in the kitty since he is very sensibly not telling. If I'm right, the ground game was worth more than a reasonably focused strat air campaign in '43. Hopefully he'll chime in when we're done to see if I'm laughably off or not.

And to further the issue the truck feedback loop won't be seen until NWE kicks off and the Germans commit enough forces to really strain the stocks needed for supply and heavy division movement. In our previous game, I entered the invasion with pretty assured movement for the panzers. Only the utter slugfest in Picardy really brought the issue up, and frankly they retained enough MP to be locally dangerous until we were fighting on the banks of the Rhine. How much of this is proving a negative - they would have been 50 MPs and 20 CV if more trucks! - versus the natural result of panzers being your go to formations that get pounded, interdicted, and called forward at every real fight, well that's an unknown.

Conclusion

The conventional wisdom on this one is mathematically right - you CAN seriously affect trucks - but to pursue it to a point where it outpaces the delta that might occur as a result of different ground action requires a very high dedication on the part of the air campaign. Like most things from the air in WitW, it's viable to do some touch up on the cheap, but to really be outstanding you need to go all in.

And this is a good thing. Because it means that to truly get results, the allied player really needs to make a decision and follow through. In this case almost certainly at the cost of VPs not taken, tanks not bombed, and depots unmolested.


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loki100
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T36 - quite enjoying the rain

Post by loki100 »

T37 – 11 March 1944

Well a quiet turn as my weather forcast was wrong, heavy rains over NW Europe and the Allies undertook no more attacks in Italy.

VP of +5.

OOB

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Ground losses, allies have lost 94 troop ships but I presume have stopped any moves from Italy to the UK for now.

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Air losses.

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Weather next turn, looks like heavy rain so another chance to rest and recover.

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RE: T35 - Spying on Bristol

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse


Loki may face some real life delays, so, as per tradition - analysis of something we've been chatting with over e-mail.

Truck Bombing - The Final Frontier?

There is a bit of conventional wisdom in AARs that bombing trucks is a high pay off strategy, cutting the legs out from under the Germans sometime in '44. And while the underlying logic that less trucks = bad news for the Heer is pretty incontrovertible, the question is whether strategic bombing is the means to do it. Somewhat unintentionally we've set up a one experiment on the matter by how Loki and I have approached the truck problem.
...

Small observation about this. The rules for factory production are different to those for factory VP and its easy to mix them up (of course v-weapon and U-boat rules are different).

Lets take a 20 HI factory and assume it has 5 pts of bomb damage.

For VP that is 5 units of value for the bombing score. If you get the damage to 20 then that is 20 units of value.

For production a factory either produces 100% or 0%. You get this outcome by damage*2/size. So in our case the 5 bits of damage becomes 10/20, in other words the factory has a 50/50 chance of producing.

Now I know that trucks are outside the VP score model but basically if you knocked out say 20 pts of a large truck factory (if I recall Mainz is 70) then the loss to production is variable but that factory won't work 1 turn in 3 or 4. If you've knocked it to 35 pts of damage, it won't produce.

I think overall the game does an excellent job in modelling the strategic air war. It actually doesn't really work but it does make an additional bit of damage. So by this stage, I'd largely lost interest in trucks. The intent, as with tank bombing is that you want to make a mess of rebuilds and make it harder for the Pzrs to recover.

Overall as an allied player I tend to find I run out of ideas for strategic bombing about now. The lower VP multiplier starts to hurt, the feedback loops are already created and it becomes a case of keeping the v-weapons as low as possible and taking out some very specific production elements.

You could make a case that post the landings in France, the Allies should have committed their strategic assets to essentially supporting operational actions but of course they didn't know the war was going to end in 9 months.
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RE: T35 - Spying on Bristol

Post by GloriousRuse »

I think there may be some WitE conflation going there - or just as likely, I'm misreading the living manual:

From 21.2.2

"Damage is applied to an entire factory, not to individual factory points. The damage level of a factory is also the probability that the factory will not produce on a given turn. For example 100 damage means no production, while 25 damage means 25 percent chance of no production and a 75 percent chance of full production. For example a FW-190 aircraft factory with 12 factory points, or size 12, which had 40 damage would have a 60 percent chance of producing 12 aircraft and a 40 percent chance of producing 0 aircraft."

I know the old WitE method was 2*damage, as are rails now? But as I said, I'm not as familiar with the game manual.
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RE: T35 - Spying on Bristol

Post by John B. »

And this turn the Allies had one unlucky bastard who clearly was the third person to light is cigarette from a single match while in the trenches. :)

The allies really did not go all in on oil and transportation until right about the time of Normandy so it could be argued that had they switched the bombers to operational attacks the German war economy would have enabled them to last longer than 9 months. One of those interesting counterfactuals that can never be resolved.
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RE: T35 - Spying on Bristol

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

I think there may be some WitE conflation going there - or just as likely, I'm misreading the living manual:

From 21.2.2

"Damage is applied to an entire factory, not to individual factory points. The damage level of a factory is also the probability that the factory will not produce on a given turn. For example 100 damage means no production, while 25 damage means 25 percent chance of no production and a 75 percent chance of full production. For example a FW-190 aircraft factory with 12 factory points, or size 12, which had 40 damage would have a 60 percent chance of producing 12 aircraft and a 40 percent chance of producing 0 aircraft."

I know the old WitE method was 2*damage, as are rails now? But as I said, I'm not as familiar with the game manual.

well I'll admit I can't find it back, and exactly the same text is in the draft WiTE2 manual, but I am sure its in the game. I think its why a factory with >50 damage shows red either in the bombing map mode or the factory map mode. I could also be talking mince - which is not impossible
ORIGINAL: John B.

And this turn the Allies had one unlucky bastard who clearly was the third person to light is cigarette from a single match while in the trenches. :)

The allies really did not go all in on oil and transportation until right about the time of Normandy so it could be argued that had they switched the bombers to operational attacks the German war economy would have enabled them to last longer than 9 months. One of those interesting counterfactuals that can never be resolved.

aye, I really should kill some more of them ... imagine how embarassing it must be to end up as the only casualty in a given week [;)]


I've pushed Overy's The Bombing War a few times as I think its both a well written overview and it takes the -for the lack of a better word - dialetic between theory and practice and how that affected bombing strategy.

So in the 1930s the mindset was the 'bomber will get through' (proved to be basically correct) and this would lead to massive war ending damage as cities were reduced to rubble (nope). Early practice (say 39-41) did little to resolve this, everyone could grab the data they wanted but basically the German attack on the UK failed at every level (morale, actual hit on production, closing the ports) and the British attacks on Germany were more dangerous to incautious cows than German production.

I think the best view is in the end strategic bombing was a failure due to accuracy and an under-estimate of resilience. The only country where the population rebelled under bombing was Italy and that stands out as the eg of a state that did very little to protect or help its citizens (the Nazis put a lot of effort into this as did the Soviets).

But it clearly diverted resources. Something like 60% of German shell production was AA, and that is a lot of artillery and AT rounds not being fired at the Allies or the Soviets. So it becomes a bit of a prisoners dilemna with a lot of sunk costs (on the allied side).

Specifically, an enduring issue in all the WiTx games is an under-statement of the fuel position of the Germans by mid-44. The pity is this then removes the scope to try a fuel centred bombing campaign as a test, the only real reason to hit fuel or oil is the VP.

edit - so in effect, ignoring what they hit or missed, did the Allies force the Germans to divert more resources (pro-rata) into the strategic war than they did? To me that is the only metric that ends up making sense, especially if the actual damage done is factored in
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T38 - testing out the Ruhr

Post by loki100 »

T38 – 18 March 1944

More allied gains in Italy

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8 AAF attacked tank production around Plauen, and v-weapons on the Baltic. Tactical Air hit the launch sites in France.

BC did its usual day raids. Just to make the point, I set up an AS with about 25% of Jagd 2, the results were predictable.

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Pulled back a bit in Italy, no point losing anything.

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Looks like rain next week (again).
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John B.
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RE: T38 - testing out the Ruhr

Post by John B. »

I have tended towards the idea that the Allied strategic bombing campaign was more effective at eroding Germany that people give it credit for. Overy has a very good book. If you pick up Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze he discusses the declines in German production starting in 1943 extensively. In addition, Vol V/IIB of Germany and the Second World War (a 10 volume set edited by the German Research Institute for Military History) comments about how German production of coal, steel, oil, electricity and so on collapsed by the end of 1944 (the index of raw material production set at 100 for 1942 was only 62 by December 1944).

Sorry, not trying to hijack your thread, just a topic I find to be very interesting.
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RE: T38 - testing out the Ruhr

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: John B.

I have tended towards the idea that the Allied strategic bombing campaign was more effective at eroding Germany that people give it credit for. Overy has a very good book. If you pick up Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze he discusses the declines in German production starting in 1943 extensively. In addition, Vol V/IIB of Germany and the Second World War (a 10 volume set edited by the German Research Institute for Military History) comments about how German production of coal, steel, oil, electricity and so on collapsed by the end of 1944 (the index of raw material production set at 100 for 1942 was only 62 by December 1944).

Sorry, not trying to hijack your thread, just a topic I find to be very interesting.

och, fully agree, its one of those topics that repays careful study.

To me, the core thing is that the Germans simply couldn't replace their losses by 1944, esp vs the Soviets but increasingly the Western Allies were doing some serious damage to. Against that background, Strategic Bombing had an impact, even if in simply making a bad situation worse?

Nows its a bit silly to say this, but remove those combat losses and strategic bombing wasn't going to win the war in any meaningful sense. So its the synergy of the two dynamics.

And one of the reasons I really like WiTW is it captures that big chunky dynamic really well - hence the validity of GR's post re truck bombing.
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RE: T38 - testing out the Ruhr

Post by John B. »

Oh I fully agree with you on the inability of strat bombing to win a war on its own (prior to August 45 of course :)). But, I'm sure it shortened it by a significant amount of at least several months. I have the same feeling about WiTPAE, to me it presents some of the same strategic dilemmas faced by both sides and, if you're both looking for the same sort of game house rules can take care of things like a day bombing campaign by BC that the players don't find to be realistic.
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T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by loki100 »

T39 – 25 March 1944

This is not going very well:

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Usual day bombing by BC over the Ruhr.

Another unsucessful interception by day fighters – which I think ends my desire to provide evidence as to why this is not a good idea. Note this is not even the FC planes, its simply putting up axis day fighters against allied night fighters - doing the reverse would be extremely silly.

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8 AAF at Magdeburg and the v-weapons. For the most part my fighers decided to ignore them, I'm going to swap over to auto-intercept and see if that makes any difference.

Unescorted raids on the v-weapon launch sites.

Decide on a couple of switches. The fighters in the Ruhr move into NE France, fear a return of the Allied fighters but it might pay off. Commit LW-Italy into a massive GS commitment, alter defensive pattern in the Baltic.

Looks like more rain for next turn.

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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by EddyBear81 »

OK, I think that settles the matter !

Indeed, given the forces compositions, the RAF should have been trashed. And it's not even a case where the LW failed to make contact, as proven by the 13 planes lost (an astonishing 50% loss rate).

It's a pity.
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: EddyBear81

OK, I think that settles the matter !

Indeed, given the forces compositions, the RAF should have been trashed. And it's not even a case where the LW failed to make contact, as proven by the 13 planes lost (an astonishing 50% loss rate).

It's a pity.

aye, that is good axis day fighters up against repurposed allied night fighters, if I'd hit a FC sweep it would have been far worse.

So basically this eliminates the axis NF from the game, increases bombing VP and there is no sensible response built around using up the axis day fighters. That its ahistoric [;)]
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by bomccarthy »

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: EddyBear81

OK, I think that settles the matter !

Indeed, given the forces compositions, the RAF should have been trashed. And it's not even a case where the LW failed to make contact, as proven by the 13 planes lost (an astonishing 50% loss rate).

It's a pity.

aye, that is good axis day fighters up against repurposed allied night fighters, if I'd hit a FC sweep it would have been far worse.

So basically this eliminates the axis NF from the game, increases bombing VP and there is no sensible response built around using up the axis day fighters. That its ahistoric [;)]

Which Allied aircraft got the kills, the Beaufighters or Mosquitos? The Mosquito is close to the German day fighters in speed, but I wonder if the code is giving too much weight to firepower.
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: bomccarthy

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: EddyBear81

OK, I think that settles the matter !

Indeed, given the forces compositions, the RAF should have been trashed. And it's not even a case where the LW failed to make contact, as proven by the 13 planes lost (an astonishing 50% loss rate).

It's a pity.

aye, that is good axis day fighters up against repurposed allied night fighters, if I'd hit a FC sweep it would have been far worse.

So basically this eliminates the axis NF from the game, increases bombing VP and there is no sensible response built around using up the axis day fighters. That its ahistoric [;)]

Which Allied aircraft got the kills, the Beaufighters or Mosquitos? The Mosquito is close to the German day fighters in speed, but I wonder if the code is giving too much weight to firepower.

A mix but the Beaufighters were surprisingly effective

The issue with the Mosquitos is the wider issue, the night version are as good as the day version so they are (rightly) an adaptable useful fighter. I certainly tend to put the Med ones onto day missions and use them as a much needed longer ranged escort.

But here's the details, I assume the 2 missing kills were operational losses (none were actually shot down by the bombers):

Image

to make it all more annoying/confusing, there is no real difference in relative experience, these weren't some of the lower experience formations I have in quieter sectors
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GloriousRuse
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by GloriousRuse »

And, of course, for this case the single seat interceptors are outnumbered nearly 3:1 and fighting above their optimal altitude - and in some cases even then, they're low on smash compared to the guys dropping in from 26K. Just to confuse the issue further. I wonder what it would look like if the BC flew into one of the A2A ambushes that the 8th occasionally hits? Not that Loki should try that now that mustangs roam freely, but I do wonder about how feasible it'd be in '43...

However, after this demonstration I fired Harris for his wrong-headed views.
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by loki100 »

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

And, of course, for this case the single seat interceptors are outnumbered nearly 3:1 ...

which is a nearly inevitable result when 25% of my fighters are rendered out of the game with this approach. I have around 1,000 useable Bf-109s, 300 Fw-190s in the pools, if I could swap the German NF to use them, then I'd have the planes to match your day operations.

Unlike the allies, there is no way is it of any sense to let German NF operate by day
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by EddyBear81 »

Could this issue be solved by a house rule like "no usage of Allied NF by day" ? If the BC quads fly unescorted, are they trashed ?

Also, I have the same feeling as bomccarthy : the firepower is overvalued in the game, which explains why the Bf-109 struggles (even with high exp pilots) whereas the Fw-190 fares better.
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by bomccarthy »

I don't have the game open (I'm supposed to be working right now), so I can't see the aircraft values in the editor, but a quick check of my library revealed that the Mosquito XIII was some 20 mph slower than either the Bf-109G or the Fw-190A. And, something that big certainly could not maneuver with the late single-engined fighters. While they were fast enough to avoid losses, they were too slow and unwieldy to achieve more than a few kills in daylight (night kills were largely due to radar coupled with surprise).

Also, the Mosquito XIII had a Merlin 21 series engine - single-stage, two-speed supercharger which fell off in performance above 20k feet. This means that its best altitude was similar to that of the Fw-190.

I think that the best solution might be to allow the Axis player to spend admin points to convert night fighter units to day fighter, or require a certain number of turns retraining as day fighters (and vice-versa), just as with retraining fighter units to bomber units. I have no idea if either idea is possible within the game code.
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RE: T39 - don't look at Italy

Post by GloriousRuse »

In the interests of running objective tests without cluttering Loki's AAR, I've put up the initial results of a Xhoel Style air ambush in the War Room.
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