Your not reading me properly. Im not saying Germany didnt have that amount of manpower, or doesnt deserve that amount of manpower, im saying they shouldnt be getting it from those sources in that quantity. Id rather see them get it from the "Lets Fight"! events then to be given amounts that are way overboard in other places.
I am with you on this one, Oliver. The system should be concise (i hope this is the right word). The model with its modifiers should produce realistic and playable outcomes, without rough patches like that. And what you say does not indicate in any way, that germany, or anyone, should have less manpower throughout the game - just that it shouldnt come out of thin air, whenever it suits the ´balance´. Cause, face it, when such patches are required to the extent they are in the game, the balance of the underlying mechanic is sub-optimal, obviously.
Sure, Pearl Harbor should lower neutrality to 0 in one go - no matter where it was before, and that should result into full mobilization of the manpower pool. The amount of MP this may yield should obviously depend on what the US was able to mobilize before - not just be a flat number. If by the time pearl happens, the US is already at war with someone else, and thus is already fully geared up, Pearl should yield about zero manpower - if it´s torn out of hybernation by it, it should yield a whole lot (be the most powerful event of the whole game, possibly).
Likewise, the Anschluss can only yield whatever austria has MP-wise times something for the chance of law/neutrality - but not some flat number.
MP could definetaly use a work-over for another expansion, imho.
Im just sort of tired of hearing that things are the way they are because of play balance. Manpower in all its forms is about the easiest thing to determine out of all the aspects of WWII. I spent about 10 years designing WWII games and never had any problems locating manpower info, whether its population, mobilized, available monthly / yearly etc... and ok you can modify that based on your beliefs of the Govt and its policies. But you simply shouldnt give more manpower for events then a nation reasonably had to offer simply because you need or want it. Instead, make the Lets fight, not two weeks, but two months, and instead of 10% modifier make it 30 or 40 or whatever. But dont have Germany say, remilitarize the rhineland and get 250 manpower (not mobilized) when nations are struggling with have that when mobilized. And while im at it a manpower unit should be a manpower unit across the board for all nations. If Germany had say 10x the troops at the height of the war then say Greece, they shouldnt have 25% here simply because they prefer you play Germany over Greece. IF the Soviet Union is overpowered then dont give Germany unrealistic manpower numbers, nerf down the Soviet Union.
Attrition and Logistics in regards to manpower doesnt work either and needs a re-look. I can usually take the existing forces of most Balkan area nations and conquer the rest of the Balkans without much additional manpower, as if that could ever be possible. The Soviet Union at its height when fighting old men and children in Germany took weeks to go block by block, and yet in a few months you can conquer 5-6 nations and barely lose a man.
Yep it needs to be looked at.
I don't think you guys really realize how unrealistic the current manpower system is.
To get anywhere near a closer model to reality it needs to be redone from scratch. Thats far far bigger then a little event/decision that shouldn't be working the same way all other events do...
To start manpower should hardly "gained" at all. Because if the population stays the same then the same amount of new recruits will retire each year.
The annual growth of a western nation was about 0.5% per year. If Germany has 60 million people it it will grow around 300k per year. Those numbers are nothing compared to the 20 million that can be drafted at an instant. Further it's nothing compared to the 10 million = 3 million draftable that join the nation when they occupy Sudetenland and Austria.
To give you a "scale" in HoI3 terms if it was working anyway close to realistic Germany would be able to draft 2000 manpower at an instant when mobilizing, get 300 from these events and 30 per year (= 2.5/month) from actual growth.
Soviet union isn't overpowered. Most MP games end with Axis victory, something that should rather be the exception instead of the rule. (If it was balanced after historical Industry and manpower numbers).Originally Posted by 21oliver
And fact is that Soviet historically lost a million men to encirclements (100:eds of divisions) and the next months they had a million more fielded ready to defend Moscow.
They are supposed to be able to field crazy amounts of divisions and win quicker through steamrolling if Germany fails to achieve their initial historical encirclements. Don't confuse a weak German offensive AI unable to conduct those encirclements with a weak Soviet Nation.
Last edited by Alex_brunius; 25-01-2012 at 12:32.
"Experience is something you don't usually get until just after you need it"
...and all those numbers should simply be modified by neutrality (or something). Btw, you said 300k per year, but only 30MP per year? I am not too familiar with the numbers, but is it possible you slipped a ´platonian´ mistake in there (10x)?
Nope I also said 2000 mp = 20 million :P
So the 10x was intentional since 20000mp would be kind of silly
"Experience is something you don't usually get until just after you need it"
I agree with you. The whole manpower system needs to be scrapped. BUT if you need to give a quick fix in a spot or two and toss loads of manpower to a nation, i would rather see it done as i said in the Lets Fight events rather then unrealistically. Germany can gain 500 manpower (while not mobilized) by simply performing the Anschluss of Austria. Now if you were playing Austria do you think you could ever get 500 manpower? and if so how long would it take and how many circumstances would have to fall in to place. I dont care how charismatic Hitler was or how harsh the Govt was, if there was X amount of men available for me, there is X amount of men available for you. You want to add a small modifier to that, fine, i can agree. But Austria starts with 50+ manpower how come Germany gets 500 for the same territory. Immediately. Not over time, not with certain laws enacted, circumstances etc... not through mobilization, but the same peace time numbers. Austria gets 50, Germany gets 500, thats way too much.
And the Rhineland wasnt re-occupied, it was re-militarized, so why a manpower bump there?
Again if you feel the need to give Germany manpower to make the game playable, then just do it. Hell raise their monthly increase if need be. As i stated earlier, what if in an effort to help GB they had lend lease be 50 aircraft carriers instead of destroyers you think that would be ok?
anyway scrap the system, stop putting quick little fixes because they cant figure out why it is the way it is.
I just have a problem when you have nations in the game who cant even mobilized due to lack of manpower (wrong.....) and then you simply hand Germany 1000k because you want to balance them with the SOviet Union. How about reducing the Soviet Union rather then making the game more unrealistic?
I have no problem with the numbers being realistic, or hell if you want to make them unrealistic, then do so across the board. Turkey usually needs to delete all their units and rebuild militia to get anything going...some of your Balkan nations cant even mobilize their troops but we are going to just hand kkkkkkk's of manpower around to Germany?
Has to be a better way. The more i hear about how realistic the game is the more sandbox i think it is. But manpower is one area that shouldnt be a problem.
Nation A had X amount of available manpower, thats available manpower, thats as in how healthy and of age they are. It makes no difference your ideology or Govt, that "X" is all ANYONE can get out of that nation. why should its owner get X but another nation get 10x ?
Manpower should be tied very strongly to laws, not only to mobilization, but to industry. If you're doing like the US did, by putting women into the workforce to replace the men who were joining up (with the consequent overturning of "traditional values" which that brought about), then you should be able to field a massive amount of manpower without affecting commerce and industry to a great extent. If you're like Germany, which chose not to do so, then conscripting that Manpower is going to have serious repercussions for your business and industry. ICs should require Manpower, and you should be able to "steal" Mpanpower from that industry if the laws permit, with the resulting impact on production.
As for long-term versus short-term manpower, Germany should begin with a sizable labor pool and a moderate military, with a fair amount of surplus, but only a modest monthly increase in that pool. As Germany militarized and geared up for war, it first consumed that surplus, then started to cannibalize the labor pool, eventually resorting to conscripting conquered populations as "slave labor". At the end, thanks to the relatively small monthly MP increase, there was simply no manpower left to recruit. The SU, on the other hand, began with a much more modest industrial base and a rather sizable military, with some surplus manpower. As the war went on, after going through the surplus, their huge monthly increase in Manpower due to the size of the country allowed them to continue to recruit fresh units while other countries had long since conscripted and exhausted their available workforce. The US should be in a similar situation, with a limited initial surplus, very little military, and a sizable industrial labor base, but a large monthly gain once the war "hits home". The SU and/or US should gradually outpace GER and far surpass them by the end of the game, but only because they can continue to recruit troops long after Germany is down to its few new "coming of age" recruits.
Could the underlying factor driving manpower and its tweaks comes from the core game decision to make all units basically the same?
German force structure was different (and changed about mid war) - from Soviet force structure - from UK force structure - from US, Japanese, Italian and so on... The game pours Manpower into the unit mold that has been pretty much homonogized and therefore some tweaky game voodoo needs to (and I know you hate the word) balance things out.
I like the ability to customize my divisions, and that also adds more demands on the manpower pool - to support this game feature, you need a little bit of "float"? Sorry for the techno-speak
I will come back to ...the single easiest element in designing a WWII game should be manpower. Whether its a nations population, its available pool, its monthly growth or the size of its fighting units. That information is all pretty much readily available. Now feel free to tweak it up or down with elements like its current situation (at war, mobilized, change in govt whatever..). My major issue is if your going to use manpower to balance out the game (which i dont believe you need to do, you need to fix the problem), just dont do it in a way that screams of being unrealistic. Id simply prefer they give bigger manpower boosts or a larger monthly growth (attribute it to their govt style or whatever). There are way too many nations that the game tries to keep "down" by unrealistically limiting their manpower pool and growth and Germany they simply throw tons at. What they also need to do is boost the fighting values of some of the majors over that of other nations, and it has more to do with training then tech. I dont rem the exact numbers, and unfortunately i no longer have the book but Trevor Dupuy had an excellent book that broke down combat ratings. In the book his values were something like = 1 German soldier equalled 1.5 British or Americans and like3 Russians, something like that. It was based on a bunch of factors. In HOI3 for example when i want to license items, i never go to the faction leader, someone else always has the equipment that is just as good and willing to sell it far cheaper.
Again all nations have an available manpower pool (say 16 to 45 years old), and there are no factors that can modify that. What one nation can get another could too. Germany gets 500 manpower in the Anschluss of Austria while at peace and not mobilized (even including absorbing the military forces), Austria begins with a 50ish manpower pool, meaning if you played them they could never raise that kind of an army under any circumstances.
Make the game realistic and most importantly consistent please is all...
Since it's the "single easiest element" and "readily available" why don't you simply fix this quickly yourself by just editing the 10000 different land provinces to have the correct manpower values then?
I'm sure many mods would be very interrested in using your 100% accurate 1936 manpower map once its done!
Last edited by Alex_brunius; 26-01-2012 at 08:25.
"Experience is something you don't usually get until just after you need it"
[QUOTE=21oliver;13339547 Again all nations have an available manpower pool (say 16 to 45 years old), and there are no factors that can modify that. .[/QUOTE]
I think you'll find there were lots of factors other than population that determined the available manpower.
I think he meant, that every country has x population ready for service in principle (gender & age, say), and that this unchangable (by and large) number should be used as a base for everything related to manpower. So that if austria can not on its own raise what germany gains by the anschluss, the reason for that should be a change of some modifier applied to austria´s population - not some flat number (or at least a number that could be plausibly explained by something like this outside the game, if it´s not by the game itself). He is asking for consistency - good call, i say.
thats it in a nutshell. And as far as "easiest" my point is that the info is available, manpower issues are not the issues that a game company should be struggling with when making a pc game. And for funny people like Alex, there would be no need to remod the info...if it was done CORRECTLY the first time!And ill repeat again from a earlier post, all you guys who like to jump on the anti manpower issue bandwagons, pretty much all the mods that everyone loves has altered most of the manpower! so THEY (hint alex...) felt that there was some issues that needed correcting.
All joking aside, if you have to come up with something to balance something else, that means you messed up the prior, go back and fix it, dont worry about messing something else up in order to "balance" it.
The following info is from; "Germans" and "Austrians" in World War II: Military History and National Identity Peter Thaler Department of History University of Minnesota
Since Austrians were treated as ordinary German citizens, they were drafted according to the same standards as Germans from within the borders of 1937. Out of the approximately 18 million men that were inducted into the German military (including non-citizens), a proportionate share of 1.2 million were Austrians.
Thats 1/15th of the German Military.
When the anschluss happens in HOI3 Germany generally has between 500-1000 manpower, the Anschluss adds 500!
<ok this is where instead of saying whoa your right the numbers are way off, what were they thinking...you come up with excuses (alex?) about how difficult the game is to design blah blah blah>
Well, the problem with MP is, that one has to carefully keep the various stocks and flows seperated - that isnt trivial at all, unfortunately.
I dont know, but maybe the MP system should just be simplified: Every province has a stock-MP at game start and every nations raw-MP-pool would be the sum of those within its borders. The laws, neutrality and whatnot (maybe IC, too?) modify which share of that you can use at any given time. Losses are randomly distributed among provinces with remaining MP>0. So with the Anschluss you´d simply get austria´s raw-MP-pool, sum of its province-MP, added to yours and subjected to your laws at al. No monthly manpower gain at all.
EDIT: And if losing territory let´s your manpower drop below zero, your industrial effeciency goes down...
EDIT2: Hmmmm... (back on topic) - maybe there should be -instead of the monthly gain- a yearly gain, in each province though, based on its base-MP (so: +x%), as new men leave classes. Since this x is dependend on a lot of things IRL, which cannot really be determined for sure, this is where you can balance to your hearts content (though within reasonable limits), with modifying techs and such, distributed differently among the nations.
Last edited by Jazumir; 26-01-2012 at 14:34.
Good, then that means they agree with us both, that manpower and mobilization needs fixing.
Your the only one of us all who (quite incorrectly) claims it's an easy thing to do though!
Manpower currently not only represent men who can serve, but also their quality and usefulness (as can be seen by comparing 3000 militia cost in mp to 3000 paratroopers, or the fact that there is hardly any in Africa). It is also interlinked with a myriad of other game mechanics and game balance...
It's NOT easy to fix.
Last edited by Alex_brunius; 26-01-2012 at 14:29.
"Experience is something you don't usually get until just after you need it"
There is also the issue that there were millions of men available to the British Empire all over the world - so why not just allow the UK to have 5000 manpower at all times
Would be much easier to play then......
lol alex when i say easy, all i mean is the info is readily available. Ill give you an idea, back pre and early pc days i spent about 10 years in game design mostly WW2. I could have gotten you any manpower / population stats you wanted from any obscure little nation in the world, i had the info...but i spent years and years trying to find the data and what each item cost to produce.
Manpower should never be an issue, out of all the complex issues that go into making a WW2 game, manpower is likely the easiest issue of all.
As far as HOI3 goes all im saying if you have to abstract/bump something up etc to balance the game, just dont do it in a way that is so obviously wrong. I mean they give you 10% manpower bumps for two weeks with the We want to fight events....well make it for 2-3 months not two weeks, make it for 20-30% or more, do something like that, dont just say well this land has 1 million people but if you take it over well give you 10 million soldiers.... i mean cmon! lol
And i really think its unfair to start some nations with manpower issues so bad they either 1) cant mobilize at full strength or 2) you have to delete all your units and reform as militia to have a decent size representative army. Nearly all nations are able to mobilize armies representative of their size, if you need to penalize their quality, but dont stop them from forming.
I dont disagree with this at all, but the original issue was how Germany could get 10x the manpower as Austria, out of Austrian citizens, while not mobilized, nor at war, immediately....There is no way to spin that other then its a bad thing.Manpower currently not only represent men who can serve, but also their quality and usefulness (as can be seen by comparing 3000 militia cost in mp to 3000 paratroopers, or the fact that there is hardly any in Africa). It is also interlinked with a myriad of other game mechanics and game balance...
I just showed you the actual numbers. IRL the Austrians made up about 1/15th of all soldiers in the Germany Military, ok so its a game its not perfect, you have to fudge a bit, fine i get that, a few % here and there...but how can they be 30-50% of my manpower in 1938, isnt that a bit much? from 1/15th to maybe half?
Ill go back to again, why not just start handing carriers and atom bombs in lend lease for "play balance"? instead of destroyers.
Enigma - I dont disagree with you but because Paradox has basically chosen to make all units equivalent, then modified by factors as opposed to making units of different nations representative on their own. They have chosen that route. Frankly each nation should have their own ratinigs (i know i know Alex, its a lot of work....but hell thats what they get paid for. Cant stand the heat they should run from the kitchen!), as opposed to 1 infantry brigade of mine is equal to 1 of yours. Just because we train or equip ourselves from similar year doesnt mean we are equal. Perhaps even bonuses in leadership to the Major powers, better militaries (in addition to the current bumps).
Im always amazed that people will cry and argue over the most minute technical non important issues (You know the penalty for crossing rivers is not accurate because blah blah blah), but things like Production, manpower, food, economics, training etc etc the actual meat that makes up the game, people can be like eh its ok...
I can take most if not all Balkan nations and conquer all the other balkan nations, without forming a new unit, nor using a HQ, and in the end i have my existing units intact. There isnt a problem there with manpower there? lol you guys know all the ins and outs of the game and its details far more then me, but i know ive taken Spain and Sweden and conquered half the world before, as well as South Africa and there isnt a manpower problem here?
Ok, its just me...
Half? I thought you at least had some basic knowledge of the manpower values you are criticizing...
Last time I tested the entire German army (including all starting units + gains from events) up to 1939 (danzig) is about 2500 manpower.
1/5:th is not even close to half.
In fact 1/5:th is pretty close to how much it should be seeing as how Austria had a population of roughly 10million and Germany 60 million. If you want to be more precise it should be 1/7:th or 360 manpower using population as a basis, or slightly less counting Czechoslovakia too.
There are alot of things that are wrong by much wider margins then that in this game.
"Experience is something you don't usually get until just after you need it"
Posting Permissions
