Britain & Germany made extensive use of burning wood for civil vehicles during the war. So no the need for fuel is not a concern. Link
Improved agriculture means more manpower for the military.
Increased Manpower + Loss of Industrial capacity?
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Britain & Germany made extensive use of burning wood for civil vehicles during the war. So no the need for fuel is not a concern. Link
Actually is still was a concern, not to mention the need to produce way more timber.
Britain & Germany made extensive use of burning wood for civil vehicles during the war. So no the need for fuel is not a concern. Link
I agree, it wasn't feasible '36 - '41 either since the Nazi's overwhelming priority was an exponential expansion of German military. A player should be able to make their own choices, but if a German player chooses to neglect military expansion they should suffer such consequences as having the Allies call their bluff over Sudetenland.
In real life the Nazis did some agricultural reform, for example taking decisive steps to end Germany's distinctive tradition of partible inheritance for farms, but they didn't have the political or economic capital to reform on the scale which the USSR did. I believe there is a game where starting and managing an early Wirtschaftswunder would be a ton of fun, but it's not Hearts of Iron which is about warfare in the '36 - '48 period.
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Actually both HOI1 and 2 (maybe 3 as well?) had tech which advanced agriculture. The effect of those was to increase your manpower pool. I don't think this represented higher birth rates because of more prevalent food supply. The time span is much too short for such a thing. It represents freeing up labor from the agricultural sector. In other words, HOI has had that side of it all along.
I would really like to see this replaced with "Farm Equipment" and "Mining Equipment", or possibly just group it into 1. Then have a manpower allocated, say you need 10,000,000 manpower to produce at 100%, or 1,000,000 machines and 200,000 manpower to produce at 100%. Now the manpower stays at the factories/farms until called up to serve, so we could produce at 102% etc. But the point is there is a maximum manpower pool to recruit from, and you need to free up this labor with mechanization. That's part of my point is that you can't just create Manpower out of thin air... men/women weren't just freely able to go to work in the factories. 50% of the people in the US lived in Rural areas requiring work on the farm etc.
I agree that it could, and should, be done better than it was in early HOI. I was merely pointing out that Paradox did not completely ignore this facet of macroeconomics.
This is what I'm imagining:
All industries, all resources take some amount of manpower to produce.
Manpower Pool = Total possible male recruitment - Total of all industry and resources Total need. If manpower isn't being called up for military it provides bonus to IND and resource gathering.
Add in 1 Industry product, Industrial/Farm Machinery.
Add in Industrial/Farm Machinery Tech with 1900/1920/1930/1940/1942/1945/1950 Techs, which reduce manpower needed to operate the machinery. Each time you need to retool the factories to produce the new tech just like Tanks etc. Also the machinery produces more resources then the manpower did, something like 1900 Machines = +100% production, 1950 = +250% production.
To free up manpower you can choose to produce this machinery with factories (You should NOT be able to get to 100% mechanized, or even to 10%, it should require millions of machines to do so)
Now you can setup things like Germany/Sino relations where the Germans were providing Mining and Industrial machinery to the Chinese, or they can trade it to Romania/Hungary to give them a larger Military manpower pool.
Nations like USA would start at about 1% mechanized, Germany at .25% mechanized.
All industries, all resources take some amount of manpower to produce.
Manpower Pool = Total possible male recruitment - Total of all industry and resources Total need. If manpower isn't being called up for military it provides bonus to IND and resource gathering.
Add in 1 Industry product, Industrial/Farm Machinery.
Add in Industrial/Farm Machinery Tech with 1900/1920/1930/1940/1942/1945/1950 Techs, which reduce manpower needed to operate the machinery. Each time you need to retool the factories to produce the new tech just like Tanks etc. Also the machinery produces more resources then the manpower did, something like 1900 Machines = +100% production, 1950 = +250% production.
To free up manpower you can choose to produce this machinery with factories (You should NOT be able to get to 100% mechanized, or even to 10%, it should require millions of machines to do so)
Now you can setup things like Germany/Sino relations where the Germans were providing Mining and Industrial machinery to the Chinese, or they can trade it to Romania/Hungary to give them a larger Military manpower pool.
Nations like USA would start at about 1% mechanized, Germany at .25% mechanized.
I am envisioning something a bit simpler than that. Instead of a bonus to production, I think the MP in game represents only that fraction of the population which can be allocated to the military. I have no problem with this. In the early years this can be done without hurting industry. I see no need for any sort of bonus from leaving the military pool unused. Part of why I say no bonus is that, as you work through the first few years of expanding your military, this can be offset by either more female involvement in production or increased hours worked per week etc.
However, later in the war, you will need more military personnel than can be taken without harming production, even with those offsets. Penalties should then be applied. I still think a very simple decision, ala Darkest Hour, in which you get more MP at the cost of a penalty to industrial efficiency is adequate.
(EDIT: granted this simple model does not represent the mechanization of agriculture. That should still be reflected in some fashion.)
However, later in the war, you will need more military personnel than can be taken without harming production, even with those offsets. Penalties should then be applied. I still think a very simple decision, ala Darkest Hour, in which you get more MP at the cost of a penalty to industrial efficiency is adequate.
(EDIT: granted this simple model does not represent the mechanization of agriculture. That should still be reflected in some fashion.)
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Those things, however, were extremely underpowered which is why the military did not use them. It was a common sight to see a civilian truck stuck under a hill or having passengers depart a bus and walking up alongside it on a rough spot because the wood just did not give enough 'kick'. So a tractor wouldn't really work very well with burning wood.
Britain & Germany made extensive use of burning wood for civil vehicles during the war. So no the need for fuel is not a concern. Link
Aha I was waiting for people to say about the agriculture techs. IMO they are the most efficient way to represent agriculture's importance in the game. But I also think their research dates (should research dates continue to be used) should be spread out - it was silly that in HoI2 half of them were just 1936, and the other half 1945.
The problem with that is that will fail to simulate how Germany increased production after 1940 - with a sum of investment and foreign Manpower. That is one of the BS of HOI 2 and 3 model - Germany doesn´t increase it´s IC (or overall production) after 1940, when it actually did. Sure you can say that you get extra IC from conquest of France etc, but it still isn´t the ideal and most realistic model, IMO.
I´m afraid this is one situation where the easy solution is the bad one. Overall I´m stil in favour of a slider system and Manpower influencing industry and resource gathering in a direct way. Also since food isn´t a resource in the game, that also makes things a bit more tricky.
In economics productivity due to technology can be very broadly broken down into two categories. You have capital concentration and you have total factor productivity. It's not a complete model but it is useful here.
Soviet agriculture (even more dramatic then German) was less efficient then post-Soviet farmers today for both these reasons. Soviets knew perfectly well how to make tractors and fertilizers and irrigation projects. But they didn't have enough of these things for every farm. Their capital concentration was much lower then today. That was the main problem. However their equipment was also a little less advanced. If you compared equipment that was equal in utility it would be more expensive to make then compared to today. Modern farm equipment manufacturers had more time to work out the kinks.
Agriculture techs can represent the total factor productivity okay but not the more important capital concentration part. The soviet problem wasn't that their technology was a little behind the Americans, it was that they hadn't invested as much in farm equipment as the US had. So letting the Soviets research a technology and suddenly have another years GDP worth of farm equipment is not a good representation.
Soviet agriculture (even more dramatic then German) was less efficient then post-Soviet farmers today for both these reasons. Soviets knew perfectly well how to make tractors and fertilizers and irrigation projects. But they didn't have enough of these things for every farm. Their capital concentration was much lower then today. That was the main problem. However their equipment was also a little less advanced. If you compared equipment that was equal in utility it would be more expensive to make then compared to today. Modern farm equipment manufacturers had more time to work out the kinks.
Agriculture techs can represent the total factor productivity okay but not the more important capital concentration part. The soviet problem wasn't that their technology was a little behind the Americans, it was that they hadn't invested as much in farm equipment as the US had. So letting the Soviets research a technology and suddenly have another years GDP worth of farm equipment is not a good representation.
I agree with this. Tech is a bad way to represent the agricultural situation. It is an economic investment. Maybe your idea about manufacturing agricultural equipment (thereby freeing up labor) is best.
A slider does not simulate the growth after 1940 any better than decisions do. You are talking about something new being intoduced into the equation (factories or foreign manpower), whereas a slider only deals with distribution of what is already there.
A different mechanism needs to be introduced to model this later growth.
Not really, but foreign MP since it´s the kind of Manpower that could be only used for production, it could create issues for allocation for the army.
Or, maybe not - consider how many Hiwis served in Germany
anyway it´s up to Paradox to decide how to do it.
Or, maybe not - consider how many Hiwis served in Germany
anyway it´s up to Paradox to decide how to do it.Well it was my idea, but anyway my idea still has Tech involved, except it's Tech in researching the equipment. It also allows some very interesting pre WWII buildups.
Let's say Germany has 100 factories, and dedicates 30 to "equipment". Germany trades thousands of "equipment" to Hungary and Romania, freeing up their manpower as well. Now all of sudden Jun 1941 comes around and Germany has 1 million more men plus an additional 250k from Hungary and Romania, but 20% less tanks and 10% less planes.
Yes, but the problem isn't with how the game models manpower and IC.
The problem is that Germany can fully mobilize for total war with maximum output efficiency and minimum consumer goods in 1939 without any problems. That's not what Germany did historically, and some of Germany's increased production was the result of mobilizing the economy for war after 1940.
I'm not 100% sure I like Dalwin's suggestion, either. But let's not kid ourselves. Germany's production could increase after 1940 because there was room for it to do so, even as manpower was still being put in uniform.
I'm kind of hoping that totalitarian regimes have to be more careful about budgeting consumer goods in HOI4 than HOI3, so that it can make sense not to engage total economic mobilization and heavy industry emphasis (or its equivalents) right away as Germany or Italy.
It is actually pretty realistic if you think about it.
You capture foreign land, you get their equipment, manpower and resources.
You can put more manpower into uniforms, because your labour pool increased.
If you were lacking resources, you can also build some IC to allow you to use it.
It wasn`t the problem of HOI3 model as much as how laws, stockpiles and AI worked. If you would be building IC as Germany, you would be doing it in 1936-1937 because in game you have no resource shortage, historical Germany faced.
And why should it be dictatorship-specific?
USA never even reached the level of mobilisation one can call "total mobilisation" it just had a huge economy. UK, similarly.
Soviet and German workers were not protesting about bad labour conditions in 1942-1945, unlike Americans that had several strikes during wartime.
Good idea OP, I think it makes a lot of sense gameplay wise (an interesting slider/decision to optimize), and it works from a historical point of view.
For the HOI development teams designers I heavily recommend Adam Tooze's "Wages of destruction". It's a great read and very informative.
I'd vote for totalitarian regimes requiring almost no consumers goods, if you run a country by terror "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem - Stalin", there will be very few vocal complaints about consumer goods, and the regime will be called out much less when there propaganda exaggerates the level of consumer goods.
For the HOI development teams designers I heavily recommend Adam Tooze's "Wages of destruction". It's a great read and very informative.
I'd vote for totalitarian regimes requiring almost no consumers goods, if you run a country by terror "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem - Stalin", there will be very few vocal complaints about consumer goods, and the regime will be called out much less when there propaganda exaggerates the level of consumer goods.