The invincible german tanks 1 to 4 with a frontal armor from 13mm (Pz1) up to 50mm (Pz4 F1)
That is everything but not invincible.
The myth of the "invinible" german armor startet with the Tiger 1942.
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85% of the Soviet armoured vehicle park on 1.1.1936 is missing from HoI4 (updated to NSB)
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The invincible german tanks 1 to 4 with a frontal armor from 13mm (Pz1) up to 50mm (Pz4 F1)
That is everything but not invincible.
The myth of the "invinible" german armor startet with the Tiger 1942.
Tell that to the poles, french, dutch and the soviets in June/july 41...
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The tactic of combined arms and Bewegungskrieg was superior. Not the tanks.
That was the point of Guderians quote.
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Haha, I knew the moment I started reading this thread that it would devolve into a discussion of the relative merits of different models of tank.
It's like a universal law of military history nerd discussions.
It's like a universal law of military history nerd discussions.
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I think you are misinterpreting here. Guderian:"Zum ersten Male zeigte sich die Überlegenheit des russischen T 34 in krasser Form."
"...superiority of T34..." The man in his own words.
The high command, the father of the Panzerwaffe, were concerned that their mainline tanks were vastly inferior to soviet designs. When Wehrmacht units encountered T34 or KV tanks en masse, they were on the backfoot. German training and communications usually saved the day, but the tanks as weapon systems proved much less effective.
That's why the Panzerkommission reacted by not only upgunning the support Tank, Panzer IV, but also by creating a Tank 1.5 the weight of the T34 with some of its features, the Panther.
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It's interesting, having gone over the issue for Japan and Hungary for my own interest, I've now seen the threads pop up for several other countries, such as SOV and France. From the looks of it, it seems to be the case that pretty much everyone other than Germany is badly under-equipped with tanks at start compared to their historical numbers.
Just due to the devs struggling to get Germany to perform at historical levels otherwise, or something else?
Just due to the devs struggling to get Germany to perform at historical levels otherwise, or something else?
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The problem is that HOI4 doesn't model WHY the strategical/tactical situation resulted in the historical outcome.
It's a game of grand-strategy and production but without the operational layer. Doctrines are just stat-padding for divisions rather than experienced based operational level differences.
Germany didn't beat France 1940 because it had superior tanks or numbers (it was mostly the other way round). Likewise the "blitzkrieg" as the British named it, wasn't revolving around tanks and in-game tactics like "blitz" (look at the campaign in Norway for a breakdown to basically battalion level effects of the doctrine/training), the tank was just the platform best suited to augment the mission-type-tactics that came with the schwerpunktprinzip into an sledgehammer tool with operational effects.
The other nations involved simply hadn't caught up at that point.
HOI4 mechanics revolve a lot more on the physical tools of war and the production of said tools than the warfare itself. Thus giving stockpiles to everytone would break the balance and turn the early-war into more of a WW1 slugfest.
To be fair though. Most people would probably dislike things like true fog of war when you don't even know where your own forces are sometimes and divisions not moving for hours or even days despite the player assigning orders (the "movement-is-attack" philosophy of PDS would make any tweaks to existing mechanics moot).
It's probably possible to add some mechanics to allow for both stockpiles and historical outcomes but it would also mean some hefty shoehorning to make it blend with the already existing HOI4 mechanics and would still leave the question on whether it would be "fun" to actually have in a game.
Given the written accounts of how French, British and later Soviet commanders perceived the daily development in May'40 and June/July'41 it would probably be ill-adviced to force the same constraints on players. Having players go through Anger, Frustration and Despair is not really a selling point of a PC-game (as proven by Cyberpunk2077).
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I'm sure balance plays a role, but I think a big part of it is simply the lack of research (and I can understand this from the perspective of their business model: doing in-depth research on every nation they do content for would slow down development by a lot and limit the development of ahistorical sandbox content). In one of the latest NSB-related videos where HoI4 content designers were interviewed, the lead content designer (Archangel85) said that they mostly look at Wikipedia, which is very surface-level and often can have quite a lot of inaccuracies, as many of us "WW2 buffs" know all too well.
It's also a lot easier to omit historical stockpiles. One could include them for all nations, or even just nations relevant to WW2, and still maintain balance. However, that would also require the implementation of systems to represent the things that historically counteracted immense advantages in quantity. Look at the Eastern Front in summer 1941, for example. When the Germans invaded the USSR, the Russians had about 26,000 tanks, over 75% of them category 1 (brand new) or category 2 (used, but operational), with the great majority of them in the Western Military Districts. The Germans invaded with only about 3,650 tanks, assault guns and tank destroyers, and still absolutely thrashed Russian armour. Air power and particularly AT units of course played a major role as well.
In that example, in in-game terms, the Russians would need heavy debuffs to simulate their catastrophic ineffectiveness, despite their gigantic materiel advantage, in the summer of 1941. And on that note, they'd also need to not only avoid collapse, but then also recover and push the Germans back, all the way to Berlin. Allied lend-lease should play an absolutely vital role in this, but that's already getting into another topic...
Anyway, all this would require much more research and tinkering with the game to get right. Their sandbox approach to HoI4 makes it even harder, by a lot. So I'm not really surprised by the way they've handled this.
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Don't forget that the tank is not the main enemy of the tank. Artillery is the main enemy of tanks, and it was from the artillery that the Red Army suffered the main losses. Add here that the Red Army was not mobilized at the beginning of the war, it was more than 100 German reinforced divisions against 40 Soviet peacetime divisions in which there were from 50 to 75% of the staff of the state number. The lack of fuel for tanks should be added to the lack of mobilization.
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I think your own post hits the nail on the head, but underestimates the scale of the issue the game designers face in this respect.
Give any half competent player 26K tanks as the soviets in 1940/41 and what chance would a German AI, or even a German player in MP have?
You wouldn't need heavy debuffs, you would need monumentally massive debuffs to address that. From some of the comments I've seen around the debuffs already present in NSB I can't see the majority of the player base being happy with those kind of restrictions/straitjacketing.
And as you say, making this type of expansive game flexible enough to go from crushing defeat in June 41 to holding in Dec 41 to rolling back the Axis in 42/43 that works for both SP vs Ai and MP is probably going to be a stretch for any game designer. I think that outcome would take more than just a little tinkering to make work with historical stockpiles.
Its pretty hard to replicate historical failure on this scale when every player has the benefit of hindsight.
Give any half competent player 26K tanks as the soviets in 1940/41 and what chance would a German AI, or even a German player in MP have?
You wouldn't need heavy debuffs, you would need monumentally massive debuffs to address that. From some of the comments I've seen around the debuffs already present in NSB I can't see the majority of the player base being happy with those kind of restrictions/straitjacketing.
And as you say, making this type of expansive game flexible enough to go from crushing defeat in June 41 to holding in Dec 41 to rolling back the Axis in 42/43 that works for both SP vs Ai and MP is probably going to be a stretch for any game designer. I think that outcome would take more than just a little tinkering to make work with historical stockpiles.
Its pretty hard to replicate historical failure on this scale when every player has the benefit of hindsight.
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Well, that's what I was trying to get at. My guess is just that the disparity between the materiel dispositions of certain countries and their actual performance is too much for the devs to make work, so they tone down the disadvantage in equipment. That being the case makes me think that it is somewhat intentional, at least.
Russia is of course the most extreme example. Giving historical stockpiles to other nations, even France, does not pose nearly the same magnitude of challenges to balance. What it does entail is research, and a lot of it, which is why, I think, the lack of research forms the primary obstacle to having historical stockpiles for most nations in the game.
Again, I do not blame the content designers for this. It's more to do with PDX's priorities; what kind of a game it wants HoI4 to be.
Again, I do not blame the content designers for this. It's more to do with PDX's priorities; what kind of a game it wants HoI4 to be.
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Well, it would take actual practice to reach the level of incompetence Red Army displayed in the first year of the war.
I guess devs simply decided to make it smaller instead of relying on players suiciding their own armies to give a semblance of a fair fight.
I guess devs simply decided to make it smaller instead of relying on players suiciding their own armies to give a semblance of a fair fight.
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I forgot to say: It's bizarre though how they made a bunch of variants for the older Russian tanks produced before 1936, like they even made a T-27, and yet none of these exist as equipment in units or in stockpiles at the start of the game.
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There's a bunch of T-27 mod 1933s in the stockpile at start. And a bunch of BT-5s.
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there's a bunch of T-26mod1933s not T-27s. btw T-27 is not a tank, it's a tankette and it doesn't exist in the game. What @@Fulmen is talking about are multi-turreted tanks like T-28 and T-35 which exist as templates but don't exist in the stockpile.
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Oh, that's right. The T-26 mod 1933.
Were there that many of the T-28s and T-35s in 1936? I know the Soviet Union's armor stockpile is nerfed compared to historical (it's always been that way), but is this one of those cases?
Well, it's one thing to classify something as brand new or operational, but something else entirely for it to actually be the case. It's not that different from the "divisions" that both sides had running around in the later stages of the war, some of which ranging more between battalion and brigade in size.
A huge number of Soviet tanks in June 1941 were anything but combat ready, even if technically counted as such. After all, if you don't know if something will run, you haven't made sure it doesn't run yet.
Some never left the depots, because neither the men needed to equip them, nor the materials to keep them running, were around yet when the attack happened. The Soviets losts thousands of tanks just due to being thrown back so quickly.
Some sort of mobilization factor would actually be quite nice to have in HOI, as right now your units are always fully staffed and ready to go if you just have enough men and equipment in general.
Some were technically around but lacking some vital parts, which was a theme encountered in many nations.
Some were "brand new" in that they were delivered to units and then never put to any use, out of fear for mechanical breakdowns. Leaving the crews often completely unprepared to actually use their powerful tanks properly. This also meant that they had no real experience on how to keep the tanks in the proper condition, leading to a whole bunch of Soviet units losing half their tanks before even entering the combat zone. The early T-34 wasn't any different than the Panther in that regard.
There isn't really a proper mechanic in the game to represent the more or less unusable tanks that still were around. Or even tanks that were reduced to being barely worthy enough to work as training equipment anymore. That's why you probably see less thanks around than there actually were. It's not like this is the only equipment where this plays a role. Basically all nations lack infantry equipment in the beginning, before production really gets rolling. In reality, many nations were swamped with old equipment that exceeded the number of troops they could field, so in theory there should be huge stockpiles, but there aren't. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can produce huge numbers of infantry equipment, when most nations never really managed to produce nearly enough modern equipment to replace the old one. Instead of tons of old equipment paired with a production of modern equipment that constantly lags behind, you get a deficit in equipment paired with enormous production capabilities that can give you far more equipment than you need.
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The T28 not so much. It had a production run of 1 (https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2-soviet-it-28/)
The T35, also not so much. By 1939, the total production run was 61 (https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/soviet/soviet_t-35.php)
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