A humble suggestion for those who love to Mod.

[Ubercat]

I'm sorry if this has already been suggested at some point, but has anyone considered basing a Mod on Harry Turtledoves excellent "WorldWar" series?

For those who aren't familiar, WWII is at it's midpoint, The Axis nations are basically at their highwater mark, and an alien race invades earth, with the intent to add humanity to their small, but growing, interstellar empire. (long indrawn breath) The aliens have a tech level roughly equivalent to what we have nowadays, or perhaps a decade or 2 ahead of us.

The belligerant nations of earth are forced into uneasy alliances to fight the common foe. The aliens have greatly superior, but practically irreplaceable equipment (they're a long way from home and don't possess FTL travel) The humans of course, have vastly superior numbers, and the ability to learn from their enemies, very fast.

I don't know much about how to Mod, but since you can define your own units, and countries and techs, I figured it was doable. I just wonder how hardcoded the 3 power blocks in the basic game are, and how a modder would make them cooperate against a 4th enemy.

Anyhow, just thought I'd put it out there. I don't have the time or the patience, but I know there are some with the aptitude, and maybe the interest to tackle it

 

[unmerged(4219)]

Well, you could always just lump the Comintern into the allies like in the 41 and 44 scenario, freeing them up for some other purpose.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

I've read the series. From a gaming point of view it would be entertaining. But as science fiction it is far and away the worst example of the "drifting premise fallacy" I've ever seen.

Look at it this way. The aliens scouted Earth 800 years ago. They saw barbarians in armor, on horseback. Easy pickings. So what do they bring for their invasion fleet?

-- Tanks (just a little better than ours)
-- Fighter jets (just a little better than ours)
-- Antiaircraft missiles (just a little better than ours)

And so on, an array of stuff ideal for fighting mid-20th-century enemies. Then on arrival they're shocked and amazed that we've made so much progress and can put up such an heroic resistance. They expected it to be a walkover.

Now tell me, if anyone can, why you would bring antiaircraft missiles to conquer a world whose inhabitants (you believe) fight with swords? Why would you need radar? To track what? Or tanks with armor made to resist a 12 kg penetrator moving at 900 m/s? From a trebuchet, maybe?

Why wouldn't you bring, for example, little mobile jeeps with just enough armor to stop arrows, and machine guns to shoot the knights on horseback? You could carry ten of those for every tank you brought. Why bring a jet that can fly at the speed of sound when a little prop-driven counter-insurgency plane that can drop napalm would do the job far better? Or a helicopter?

Oh, it turns out just great in terms of staging these desperate rearguard actions where the Germans realize the PzKw IV isn't good enough to fight aliens, and they quickly deploy Panthers, which are still not quite good enough but throw a scare into the alien tank crews. If you just don't think about how the aliens got there, some of the scenes can be entertaining. There's one memorable bit where the Germans emplace the 'Dora' 800mm supergun and fire at the alien landing zone, hitting an alien ship and causing its reactor to explode or something. The aliens are completely thrown by the idea that the incoming shell is a solid projectile, not a fragile little missile, and so their antimissile defenses can't stop it. Very amusing.

But it is so utterly freaking illogical, to have aliens who are brilliantly sensitive to the nuances of technological war, so that they know all about heatseekers and EMCON tactics, but who insist on dragging all that crap across lightyears of space expecting to kill peasants with pikes. I think this would make the scenario design process unbearable, just not being able to come up with a better reason for why this situation arose than that the aliens are brilliant at design but unaccountably stupid at what the weapons are used for.

The best analogy I can come up with is that in 1979, when the Soviets went to Afghanistan, they took all their weapons including their 23mm AA guns and missile launchers. The Afghan resistance didn't have any aircraft, but thanks to the Soviets, soon they too had their own 23mm guns and missile launchers . . . apparently it was just force of habit, nobody in the Soviet chain of command considered the possibilities.

 

[jdrou]

Yes, that was always my biggest problem with the series too although I did enjoy it when I could forget that issue. Not to mention why you would even have 20th-century-style tanks if you'd never known an opponent with guns. You might have tracked heavy artillery but the armor only needs to be thick enough to stop spears and stones from pre-gunpowder artillery. You certainly don't need a high-velocity gun if your enemy has no tanks. And you don't need supersonic jets if your enemy has no aircraft; slower aircraft tend to be better for ground attack.

 

[unmerged(15561)]

Forgive, I havent read the series but I write SF/Fantasy stories as a hobby....HOB E.

SF? sounds like fantasy to me. While both jdrou and MG make excellent points I would suggest that if the shoe where on the other foot.... i.e we went to invade our nearest interstellar neighbour, we would bring our best tech with us. If it took us 100yrs in deepsleep to get there then, it would be possible to have our enemies make 100yrs worth of advancement!

We travelling from normal space dont have the luxury, although Earths nations would be while we are off inventing. By WE I mean the invasion force.

Also, the force would be small enough to conquer a planet of people that were technically inferior to us so we wouldnt need masses of troops. Enough to take the strategic points of the globe.

Jdrou and MG, you are both ignoring the fact that the Europeans took their best to the far shores of the America's (so they didnt know what was there) and found indians with bows and arrows.

It shows that when you go to do something you go there with what you consider is your best, not necessirily the equivalent. I for instance wouldnt send 10 divisions to attack a far SU province with only 1 MIL. For all I know the Reds might be Strate Redeploying 50 divisions to that province!

That said, there are other things that I dont fit my sense of logic with the HTD seems to present his world, but thats for another time.

 

[jdrou]

Certainly if you are going to an unexplored land you take your best tech but once you've been there and found that their tech appears to be 1000 years (or more) behind yours you don't equip future missions the same way when you could get the same results at 1/100 the cost. (The reason the aliens expected to see the same tech that their recon saw is that they and the only other intelligent species they knew of made negligable tech advancement in 100 years by our standards.)

 

[unmerged(19877)]

Certainly if you are going to an unexplored land you take your best tech but once you've been there and found that their tech appears to be 1000 years (or more) behind yours you don't equip future missions the same way when you could get the same results at 1/100 the cost. (The reason the aliens expected to see the same tech that their recon saw is that they and the only other intelligent species they knew of made negligable tech advancement in 100 years by our standards.)

The Nazis believed the Soviets to be inferior in every respect yet still attacked with the best they had. Maybe it was a case of poor alien intelligence.

Of course, this entire argument is premised on the notion that aliens think like humans and employ identical logic. Is there some sort of interstellar cultural gap?

 

[unmerged(13914)]

I think it was just that Harry Turtledove didn't put in a few extra days or nights of revising his premise.

We all understand what the goal is: to arrive at a plausible reason why WW II should be interrupted by aliens driving the equivalent of M1A2s, and then another plausible reason why the aliens should be inferior to humans at inventing new technology, and surprised by what the humans do.

Sadly, there were just too many other, better ways to arrive at that goal. See Niven and Pournelle's Footfall for a very similar story that made far more sense. The backstory he chose gave no reason for the aliens to have M1A2s in the first place, and then compounded that problem by giving them a very good reason to leave them at home and bring armored jeeps instead.

I think of Turtledove as a better historian than technologist. He can come up with the right 'local color,' he merges real people like Churchill and real historical events into his fiction quite well. But no engineer would stand by watching a starship get loaded with tanks and not ask, "Err . . . these people fight with swords and spears, right?"

 

[jdrou]

The Nazis believed the Soviets to be inferior in every respect yet still attacked with the best they had. Maybe it was a case of poor alien intelligence.

Of course, this entire argument is premised on the notion that aliens think like humans and employ identical logic. Is there some sort of interstellar cultural gap?

The Nazis didn't think the Soviets were 1000s of years inferior in tech. Again, based on the aliens' tech progress speed that's how far behind we were when they did their recon; it just turned out that we progress much much faster which they had no reason to suspect since the only other intelligent species they knew were similar to them.

 

[unmerged(14683)]

Oh, I remember this book, although in Poland only the first tome (In the Balance?) was printed - author's vision of Central Europe was so naive and funny that publisher not dared to print second one.

PS. Yes, scene with Dora was remarkable. But still, I believe whole story was just excuse to show "modern army vs. WW II army conflict" and add some sex scenes on the top. I prefered "Lost Legion" series much more.