Yup. Got it in one. The DH system is good for a super-mod like DH, but for HOI4 I'd like to see a more realistic system.
Can manpower be modelled better?
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Yup. Got it in one. The DH system is good for a super-mod like DH, but for HOI4 I'd like to see a more realistic system.
No disrespect to you guys as developers, but just because DH couldn't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done. AOD made the link by linking MP to consumer goods. That may not have been the "best" way, but it was a link that was intuitive and was easy to track.
Finally, people are actually discussing the question of manpower!
Since people have already commented my earlier proposal, I think I'll have to clarify my position a little bit.
What I actually said:
Show me where I said anything about physical fitness? Since fit in that context means "fit for service", not "in a good shape."
You are the only one who keeps talking about physical fitness and strength here, and you've kept that argument up through the thread without any relation to what I've actually said.
So, please let this strawman argument go and let's continue the discussion?
Then please do point out an example of a major power that ran out of bodies in uniform before surrendering in WW2? Manpower collapse of previous parts of HoI is not historical, whereas drafting militia and fighting on until capitulation is very much part of WW2.
As I pointed out earlier, I rather dislike it when people create a strawman argument and then in essense argue with themselves.
So first you say that the proposal is wholly unrealistic and then state that it represents WW2-era reality rather well? Also, "nearly impossible" does not equal "bottomless manpower." Once again you made a strawmen argument and then went on talking about it. Not very constructive style of discussion if you ask me. :glare:
But then again it's nothing new on Internet either.
As a summary of good points raised in this topic so far:
-Production and manpower should be linked in some manner
-Manpower should not be a crop to be harvested and stored in capitol
So, how should the recruitment system work if the idea of "manpower harvest" is obviously outdated and unrealistic?
Since people have already commented my earlier proposal, I think I'll have to clarify my position a little bit.
What I actually said:
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Splitting Manpower into several sub-units would make Hearts of Iron IV a better game.
Why?
Suppose that Manpower was split into four grades: A, B and C and D (Special forces, Well-trained professional, trained reserves, militia/Larry, Curly and Moe for all I care - the main thing is that the resource is split into four subcategories)
[B]Grade A[/B] would be required to build and reinforce better-trained special forces, like Paratroopers and Marines.
[B]Grade B[/B] would be the well-trained professional soldiers, prewar British army or 1935 Reichswehr. Any common unit could be raised from this quality, and it would receive a slight boost to starting experience.
[B]Grade C[/B] is early war reinforcement manpower - nothing too impressive but fit and trained enough to perform without any penalties. This manpower type would be most numerous, and only years of hard attritional warfare would lead to situation where it is not numerous enough to cover Major power losses.
[B]Grade D[/B] is bottom of the barrel, Народное ополчение/Volkssturm-quality. This manpower is used to raise Militia formations, and replace losses on regular formations if trained manpower has run out. Exhausting this manpower resource is nearly impossible.
If Grade B and Grade C type trained manpower resources of a country are spent, the country in question can only raise common unit types (as SF formations require better-quality manpower), and receives a negative strategic modifier that reduces unit combat effectiveness to represent the fact that available reserves are not up to their task.
This way countries would no longer suffer an unrealistic manpower collapse and run out of manpower. Instead they would suffer a steady decline in manpower [B]quality[/B], which combined to increased casualty rates would easily turn into a vicious circle. None of the major powers that fought in WW2 ended the war in situation where they had run out of soldiers in uniform, and IMO HoI IV would be a better game if it simulated this historical situation better.
tl;dr -
Historically countries didin't run out of manpower per se, only well-trained soldiers. Game could easily simulate this and still be easily accessible and learn.Show me where I said anything about physical fitness? Since fit in that context means "fit for service", not "in a good shape."
You are the only one who keeps talking about physical fitness and strength here, and you've kept that argument up through the thread without any relation to what I've actually said.
So, please let this strawman argument go and let's continue the discussion?
Then please do point out an example of a major power that ran out of bodies in uniform before surrendering in WW2? Manpower collapse of previous parts of HoI is not historical, whereas drafting militia and fighting on until capitulation is very much part of WW2.
As I pointed out earlier, I rather dislike it when people create a strawman argument and then in essense argue with themselves.
So first you say that the proposal is wholly unrealistic and then state that it represents WW2-era reality rather well? Also, "nearly impossible" does not equal "bottomless manpower." Once again you made a strawmen argument and then went on talking about it. Not very constructive style of discussion if you ask me. :glare:
But then again it's nothing new on Internet either.
As a summary of good points raised in this topic so far:
-Production and manpower should be linked in some manner
-Manpower should not be a crop to be harvested and stored in capitol
So, how should the recruitment system work if the idea of "manpower harvest" is obviously outdated and unrealistic?
Well, Vic2's POP system for soldiers worked rather well. Soldier and officer POPs weren't available to do anything except form the basis of brigades. They weren't harvested and sitting idle because they still had to be paid, even if all possible brigades weren't recruited. And brigade losses directly hurt the POPs upon which those brigades were derived.
Mobilizing reserves let you put poor POPs into uniform at a flat cost to productivity (they aren't working in fields or factories anymore).
But this puts us back into the problem of adding a complicated demographic model to the game.
This seems kind of like a caste system. Anyway, while the "officer class" was a big factor in the 19th century, the transition to citizen soldier was pretty much all done by the time we got to WW2.
Some kind of vastly simplified model might be enough for HoI.
A model where maintaining the manpower-production system and reservist pool would have running costs (money and supplies) seems like one possible solution, as people have already pointed out.
Depending on how IC is modelled, supply costs linked to training laws could even become the primary mechanic of controlling army size and quality and training of reserves.
No it´s not a caste system. If you haven´t played the game don´t judge it.
Victoria 2 had professional soldiers (armies that were raised 100% time and based on soldier POP) and a mobilization pool from poor strata (labourers/farmers/craftsmen). With mobilization having economic impact (through you didn´t have degrees of mobilization). The size of soldier POPs was directly linked to the military budget.
Good idea.
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In my opinion DH set a link but as usual it was based on the rule of thumb. AOD did better but it was based on the same thumb. As I said in order to set up a proper link you need to model production http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?755526-Production-IC
Yeah, I'm liking this idea.
If you can add fuel costs for training laws (those tanks and planes don't fly and drive themselves on fusion reactors), I'd be completely on board with a mechanic like this.
One can already simulate this to a certain degree with HoI3 training laws and strategic effects, so the only problem for the next part of the series would be to code the AI to deal with such situation from the start.
Post #84 by Praetori. He clearly related physical fitness to the manpower grades you proposed. Even if that is not what you mean, that's how Praetori at least interpreted it, so I didn't pull it out of my hat the way you claim, I was rebutting other people.
That was not a strawman. A strawman is a malicious attempt to misrepresent someone's argument - if I have misunderstood you then I am sorry, but it wasn't malicious. Even after calling this a strawman you've failed to clarify your argument - what is the difference, if not physical, between A and B? As several people have pointed out, "elite" troops were superior to line infantry (in those cases that they were) because of esprit de corps, and they were limited in numbers because they were limited in utility, not the available numbers of men who could do their task.
As I said earlier, you could make the majority of your army paratroopers, the average soldier is abundantly capable of being pushed out a plane and having their 'chute automatically deployed by a line. Armies didn't do this because it's less than useless to do so: paratroopers are only useful in their specialized role in a few niche cases, otherwise they fight as infantry, but lack the heavy weapons of regular infantry. You spend more resources making paratroops and produce a less capable unit in terms of their equipment. The same goes for the other two HoI2-3 special infantry types, mountain infantry and marines: lack of heavy weapons (the USMC is an exception), more expensive, unique equipment that isn't useful outside of their specialized role, and more specialized training that takes longer and consumes resources. You wouldn't bother training more than a small number. That's the constraining factor, not the available men. Hearts of Iron already had this: marines had their better terrain modifiers where applicable, but were more expensive to produce and maintain.
I wasn't the only one who took you to mean physical fitness was the division between classes; that was essentially the historical division between, roughly, what you call class C and class D. Volkssturm was comprised of men who Germany would have rejected as unfit earlier in the war. Your post was apparently unclear, and instead of politely explaining where people misunderstood you, you've gone off at me for straw manning you... and not clarified your argument.
That's goading, which is itself, not constructive.
As I have pointed out, I was replying to people who did talk about fitness. I apparently misinterpreted your original post, and yet you haven't clarified it. Nevertheless, rereading your post, at risk of misunderstanding you again, you're saying Class A is superbly highly trained, Class B are peacetime trained soldiers, Class C are wartime soldiers, and Class D are undertrained soldiers. The trouble with this, and this would be why people misconstrued it, is that this is putting the cart before the horse. From what you're saying, a man in Class A is the same as a man in Class D, just that Class A has been trained to a higher standard. But this is already in Hearts of Iron: marines take much longer to train (and use more IC and supplies) than regular infantry who in turn take longer to train than milita (who use less IC and supplies). Why divide them before they undergo training in Hearts of Iron, if a man of Class A is the same as Class B and Class C in every regard other than the training they receive? They should be in a common pool, as they are already, and the training they are given should determine the combat efficiency of the unit that is produced - you simply put things in reverse order, so that prior to any training you've got fixed proportions of variously training manpower and that dictates what units they can be put into. I do not understand, why do you say it should be done in reverse (if this is what you're saying)?
You've misunderstood me, I never said it was representative at all. I'll try to clear this up, although this was in relation to dividing manpower based on fitness which is what I was talking about in response to Praetori. Understand now that that is not what you're speaking about anyway, but because you have misunderstood it:
In the historical reality armies didn't distinguish extremely fit, highly fit, acceptable, and then everyone else. Instead there was those who are fit and those who are not, that was the binary distinction. In US terms you were almost always were 1A meaning you passed the tests, or 4F, meaning you didn't. There were no grades above "fit". However, for those who were unfit, when numbers ran low armies frequently began putting increasingly marginally fit men into service. This was not, however, a large group by any means, it was smaller than the group broadly defined as "fit".
Thus if we're creating a scale of manpower based on fitness you'd have a very large pool that is considered optimal, and when it runs out you'd use a much smaller class of men who didn't quite make the grade - after that there are many different grades of manpower that doesn't make the grade, from those who had a minor defect like being too short, to at the other end, men with arthritis who shouldn't be considered at all. But crucially the entire group of men who don't belong in the "fit" category is smaller than the "fit" group, not larger: in the 1940s population pyramid the fit men between ~18-40 is a larger group than all the unfit men who are at all usable between ~12-80. You'd either have one very large optimal class and myriad suboptimal ones of total size much smaller than optimal, or you'd just amalgamate all the suboptimals into one or two classes, but again, the total suboptimal manpower is below the optimal size by a wide margin. So I did not say your tiny A, small B, big C, "nearly impossible to exhaust" D classes, interpreted as applying to physical fitness, was like the historical reality. I will assume you misunderstood me, rather than that you're mendacious.
In my post I say that no country has "near limitless" manpower of any quality, and then say that I want to reiterate that "no army had bottomless manpower a la category D". I would consider it clear that "bottomless" is a colloquial phrase meaning "endless for practical purposes" since I'm saying that I'm reiterating my point that no country had "near limitless" manpower in the manner you described category D - and your chosen term "nearly impossible" is no less colloquial. So I am not trying to straw man you, and if I was unclear, you were equally unclear. Either way, no country had so much manpower it was "nearly impossible" to exhaust it, unless you mean something quite different to what I would assume you mean. Perhaps you need to be explicit about what you mean.
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Where do I begin? Germany did run out of ideally fit men to continue adding to their forces. Check FOARP's post on page 1: Germany in 1944 was so desperate that a big share of its army was composed of non-German nationals. The "Volksdeutsche" were bad enough, being nominally German in ethnicity, though not all even spoke German, and many had no desire to fight for Germany. Then there were Hiwis, volunteers from occupied territories, often surrendered Red Army soldiers; some of them actually did all that they could to see Germany win, others just wanted out of the PoW camps, and the degree to which they were trained and equipped varied, but tended to be rather poor. Then there were foreigners simply forced into uniform for the Germans who if anything wanted Germany defeated. Some of the men Germany deployed against the Western Allies were probably had their greatest impact through the resources it took to deal with all of the surrenders. The Red Army suffered manpower shortages as well, and as discussed, created "fortified districts" to hold ground with limited personnel, so the freed up manpower could be sent to armies intended for offensives.
So Germany did not have "nearly impossible" to exhaust men between 18-45 who were fit for duty that they began pressing into service without sufficient training or equipment. Rather, leaving aside those non-Reichsdeutsche who were pressed into service, the men Germany was increasingly forced to use in the latter part of the war were unfit. They were over the original age limits (being over age doesn't necessarily mean you can't pass fitness tests, but a lower proportion of men in over age groups could pass those tests), or were short sighted, blind in one eye, deaf, arthritic, et cetera. This is where the confusion about physical traits comes into it, I believe: the pool of manpower that was tapped in desperation was physically impaired -Volkssturm particularly. On that basis I don't disagree that if this pool is tapped there should be a penalty. I don't believe I've said that earlier, but then prior to this the whole manpower grading debate has been on the other end at having higher quality manpower limiting "special" divisions, not the low quality end. So yes, armies did tap into sources of sub-optimal manpower, and there should be penalties for using it. However, sub-optimal manpower from one's own population (IE not foreign populations), is smaller than the fit category, not larger. Again, the population pyramid for a 1940s society would have the majority of men between 18-45, the majority of those would pass the fitness tests armies applied, fewer men would lie outside of that category while also being of any use at all in combat; there would be far more boys under the age of 10 than men over the age of 45. As such, unless you're talking about the sort of "mobilization" Japan desired at the end of the war, in which every person is expected to fight, with bare hands if necessary, crawling if they can't walk, then there isn't a pool of manpower that's larger than the "fit" category already discussed. And if you are talking about that, well, that's a whole 'nother issue.
And yes, most of those men were sent into combat under-equipped, and under-trained or even un-trained. Again, there should be a penalty because they're unfit, but I don't see why they cannot be properly trained and equipped if the nation has the time and resources.
Countries did run out of manpower. Even Britain ran out of manpower, just that Britain could afford to reduce the size of her armies and let the USA shoulder the load she relinquished. Germany had no more fit men to add to its forces in 1945, it was hardly even having a trickle of men reaching maturity because it had already tapped under-age groups. It had far fewer men under arms, even having mobilized virtually anyone it could find, including foreigners, and if you cut foreigners from its order of battle their forces are much, much smaller. Germany also ran low on equipment, which accelerated losses. As far as running out of men in uniform, certainly it's true no army gave up when their very last man in uniform died but that's distinct from running out of more useful men to train/equip/pressgang and simply point toward the front. By the time you're putting septuagenarians in uniform you've already lost and your army will be getting smaller and smaller right up until you surrender.
Personally I favour an even more simple solution - you start with a manpower pool which represents the entirety of the available workforce in your country. Some of this manpower is required to keep industry running. Some cannot be used for military service because it represents people who are not liable for military service. The more you dip into this manpower pool, the more your forces experience negative maluses and the more national morale and output suffer. And that's it.
The problem I see is that most of these ideas are based not on facts but on mere common sense (which very often is plainly wrong). Just to make an example when USA introduced mass production for freighters the productivity tripled. So even though some men from that industry went to the army the net effect was an impressive increase in production and NOT a decrease (as the common sense would say)
Once more (maybe this is the 20th time I say it) if you don't model correctly production you cannot establish any link with manpower.
Did I say anywhere that tech-developments and production-line efficiencies were going to be left out? We're talking about manpower here.
You said this
In order to avoid misunderstanding please show how your model (based on real data) would work.
The workforce of Germans in war-industries declined from 39.1 million in May 1939 to 28.4 million in September 1944 (stats already discussed above), with this loss being almost entirely due to mobilisation for military service. Are you really saying that output in war industries was not less than it otherwise would have been had fewer people been mobilised into the armed forces? Yes, yes - production in existing prodcution lines increased due to streamlining and greater experience and efficiencies, but are you really saying that mobilisation had no impact on output?
My system would model this very simply - the more manpower you mobilise from industry, the more production would suffer relative to where it would otherwsie have been. Why is this so hard to understand?
This is just common sense. Please show us how your model would work based on data e.g. -x worker implies -y production
Cardus, you are being dense. We have this little thing called "productivity per worker." So say that Hans, Franz, and Hank all produce 80 Reichmarks of widgets per hour in 1938. So in 1938, Germany is getting 240 Reichmarks out of these three guys.
By the end of the war, Hans and Hank are dead, but the advances in mechanization and industrial technology has increased the productivity per worker to 300 Reichmarks per hour so Germany's total production can still increase since Franz is still there plugging away.
There is the positive factor of increasing productivity allowing for a single worker to produce more stuff, and that is counter balanced by the drain on the workforce by the army.
For most nations of WW2, increasing productivity due to technology and rapidly dropping unemployment outweighed the manpower drain so net production went up.