Johan said:
As mentioned at the top of diary leadership is your educated people. These aren’t just the top the university graduates, in fact it is the exact opposite. If we look at the Manhattan project there were over 130,000 people working on it and not all of these went onto to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. All research projects in our time frame relied on these support people to make them happen, and this is Leadership. The top graduates are represented by your nations accumulated theory value and can only give you benefits for projects where their skills apply, while the clerks, secretaries, draftsmen, chemists, physics etc. who are the unsung heroes of wartime research, they can work anywhere.
In order to make our task of game balance easier these leadership points are consumed when you do research. We do acknowledge that the people you assign to projects will become steadily more experienced and don’t just disappear and this is also held as your accumulated theory value. The more you research in an area the less leadership points you will need to advance in a field. Similarly for practical values, having a number of tanks to work with already means you need to expend less effort to advance in a field.
I also mention the officer corps, to put your minds at rest the divisional level and above leaders you had in Hearts of Iron and Hearts of Iron 2 are still there. These represent the Officers and NCOs below divisional rank. These are the men supplied the glue that held your divisions together. As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.
Johan, I think we all seem to agree that the concept you are developing here is exactly right. But the terminology used is definitely wrong.
Looking at the Manhattan Project - Robert Oppenheimer was the leader, and exercised leadership over the direction of the work carried out by the other 129,999 people involved. Some of these, in different management roles below Oppenheimer will have also exercised leadership over their particular part of the project, but discussing the mass of them many will have been engineers and scientists, but not all, and the correct terms to describe them IMO would be: specialists, technicians or professionals.
Outside of technical research, "technicians" would probably not be correct. And may not have been in usage at that time anyway.
In the military context, the men you mention - from NCO's to Colonel - mainly exercised leadership over the men below them, but not always. They will have included the staff officers, quartermasters, medical officers, etc. Nevertheless, I accept that the leadership of the junior officers and NCO's in the combat battalions might be critical for the morale and organisation of the troops in individual ground combat operations. But the game scale is far higher than that, and it is important that the concept we are dealing with here is not confused with the individual "leaders" named in the game. Including, in the military context, the leadership given by Maj.Gen. and above.
If we move out of the ground combat arena, then in the air forces, specialists and professionals were evident in the ground crew responsible for maintenance/repair of aircraft. In addition, the junior officer and NCO's involved in the combat wings, were not primarily exercising leadership over other men, but exercising highly skilled combat roles (pilot, navigator, etc.). In nearly every country these men will have been recruited amongst well-educated/skilled workers, and, dare I say it, almost exclusively amongst the upper and middle-classes.
If what we will have in HOI3 is a system representing that a significant proportion of the population of each country with the necessary educational level/skills/experience/background, can be recruited to:
1. Form the backbone of the frontline combat units in the army or navy, or form the entire combat units in the airforce
2. Carry out research on technical projects
3. Work for the Foreign Service/Diplomatic Corps
4. Work for the Intelligence Services
5. Work in industry building ships, airplanes, tanks (you didn't mention industry, I'm speculating here, that putting these guys into building an existing model of airplane rather than researching a new one, would lead to production bonuses?)
Then whatever this is called, it must be clearly differentiated from the military leadership system. The new system is going to have to be explained in the game manual, forums and Wiki etc. and I can see the use of "Leadership" in two different contexts causing some confusion, for some experienced HOI2 players, but also new people who come to HOI3.
It would seem to me better if the ONLY area of the manual/game that mentions "leaders"/"leadership" is in the context of military officers Maj.Gen. and above. Therefore another word should be used to describe your new concept for HOI3.
I prefer the term "Specialists".
I also think on a slightly more general issue, you might be better not to include any term with the word "Points". The screen shots show Italy with a manpower of 450 and, if I have understood the new game interface correctly, 6.45 of your proposed "Leadership Points". Personally, I would much prefer you to scale the manpower up to something which looked more realistic: "450,000" instead of "450" makes it look more real. So we would have an Infantry Division requires "10,000 men" instead of "10 manpower points".
Taking the same issue with the "Specialists" ("Leadership"), I would have (for example) Italy with "645,000 Specialists" and the Tech. Tree showing a major technical research project requires "25,000 Specialists" to be allocated to it for one year.
Or you need to recruit "3,000 Specialists" into the Army to form that new Infantry Division. So you are then only left with 642,000 Specialists for Research. Not really significant, unless you decide to build 20 new Infantry Divisions, and you are then left with only 585,000 Specialists, and it starts to impact on your research.
Or you keep sending your air units against targets that are very well-defended and the rate of loss of aircrew is so high that every few weeks you keep having to recruit 2,000 Specialists to replace them.
It's then far easier for a newbie (and for us!) to clearly understand what we are doing, and how building new units/replacing combat losses within units directly affects Research.
