Where is the graph form? What does it represent? Are munitions ammo or tanks, artillery & aircraft?This is not true.
Hearts of Iron IV - Developer Diary 7 - Air Combat
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Actually "Munitions" is inaccurate, I should've gone straight to the source. The graph is a measure of everything you mentioned and more, an aggregation of the value for all armaments produced in Germany.
The original source is more clear.
The source itself is the economist-historian Adam Tooze's book 'Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy'. The effect of Allied Strategic Bombing, in particular after the Battle of the Ruhr:
And we can take the words of Albert Speer himself.
-Albert Speer, notes on the 29 July 1943 Zentrale Planung conference. Source DRZW Chap. 6 page 630-709 W. Murray and A. R. Miller. A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass, 2000)
As for the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, in August 1943 Field Marshall Erhard Milch, coordinating director of the Luftwaffe, lost his composure, proclaiming to an audience of Gauleiter, Ministers and senior civil servants:
Prompting Hitler to dispatch Goebbels to personally lecture Milch on the danger of a defeatist attitude. On 18 AUG '43 the Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek, the man most immediately responsible for the conduct of the German air war, committed suicide.
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This is not true.
Did you ment "your date is off by 7 month"?
I`m not interested in debating + or - 1-2 month or some sort minor ditail.
In HOI3 Germany can effectivly defend allies attempts to bomb it`s industry for a long time, long enough to either win or loose Eastern front. IRL, after the battle of Britain British took several efforts to bomb Germany, but only "succeded" by whatever the established measure of succes there is, since, let`s remember strategic bombings are anything but free, in later portions of war, after the tide already turned on Soviet front and Germany was doomed anyway.
Does the game has the overall picture right? More or less. Now debating details of somthing as complicated as strategic bombing campaign on a game forum is foolish, so I will not debate on "when" allied bombings actually became "efficent" and German defences "inefficent".
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Yes, it would make sense. I'm guessing they are not going to give us naval HQs and instead there will be an almost identical system of naval bases within range of a strategic sea region can be given patrol and interception missions, convoy raiding etc. and if you want you can set some smaller areas of sea zones within that for prioritising then you can would be able to do that.
Personally, I don't see this system as massively different from HOI3. I would set-up my JAP fleets to cover what will probably be strategic sea zones:
- the Yellow Sea (battle fleet to protect CVs to provide additional air cover over northern China after Marco Polo)
- the East China Sea including Taiwan area (mix of convoy raiding to get convoys running from Shanghai and interception missions in case Nat.Chi navy goes to sea)
- the Pacific Ocean to the south east of Japan home islands
Having these as regions which you can set the strategy and see how this is going in a fairly clear interface is really good.
Edit: ... though I would have liked to see East China Sea Fleet HQ with an Admiral in charge located in a naval base, which controls a number of flotillas of ships that can be in several bases.
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Calm down, the size of states and strat provinces can all be modded - I'm am sure they understand they're taking some risk here, and not allowing it to be modded to allow PLAYERS to also experiment with different sizes, will surely paint themselves in a corner. I too was concerned, and moddability was an early question.
Not sure I like this idea of automating everything air and naval, may as well take it one step further and automate land battle as well and make it a fully automated animated wallpaper game?
I guess you can mod which provinces are in which states to make them smaller/bigger, but that would be a lot of work to change. Easier would be to split a particular strategic region.
More to the point - this pre-alpha. Until the devs have been play testing and then had the beta testers play the game over and over, they won't be sure if they have got this right for release. And, who's to know, originally HOI3 gave you no choice over the area covered by Theatres, then they implemented the option to set your own area. It surely wouldn't be too hard, except I'm not sure how that would affect the AI - does the AI and player need to have identical strat regions to use?
I'm ok with the design they have here for the air warfare, I tended to get a bit overwhelmed with it about mid game and on trying to micro it and in fact I'd be ok with something like this for convoy raiding but I am not sold it is something I would enjoy for naval warfare yet
What is wrong with it? You move the air units, you give the orders, you get the progress reports, you can reinforce, you can stop the missions, you make the decisions. I really disliked having to micro every, or near every air attack in the game.
Land battles are automated - you commit your units to a battle and fully automated routines then carry out the combat, where you only get to watch not influence what happens.
No different with air (or I suspect naval) just commit your fighters to certain air bases, give them an order to intercept bombers in that region and let them do it. Or send the bombers to do bombing. In fact, there is not such a massive difference with HOI3 if you used the area of a mission to be quite large and set the missions to last a few months. You then never needed to constantly adjust them, I would often only change things when the front moved so far forward to capture a new air base that I could relocate units.
1-2 months = 7 months? Or was it closer to a year? Surely you weren't implying that you think on 01 JAN '44 suddenly the Allied Bombing campaign in Europe became completely effective. A year is an very large amount of time in WW2.
You're entitled your own opinions about the relative importance of strategic factors. I stand by correcting your "ditails" about the German Luftwaffe effectively countering Allied bombings until 1944. I think that I've demonstrated above that Allied bombing had a large impact on German Armaments production through most of 1943.
The game being HoI3? Absolutely it does not have the "overall picture" in regard to the effectiveness of Strategic bombing. You debating the details of strategic bombing's efficiency/inefficiency relative to real history was what prompted my comment.
The Allied AI failure in not being able to use Strategic Bombers effectively in the HoI3 game does not parallel the real life failures of the Luftwaffe's defense of Germany.
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While Germany was "doomed" to be outproduced by the Russians and find their armies inadequate in 1944 onwards, surely the strategic bombing played a role in why the soviets kept increasing the materials they could supply their men with on the front while the germans kept supplying less.
No, my point was I like what they have designed for Air combat and think it would be good for Convoy Raiding but I haven't worked out how it would look for naval warfare. I'm very interested in the Naval DD but personally spending as much IC and time in que as I normally do for major naval units I never minded the micro of HoI3 naval combat *Minus Sub's).
I actually like to play games myself so no i didnt automate things in hoi3. And if they are going to add it for air and naval, I would like for it to stay as an option so we can still play the game as we want.
An option for automatic air support would be a godsend with the ability for a human to override them and assign specific tasks would be a god send. It would make sense to just set your heavy bombers on strategic bombing and let them go at it at will instead of having to tediously assign strike areas. The same goes for bombers and CAS. I think in general every mission should have two modes:
1) An automated mode where you select an option and they do that. For example, if you choose CAS to enter CAS mode they will automatically attack targets engaged in close ground battles with your troops to help tilt the scales in your favor (and hence granting them the "support" part of their names). Very little human input would be required after that except having to occasionally rebase the buggers.
2) A manual mode like what we have now that allows you to specifically direct your missions at one target or area specifically.
That way you get the best of both worlds.
1) An automated mode where you select an option and they do that. For example, if you choose CAS to enter CAS mode they will automatically attack targets engaged in close ground battles with your troops to help tilt the scales in your favor (and hence granting them the "support" part of their names). Very little human input would be required after that except having to occasionally rebase the buggers.
2) A manual mode like what we have now that allows you to specifically direct your missions at one target or area specifically.
That way you get the best of both worlds.
Ofcourse every bit helps. However Germany was really limited in materials and oil, thus it wasn`t even theoretically capable of "keeping up" even if allied bombing was absent.
You didn`t demponstrate that Germany failed to counter air raids. You did demonstrate that they had an impact, which is not the same, nor did I imply it is same.
UK&US managing to limit the grow of German industrial production, is not a "failure" to defend it`s industry by Germany. As I said, strategic bombings were not free to allies.
For a proper comparison, one has to compare the material and labor that went into manufacturing, maintaining, and operating those strategic bombing raids against the impact, which, curiously almost no-one is willing to do, and at least I can`t find any accurate figures on how much personell had to be comited to strategic air branch.
I have one complaint to raise after re-watching the screenshot: why there is a single, giant guy instead of a couple of smaller guys? It really turns me off, towards counters, even if counters are made in terrible NATO-style. I do hope there will be a way of telling what's in the stack in a single province too. In previous games we simply had a couple of flags and that wasn't good enough for me. Planes I do like.
Or you could not defend, and simply sneak-invade the UK and win. The air war could be ignored.
You seem to be describing what the AI does, rather than what the player actually had to do: again, you could safely go without air cover in HOI3.
But you still won, right? The 1944 scenario especially was an easy-to-win joke.
And you didn't simply sneak-invade round it because why?
Who cares what the AI does when the air war can be simply ignored?
The problem is that a range of factors combined to overwhelm The Third Reich in 1943-45, and identifying the share of that which belonged to strategic bombing is difficult. The case is much clearer, however, for Japan, which was economically crushed by a combined strategic bombing campaign and submarine warfare.
One figure does indicate a degree of success for the Allied bombing campaign though - the manpower strength of the Luftwaffe, which peaked at more than 1.5 million men, the overwhelming majority of whom were employed in the defence of the Reich.
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I like what was said in this DD, although, i might have wanted to supplement this system with planes also being able to be part of land units/HQs. They´d take up severe TOE space as not only the planes themselves would take a slot, but also the construction units, paving the airstrips. Planes attached to the ground forces in such a manner would need no orders at all, as they would just automatically support the ground troops they are attached to. Needless to say that fighters and CAS-bombers would be prime candidates to attach to the ground OOB. This way, we could have both: Easy, non-micromanagment heavy, startegical air warfare on a greater scale (with rather big stratregic regions) AND very detailed control without any extra micro at all.
Edit - example: I´d like to add to my armored corps HQ template 50 CAS and 50 heavy fighters. And for them to stay operational, 2 constructions battalions, or whatever. These 100 planes would support and cover very specifically the divisions attached to the HQ (and the HQ itself, of course).
Edit - example: I´d like to add to my armored corps HQ template 50 CAS and 50 heavy fighters. And for them to stay operational, 2 constructions battalions, or whatever. These 100 planes would support and cover very specifically the divisions attached to the HQ (and the HQ itself, of course).
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That's not what I read - strategic bombings had, to my knowledge, much less impact on Japan than cutting off the merchant fleet supplying the island(s) with resources from the mainland.