So any commander could have called up high command and drastically alterer all divisions in their army?
Well, to start, I think it's false to claim that the player is "any commander". Judging from how much overall power the player has in taking decisions, I'd say that the player is rather a president, prime minister or dictator. That combined with also being a commander in chief for both the army, air force and navy. With that in mind, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a person in that position to ask for a change in division setup if he sees a need for it. Because if that person is not considered qualified for such requests, then who is?
not without solid testing in training exercises or data from actual combat, which is what the system simulates.
If we bring this down to the most basic foundation of logics, then we could reason that experience is not required to make a change. Experience might help us to make a good change, but we are not forced to have experience just to make a change. Equally, just because we have experience, doesn't neccessarily mean that a change will be good. Good is a relative term and we don't know if something is good until we compare it with something else.
With that in mind, I see 3 problems here:
1. Why would we need training or experience in order to make a change that makes sense without having experience? For example, we don't need combat experience to realise that a garrison division that will mostly sit idle can consist of fewer battalions. Equally, we don't need combat experience to realise that a certain division is too cheap or too expensive in regards to our nations industrial capacity.
2. Why would training or experience against one opponent help us against another opponent? For all we know, these two opponents might fight entirely different, with different tactics, doctrines, equipment etc. What works against the French must not necessarily work against the Russians, and the experience we gained when fighting the French might not be of any use when fighting the Russians, and so on.
3. Why would a player need experience points when he doesn't know what to expect from his opponent and thus gains experience simply by playing against the opponent? This player has no idea what to expect from his opponent until the actual fighting starts and thus he cannot prepare any optimal divisions. With a more interesting AI that uses different strategies each game, we wouldn't know what to expect either.
Some nations were much more behind than others and I feel its important to model this.
Nations being behind prior to the start date of 1st january 1936 is already modeled by the starting scenario. This has nothing to do with experience points. The nations at that time used division templates that they considered to be right for them at that time, otherwise they would have changed them. It's not like these nations wanted to change their division templates but couldn't do so because a lack of experience points.
I wouldnt like a system where you could just change stuff to the optimum however you pleased.
Maybe the problem here is that we have an "optimum" in the first place? In real life, there is no "optimum division", since the optimum division for a specific scenario entirely depends on what the enemy is using. So maybe, the problem here is not about allowing us to change division templates for free, but rather the problem is an AI that always uses the same division types, which in turn creates a predictable behaviour, which in turn creates an optimum division?
