My point is that you can not have a game both historical and rational, because history is not rational. Some of the causes and effects can be modelled, but you can never get the same chain of events to always happen with a simulation. Life is stochastic.
+1
thank you for saying this Slan. You are exactly right. And, what further complicates our views of the past is that we often skew our views and even, without knowing it often, perceive the people of the past as of the same mind as ourselves (meaning the exact same rights and wrongs or views on life and death). But, we take for granted so many of the advances we have. Hell, in the field of medical science back even in the first half of the 19th centuries, you were more likely to die from infection after surgery than from your wound itself (the top development in medical science which prevented this was for doctors to wash their hands and sterilize equipment before use... and it took them until the mid 19th century to figure this out!). Life expectancy was shorter. That would have a huge impact on the way society would have thought and acted. Then factor in socio-cultural ideologies circulating at the time and you realize you have a very different world on your hands.
Now, the second world war is not as distant as the example I used, but the same principle applies. Simply put, times were different then, and even though we have HUGE records on the war, we don't know everything. A fellow student of mine put it this way in class "I'm writing out these lecture notes as if I firmly believe what's being taught to me, but in my mind I could be thinking the exact opposite, or about something else entirely. But people studying this class in the future will never know, because they'll only have these notes to work with."
What makes history (particularly military history) is often looking at outcomes, and then trying to derive motives from those outcomes. But we also have to remember the ends don't necessarily justify the means. I don't even mean morality in this instance, I mean the outcome of something can often be completely different from what was intended.
Let's take an example for a second. the German Reich in the war. Looking back, we don't understand some of the decisions the Nazis made, especially in regards to the Holocaust and the final year of the war. "Why did they devote MORE military personnel and equipment to death camps when they were losing a war? Why even kill off the population of Jews you were using as slave labour? it doesn't make sense." It's true, it doesn't make sense. From OUR perspective. But from THEIR perspective, it made total sense. The core foundation of Nazism is RACIAL PURITY and anti semitism. This by that point (44-45) in the war was more their goal than winning the war.
it seems like I've jumped around alot in this comment (I have), but there is a point to this. What we percieve as rational in our hindsight must not be mistaken as what those of the past must have also percieved, particularly in the case of nazi Germany, where much of their leadership was NOT thinking rationally as we would define it. Likewise, much of the decisions other leaders made at the time don't seem rational to us because we're largely basing our opinions on the OUTCOMES rather than their perspective of the situation.
There's a few old assumptions about history and the past, one of which is "Hindsight is 20/20" but as we know here, nothing could be further from the truth.
If your British AI defeated Italians and Germans in north Africa then vanilla AI manages to lose Egypt and even Iraq to Italians. If your American and British AI managed to land in North Africa, Italy and France then vanilla AI manages to land somewhere in Island or Norway and if manages to land in France then is easily crushed.
