Manpower in real terms.

[unmerged(276755)]

Manpower is people available, not joining. The only thing a conscription law can change is the range of age where you recruit

Yes, that's the point. You can radically change your available manpower if you say, decide to include 14 year olds in the front line as Germany did towards the end, or give untrained 55+ year old illiterate peasants (who couldn't even speak the same language as their officers) a rifle as the Soviets did, but that's all a choice of the leaders, not just raw population per se.

Or even modern militaries will remove previous exclusions (such as accepting some medical conditions which were previously off limits) to "increase the pool"

So Austria only has 150MP but then Germany suddenly gets 500? Simple - they changed the rules and suddenly a lot more Austrians are now eligible.

I think it's a reasonable attempt to model that Axis and Comintern countries can get away with being much more horrible to their own populations that what would have been likely tolerated by most of the Allies.

 

[Angel Walker]

Yes, that's the point. You can radically change your available manpower if you say, decide to include 14 year olds in the front line as Germany did towards the end, or give untrained 55+ year old illiterate peasants (who couldn't even speak the same language as their officers) a rifle as the Soviets did, but that's all a choice of the leaders, not just raw population per se.

Or even modern militaries will remove previous exclusions (such as accepting some medical conditions which were previously off limits) to "increase the pool"

So Austria only has 150MP but then Germany suddenly gets 500? Simple - they changed the rules and suddenly a lot more Austrians are now eligible.

I think it's a reasonable attempt to model that Axis and Comintern countries can get away with being much more horrible to their own populations that what would have been likely tolerated by most of the Allies.

Well, it's hardly a very good excuse... changing your recruitment age from 20-40 to 16-60 (just throwing an approx. as an example) is not going to triple the number of people available (if it does, I do wonder how could such a country sustain itself). And then again, as you said, that is something that'd only happen towards the end of the war, not at the moment the Anschluss fire.

The only explanation is that it's an "artificial" way to balance Germany's MP.

But I think it's well accepted that the MP system and conscription laws are very simplified and could benefit from a major overhaul in future installments of the series.

 

[21oliver]

Im not so sure that even if Austria had three year draft they would have had that amount of MP... Anyway it was just to make a point about how the MP is abstracted in the game, and simplified as stated above. Which is all okay as long as you take it for what its worth. I keep looking at it this way...HOI3 is a wargame, a nice fun one, what its not is a historical/realistic WW2 game.

 

[BattleMoose]

The naming of the conscription laws as draft laws is probably just bad wording when it comes down to it. In reality, the reasons and mechanisms for how many men a country can commit to the war effort and vast and varied.

Including:
1. Age
2. Medical (flat footed, eye sight et cetera)
3. Unemployment
4. Occupation (Increasing your occupation had to be more and more important for the war effort to avoid being drafted)
5. Foreign labour
6. Women labour
7. Economy, mechanisation (Does a farm need 20 or 60 men for the same output?)
8. And I am sure many more that people can think of

Back in reality, different countries made very different decisions as to how and which men were committed to direct military service. Making proportationl comparisons to specific countries highly problematic.

 

[21oliver]

And a modifier to all the above would be the circumstances. A Nation like say the USA sending troops off to the Pacific or Europe as opposed to Germany and Japan later in the war facing invasion. Necessity often alters perspective.