Well then that means there is very little to no benefit to staying at anything other than total conscription, since your available manpower only grows at optimum rate if you're actively conscripting everybody, apparently. Yay realism!
Manpower recovery
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Well then that means there is very little to no benefit to staying at anything other than total conscription, since your available manpower only grows at optimum rate if you're actively conscripting everybody, apparently. Yay realism!
And then you have nobody at home to produce anything... so yeah, yay realism.
There's a reason why you only call in new conscripts when forced to, and not at the onset of the war (Though HoI3 was opposite, sadly, where war mobilisation always made sense ASAP). HoI4, we're told, will incorporate this.
And the whole pop-growth thing is somewhat silly. Nobody born after the game start can really be relevant within the games' timeframe. Born on January 1, 1936, you'll be 13 years old by the time the game ends. Population growth doesn't matter in such a short period.
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Aye. But born in 1919, you will be 17 during game start, and 18 the next year.
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Sure they are, which was sort of why I didn't mention them as being silly?
Pop growth isn't about the people already there, it's about adding new ones.
That's not how I meant it, which I thought was obvious from what I was posting. @Opanashc gets it correct, the amount of people coming of age needs to be calculated, otherwise it's a HOI 3 scenario where you go total mobilization as soon as possible.
The higher you go with the conscription levels, the less effective your factories will be. If everyone is at the front, then nobody is at home to produce equipment and stuff.
For example, if you are enacting service by requirement you will be able to enlist 40% of your population, but also take an -40% penalty to factory output. If you go even higher than that, say All Adults Serve, you get 50% of recruitable population and an -50% penalty to factory output, but also the maximum training will be reduced by 10%, which means your units wont be able to reach the highest level and fight less effective.
One thing that should also be noted is, that All Adults Serve and Scraping the Barrel can only be enacted if you have less than 50% of IC of an enemy country. That means unless you are fighting the USA for example as germany you cant enact those policies.
No I understand, but from the standpoint of a country with low manpower (meaning less production is needed to equip their army, like the UK), it would be by far the most efficient strategy to start off by moving conscription policies higher as soon as possible.
Honestly if the game tracks the populace coming of age, then there wouldn't be a problem. The thing is, we don't know what kind of calculations are going on behind the scenes since the devs have only spoken about total population growth, not coming-of-age.
Not unless you have a large stockpile of weapons to give those mobilized. That's the entire point of gradual mobilization - men manufacture weapons, then same men are mobilized and use the very weapons they manufactured.
Yes but if you look at the wiki you will see that in order to get extensive conscription you need less than 30% of the IC of your enemy while for the scraping the barrel you only need less than 50%. These tooltips are wrong. It should be if your enemy has at least 50% of your IC.
The industrial mechanics are not that complicated in HoI though, to be honest. It would take a lot of balancing and tweaking (to an unnecessary level) for a very small result.
For a country with low manpower to raise drafting laws higher means drastically increase their army size. Men without weapons are no good on battlefield where winner is not detirmined by hand to hand combat.
Not it it's proportional, which it is. A country like the UK, for example, which has low manpower but few production issues, would do well to raise their manpower laws as soon as possible to maximize growth. The UK will only be able to field a relatively small land army compared to Germany, the USSR, and the US, and shouldn't have issues keeping up production-wise, particularly if there's women in the workforce events and/or modifiers.
I do believe you are misunderstanding something. Manpower pool is pretty much set for all nations, in accordance with their historical population (allowing for game balancing). Under different laws, a nation can draft a different % of that manpower pool, at the cost of reduction of production. Monthly increase in total manpower is same under all draft laws. UK, with enough equipment, can field same size army as USA did. Quality of soldiers will be much less though.
Is the monthly increase in total manpower the same no matter which laws one uses? That's what I'm asking, since I've seen no indication of that being the case.
Extensive Conscription can only be done if you are facist/communist or have less than 30% of the enemies IC. It is something that democracies cant easiely choose. That means you are either limited to limited conscription or Extensive/Servie by Requirement if you are really far behind. Let's say if germany successfully executes operation barbarossa and basicly controlls all of europe, the UK probably need to enact extensive or service by requirement. The tooltips arent wrong, it simply is that way and it makes sense.
All Adults Serve and Scraping the Barrel are basicly there if everything else failed and you need alot of manpower really quickly. Let's say if the germans land on mainland UK or marching towards moscow for example. Or if the soviets/allies march towards berlin. The penalties for it are so harsh that it really isnt you should do if you dont need to.
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There is no population growth due to the short period the game focuses around. The getting to conscription age isnt an massively complicated calculation but simple an monthly manpower gain, which is affected by your conscription laws. volunteer army, which Johan has in episode 1 of WWW, has -90% reduction of monthly manpower for example, as seen in episode 1 when he hovers over it. It is an abstraction, age of your population isnt tracked and simulated.
(Note that the monthly Manpower did not work in the first 4 episodes but johan said it would be fixed by now.)
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You need to keep in mind that you need to have big stockpiles for the war to replace losses and constantly have to replace them. Other than that, especially as the UK you have to keep up with the plane and ship production to keep you save. Other than that if you have less men availabel, the smartest choice is to get them trained as best as possible. Fewer well trained elite soilders are much better than an larger, worse equipped recruit army. You can only throw an limited amount of divisions at the enemy at the same time anyway. Even if your army is outnumbered 5:1, in the end it comes down to tactics, terrain and experience.
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You'd be 9 at the time Berlin fell. Somehow I don't think the few 9-year-olds who might have participated in the doomed defense of Berlin had enough of an impact to justify making a whole mechanic for how they're added to the population.