planning your war effort

[Spruce]

Okay,

I played Shogun=total war lately. I was really pleased that they had a good military management model.

The military units can not be recruited everywhere, you have to invest (heavily) in some infrastructures to build them and they take some time to build.

Also your financial resources are very narrow in the beginning. Further, military units (troops and generals) have some value (honour in this case). So opponents with the same weapons can have a very different value in combat.

Military campaigns are planned very carefully and take much fun.

From EUI and EUII I had the feeling that military units were very ease to recruit (only have to need money and a high recruitment pool). I had the feeling the focus was more on quantity than on quality.

So paradox, please take following things into account =

- quality or experience of the general of an army group,
- quality or experience of the military units themselves,
- don't produce everything everywhere. If you conquer another province, you don't start producing panzers and planes right away.
- a panzer factory is something very different from a recruitment tent. Constructing a factory is very expensive,
- take supply routes into account (metal, food, oil, etc). Don't translate directly money into goods.
- you only get a tech bonus from nations you are at war with. And if the tech level gap gets smaller, the bonus also decreases and becomes 0 when the gap is 2 or 3 tech levels.

 

[unmerged(2005)]

Quite frankly, the typical you_need_that_building_to_build_such_and_such doesn't make sense in a WWII game. Rather, you should have a limited manpower pool and factories.

Factories need resources transported to them in order to produce production points. With these, units are built, but take a specific time.

Also, units require manpower, vaiable depending on what unit you are creating. Obviously, this manpower pool should not recover many times over within the time period. Rather, you have pretty much the same male population in 1936 as 1946. You get some new elegible young recruits as time goes by, but that is no big deal. You should be able to pass however a bill on enlarging the base population for conscription.

If desperate you could enlarge you manpower base to the 14 to 65 year olds, i.e. the Volksturm. Clearly, the quality of such troops isn't too great and there might be also other adverse effects of taking such a desperate measure.

Resources, factories, manpower. Those are the basic ingredients to a proper economic model. Oil is obviously simulated apart from this, but that is really more a supply and logistics issue.

 

[Spruce]

I only wanted to say that you have to take care about the gameplay with economic models.

Please note that the title is "planning your war effort", you should plan things and take "joy" out of the job. If you waste your chance you'll be sorry...

The smash and bash from EU1 and EU2 was getting on my nerves, quite frankly each game has its merits.

And reading the strategy gaming online article I'm sure I'm on the same wave length as Paradox...

en garde