Yesterday, when I was playing a rather long version of the great war which lasted to the end of 1918 after a long period hands-off, a fundamental problem came to my mind again, that makes it hard to end such wars because of hundreds of stockpiled divisions on border provinces and a massive slowdown of the game.
Constant manpower growth throughout the years leads to the construction of enourmous armies as long as war is going on, even little countries like denmark stockpile more than a dozen divisions as they do not know what to do with their manpower.
Someone once mentioned that manpower growth in hoi considers only the number of young men who become available for service, but not those who become too old. This is why I propose a massive change in our manpower policy:
Countries should be given a rather small manpower pool at the beginning of a scenario. When they mobilise for war, large amounts of manpower become available in waves through large-scale conscription.
As a desperate measure, when war is going bad, they might activate some more men who were previously considered too old, too young or unsuited for service. They should be given the option to do this or not, yet doing so would be punished with dissent and a negative IC mod to represent the missing workers, which could be countered by sending women or POWs to the factories.
The gist is, that beside manpower granted at the beginning or by events, there should be no more considerable manpower growth from provinces. It should not exceed the general growth of population of that country, 5% annually at most, and should not even be sufficient to reinforce losses of hard battles and certainly not enough to build more and more divisions each year. The number of men either available for service or in active service should be much lower at the end of the great war than before. Serbia, for example, lost every second soldier during the war.
By implementing this model, countries with very high manpower (Russia, USA) will see a benefit in later war years as they will not be faced by severe manpower problems in comparison to low manpower countries (France). This way, manpower will become an even more precious resource and the limiting factor to highly developed countries who are than even more encouraged to upgrade divisions and building defensive brigades like tanks to reduce their losses instead of building more cheap infantry divisions as years go by.
Discuss!
Constant manpower growth throughout the years leads to the construction of enourmous armies as long as war is going on, even little countries like denmark stockpile more than a dozen divisions as they do not know what to do with their manpower.
Someone once mentioned that manpower growth in hoi considers only the number of young men who become available for service, but not those who become too old. This is why I propose a massive change in our manpower policy:
Countries should be given a rather small manpower pool at the beginning of a scenario. When they mobilise for war, large amounts of manpower become available in waves through large-scale conscription.
As a desperate measure, when war is going bad, they might activate some more men who were previously considered too old, too young or unsuited for service. They should be given the option to do this or not, yet doing so would be punished with dissent and a negative IC mod to represent the missing workers, which could be countered by sending women or POWs to the factories.
The gist is, that beside manpower granted at the beginning or by events, there should be no more considerable manpower growth from provinces. It should not exceed the general growth of population of that country, 5% annually at most, and should not even be sufficient to reinforce losses of hard battles and certainly not enough to build more and more divisions each year. The number of men either available for service or in active service should be much lower at the end of the great war than before. Serbia, for example, lost every second soldier during the war.
By implementing this model, countries with very high manpower (Russia, USA) will see a benefit in later war years as they will not be faced by severe manpower problems in comparison to low manpower countries (France). This way, manpower will become an even more precious resource and the limiting factor to highly developed countries who are than even more encouraged to upgrade divisions and building defensive brigades like tanks to reduce their losses instead of building more cheap infantry divisions as years go by.
Discuss!
Thanks for your extensive work.