Amob_m_s said:
Let's say we do include the Maus, for example. What stats does a Maus brigade get?
That's a good point. I'd say the easiest and the most intuitive solution is to simply give these tech roughly the stats that the original design envisioned them to have. So Maus would have extremely high firepower and speed of a crippled turtle, Amerika bomber would have cross-Atlantic range and etc. True, given the fantastic nature of some of these secret weapons (but not all), such stat could feel ridiculous. But this can be balanced out by having correspondingly high research cost/difficulty/failure rate, as well as very low reliability (which is a new stat already included in HoI3).
Alternatively, these special brigades could have somewhat randomized stats. Given that HoI3 will no longer have the "model" model, I think this is quite doable. It's doable in HoI2 even since the units' stats are saved individually regardless, it's just that the scripting system doesn't support altering individual unit stats.
But you raised another good point: how effective is any technology, experimental or banal? We tend to think of military technology as a long continuum of progress from the primitive to the advance: carrier is more advanced than battleship, mobile tanks are more advanced than heavy tanks, light infantry more advanced than line infantry, etc. But the truth is that mil.tech. development is inseparable from the military thinking of the time.
Case in point: only a minority of military thinkers believed in the true potential of carriers at first. They managed to convinced the decision makers to invest in research that indeed realized carriers' effectiveness, leading to carrier's domination on the open sea. But if this thinking didn't become mainstream, we could possibly have a world where battleship remained dominant, perhaps evolving straight into ultra-long range missile ships, and CV's could have remained no more than CVL and CVE in a support role. Similarly, line infantry tactics could remain useful if more investment were made into body armour research and less into light, automatic and accurate rifles; heavy armours could remain useful if defensive strategy were more in vogue; light and agile fighters could continue to dominate the sky if research for sturdy and long range bombers didn't also change the characteristics of escort fighters.
Basically, what I want to point out is that none of the military advancement was inevitable. Mil. thinkers come up with ideas and they invest in technology that would suit the ideas. They test their ideas against the enemies' ideas, and then they find out how practical their ideas were and modify accordingly. There may not be anything wrong with their original ideas, just that it may not have worked in the particular circumstance against the enemy's particular ideas. It's all very
organic.
Again, our hindsight often to blind us to this variability in the background, but this is very much going on today. If you were to make a modern war game, for example, it would be completely unrealistic if you don't try to model in guerilla, insurgent, and yes, terrorist tactics. Well, I don't know any game that does it, but that's because it's still very poorly understood, and big military organisations like the US armed force is still working hard to find a workable doctrine. That's also why war games are often limited to WWII, cold war etc, because the hindsight gives us the security that "we know how things worked". But in the end it works against a really challenging and immersive game design, because there's something inherently gamey about knowing this much.
But yeah, I know it would be bloody hard to model this, though. So all I'm asking for is some degree of uncertainty and the possibility of disruptive technology in HoI3.
