do all of the leaders that I lose from the purge outweight the mass dissent if I don't do it?
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surely. it was proved many times around, that you actually don't need good officers to win the war as USSR and you will have enough of them left. only reason not to do purges is flavour, since you risk loosing all those great heroes of red army. and since the event is written the way it is, no general is safedarthbalmung said:
It's not just the dissent differences of 10% vs 30% It's also the lost of 2 Hawk moves which means all units are 21% more expensive to build as the last Hawk slider moves each mean a 5% differences for both time and cost.
Accept the purges. Get rid of the 10% dissent. Build one more round of factories and then build lots of infantry so that you get lots of autopromotions. In some ways it's more fun to play the SOV because you never know what Generals and FM will emerge: you can get skill 4 major Generals like Tolbukhin promoted to FM. Give your good skill 3 or better land commanders 1 div each and use statistics folder land commander page to sort on rank and skill to see who gets the autopromotions.
Accept the purges. Get rid of the 10% dissent. Build one more round of factories and then build lots of infantry so that you get lots of autopromotions. In some ways it's more fun to play the SOV because you never know what Generals and FM will emerge: you can get skill 4 major Generals like Tolbukhin promoted to FM. Give your good skill 3 or better land commanders 1 div each and use statistics folder land commander page to sort on rank and skill to see who gets the autopromotions.
Wait what do you mean by build lots of infantry and sees who gest autopromotions? How do autopromotions work?
Autopromotions lets the AI decide which of your leaders get promoted, with the benefit of not losing a skill level when promoted. All countries seem to have the same ratios.darthbalmung said:
Code:
leader_ratio = {
land_field_marshal = 0.0200
land_general = 0.0310
land_lt_general = 0.4100
sea_grand_admiral = 0.0200
sea_admiral = 0.0610
sea_vice_admiral = 0.4010
air_marshal = 0.0200
air_general = 0.0910
air_lt_General = 0.1100So for every 100 ground units, you will get 2 FM's, 3 Generals, and 41 Lt. Generals. After the purges and a huge infantry building program the USSR should get a huge number of promotions.
Does the game reflect Stalin's officer purge well?
A lot of opinions I've read suggest that Stalin's officer purge was the result of his own personal paranoia; and that it was a strategic blunder which resulted in the Red Army's difficulty in the Finnish war. In HoI2DD (playing as the USSR), is the Soviet-Finnish War more difficult as a result of Stalin's officer purge? Thanks in advance
A lot of opinions I've read suggest that Stalin's officer purge was the result of his own personal paranoia; and that it was a strategic blunder which resulted in the Red Army's difficulty in the Finnish war. In HoI2DD (playing as the USSR), is the Soviet-Finnish War more difficult as a result of Stalin's officer purge? Thanks in advance
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If Stalin is killed by a random event ("Rogue Politician") before March 1938, then the Purge will not take place, and the USSR will be much stronger in the early game.Marshall Thomas said:
If Stalin is still in charge (as usual) in March 1938, then accepting the Purge is better than taking the Hawk-slider penalty for refusing it... despite the loss of over a hundred leaders.
The USSR doesn't need GOOD leaders... they just need leaders, to avoid the -75% OCL penalty. Accepting the Purge still leaves you with over 500 Leaders in your pool, counting later arrivals.
If you ask me, i would say that the "purges" event is neither balanced nor historical. In my modded games, the USSR begins the 1936 campaign with NORMAL (0.8) ground defence efficiency and ONLY if the player chooses to go ahead with the purges, the gde is reduced. So there is a reason to avoid the purges.
The purges were what destroyed the efficiency of the red army, so the USSR should only get that huge reduction in GDE if the purges are chosen.
The purges were what destroyed the efficiency of the red army, so the USSR should only get that huge reduction in GDE if the purges are chosen.
In my current game as the USSR, the purges killed Mustachovich, Fedorenko, Voronov and Zhukov... So i reloaded, and no one too well known died this time. I know, it's cheating, but hey, i was trying to do some roleplaying...
And then on the second week of the war, Zhukov died while leading his Tank corps into poland
And then on the second week of the war, Zhukov died while leading his Tank corps into poland
DesertSnow said:
Well, we have had this discussion before, but its very hard to prove that the purges destroyed the efficiency of the Red Army. That is the common wisdom but a lot more went into the disaster of June 1941 than just inexperienced front line leadership. Consider it this way, the complaint about the June 40 campaign and the French is that their leadership was stuffy and old, the complaint about the Russians, in June 41, is that their leadership was inexperienced and too young.
Its easy to come up with simple generalizations like these in hindsight.
Fact is that had the purges not happened many of the very competent generals of the Soviet army who are the stuff of legend would never have been heard from. Zhukov, Vasillevsky, and Rokossovksy all benefited directly with promotions because of the purges, even though they had little to do with it, and the fact that the last was even a victim of it. Notably, Rokossovsky went on the brutally repress Polish nationalists after the war when he was made Marshal of Polish Defence. Hope this doesn't sound harsh, and none of this detracts from the fact that the officer purges, along with all the other purges were a massive crime, but its hard to put a clear finger on any one aspect of the Russian army that failed in 41, because there were so many.
In particular Stalin's refusal to believe the Germans would attack, and the failure to mobilized the front line to that end, or even put the airforce on alert are far more sailent features of that failure, than the incompetence of the officer corps. Fighting in the Ukraine was intense, right from day one, and its hard to say the front line leadership there was a total disaster, despite the collapse of Pavlov's Belorussian front. Its not even clear that was all his fault since he had been ordered to deploy forward in the Byalistok sailent, where much of his army met its doom.
Stalin ordered the forward deployment, and stripped the Dnepr fortressess, and ordered the army and airforce to stand down, that was the policy, and none of that had anything to do with the front line officer corps.
That said, I agree, the purge event could be more nuanced. I also have made it more of a choice in the EIR mod. Both options give dissent, but one kills less officers, but moves the country right to Leninist, and gives a few not so good slider moves. Shaposhnikov is gone and Tukhachevsky stays. Molotov becomes head of government. The idea of improving the GDE also occurred to me, and it's a good one, but I chose a different approach. Mine really is about Stalin choosing to support a different clique in the army, than purging or not, since purging really was the method of the day, under Stalin.
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Oh and yeah, in the vanilla event, purge is best, unless you want to give yourself a challenge.
The case of the Soviet Airforce was a particular tragedy, and a complete cock-up. A pretty sad story...Cueball said:
In 1939 or '40, it had been decided by the USSR supreme command that the existing Airfields were inadequate to support a real war effort, so a massive program of improvements was ordered... supervised by one of Stalin's old cronies (Meklis? Yehzov?).
Only a certain amount of heavy equipment was available, but instead of allocating it to certain Airfields and renovating them a few at a time, the decision was made to start work on ALL of the Airfields at once... it looked better "on paper" to be able to claim that construction was underway on all of the Airfields, not just a few of them.
This meant that all of the military Aircraft had to be moved to secondary fields, and crowded together with inadequate dispersal areas, few hangars, and primitive maintenance conditions... and then kept there for several months, since the shortage of heavy equipment (and the fact that it was spread evenly between many Airfields) meant that the main fields were being renovated painfully slowly.
The German attack caught them still crowded together on inadequate fields... and thousands of Russian military Aircraft were destroyed in the first few weeks of the campaign... basically, sitting ducks.
sbr said:
So if I understand correctly, autopromote is based upon how many leaders are which rank and how many units I have?
The point of my post is not whether or not the purges destroyed the red army's capacity in RL, but whether or not the in-game event has any practical meaning.
So, in game terms, i believe that linking the purges with the gde would be more rational than having the soviets beginning the game with a gde of 0.2 (when i discovered that, i finally managed to understand why so many people believed Barbarossa to be a cakewalk). Perhaps the event text could be changed so as to include other factors (the general submission of the military structure to the party officials)...
About the French Army: i like reading books where historians try to analyse their views on what caused the success or failure of an army. What most people fail to realise, is that the ones making the decisions did not have the luxury of spending time collecting material to write books. Sometimes, things work the way a basketball game does. Imagine a player deciding to go for the 3-point shoot at the last seconds of a game, while his team is losing by 2 points. If he scores it, he becomes the "hero". If he fails, he becomes the one who doomed his team due to his lack of common sense...
So, in game terms, i believe that linking the purges with the gde would be more rational than having the soviets beginning the game with a gde of 0.2 (when i discovered that, i finally managed to understand why so many people believed Barbarossa to be a cakewalk). Perhaps the event text could be changed so as to include other factors (the general submission of the military structure to the party officials)...
About the French Army: i like reading books where historians try to analyse their views on what caused the success or failure of an army. What most people fail to realise, is that the ones making the decisions did not have the luxury of spending time collecting material to write books. Sometimes, things work the way a basketball game does. Imagine a player deciding to go for the 3-point shoot at the last seconds of a game, while his team is losing by 2 points. If he scores it, he becomes the "hero". If he fails, he becomes the one who doomed his team due to his lack of common sense...