Agreed, the Chinese wars especially are far too cheap in terms of manpower. They weren't losing equipment there because they didn't have any.
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I agree with much of this.
In HOI2 paradox represented the primacy of the offensive by giving lower strength losses to the attacker - but moving forward cost organization while the defender regained organization on the retreat.
This is in many ways the opposite of what should happen. Both attacker and defender can take heavy losses but the defender is generally the only one suffering from a forced change of posture. Therefore a successful attack means the attacker ends up with organization intact and the defender with organization broken even if both sides take heavy losses.
I hope the new combat model allows a more realistic outcome!
Well, this would be really terrible for the balance.
Once the attacker has breaken through the enemy lines, it is almost impossible for the defender to stop him as he will automatically lose the following battles due to almost no organisation.
Besides, I think a loss of organisation while advancing is quite logical. Your troops get tired from marching, some of your tanks and trucks will need some repair, etc. Besides, do you know the very old game Panzer General?
At least my army loses "organisation" in this game while pushing back the enemy. At the beginning I have a good set up at all positions of the front with a balanced amount of tanks, artillery, infantry and air support everywhere. Later normally I always get in situations where I miss some tanks or artillery at one point while in another place a lot of them are doing nothing.
So, while in the beginning almost all my units are fighting, later in the game a lot of them are just trying to find an enemy to shoot at. And this is probably quite realistic. If you push forward too fast, a lot of your men will be standing at the wrong place. It's not that you can move 10.000 Soldiers as one huge block. So either you have to wait for the rest of your division, or try to attack without them and suffer higher losses.
Perhaps combat events can come into play here? Breakthough or encirclement in particular may lead to much greater strength loss to the defenders due to losing people behind the lines/mass captures? I know HOI2 has this to some degree, but perhaps not to the right scale...
As far as retreating armies gaining org while advancing armies lose org, that seems more a model of shortening/lengthening supply lines than anything, along with the defenders being on familiar ground while the attackers are not...
As far as retreating armies gaining org while advancing armies lose org, that seems more a model of shortening/lengthening supply lines than anything, along with the defenders being on familiar ground while the attackers are not...
In that case what Im looking for is more powerful events for the defender, that can raise losses for the attacker aswell.
And? There are plenty of examples of exactly that in World War I and World War II!
Of couse you're right there is an important logistical dimension. However, the HOI3 logistics system will be much more sophisticated than HOI2's. So we might well see tanks stopped because they have outpaced their supply lines.
And there are plenty of examples where a breakthrough was stopped.
I just don't think it would be fun to play with such rules. If you play Germany, you could just order your tanks to go directly to moscow after breaking through the sovjet defense lines. As SU, you must stop Germany at the border, or you will have severe problems in slowing Germany down without any fightable units. Logistics can be a problem for Germany, but would it matter if the SU hasn't any fightable units left?
Try playing wif for hoi2. the combat system is modified so that battles last days and weeks instead of just hours. by the end of a battle ive had units severely under strength and while i can quickly reinforce them it uses up a lot of mp sometimes more than 100mp after a major battle. it makes fighting russia quite tough as you have to encircle them which is not as easy in wif as they have so many divs that they can keep feeding them into the battle forcing germany into a battle of attrition it just cant win.
this is the sort of combat mechanism i would like to see in hoi3 i.e. long drawn out battles which force you to think not just use a super stack of infantry to win. though the new frontage system should do this
Which is way ahistorical and unrealistic... how many large scale battles happened in the real WWII? The largest ones like the battles of Kharkiv, Kursk, the Bulge, El-alamein, Falaise or Debrecen should be represented as multi-province maneuvers, with dymanic action. Such battles could/should last for one or two weeks... but with the movement time I think they would.
Sieges like Stalingrad, Leningrad, Sevastopol, Warsaw or Budapest (were there any more large scale sieges?) could last for a couple month, but it should depend on the reinforcements sent to the area.
It's no WWI meat grinder, WWII is about manuever warfare so the battles should be relatively quick no ultralong stalemates. Indeed the AI should stop pushing hard if the chance of a decisive victory is small... well maybe the Soviet AI should not.
This is why I'm quite excited about the frontage system. It allows both meat-grinder battles and more fluid conflicts. If we want to try and take Stalingrad, the enemy can just feed more divisions into the province. We, in turn feed more into the province and so on and so forth. Each unit is then slotted into the front line when another is withdrawn.
The frontage system means that the HoI battle mechanic has changed a great deal, so it'd be interested to see how they deal with this mp issue - and it is an issue. Barbarossa should be a punishing enterprise for all involved in the conflict.
I'd be interested to see if anyone has played a completely historical Barbarossa campaign (within certain tolerances obviously) and recorded the strength losses and compare the difference to history.
WWII wasn't a meat grinder because of the new tactics that were used. If they had stormed the trenches with infantry alone they would be just as dead as in WWI. Only reason WWII didn't become the same stalemate was because of tanks, air power and combining these with infantry. If you send pure infantry (no artillery or tank brigades and no air support) into a well dug-in division, you should get totally massacered this doesn't happen in HoI2 at least.
Yep - by fresh reserves, not by the same units that got kicked in the previous battle.And there are plenty of examples where a breakthrough was stopped.
(1) It was not the Soviet defenders, but a lack of POL to go further, a lack of ammo to fight with and a lack of spares to mend broken-down equipment with that stopped the Wehrmacht reaching Moscow; (2) it was not the border divisions that were fighting the Germans by then - it was reserves that had been behind the lines or brought up from elsewhere.
Lesson 101 in warfare for most of history - keep a decent reserve, just in case things go belly-up!
The average duration of a combat between forces of single division size in WW2 was 4 days. Larger forces fight for longer in rough proportion to the square root of the force size (so 4 divisions a side takes 8 days, 9 divisions 12 days and 16 divisions 16 days - roughly). When you realise that a force deployment has depth as well as width this makes perfect sense. In vanilla HoI2 battles don't even last long enough to get reinforcements/reserves into the fight. "Several weeks" for a single combat would indeed be ahistorical, but so is the "several hours" typically seen in HoI2.
The way it works in HoI2 the fight will be over before the reinforcements arrive...
Stalingrad wasn't a meat grinder?
Or Cassino?
Plus you could look at the battles of the frontier early on in WW1, plus pretty much all the engagements on the eastern front were ones of manoeuvre. You're correct to a certain extent where, in the western front trenches most notably, the ability to attack was overshadowed by the ability to defend.
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??? An Me262 is not supersonic; a bullet is - that's one reason guns go 'bang'. An Me262 will only outrace a bullet by making sure the range is high before the enemy pilot has time to react; it has an advantage, sure, but it's not invulnerable.
Many of the "enemy tanks are invulnerable" stories were misunderstandings. UK AP shot, for example, had a tracer band on the back end that frequently became detatched on impact, even when the shot actually penetrated, making the firing crew think the shot had "bounced off". Of course, some parts of some tanks really were invulnerable to smaller rounds - but even then a track or wheel hit or a hit to the underside or rear top will functionally disable the asset. As others noted, there is also a great deal more to the Panzer division than a few Tiger tanks...