TIL Paradox's has adopted the Japanese high command's wishful thinking as their design document.

[Porkman]

I picked up a copy of The Japanese Merchant Marine in WW2 by Mark Parillo and it's a great book.

One of the things he makes a point of is describing how the Japanese high command was filled with wishful thinking, ignored logistics, and focused almost exclusively on the front line units to the detriment of logistics, shipping, escorts, realistic supply assessments etc.

I came across this passage

This fatal divergence from reality was a constant theme of Japanese war direction during World War II, clearly evident in the navy's map maneuvers and wargames, where referees sometimes permitted units to refuel without a loss of time in order to avoid disrupting plans. And it was common for a commander to initiate an offensive over the logistics section's insistence that it could not supply the operation.

And I couldn't help thinking... they would have loved HOI4.

 

[WSnova]

Hittler would have loved it too!

All leaders would have loved it too.

 

[Granite]

Ask yourself, sincerely. Did we really need another fuel thread?

 

[GhostKiller01]

Logistics were the fall of my HoI 3 Japanese campaign (the theatre AI as well, but that's another matter). My invasion of Canada was badly supplied, and fell apart after taking only the Western part of the country, and then being pushed back to half of the progress my armies had made. My second push into the USSR almost fell short due to lack of supplies, and would have resulted in a rout back to half of the gained land if I hadn't improved two lines of infrastructure that followed my soldiers all the way deep inside Siberia. The AI itself is bad: instead of making due with a bunch of supplies they had, many divisions of my Kwantung Army Group stayed two tiles away from Singapore because ten brit division (6 of them HQs) were holding the one province that fed into it through the mainland and they were short on supplies because they had ten divisions on the fucking provinces, go figure, even though the brits were undersupplied due to a blockade I had to establish (I ended up dropping 4 paratrooper divisions into Singapore (undefended) and then attacking the back of the brits during which, to my surprise, the AI sent the 20 divisions it had right next to it to support my personal paratroopers (always keep 12 special divisions, with 5 brigades in them, under your direct command at all times (4 paratroopers, 4 marines, 4 divisions composed of mechanized and medium armour))). And don't even get me started on the island hopping, the AI can't do it at all unless you give it specific orders to and even then it takes a year during which it asks for a ton of ships and infantry and ends up dropping 20 divisions on the Maldives -_-...

 

[Porkman]

Ask yourself, sincerely. Did we really need another fuel thread?

It's not about fuel.

It's about the underlying philosophy that says fuel or actual military supplies are unimportant.

Japan failed for many reasons but one was that everything they had went into preparing for one decisive battle with the main fleet. They hadn't realized that seapower by the time of WW2 was about many more elements: submarines, logistical systems, base facilities, flotillas of smaller vessels, aircraft, radar... etc.

Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. We have a game that seems to be going out of its way to be amateur.

The HOI philosophy seems to be "let's abstract everything but the main fleet." The US didn't win by attacking Japan's main fleet. It was a nice bonus when the US could take down some Japanese ships, but it wasn't what crippled the empire. The US won by attacking the shipping of Japan and leaving its ships and soldiers starving and useless.

I see this philosophy play out when they decided that infrastructure should be abstracted to the State level and not the province.

 

[WSnova]

To be fair a full logistics simulator would be dreadfully boring for most players.

But yeah its still a game and if they decided that the new system was more fun its up to us if we buy the game or not because of that.

You could make a game solely out of logistics, so its not like its something trivial they can put in alongside the diplomacy and combat

 

[Secret Master]

We already have a thread to talk about fuel and supplies and logistics issues. Use it. Don't start other threads.