How would you rate countries and territories considering realism in big WWII maps.
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@cernel Maybe the biggest thing that would surprise me out of those values is that Poland would be stronger than Italy. I wonder if at those times Poland was more economically advanced than Italy. Also, maybe energy consumption overvalues countries in colder regions; no idea what is the relative impact of home heating on energy consumption.
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In 1940:
Axis: Germany(126)+Denmark(2)+Norway(2)+Belgium(13)+Netherlands(6)+France(28)+Hungary(4)+Romania(5)+Bulgaria(1)+Yugoslavia(2)+Finland(1)+Italy(8)=198
Allies:Australia(8)+Canada(Assuming 9)+Egypt(1)+New Zealand(1)+Russia(99)+South Africa(10)+UK(114)+Latvia(1)+Lithuania(1)=244
Combine all axis/allies do not even make up USA in terms of energy consuption. Adding USA would make game unplayable. But suprisingly without US their values look close to each other.
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@cernel Also, for a general relative comparison of all countries, I personally suggest taking the 1937 economic data over whatever that follows. The reason is that at the end of 1937 the United States of America had a major depression, that impacted differently on the various countries in the world; so the data for 1938 and 1939 is not as good as 1937 (it undervalues USA, etc.), while the data from 1940 onwards suffers from war events. Alternatively taking 1939 data and multiplying it by 1/(1-x), when "x" is the unemployment ratio for that country (not very good, as different countries account unemployment in different ways). 1937 would be just the year that minimizes the incidence of the Great Depression on the data (the United States of America, etc. will be undervalued anyways; just less so).
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Another objectionable thing about these numbers is they do not reflect natural resorces, harbours, strategic locations, for example in this data Denmark and Norway are equal but Norway had oil and lots of harbours for German U-boats and located in more important area. I would say Norway deserve at least twohold or threefold more value. The same applies to Iraq or Iran.
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@schulz said in How would you rate countries and territories considering realism in big WWII maps.:
Combine all axis/allies do not even make up USA in terms of energy consuption. Adding USA would make game unplayable. But suprisingly without US their values look close to each other.
The United States of America alone being able to produce more than all Axis countries and their conquered territories summed up is realistic, also since Germany was not getting out of the conquered territories as much as they were worth. After Barbarossa, you would also have to add to Axis something like half the current production of Russia (that would represent 1/3 of the production of Russia, had it not lost any territory), tho in reality Germany would get from it much less than the original owner (you would need some rule that lowers the production if the current owner is not the original owner, and that would make Axis even weaker, as it would also impact on France etc.). Vichy France would be in a special position, as well, about how much of its production it would give to Axis.
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@schulz Where did you get the info that Norway had oil? I'm almost sure it had no oil at all.
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Yes, I really would like to see Vichy France as combatant in big wwii maps though officaly she wasn't Axis militarily but economically she was and it had been constantly attacking by Allies. Vichy can be Axis country that's why I am favorable to stary it in 1940 rather than 1939. I would not really care balance in realistic game. Because Axis had realistically no chance but surviving for certain rounds rather than winning could be main axis goal.
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Yes Norway has oil but I don't know did they have significant reserve during the war.
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"""Lowering the production if the current owner is not the original owner,""" Really great idea does the current Triplea engine support this feature?
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@schulz No direct way (of course, you can have a lot of triggers changing production under conditions, or maybe negative objectives; better you do that after you are very definitive on the production values tho).
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USA would be only acceptaple maybe making Soviets doomed to fall, and giving Axis another advantages otherwise playing without USA is the only option.
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@cernel I made the reformatted correlates of war file based upon the files they had. My file allows easy changes in the weighting of the variables.
COW includes India under United Kingdom.
Trying to put military/economic strength in a single number inevitably gives odd results. China & Canada have about the same strength but what does that mean? China could field vast forces of poorly-equipped infantry while Canada had a small modern military. Canada could project its limited military power world-wide, while China could only operate in its own country (or just across the border). To be realistic China should be able to build cheap infantry with 0 attack strength.
Almost no version of TripleA really considers the massive US economy. However, US power was somewhat reduced by its distance from the main theaters of conflict. The huge expenditures on merchant shipping were at the expense of actual combat forces.
Given the interest in this topic, I will revisit the databases and post information for WW2. The raw data from the sites can be hard to use, so I will normalize the data on total worldwide income of 1,000. I also have some interesting information from books and other games. Watch this thread.
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@rogercooper said in How would you rate countries and territories considering realism in big WWII maps.:
COW includes India under United Kingdom.
Both for the values at your first post at this thread and in this reference:
http://www.rogercooper.com/documents/COW-Reformatted.xls
the United Kingdom is given as 3.1%~3.2% of the world population, from 1932 to 1941. That cannot possibly include the Indian Empire.My period atlas, printed in 1945, gives the Indian Empire without Birmania (before 1937 Birmania was part of India) at 338,119,154 people in 1931 and 388,832,000 in 1941. That would be about 17% of the world population.
Besides, mixing United Kingdom and India data together would be basically a statistical mess; so I don't believe they are doing that. However, taking a look at that site, I cannot find anything for India before 1947. Especially for the population statistics, missing India is going to seriously degrade your correlates of war, in the moment they are presented as a ratio of the world's total.
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These raw poduction capacities really do not reflect their real powers totally becuse also there is somethings that played significant roles in wwII and they are not easiy measurable like production numbers.
As everybody know Allies had huge advantge in terms onf resources,manufacturing and manpower but on the other hand Axis had some advantages that Allies didn't have to take into account them before declaring countrie's relative values. For example according to these stats Germany should be 129, and US 421 but I would object this.
Germans had better generals, tactics, and trained army, more devoted population,they were better at exerting total war economy even they were be able to increase their gdp during wwii despite constant allies bombings.
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Germans had better generals, tactics, and trained army, more devoted population,they were better at exerting total war economy even they were be able to increase their gdp during wwii despite constant allies bombings.
You are really talking about some very different, and to a certain degree abstract things here. Either you are going to evaluate the economic position via the statistics to attribute it to regions... or you are going to start to interpret less tangible factors and try to incorporate it into the economic data. Once you decide you want to lump things like fanaticism (Germany) verses resilience (Britain) you get into a really murky area where you have to arbitrarily attribute a value to a purely intangible and immeasurable concept.
If anything... you should segregate the data into groups... then use those groups to compare how you have evaluated each nation....
ie...
- Economics for every country
- Attitude of the country
- Modernization of the country
- Military capability and training
etc.
This will allow you to create comparative values for every country in each category... then examine the individual values to one another in order to decide whether or not you are over estimating or underestimating.
If you use a uniform scale across countries....
ie...
Economic Data accounts for 60% of the overall weighted scale.
Attitude accounts for 15% of the overall weighted scale.
Modernization accounts for 15% of the...
Military Capability and training accounts for 10% of the...(edit I just made these percentages up for example purposes)
It will make your challenge much more manageable.
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I think just considering production capacities,resources and man power do not reflect countrys' real powers. We have to take into account another factors that I have listed. I agree thay are less tangible but definitely we should take into account all these factort before determing the real power of countries.
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@schulz I agree. It was just meant to give you a guide as to how to break the work up into manageable groups. The criteria is simply what you feel are (the most) important factors.
The other big question is how you represent it in the game. If you are planning to run a game with a single resource (PU) then the value of doing an in-depth analysis may be lost since there is no way to distinguish between lots of resources or lots of fanaticism.
So then just because you give say... Germany a boost for being overly zealous and add 3 PU to Berlin. Would it make sense that they can build extra Tanks even though we know access to steel (as well as other resources like oil) was a hugely limiting factor for them.
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@schulz Actually the German war economy was terribly run. Here is some figures from World War II: A statistical Survey by John Ellis
In 1941, the Germans built 3,790 tanks. The British built 4,841 tanks. The Soviets built 6,590 tanks.
Artillery Germans-11,200, British-16,700, Soviets 42,300
Military Aircraft- Germans-11,776, British 20,994, Soviets-15,735
This is despite the fact German had the larger economy. The disparities got worse after 1941.
The cause of the failures of the German war economy were varied. The refusal to employ women in factories, the holocaust, the failure to setup a war production board (until Speer's reforms), emphasis on sophistication rather than mass production hurt the German war effort.
As for Cernel's comments on the Correlates of War, I agree that figures are confusing and inaccurate. They were assembled by political scientists who were interested in why wars occur, not in what happens during wars. Take a look at this wikipedia article to see the odd things they are doing with the statistics. However, it is still the only public database I know of that covers historical military capability.
I am working with the newest version of the Maddison Project database. I will present something soon (but I have a game convention this weekend). The economists of the Maddison project are mostly interested in economic growth and standard of living, but the figures implicitly measure GDP. The quality of the Maddison work is much better.
The Germans did have a considerably more effective army (about 20% better in 1944 according to Dupuy). So poor production planning and greater military effectiveness largely cancelled each other out.
An interesting point is the US production was large but not overwhelming. In 1944 the Soviets & Germans made more tanks. The key advantage of the US was mechanical reliability. In 1944, the use built 96,000 planes, by comparison the Japanese build 26,000. (The US planes were larger however).
If someone has access to research library, the Statesman's Yearbook is full of useful historical military & economic information.
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@rogercooper said in How would you rate countries and territories considering realism in big WWII maps.:
This is despite the fact German had the larger economy.
And despite the fact that the Soviet economy in 1941 suffered greatly from the loss of at least 1/3 of its economic power and the need to redesign a lot of its production network. At the end of that same year, the Germans had about 4 times the steel production of the Soviet Union, counting all controlled territories (since they got also France, Belgium, etc.).
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@rogercooper said in How would you rate countries and territories considering realism in big WWII maps.:
As for Cernel's comments on the Correlates of War, I agree that figures are confusing and inaccurate.
The energy consumption ones seem really good enough for a linear mono-resource production representation, except only that thing of missing India (not a terrible obstacle, but annoying; plus I really don't understand why it is missing before 1947, if it is, since there a a lot of less important countries). Mainly, the matter, in case, would be finding something else having energy consumption, since steel production is really a limited index, and the GDP on its own is not really that good.
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