Flames and Steel (official thread)
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It's simple to make the Pacific War work.
"Give the USA a Pacific fleet and marines worth 2–3 rounds of the entire country's income, and make sure they are far enough away to take at least 5–6 rounds to reach Europe."
Hence, the US would be unable to take advantage of these units for a very long time if they try to move the entire navy to execute KGF.
To prevent KJF, as I said an unstoppable Germany without US commitment is enough.
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@Cernel said:
For example, the restriction can be that the US cannot invade any enemy territory so long as any part of the US plus Hawaii (so not comprising Alaska) is in enemy hands. This way, while going for KGF, the United States is forced to do the minimum necessary to keep Hawaii (need splitting it in more than one island to avoid this being done just by piling up land defence, or you can add that also warship presence near the West Coast counts as a no-no as well). Not a big fan of political restrictions though.Sounds like an obnoxious rule to play with, and it still wouldn't compel the US to do anything beyond stacking defense in Hawaii - they can still hang China, India, and Australia out to dry while dogpiling Germany.
I would continue to look at the bonus objectives as the right way to incentivize a mixed strategy. Besides messing around with Germany and Japan's bonuses to make them more dangerous if left unchecked, there's an alternative option, which is to tie the US objectives to sets of goals located in both the European and the Pacific theaters. And not just little ones. If the US is still getting something like that big 30 IPC bonus from Global 1940 just for being at war, break that bonus up into chunks, say, three bonuses worth 10 IPC each.
Match each of those 10 to a target in the west and a target in the east.
For example:
10 if the Allies hold both India and London
10 if the Allies hold both Canberra and Egypt
10 if the Allies hold both Hawaii and MoscowThe bar should be set pretty high for the Axis, so the targets should be objectives the Axis never actually managed to take in real life.
But you see what happens if the US ignores one theater now? Germany or Japan have the opportunity to slice a huge chunk of income away from the US player. The Axis dominating either theater reduces US power across the entire globe, so the US player must commit to fighting both.
Your economies have much different base values from the vanilla G40 game, of course, so you'd have to adjust accordingly to account for the relative difference.
I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with it from a game-play stand-point, but that is just completely or largely ahistorical, just to force the game into some direction.
Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of national objectives unless they are actually representing something like "Monopoly": two or more territories which are worth more than the sum of their productions if the same player or alliance owns them all.
Let's take as an example "10 if the Allies hold both Hawaii and Moscow". I assume that this is a +10 PUs per turn for the United States. What would that be based on? My answer is absolutely nothing.
If Hawaii already has a production value, that is all that it is needed to represent the ability of Hawaii to increase the productive capacity of the United States. Back then, Hawaii (even only as a matter of relative population) was nearly insignificant: losing Hawaii would not have reduced in any significant measure the ability of the United States to produce stuff and raise armies. (And, no, the political shock of losing Hawaii to the Japanese would not have caused the United States to produce less. At most, you might argue the opposite.)
Obviously, Moscow does not matter for the ability of the United States to produce more of anything.
Is it representing trade advantages? No, it is not: there was no significant trade to the United States at that point (after the loss of Philippines and Dutch East Indies) needing Hawaii as a hub (as far as I know). Besides, that would be better represented giving production values to those (indeed valuable) territories.
Is it representing some sort of beneficial link between the Soviet Union and the United States which is granted or facilitated by the United States controlling Hawaii? No, it is not: the only link would be the Lend-Lease from the United States to Vladivostok (and that would be need Vladivostok in the objective amongst others), and Hawaii does not matter for that because transports flying Soviet flag were completely free to move through the Pacific without being attacked by the Japanese anyway. On top of that, the Lend-Lease would be a loss of income for the United States in exchange for a bonus of income for the Soviet Union, certainly not a bonus income for the United States.
As I said: I agree with it from a game-play stand point, but you don't actually need National Objectives: you can just give high production values to Midway, Hawaii, the Solomons and so on to incentive just the right amount of Pacific play without forcing the United States to go full Pacific to get Japan itself or something hard to conquer which would impose an all-or-nothing approach. The problem with that is just on the level of realism: none of the territories which I've mentioned actually had any significant production vale, meaning that none of them would have changed the ability of the United States to produce anything (beside the Dutch East Indies, which were very valuable to the United States especially for the rubber and are a good candidate to add some not too hard to get income in the Pacific) to any significant level. (Hawaii and Alaska back then were way more backward and underpopulated than they are now and amounted to almost nothing compared to the population and economy of the United States and did not produce anything important. Yes, sugar and other stuff is nice to have, so Hawaii should have a little bit of production value because it did have some relatively very small productive value.)
This said, a realistic way by which it is possible to force a moderate amount of Pacific play exists: as per your first objective, it is called India. Using National Objectives is not necessary. Making India very valuable (to a limit) as a matter of normal territory production is quite realistic (India was economically important back then: it was economically about as important as all of China, actually, contrary by far to what every TripleA game is depicting.).
The way this can be done is by making India very valuable and balancing everything so that a modest amount of United States effort in the Pacific is all that is required to avoid Japan taking India (which would be critical if India is valuable enough and Japan is powerful enough to take it if the United States do nothing in Pacific), so that the United States have advantage in just spending on Pacific the minimum necessary to avoid the fall of India (or assuring the British or the Soviets to be able to take it back) while investing the rest in the Atlantic against Germany and Italy.
Can I point to a map which does this. Sorry, no. India's production being (ahistorically) much lower than China's production is pretty much a given in every map I know.
For example, using Maddison, China for 1937 is given as 528 something GDP (GDPpC multiplied by Population) and India as 400 something GDP, so there is all the margin to have the production of India anywhere between 50 and 100% of the production of China (and by China I'm saying summing up all the production of Chinese as well as all Chinese territories occupied by Japanese comprising Manchuria. I guess not Formosa/Taiwan, but I'm not sure if Maddison's China comprises it).
I've been researching some of the things you're saying, and I think you've done a good job of adding increased realism to this discussion.
At least according to AI, India may have actually had more military production than China during WWII. China's military production was reduced due to Japanese occupation, and because of its civil war. Whereas, the Raj served to increase India's military production due to the organizational efforts of the British empire.
Likewise, you've correctly stated that Japan's military production should be significantly less than Germany's. Here is a link to military aircraft production during WWII.
Military aircraft production can be used as a decent proxy for overall military production. This metric will understate British and American military production, because both nations produced a significant portion of heavy bombers. A heavy bomber, with its four engines, is more difficult to produce than a one - two engine fighter.
Interestingly enough, the Japanese Zero (obsolete later in the war) required 10,000 hours to manufacture. Whereas, Japan's late war Ki-84 Hayate plane (modern by the standards of 1944) required only 4,000 man hours to manufacture. The Zero had not been designed with large scale mass production in mind. It had a lot of custom work needed for it. Whereas, the Ki-84 Hayate--the "Frank"--was designed to be more easily manufactured in large numbers. A total of 3,500 Ki-84s were built, compared to nearly 11,000 Zero carrier aircraft.
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@Cernel said:
I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with it from a game-play stand-point, but that is just completely or largely ahistorical, just to force the game into some direction.Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of national objectives unless they are actually representing something like "Monopoly": two or more territories which are worth more than the sum of their productions if the same player or alliance owns them all.
[....]
As I said: I agree with it from a game-play stand point, but you don't actually need National Objectives: you can just give high production values to Midway, Hawaii, the Solomons and so on to incentive just the right amount of Pacific play...You're objecting to my idea on the grounds of realism, and yet you're proposing an alternative which you already admit is unrealistic itself.
If neither of them wins on realism, then you just have to ask yourself which one achieves the desired gameplay effect better than the other.
My suggestion is a straightforward punishment to the US player if they let the Axis expand beyond its historical limits in either theater. It presents a very clear and honest instruction to someone playing the US - don't let Japan get this far, and don't let Germany get that far.
Pumping up the territory values instead is trying to steer player behavior passive-aggressively through stealthy implications rather than putting up clear signposts. It also distorts the macroeconomic balance when you start throwing more IPCs into the mix than there were to begin with - if I pump up the Allies by making their territories in the Pacific more valuable, than I have to inflate Japan too to keep it strong enough to compete - but then the Allies have extra resources they could turn against Germany if they want, so I have to pump up Germany too, and then I have to pump up Russia... on and on it goes. My idea doesn't inflate anyone's economy and require a wholesale game rebalancing like that, it just penalizes the US if they play with a cheese strategy.
Finally, does your proposal even accomplish what you mean for it to do? If you give India a bunch more IPCs, the UK Pacific will just pump out a lot more units and defend itself - the US isn't going to have to do anything. And what about the reverse problem? How do you fix it if the US does KJF and leave Germany unchecked? Now you have to go mess around with a bunch of territory values on the Europe map, and deal with all the endless balance headaches that causes. And then at the end of the day you're probably going to have a bunch of realistically-minded players like yourself complaining about how the map is a mess and all the islands are overvalued.
My strategy is a simple one and done. Simplicity is your friend.
If you want some sort of in-universe justification to explain it, imagine the fall in US IPCs representing the loss of public support for the war effort when the Axis seems to be completely dominating one theater or the other - the people have lost confidence in your direction of the war and they're not putting in as much effort or overtime for you.
@Cernel said:
This said, a realistic way by which it is possible to force a moderate amount of Pacific play exists: as per your first objective, it is called India. Using National Objectives is not necessary. Making India very valuable (to a limit) as a matter of normal territory production is quite realistic (India was economically important back then: it was economically about as important as all of China, actually, contrary by far to what every TripleA game is depicting.).The way this can be done is by making India very valuable and balancing everything so that a modest amount of United States effort in the Pacific is all that is required to avoid Japan taking India (which would be critical if India is valuable enough and Japan is powerful enough to take it if the United States do nothing in Pacific), so that the United States have advantage in just spending on Pacific the minimum necessary to avoid the fall of India (or assuring the British or the Soviets to be able to take it back) while investing the rest in the Atlantic against Germany and Italy.
Can I point to a map which does this. Sorry, no. India's production being (ahistorically) much lower than China's production is pretty much a given in every map I know.
For example, using Maddison, China for 1937 is given as 528 something GDP (GDPpC multiplied by Population) and India as 400 something GDP, so there is all the margin to have the production of India anywhere between 50 and 100% of the production of China (and by China I'm saying summing up all the production of Chinese as well as all Chinese territories occupied by Japanese comprising Manchuria. I guess not Formosa/Taiwan, but I'm not sure if Maddison's China comprises it).
If you want to get off onto that whole tangent, GDP and wartime production are two very different statistics - which is still true today, and even more true in the time period we're discussing. From a GDP perspective, India and China would rank as great powers, right behind Italy.
In terms of wartime industrial production, however, they were deep down in the minor leagues. Neither of them built a single tank during the war. They could only assemble planes from knock-down kits or license some very basic foreign designs - trainers or low-powered early war fighters (India assembled a few dozen, China a couple hundred). India could only build small trawlers and patrol craft, China could build gunboats and very small, basic cruisers before the war but lost control of its shipyards. India assembled a few thousand Indian Pattern carriers, but that was fitting a locally manufactured armored upper body onto an imported chassis and drivetrain - they couldn't manufacture the engine or other complex automotive elements domestically.
China and India could manufacture rifles, ammunition, basic infantry equipment, mortars, and light artillery at significant scales. But in advanced manufacturing of things like heavy artillery, armored vehicles, high-powered aircraft, and warships, they were not just light years behind the major powers, but miles behind even minor European powers like Poland, Hungary, Sweden, etc. - whom they'd crush by 10:1 or more in a GDP measuring contest.
Realistically, UK Pacific would be stuck with very similar production limitations to China - able to build lots of Infantry, a few Artillery and Mechanized, and nothing else.
India's real economic importance to the British Empire came more from supplying raw materials to fuel the UK's industry than from independent manufacturing of its own. So if you wanted to represent that more accurately within the limitations of A&A, you'd write an objective for UK Europe that gives their economy a big penalty if they lose India (or a secure sea route to it), or a bonus for when they do hold it, rather than adding a lot more raw IPCs to India, which would be used to inflate unit production there directly.
I put sort of a soft cap on UK Pacific into the Optional Rules section on my TRO thread, where you need a major factory to build aircraft carriers, battleships, or strategic bombers, but UK Pacific only gets a minor factory in India instead. They get a second minor factory in West India, so they can still train Infantry and other cheap units in decent numbers, but it stops allowing the UK to materialize capital ships directly into the Pacific theater.
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If you want to get off onto that whole tangent, GDP and wartime production are two very different statistics - which is still true today, and even more true in the time period we're discussing. From a GDP perspective, India and China would rank as great powers, right behind Italy.
Actually, if you use Maddison the same way I did it for China and India (528 and 400), Italy would be 210, so India and China would rank far above Italy.
In terms of wartime industrial production, however, they were deep down in the minor leagues.
I don't want to start talking about India and China relatively to others, but I agree that GDP is not very good in itself across very different countries (like comparing China and the United States at the time, which would much over-estimate the importance of China), but it is fairly good for economic realities which were not too dissimilar and especially for India and China, having not very far away levels of GDPpC.
You may have noticed that I've used the GDP only to compare India and China (telling that it would be realistic to have India's production in between of 50 and 100% of China's production comprising occupied China comprising Manchuria - by production meaning income collection, not placement abilities).
Also, please read my other post in which I say that
India starts with very few factories (or anyway placement ability), that factories are very expensive and that the British player (if unified with India) already has enough factories in Atlantic efficiently to place all or almost all its production there without any need to purchase new factories (or anyway not being able to defend India efficiently without help from the United States).
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@Cernel And yet, Italy produced more war materiel than the two of them put together, and could engineer things that were completely beyond them like tanks, multi-engine bombers, submarines, battleships, etc. GDP can be somewhat helpful in comparing two industrial economies or two agrarian ones against each other, but very misleading for comparing agrarian ones with industrial ones.
Yes, relative to China, Axis & Allies undervalues India itself on the territorial map. However, India is not a standalone economy in A&A. It gets fed by all of UK Pacific's holdings, and when you add those in, UK Pacific starts the game with a larger economy than China - and it starts with a major factory and can build any type of unit, while China is limited to infantry plus artillery with Burma Road.
So if you give India itself something like 12 IPCs to be on par with China at the start, that inflates UK Pacific to be on par with UK Europe or with Japan itself. Unless you drain an equal number of points out of Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong, and so on - but then the rest of UK Pacific is all 0 or 1 value. Flames & Steel is using completely different economic scaling, so perhaps there's room to add a little more value to India without breaking things, but that's something that always has to be kept in mind, what are the butterfly effects outside the specific area you're messing around with the balance in?
The whole major factory in India / UK Pacific economy setup is a legacy artifact from Pacific 1940 being designed as a standalone game, where they wanted the British to be able to produce a full range of units without having to write special rules where things like tanks, planes, and ships that were all built in the UK would have to be teleported in from off-map - and that model continues to be used in most people's mods out of inertia, just because it's something everyone's gotten used to playing with, rather than because it's a good representation of the wartime economics there.
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@Cernel said:
I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with it from a game-play stand-point, but that is just completely or largely ahistorical, just to force the game into some direction.Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of national objectives unless they are actually representing something like "Monopoly": two or more territories which are worth more than the sum of their productions if the same player or alliance owns them all.
[....]
As I said: I agree with it from a game-play stand point, but you don't actually need National Objectives: you can just give high production values to Midway, Hawaii, the Solomons and so on to incentive just the right amount of Pacific play...You're objecting to my idea on the grounds of realism, and yet you're proposing an alternative which you already admit is unrealistic itself.
Actually, maybe I've not been clear, but, if you keep reading the whole thing, this is what I said:
As I said: I agree with it from a game-play stand point, but you don't actually need National Objectives: you can just give high production values to Midway, Hawaii, the Solomons and so on to incentive just the right amount of Pacific play without forcing the United States to go full Pacific to get Japan itself or something hard to conquer which would impose an all-or-nothing approach. The problem with that is just on the level of realism: none of the territories which I've mentioned actually had any significant production vale, meaning that none of them would have changed the ability of the United States to produce anything (beside the Dutch East Indies, which were very valuable to the United States especially for the rubber and are a good candidate to add some not too hard to get income in the Pacific) to any significant level.
Meaning that, yes, both doing it with National Objectives or production is bad in this case. It was not my intention to argue which one was worse as being both just unacceptable (so being a moot point what is the most unacceptable).
That is why I moved on saying that, if the matter is having contestable income at the borders of Japanese expansion (so to encourage doing something against Japan without having to focus fully on it - meaning an anti-Japan strategy not requiring to be a "Kill Japan" one), India (beside of course the Dutch East Indies and Australia) is practically the only place where you can manage such income distribution without discarding realism entirely.
If neither of them wins on realism, then you just have to ask yourself which one achieves the desired gameplay effect better than the other.
Well, what I actually said is that both have to be discarded (for being wildly irrealistic), but, yes, that is why I said
I agree with it from a game-play stand point
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@Cernel And yet, Italy produced more war materiel than the two of them put together, and could engineer things that were completely beyond them like tanks, multi-engine bombers, submarines, battleships, etc. GDP can be somewhat helpful in comparing two industrial economies or two agrarian ones against each other, but very misleading for comparing agrarian ones with industrial ones.
I don't know why you keep arguing with me between Italy and India / China. I've never done that (or thought about doing that in here). As I've said, I've only compared India and China on the basis of GDP.
(I've just corrected you on the basis of the data which I've used because you mentioned them being "right behind Italy" in GDP, which is not what THEY say. Nothing else. I'm sure you can have other GDP data which give different results - even across different editions of Maddison.)
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The whole major factory in India / UK Pacific economy setup is a legacy artifact from Pacific 1940 being designed as a standalone game, where they wanted the British to be able to produce a full range of units without having to write special rules where things like tanks, planes, and ships that were all built in the UK would have to be teleported in from off-map - and that model continues to be used in most people's mods out of inertia, just because it's something everyone's gotten used to playing with, rather than because it's a good representation of the wartime economics there.
Yes, that is terrible - and a very bad legacy.
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@Cernel So your answer is "it probably works, I just don't like it?"
We're discussing game design here, not simulation design, and A&A is definitely on the casual side of the WW2 grand strategy genre - it's not World in Flames or The War or Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. The game abstracts and simplifies and overlooks a million different things to give people something that's straightforward and fun to play.
Yes, the objectives I wrote might feel arbitrary, even with the head canon explanation I came up with for you, but what's worse for the game - having those, or having US players cheese the game for easy wins?
If it solves a dilemma that you've said pretty much no other map has managed to address in a fully effective way, I don't think "it's not realistic" is a good enough argument to reject it, because I could point out a hundred things about Axis & Allies that are already unrealistic. If maximum realism is the main thing you're looking for, there's at least a dozen other games out there that will do a much better job of it than A&A mods ever could - at the price of being far more complex to learn and taking far longer to play.
I feel like we're at risk of derailing the thread here if we keep going back and forth on this, so I've said my piece.
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At least according to AI, India may have actually had more military production than China during WWII. China's military production was reduced due to Japanese occupation, and because of its civil war. Whereas, the Raj served to increase India's military production due to the organizational efforts of the British empire.
To be clear, it was not meant to be a maximum realism suggestion. It was meant to be a realism compromise, where you could add production (mainly in the sense of income) with some basis of realism.
For game-play (realistic or not - and I would say not too much if not), it would be necessary for India to have very low placement ability (factories) (and being able to place little TUV, meaning being restricted to placing infantry (a good number but not too many of them - whether realistic or not, I know there were many Indians in the British army) and hardly anything else - kind of like China even though the situation was not as bad as China after 1937), while having fairly high production (income) and being part of the British Empire - meaning sharing its income with the United Kingdom - so that India is mostly a British cash-cow that Japan can take and the British cannot defend alone, thus pressure from the United States in Pacific is needed, or the Japanese take India.
I don't intend to enter any discussion about how much of the income of the British Empire India should be, at least not now or in here. I'll just say that the British were screwing around big time with the money (to India's disadvantage) so to be able to purchase stuff from India with relatively very little of their money and selling to India at very high prices and borrowing from (meaning accumulating public debt towards) India however they wanted - so do not look too much at nominal GDP if you want to look at it at all (I'm not.).
Likewise, you've correctly stated that Japan's military production should be significantly less than Germany's. Here is a link to military aircraft production during WWII.
Military aircraft production can be used as a decent proxy for overall military production. This metric will understate British and American military production, because both nations produced a significant portion of heavy bombers. A heavy bomber, with its four engines, is more difficult to produce than a one - two engine fighter.
I don't remember that. I think it was @schulz, but I agree, probably even less than that because I guess Japan was focusing relatively more than Germany on aircraft - not sure.
Both Japan and Italy are usually way over-valued in TripleA games.
Yes, it makes more sense to count the engines rather than the number of aircraft. I'm not saying that a four-engines bomber is exactly or very closely 4 times the cost of a single-engine fighter, but it surely gets closer than just counting per aircraft.
Interestingly enough, the Japanese Zero (obsolete later in the war) required 10,000 hours to manufacture. Whereas, Japan's late war Ki-84 Hayate plane (modern by the standards of 1944) required only 4,000 man hours to manufacture. The Zero had not been designed with large scale mass production in mind. It had a lot of custom work needed for it. Whereas, the Ki-84 Hayate--the "Frank"--was designed to be more easily manufactured in large numbers. A total of 3,500 Ki-84s were built, compared to nearly 11,000 Zero carrier aircraft.
I don't know about this, but you need to know the time of those statistics. Maybe it's just different years. It is easy enough that, after one or two years, the same aircraft can be produced with half the man-hours than it used to require. Also, beside the added cost of folding wings and everything else which carrier-aircraft needs, it can be that you need to have extremely high standards for carrier aircraft because, if anything bad happens on a carrier, it is much more of a problem than if it happens on a field. Besides, a carrier costs much more (and takes way more time to become operative since laying it down) than the total cost (and time) of the maximum number of aircraft it can carry (contrary to what usually happens in TripleA).
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