• Customizer

    My proposal is that infantry recruitment should be entirely separate from the production of mechanical units in factories.

    Instead, each country will be divided into a number of Army Corps districts centred on a depot, responsible for the recruitment and training of infantry. Broadly speaking an ACD will correspond to a single area of the map, so that we might have for example Bavaria corresponding to the Bavarian ACD with Munich as the depot.

    At the beginning of the game each area/depot will contain the units of the standing army. These will be considered fully trained professional troops (1-2 in combat). On mobilization these will be ordered to the fronts to form army groups. They will then be replaced in the depots with the reserve, that is trained reservists (men who’ve undergone compulsory military training or national service).

    Thereafter all newly raised infantry are considered as untrained conscripts (1-1). These can be either sent strait to the front untrained, or spend a turn in the depots to be trained up.

    Each depot will have a set capacity, forcing the player to raise troops from all over his Empire to keep up with requirements.

    Considerations:

    After the first year or so of the war, the professional soldiers that began it were getting thin on the ground. Replacements were rarely of the same caliber in battle,  and were more prone to mutiny and disobedience. Players have the option of throwing untrained troops into battle, or taking the time (and cost) to train them up. Since a prime function of infantry is to soak up hits, numbers may be more important than abilities.

    In addition to training up conscripts, depots may also function in upgrading standard infantry into Elites/Stormtrooper (2-2) units.

    After pros and reservists have been deployed, new units and training still have to be payed for, so the final costs are:

    Conscript (1-1) 2
    Standard (1-2) 3
    Elite (2-2) 4

    Bear in mind that I’m of course assuming the implementation of full rail movement, so the geographical location of depots vis a vis the front lines is not that crucial.

    Units raised in national minority areas would be more prone to mutiny; it’s a question of how far you want to go to identify individual units. Also, on capturing a depot within a national minority area a player may be able to recruit units there to fight against their former overlords.


  • Infantry:  Attack at 1, Defend at 2, Move 1, Cost 1.5  with  Entrenched ( “machine gun unit” gets defense of 3)

    This is world war one, the lethality of attack is not advantageous to the offensive. Elite infantry in terms of something that would be a class above are found only in stosstrupen ( Germany and Austro-Hungary)

    Step 11  Unit Placement:
    Units that were purchased are placed on the map at this time subject to the following conditions:

    1. Infantry, storm troops and cavalry may be placed in any territory you control with a value; Total number of units can be built to the value of the territory.
    2. Mechanized units, with the exception of subs at Zeebrugge, may only be built in original friendly areas that have a factory.  Total number of units can be built up to the value of the territory.
    3. Ships that are purchased may be placed in any home port or in the sea zone adjacent to that territory.
    4. Mines may be placed in any friendly sea zone which was controlled at the beginning of their turn.  To do so a warship must remain in the area.
    5. Contested areas may build and place half (rounded down) of their normal level.
    6. Corfu, Osel/Dago, Gibraltar, Fao, Gallipoli and Rhodes all have a white one value inside a black circle.  This may be used to recruit a single infantry, cavalry, or storm troop by the side that originally owned the territory.  However, only upon the collapse of Serbia does Corfus value come in play (see fall of Serbia).

    Placements may never be made into newly captured areas.

  • Customizer

    What happens to POWs in the event of a country dropping out of the war? An article in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk provides for the exchange of prisoners between the former enemies:

    http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/brestlitovsk.htm

    This led to a large number of German prisoners returning home, and inevitably many were redirected into the military depots to be recycled for the front.

    In general, then, how to represent in more depth the consequences battles?

    Descriptions of such usually describe figures in terms of number of casualties (killed, wounded and taken prisoner), and the number of guns captured (often running into hundreds in large battles, since retreating gunners would leave intact hardware behind).

    To what extent were captured artillery put to use? There are examples, the main problem being the production of compatible ammunition, since different pieces used differing calibers of shell.

    What percentage of “destroyed” infantry can be regarded as being taken prisoner?

    What percentage can be regarded as wounded? (I’m thinking wounded infantry can be sent back to their depots to be recycled.)

    Some suggested ways of reflecting the greater mobility of war in 1918:

    Tank bonus - it seems the morale effect of tanks was much greater than their actual combat ability. Yes, they could break through enemy lines, but mechanical unreliability meant that they could rarely exploit the advantage; rather, accompanying infantry felt more confident with tanks leading their advance. So, rather than tanks being that much more powerful in attack, how about something like:

    For each tank involved in an attacking army, one accompanying basic infantry attacks at 2. This can apply on each successive round of combat if the tank/infantry ratio is maintained.  The bonus does not apply in defence. This seems to me more appropriate than the inf/art bonus from A&A; artillery did not move forward with the troops in this way.

    I’m more than ever convinced of the validity of some kind of supply rule, particularly in regard to artillery. Very often armies could advance only at the rate at which they could keep their artillery supplied with shell.
    I also feel that different kinds of shell are significant: armour piercing against tanks, gas shell versus infantry. But perhaps more significant than either of these is smoke shell, which was increasingly used to simulate the benefits to the attack of fog; effectively cancelling out the advantage of entrenched defences.

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