Hi, Ben,
Yeah, Wikipedia plays a big part in my research. But I stumble across other websites as I’m hunting for things also. Sometimes I find declassified official documents from the time. I also use other games in my collection, like War in Flames and Battlewagon, where the designers did the research, and came to their own conclusions about how to fudge things. I used to be in Military Intelligence when I was active duty army. I spent six years at NSA (“In God we trust. All others we monitorâ€) 😉 So I developed the habit of confirming intelligence from multiple sources whenever possible. I’m still in the National Guard, actually. But I switched my MOS to MP so I didn’t have to drive so far for drills.
Midnight,
Good job on the research. Every time I start to do it for land forces, I get distracted by all the different sources, and how they use different methods for listing things. Yeah, with the way A&A works, where the infantry of one country is equal to the infantry of every other country (unless you are using the elite units in Global ’39), then you have to reflect differences in troop and equipment quality by using different ratios to represent one unit.
One idea I’ve toyed with is using the same ratio for everyone’s infantry, (like 1 for every three divisions) but then reflecting the differences in firepower by assigning different ratios for artillery. For instance, at the start maybe Germany gets an artillery unit for every 2 infantry, and France gets one for every 5 infantry, or something along those lines. The problem there, of course, is that the French (and Russians) really really liked artillery, and it made up a bigger percentage of their overall forces. So it would not be entirely satisfying from a historical perspective. For the same reasons, I am reluctant to just start them off with a bunch of SS units. Although I suppose I could just not call them SS units. But I’d know. I’D KNOW, and it would bug me 😄
