GS v2.01.24 suggested changes

[Peter Stauffenberg]

3. Manpower drop
Country group 1 (USSR)
Each railcap point: 5% manpower drop

Country group 2 (UK, USA, Germany):
Each railcap point: 10% manpower drop

Country group 3 (France, Italy):
Each railcap point: 30% manpower drop

What I need your vote on is whether we should use the max railcap value instead of the current value. Should it be able to bombard the manpower generation from a city by dropping the rail cap similar to production drop? Please
vote: MAX or CURRENT

[Peter Stauffenberg]

4. Reduced Atlantic escort presence will reduce the convoy size

Currently this is linked on London being Allied controlled. I think we can remove that requirement and make be effective all the time. That means the British will be punished if they squander the Royal Navy and lose especially the important CV's which count as 3 naval units.
The requirement is 10 surface naval warships.

Only naval units from countries at war will be counted so the US naval units will only help after USA joins the Allies.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

In addition I've looked at some current games and have found some exploits we can eliminate.

5. Max labs in one area

Some players min/max with their labs and e. g. build 3-4 labs in 2 areas and 0 in the others. This way you can have USA build air and armor and UK naval and infantry. Russia can focus on just 1-2 types of tech and you can just build those kind of units. That's actually a blob strategy where you let the major powers work together to build the strongest possible join force. This was not what happened in the real war. All countries had something in most techs.

So I suggest the following simple change.

In order to build the first 3 lab you need to have at least 3 other labs with at least 1 or higher
In order to build the second 3 lab you need to have at least 3 other labs with at least 2 or higher or 4 other labs with at least 1 or higher

By doing this you can allow for 1 lab to be 0. That can be handy if you e. g. complete all techs and sell labs in one
area to e. g. get 4 labs in the others. This is most useful or air labs since they’re the only ones that can be
maxed out.

So you can then have 3-1-1-1-0, 3-3-2-2-0, 3-3-1-1-1

The good thing about the above is that all powers can achieve this because you need only 10 labs to get 3-3-2-2.

This allows Russia to have 0 naval labs and Italy to have 0 armor labs and get more other labs.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

6. Purchased Russian guards

I noticed that we have made a logic bug with the Russian guards since we setup the possibility to have 6 units in 1941. We increased all numbers by 4 to include the shock armies that arrive at guards status. This means that with the current settings Russian can purchase 6 before they arrive and get 4 more for free for a total of 10. That was not intended.

So we should drop the max number of Russian guards in 1941 from 6 to 2. The numbers from 1942 and later are correct because then the shock armies are already on the map.

We could consider dropping the max values slightly so the difference to the SS units is less.
MAX_GUARDS_1939 0 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1939 */
MAX_GUARDS_1940 0 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1940 */
MAX_GUARDS_1941 2 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1941 */ (decrease from 6)
MAX_GUARDS_1942 6 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1942 */ (decrease from 8 )
MAX_GUARDS_1943 8 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1943 */ (decrease from 10)
MAX_GUARDS_1944 10 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1944 */ (decrease from 12)
MAX_GUARDS_1945 12 /* Max number of Guards units allowed on the map in 1945 */ (decrease from 15)

An alternative could be to increase the SS units late in the war:
MAX_SS_1939 0 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1939 */
MAX_SS_1940 0 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1940 */
MAX_SS_1941 1 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1941 */
MAX_SS_1942 2 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1942 */
MAX_SS_1943 5 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1943 */ (increase from 4)
MAX_SS_1944 8 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1944 */ (increase from 6)
MAX_SS_1945 10 /* Max number of SS units allowed on the map in 1945 */ (increase from 8 )

By allowing a few extra SS units you can get e. g. more SS corps that can hold key cities. With very few SS units you get armor and mech for the offensive firepower and don't have slots available for the defensive SS corps units.

Please vote on the elite unit limits. This can easily be set in general.txt without any code change.

[gerones]

Vote yes for all. Regarding manpower drop I vote for MAX rail cap value. If we allow strategic bombings to affect manpower Germany would be much more affected. So I vote no for the strategic bombings to decrease manpower.