Preview of map changes regarding rail hubs

[Peter Stauffenberg]

I think it would be smarter to show you what the proposed map changes can be. Then we can discuss which we add and which we discard. I can easily add the ones we decide upon in on-going games so we don't have to restart.

Ireland:
Cork added with a port. No changes in Britain.



Central Europe:
The below changes should make rail movement a bit easier in Germany, the country with the most extensive rail network in Europe.

Added in Germany:
Rostock
Erfurt

Added in Austria:
Linz
Graz

Added in Switzerland:
Zurich

Added in Czechoslovakia:
Brunn (Brno in Chech language)
Kosice

Added in eastern Poland:
Lublin

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Ukraine:

Added:
Zhitomir
Chernigov
Cherkasy
Sumy
Split the Manganese (2) mine SE of Stalino and moved the Manganese (1) mine to the proper location south of Dnepropetrovsk and created a new Donbass (1) mine where Voroshilovgrad is located. By doing this we get rail hubs from the mines without adding new cities.

These extra cities / mines will make it possible for the Germans to get rail hubs in Ukraine a little sooner and that means they can rail reinforcements a little earlier. That should allow for Rostov to fall and maybe move past if you're good.



Russia:

Added:
Velikiye Luki
Mogilev
Rzhev
Kaluga

These added cities should make it possible to get reinforcements earlier for a chance for Operation Typhoon for German in the fall of 1941. Cities without production can make get entrenchment level 3 so they won't be much better in defense than a forest hex.

I've deliberately not added any cities east of Rostov because this area didn't have many rail lines. Especially south towards the Caucasus. So you need to rely upon truck supply and get to Krasnodar, Maikop and Stavropol to get a chance to rail reinforcements further south. Oilfields and mine work as cities regarding rail movement so getting Maikop and the Grozny oilfield will help

[JockeBu]

Doesn't the added cities change dynamics a bit? There's a lot of cities added in Ukraine, these cities are much easier to defend than the plain. This will make it harder for the Germans to steamroll through Ukraine.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Middle East:

Added:

Trans-Jordan:
Amman (the capital)

Syria:
Aleppo
Homs

Iraq:
Fallujah
Najaf
Kut
Nasiriryah

Persia:
Kermanshah
Qom

Adding the cities in Syria makes it easier to actually use the country to e. g. place forces at the Turkish border. Amman was quite a bit city and the capital of Trans-Jordan so it should be added. In Iraq the biggest cities near Euphrates and Tigris are added so movement is easier there as it should be. In Persia some cities are added to make movement slightly easier towards Tehran.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Please post what you think and what you would change. I think the above would help against the concerns some people have against rail gauge and rail heads.

[ncali]

Doesn't the added cities change dynamics a bit? There's a lot of cities added in Ukraine, these cities are much easier to defend than the plain. This will make it harder for the Germans to steamroll through Ukraine.

I tend to agree and am not sure these were large enough cities to justify defensive benefits. I think the solution would be to add a new terrain type for "minor cities" with less defensive benefits.

Alternatively, I still feel the new rule requiring units to be adjacent to a city to rail out is too inflexible. Maybe (if you are inclined to keep the rule), it should be modified to allow rail if a unit is within a greater distance from a city than simply adjacent.

[Schnurri]

Amman was actually quite small in the early 40's - < 20,000 - but it did have a railway depot some 3 mi distant. Note - it is also only about 20 km from the Dead Sea - should it be one hex closer?

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Cities without production can only get to entrenchment level 3 so they won't last long. In 1941 these cities are so far west that the Germans will love having the Russians waste units defending them. The Germans WANT to kill Russian units instead of chasing a retreating enemy.

What will stop the Germans is areas with a contiguous defense line like rivers, terrain belt etc. A city like Zhitomir will not stop the Germans just as Lvov, Vinnitsa etc. are just places for the Germans to kill garrisons.

Russia start the war with no entrenchments so these cities (except maybe cities like (Rzhev and Kaluga) will be overrun before you can even get to entrenchment level 3.

Regarding city size I would say that several of the proposed cities are larger than cities already on the map.

Old:
Pskov: 200k
Petrozavodsk: 260k
Vologda: 285k
Smolensk: 325k
Vitebsk: 340k
Kherson: 330k
Orel: 330k

Proposed new:
Mogilev: 370k
Cherniagov: 300k
Sumy: 280k
Zhitomir: 280k
Rzhev: 70k (but was on the vanilla game map)
Velikiye Luki: 110k
Kaluga: 325k

So only Rzhev and Velikiye Luki were cities that were smaller than most in Russia, but both cities were crucial in the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Velikiye_Luki

Here we see that Velikiye Luki were defended like a fortress and was crucial for both sides to capture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Rzhev

The Germans held a salient around Rzhev for quite some time and the area didn't fall during the Russian winter offensive.

Another thing to take into consideration is that city size changed from WW2 to now. So all cities were smaller, some more than others. What we need to look for are what kind of gaming effects do we want. Those cities are more like rail hubs, but they were important rail hubs for the outcome of the war.

Still, nothing is set in stone here so we can easily remove some of the cities if we want to.

Do we know the size of Amman during WW2. Did it have any impact on the warfare there? If no then I don't mind taking it away since Jerusalem is close by.

We have to know that the cities were smaller in general in the north so the rule for how big the cities should be is lower there. E. g. most of the cities in Scandinavia were around 100k or smaller.

Central Europe:
Rostock: 200k (but biggest city in the area that's otherwise empty of nearby cities)
Erfurt: 200k (greater Erfurt 500k)
Graz: 290k
Linz: 270k
Brno: 400k (greater Brno 800k)
Kosice: 240k (second largest city in Slovakia after Bratislava)
Lublin: 350k

So we see that most of the proposed cities are of the same size and you find many on-map cities of the same size. So we don't make a mistake whether we do or don't any new ones. No huge cities are forgotten.

Making a new terrain type (town or rail hub) is nothing that I recommed at the moment. Maybe we could consider lowering the defensive bonuses for cities without production? They can have max 3 entrenchment so maybe the values could be lower while they have entrenchment above 0. That would simulate having a town and not a city.

I could even make code so a city without production is called a town although it's treated as a city game wise. Then I don't need to change the code. So there are several ways we can deal with this. I could even use a different symbol for cities without production so the circle is smaller (since there is no number to write in the center).

What do you think?

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Amman was actually quite small in the early 40's - < 20,000 - but it did have a railway depot some 3 mi distant. Note - it is also only about 20 km from the Dead Sea - should it be one hex closer?

That means Jerusalem should be moved too. So many the end result could be to remove the city if it was below 100k or so in 1941. Today the city has more than 2 mill inhabitants, but it expanded mainly because of the Palestine situation after the war.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

One moment regarding cities in the Ukraine. Those will actually help the Germans more than the Russians. Let's say the Germans take Zhitomir. That means they get a city that will soon be linked to the standard gauge rail network so corps units can rail there. Then corps units can take Kiev while the panzers focus on targets further east.

Germany's biggest worry should be to grab cities so they can rail corps units eastwards. They need to let corps units do more of the battle so the precious armor can be used for exploitation. If the corps units are too far away then the panzers must do the dirty work and lose steps.

Again I want to remind people that we're trying to tune the balance here so what we end up with is certainly different from what we discuss at the moment. We need hard data from actual games before we can make conclusions. Prior experience from changes in the past show us that the effect might be different than people anticipated. Sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better.

We have discarded good plans before because they didn't work out and we've found elegant solutions to big game balance problems. So let's test and see where it brings us. I think we should get the first data in soon. Some players are quite fast with their turns.

[Diplomaticus]

Two points:

1) While it is true that a max of entrenchment 3 is not a great benefit, a city does add to the unit's AA (right?) and it makes the unit impossible to dislodge.

2) Adding a lot of new cities will make it much more difficult to execute armored encirclements, since those cities will provide supply to the isolated units.

So I propose that we at least consider using resources, instead of cities, for some of these proposed hexes. Resources do not provide supply, and defending units can be dislodged from resources. Does the game permit us to create a '0' production resource hex?

[ncali]

I'm also uncomfortable with using current population figures. I took a look at a few of the cities that you cited, and the population figures you gave are for contemporary (post-2000) censuses. I haven't found a good source of all 1940's era population figures for Soviet cities. But what I have found indicates there have been tremendous changes! I guess I am also factoring in that cities are a lot more defensible against armour and have other bonuses than the entrenchment bonus. The Soviets will also have to take these cities back when the tide shifts.

For Sumy, Wikipedia gives these historical figures:
1850 11,500
1897 27,564
1913 50,400
1926 44,000
1939 69,000 1959 98,000
1970 159,000
1979 231,558
1989 293,706
2001 295,847

For Kherson:
1790 24,000
1926 58,000
1939 97,000
1959 158,000
1981 361,000
2004 354,000
2007 329,000

For Zhitomir, Wikipedia gives these historical figures:

1861 40 564
1891 69 785
1926 76 700 (of whom 10 500 were Russians)[4]
1939 95 100[5]
1941 40 100 (Russians along with Poles, Jews, and Germans in minority)[6]
2005 277 900

[Cybvep]

Cities in CEAW don't represent just major population centres, but important rail hubs/junctions, too. There are no "real" railways in CEAW, so cities without production serve as an abstract way of representing them.

The impact of the added cities cannot be evaluated without several test games.

[ncali]

Yes, but I think that supports Diplomaticus's idea to use resources instead of cities to represent these for rail purposes. Units will get a much smaller defense bonus (I think it's 10% for resources) than the defense and armour bonuses for cities (not to mention the entrenchments).

[Peter Stauffenberg]

I think all cities were smaller during the war. Some more than others. I don't care so much about the exact size. More important is whether the city had any real impact on the war or not. If we have info that battles were fought for the cities and they held out for awhile then we could consider it. One such example is Velikiye Luki. By itself it's too small.

We have to consider how warfare is done in Russia in GS. In 1941 the Germans storm eastwards and the Russians usually put up garrison units in cities ahead of the main defense line. Some places they place corps units, e. g. to hold river lines. Encirclements where you cut supply to units is rarely seen, except in the far west.

Russian garrisons in cities fall very easily to one air strike and 2 land attacks. It doesn't matter much whether the unit is in a city or in the open. The main reason is the low efficiency of the Russian units at that time.

Even resources have some benefit to defense. I think it looks more weird to have mines without production on the map compared to cities without production. You expect resources to have production or they wouldn't be there at all.

It's actually possible to cut supply to a city. You bombard the city or attack it enough so its inner strength drops far enough. If it drops down to red it will not provide supply at all.

In 1941 and 1942 the Germans fight a war of mobility. I think they will be as fast in 1941 as before. In 1942 they will usually fight in areas where we didn't add new cities so there will be no difference.

In 1943 and later the Russians will fight a war of attrition instead of a mobile warfare. They want to destroy German units and move into hole when the German line cracks.

If you look at the map there are enough open space to manoeuver in. The city concentration just much higher in Germany and the Allies don't seen to struggle with cities when they rush towards Hamburg and Berlin. Not even the Siegfried line seems to be a big obstacle. Having enough air support is the key.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

I think it would be more productive to discuss each city by itself and look at the location and the history and say yes and no to each of them.

Schnurri had a valid argument about Amman (city mainly grew after the war and was quite small during the war). That means we could probably remove that city suggestion.

I would like to have a similar discussion about each of the others and maybe add suggestions yourself if you see alternatives that could work better.

E. g. in Ukraine I could have chosen Poltava instead of Sumy or Kremenchug instead of Cherkasy. They are close to each other and almost at the same size. So cities are actually a cluster of population. This is simulated because you can place reinforcements and rail adjacent to the cities as well.

Lublin is quite important for the Axis because it's the only city in Poland east of Warsaw they control before Barbarossa so you can rail most of the units for Barbarossa to Lublin instead. Since the east weather line goes just east of Lublin it means even mech / armor units can move from the city to the front line in one turn. From Warsaw you often needed 2 unless you waited for fair weather in the east.

Cities like Rzhev and Kaluga makes it easier for Germany to actually stage an assault on Moscow in 1941, as happened in the real war. Rzhev (despite being small) was so important that the Germans fight very hard to keep the salient instead of withdrawing to straighten the line. So some cities had strategic importance more than being big.

I think we can learn by testing. It's very easy to remove cities if we find they're superfluous or make front lines to much like WW1 and not WW2.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Yes, but I think that supports Diplomaticus's idea to use resources instead of cities to represent these for rail purposes. Units will get a much smaller defense bonus (I think it's 10% for resources) than the defense and armour bonuses for cities (not to mention the entrenchments).

If we do this we need to make a new resource type called town and let it just have a token defensive value, but function as a rail hub, but not a reinforcement city. I can certainly code that, but then all save games will be invalidated again. Do we really want that?

If we add towns we get the big discussion many places about which cities should be downgraded to towns and which should remain as cities.

I think a simpler solution would be to do one of the following for cities without production only:
* drop entrenchment level from max 3 to maybe max 2 or even max 1. This they can see on the map.
* Reduce defensive protection from 20 to 10 and armor protection from 35 to 25
* Enable retreats from attacks upon such cities. This rule could maybe be hard for players to remember since cities look the same.

[Schnurri]

I like the first suggestion - and we can worry about cities vs. towns at a later date. Seems important for the player to be able to easily see which are "towns". In the real war many towns took on historic importance for strategic or tactical reasons and there is no way to know apriori which ones would do so in a reenactment. I think your solution solves all the issues. My two cents.

[ncali]

I think a simpler solution would be to do one of the following for cities without production only:
* drop entrenchment level from max 3 to maybe max 2 or even max 1. This they can see on the map.
* Reduce defensive protection from 20 to 10 and armor protection from 35 to 25
* Enable retreats from attacks upon such cities. This rule could maybe be hard for players to remember since cities look the same.

I also like this idea as a compromise. I'd drop entrenchment max to 2 and reduce defensive bonuses as described (both changes will be readily visible during the game). I could go either way on retreats for the reason you mention, as it will be a little less clear to players what is happening.

[metolius]

I think a simpler solution would be to do one of the following for cities without production only:
* drop entrenchment level from max 3 to maybe max 2 or even max 1. This they can see on the map.
* Reduce defensive protection from 20 to 10 and armor protection from 35 to 25
* Enable retreats from attacks upon such cities. This rule could maybe be hard for players to remember since cities look the same.

I also like this idea as a compromise. I'd drop entrenchment max to 2 and reduce defensive bonuses as described (both changes will be readily visible during the game). I could go either way on retreats for the reason you mention, as it will be a little less clear to players what is happening.

Yup. I like it.