Slitherine

What I'm after is having a chance to rail / place reinforcements in areas that had a rail line during WW2 where the map doesn't have a proper city for. Moscow was a highly populated area so there should be a possibility to place reinforcements several places near Moscow. As long as Moscow is still Russian I don't think there is a problem, but once Moscow falls you will see that there is quite some distance to Gorki so having a city like Vladimir will definitely help.

When placing cities we don't only look for population. In some areas (Kotlas for example) we place a city because it's the only way to get units there. The city size was small, but it was the biggest in the area.

In other areas we omit big cities because even more important cities are nearby. Manchester is one such example. It's too close to Liverpool / Leeds to be on the map even though it's big enough. A rule of thumb is that we should not place cities closer than 3 hexes from each other.

In the Ruhr area we just have Cologne and Essen even though we could have picked many cities there (Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg etc.).

So placing cities is partly for effect. We have them there to allow for rail movement. E. g. Stavanger and Kristiansand are on the GS map in Norway and they had a rail line so therefore we placed them. Both cities were too small to be on a map with rail lines. Same with finnish cities like Joensuu. Still having them seems to work because you can now rail to an area where it was possible to rail.

Izhevsk was added because it was actually quite a bit bigger than expected (more than 600.000 inhabitants) and it was 3 hexes or more from another city. Otherwise it would have been omitted. I took away Yoshkar-Ola because I added Izhevsk.

Saransk was added to have possibility to place units west of the Volga in an otherwise empty area.

Nizhny Tagil is a suitable city to have because quite often when the Russians collapse they collapse north of Omsk due to not having cities nearby. Now the Russians can rail there and form a front line.

One of the weaknesses in GS in my opinion is that it's too short from Moscow to Omsk, but that can't be remedied because we're limited to 150x72 hexes. Ideally Omsk should have been a further 10 hexes east. So the area east of Moscow is compressed to fit in the Urals and that creates a situation where the Axis player can move too fast from Moscow to the Urals and game victory. Having some city stumbling blocks will certainly help.

One of the weaknesses in GS in my opinion is that it's too short from Moscow to Omsk, but that can't be remedied because we're limited to 150x72 hexes. Ideally Omsk should have been a further 10 hexes east. So the area east of Moscow is compressed to fit in the Urals and that creates a situation where the Axis player can move too fast from Moscow to the Urals and game victory. Having some city stumbling blocks will certainly help.

This sounds like sth that could be modelled by decreased supply level for the Axis in the areas in question.

Just did some city checking against Gary Grigsby's War in the East (not necessarily definitive but he does do good research for his games);

Nizhny Tagil size 15 city
Ivanovo size 15 city
Ryazan size 14 city
Saransk size 12 city
Vladimir size 10 city
Izvesk size 9 city
Machakala size 8 city
Syktyvkar size 7 city
Lipetsk size 6 city
Uralsk size 4 town
Sterlitamak size 4 town
Astrakhan size 1 town

All but one of the above cities/towns is on a strategically important rail line. The exception is Syktyvkar which is near the end of a rail line that runs from Kotlas (and goes off map to Ukhta). Hence, if Kotlas falls, the city is no longer connected to the Urals by rail line and an arguement could be made that it shouldnt be possible to rail to it - my inclination is to delete it as it wouldnt have been possible for it to be used as a marshalling point for building a defense line.

Its interesting how small Astrakhan is noted as in WITE - if accurate it demonstrates how much some of the cities have changed in size since WW2.

I would only add Ryazan, Vladimir and Mogilev. Mogilev would be useful for making a little bit slower the german advance in case of an early and strong Barbarosssa.

Something you might consider, given the gradual additions of more cities in Grand Strategy, is differentiating "major" and "minor" cities in terms of terrain effects. Major cities (like Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad) would have slightly more terrain penalties for armour units than minor cities (like the current proposals and many existing cities, such as Novgorod). The reason would be that the hex of a major city is much more representative of an obstacle in which substantial urban fighting would occur than a minor city. Likewise, you could have the maximum entrenchment cities for minor cities be lower than for major cities (as was mentioned). You could differentiate a major city from a minor city, easily enough, from a graphic standpoint.

I think this allows sufficient differentiation. There may be some minor cities that would even have production under this formulation.

Just a thought, could you use two hexes for a number of Major cities, Moscow and Berlin say making it more difficult to capture, but leaving Rome, Paris, London & New York as one?

Likewise, you could have the maximum entrenchment cities for minor cities be lower than for major cities (as was mentioned)

This is already the case when it comes to capitals. I don't know whether there is any differentiation between non-PP cities and PP-cities besides supply, though.

Having double hex capitals is not a good idea for a strategic game like this. Besides, London and Paris were much bigger than Berlin. Even Rome was bigger than Berlin.

One thing we could do is to differentiate the max entrenchment level for cities dependent upon their production. It's maybe strange that a minor power capital like Oslo can have max entrenchment 8 while a big major power city like Stalingrad or Munich can have max 5. All cities have max entrenchment 5 and that means the cities without production have the same max entrenchment.

We could make a change according to this formula:
Max entrenchment = max production +3 (max production > 5 is treated as 5 so max entrenchment = 8 ).

This means capitals compared to big cities have only a slight advantage since they have a bigger impact on reducing the attacking strength.

We could even use this rule for fortresses and maybe even capitals as well.

If we add it for fortresses it means large fortresses like Sevastopol and Leningrad will get max entrenchment higher than 4 (current max for fortresses). Small capitals will get a lower max entrenchment. It won't affect minor powers much because units there start with no entrenchment when the minor power is attacked.

This seems reasonable on the face of it (cities, fortresses and capitals). What kind of long-term effects might this have on game-play? Does it raise or lower overall defensive capability or merely re-distribute it?

I agree that changing the defensive capacity for certain key cities makes sense - the facts seem to support this approach. Worth pursuing.