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On the other hand, I'd really like to see an over-haul with the base game where-in the player could pick either side in all scenarios... it would require a good chunk of work on the way the AI works, but imagine being the Soviets in Stalingrad or Taifun, or being the Germans in Berlin. I'd pay for a DLC that does nothing but re-tool the AI so you can be the defender in single-player battles.
All war strategy games make you expend human lives on some level, but this one goes beyond. In other game systems like Advance Wars, you'll get docked if you lose too many men at the results. In others like Mount & Blade losing tons of your men (especially your best and finest) will hurt for a long time. Ditto the Total War series, or Civilziation.
This game does nothing of a sort. It doesn't matter if you take all of your units and have them fight all of the enemy's units- killing off hundreds of thousands if not millions on both sides- as long as the last unit on the field is your own, and it gets to all the targets by the time the game wants it to. And that's why you do it. As the German, you use Romanian/Hungarian infantry as low grade cannonfodder to be devastated if not destroyed juuust to try and open up that marginal gap for your actual troops. You press on relentlessly regardless of the costs so long as you cna make it to the checkpoints on time.
It works so well here because that's- broadly speaking- what the majority of the Eastern Front was like. Most of the governments involved were totalitarian nightmares and the value they placed on the individual lives of their troops was- always at best- dubious. And it makes the player think the same way.
Transmitting that sort of engine West, on the other hand... isn't likely to work so well. Because that sort of mindset really wasn't how the Finns, Americans, British, or French fought. I can probably count the number of times when they missed a crucial chance (like the ability to cut off Kesselring in South Italy, or to wipe out everybody in the Falaise Gap, or to keep fighting in 1940, or or or) for fear of the political and morale repercussions than I can when they had an army fight to the point of utter annihilation when they had the choice.
So in order for it to work, I think there'd have to be some sort of morale feature, and something to measure casualties. At minimum that's what I think you would need to adapt this system to cover the West.
The closest you might get to it fitting would be if you did the Western Fronts of WWI at present (since I think the rough "rhythem" of its' infantry fighting would be fitting), but even there morale was far, far, far more of a factor than this system does justice to yet, and better handling of things like artillery.
Just my two cents.
Not taking into account losses is a huge limitation of this game. However, you're wrong about the reasons behind why operational level warfare was conducted in such a highly attritional manner on the Eastern Front. I think it comes down to three factors: (1) Leadership; (2) Terrain; and (3) Logistics.
If you look at the Great War, there were huge losses on all sides and warfare was highly attritional, but not because of incompetent leadership or totalitarian regimes—unless you consider Britain and France totalitarian. The first year of the war was characterised by an almost exclusive use of manoeuvre to defeat the enemy. It was only until the beginning of the second year that everything devolved into trench warfare. It was the operational reality of the time, due to advances in stationary firepower, namely widespread deployment of the machine gun and breech loading artillery. All mobile forces had to fight with were bolt action rifles and lances.
Soviet losses for the first half of the war on the Eastern Front were mainly due to extreme Soviet incompetence from their officer class. Although their best and brightest were purged by Stalin a few years earlier, Soviet and Imperial Russian leadership in the Russian army has always been very poor in the industrial era.
Furthermore the Germans had a huge material advantage in the first half, whilst the Soviets were still gearing their centralised economy towards being able to support total war. In comparison, the German army and economy was already fully prepared.
Through bitter experience and massive losses, the Soviet officer class through the second half of the war was almost just as capable as their German counterparts, and now they had a material and numerical superiority without the crippling effects of low quality units.
The terrain across the Eastern Front was dominated by three factors: (1) Wide open areas in the western half; (2) Muddy areas in the eastern half; and (3) Russian winter. The wide open areas of the steppes in the western half of the front favoured the lightning warfare favoured by Heinz Guderian and supporters of his military theory, which included Hitler. The eastern half was where that horrible mud in Eastern Europe begins. The more your move in it the more you sink. Tanks, trucks, cars, horses and infantry were all equally affected, slowing everything to a crawl. Rain was a huge problem on the front. The winter would halt any advance, so any real gains would have to be achieved during the campaign season in summer.
The Wehrmacht's logistics capacity primarily came from horses, not trucks. There was a shortage of material and fuel, so a lot of the resources went directly to combat units. Subsequently, German armour had fast mobility and hard hitting power, but very little staying power because there weren't the resources to replace them nor the fuel to keep them running. In fact, Blitzkrieg was not an official doctrine of German military, but arose because their economic situation and technological superiority meant that lightning warfare was chosen because it offered the best chances for victory.
The further you advance into enemy territory the further you are from your supply lines, and the closer your enemy is to theirs. In addition, there's a peculiar terrain feature regarding the Russian railway lines in the area: They run vertically instead of horizontally. If they ran horizontally Germany could capture them and use the capacity for logistics transport, but those railway lines don't exist.
"You're wrong" is a bit hard to pass off without in-depth justification.
The truth is that it just about *always* comes down to those three factors, almost anywhere you look at. That spams everything from the apocalypse of the Eastern Front to the almost bloodless incidents like the "Potato War."
But the presence of leadership, terrain, and logistics (sometimes even in ways that were highly similar to the Eastern Front of WWII) doesn't explain why some wars turned out to be not just bloody but unbelievably brutal in doing sowhile others turned out different, does it?
The wars of Frederick the Great-including his battles against the Russians- were doubtless bloody, and some like the unbelievable (for the time) carnage at Zorndorf could be oddly reminiscent of some actions in this war, and both were waged by states and leaders who claimed absolute power. But that doesn't mean the results were the same.
No, but I certainly consider (at minimum) the Bismarckean German Empire, Habsburg Empirel and Ottoman Turkish Empire so, with the Tsarist Russian one only really being kneecapped from that proportion by the weak personality of the guy who was supposed to be its' absolute leader. And I think to ignore those factors is at best bad research.
It's also worth noting that while WWI was highly attritional, it didn't see the wholesale brutality we see in the Eastern Front of WWII (with the wholoesale massacres of prisoners and civilian populations- at least on the whole-, the war being viewed as a racial one of anihilliation, etc). The main exceptions were- again- the Central/Eastern European (defacto) absolutist states, like the German, Turkish, and Habsburg Empires, and even those were on a far more restrained level than what Stalin and Hitler would usher in.
That again points to the fact that there was something vaaastly different than simple strategic and tactical issues at play, that that set aside the Autocracies from their less absolute allies and enemies (as the nearly powerless Kaiser was happy to croon about in 1918), and that that too separates WWI from the Eastern Front of WWII.
BZZZT. Wrong Answer.
Yes, the first year of the war (especially in the West) was far more devoted to manuever than just about any other time except for the last year of it. But the idea that this only "devolved" into trench warfare in the second year is flat out wrong. The truth is that a major reason why the war in the West bogged down was because Western Europe was already the most heavily fortified region on the planet, and the role of the fortification and entrenchments in modern (for the time) warfare dated back more than forty continuous years to one of the main reasons why WWI broke out in the first place, the Franco-Prussian War.
This was the reason why both sides had already had the role of entrenchments on their minds, and why they used them to devastating effect in the latter days of the 1914 campaign and were factoring them in as strategic factors long before them. The Germans used the Lorraine border fortifications to pin a huge swath of the French Army down to help the hook through Belgium work, the French used the massive fortified camp that was Paris as a strongpoint to anchor their lines, and most directly the famous Battle of the Marne was enabled by the French forces on the right flank digging trenches to secure the other Western Allied forces jamming themselves into the gap, and the Battle of the Yser (where the Western Allied trenches helped hold the line until the Belgians were able to blow the dikes to flood the far left flank of the Western Front).
So trench warfare was already well practiced and in use by the time you are claiming it was still manuever; the main issue is that it was used as a supplement of manuever warfare rather than a substitute for it and that just about nobody foresaw how prevalent it would get until the Race to the Sea was over.
And again, none of this explains why even given the bloodbaths of the Western Fronts, we did not really see things like the bloody massacres of the WWII Eastern Front.
A: Even the latter is not true, especially factoring in the developments of more mobile artillery and machine guns, which saw considerable use in mobile warfare before the war and during it. In fact, this was largely a mixed blessing as we see at things like Le Cateau, where the extra manueverability of artillery led to things like it being deployed in qualities and quantities that would've made Napoleon blush, but unwisely. Hence why the Germans were able to take an extreme amount of the BEF's big guns without actually breaking them like those figures would indicate.
B: More importantly, "operational reality of the time" can be used to package all sorts of dubious baggage or reasons unless it's qualified and clarified. The armies of the Eastern Fronts were operating under "operational realities of the time" that were largely similar to those on the West: similar modern equipment, similar experience in trench warfare (the Russians had proved they knew how to assault forts and entrenchments in the Turkish war of 1877 and knew how to defend them and build them in the Crimean War and Russo-Japanese War, to give just one example; many of the players were the same on both fronts, etc).And yet we never saw the real, serious trench warfare in the East outside of a few extreme rarities, like during 1915 and 1916 in Russia, and even those were shallow impressions of those on the West.
Why is this? And how does this "operational reality" explain how different WWI is from the Eastern Front of WWII?
For instance, even in spite of the lethality of the Western Fronts of WWI or WWII, it was very rare for entire formations to be totally obliterated, and especially not by dying to the last man in combat. Usually, both sides would (more frequently) pull the affected unit out and get it replenished on some level. Or less frequently, the unit would surrender and be taken prisoner in a relatively normal prisoner of war camp. Not sent to a death camp like both sides of the Russian Civil War and the Eastern Front did. The casualties could indeed be massive and thee determination grim and costly, but it was rarely *that* destructive per capita.
In the Eastern Front it happened vastly more frequently, and in the game in particular it happens even more frequently than it did in reality.
Why is it that the Caucasian/Ottoman Home Front- which had *pathetically* little tactically or militarily in common with many of the actions we see in this game and in the historical Eastern Front- see events like this (the wholesale war to the very last drop of blood, only considering an area conquered when the very last enemy and city is fallen, preferably in ruins) etc)?
Was that due to the "operational reality of the times", or was there something more than just the tactics and pure military strategy?
This is overstating the case *At Best.*
Yes, we agree that Soviet losses for the first half of the war on the Eastern Front were mainly due to the Soviet High Command botching the job at almost every concievable moment. However, writing it all down to that is mistaken, and trying to say tha t"Soviet and Imperial Russian leadership... has always been very poor in the industiral era" strikes me as startlingly ignorant. Only attributing the victories in the early days of the war largely to a "huge material advantage" by the Germans exceeds it.
Let's break it down.
A: In spite of Stalin seeming like he was trying his very best, the Soviet Command- including those who were defeated or even felled by the first half of the war- was far from uniformly 'very poor." While the Great Purges had killed off many of the best and brightest, it hadn't killed off many of them. To throw some names out, we have:
* Zhukov, a seasoned WWI and Russian Civil War cavalry veteran, as well as the victor of Nomohan and one of the great innovators of WWII combined arms warfare.
* Ti(y)moshenko, another WWI/RCW Veteran and the man who managed to actually get the Soviet act together enough to force peace in the Winter War by simply, bloodily, but effectively bulling his way through the Mannerheim line.
* Vasilesvsky, yet *another* WWI/RCW veteran (with a far more distinguished career doing so than the former), who was involved planning the Winter War (for both good and bad) and the training up of the post-purge officer corps (again, for both good and bad).
* Kirponos, who was a Russian Civil War and Winter War veteran with relatively less experience but a fairly successful record, as well as good nstincts and the rare courage to step up against men like Zhukov and Stalin. His death early in the war was probably one of those unheralded "what if"'s of the Eastern Front.
* Vlasov, the commander of what was recognized as the best division in the Red Army at the time, with a distinguished junior officer career from the Russian Civil War and senior officer experience from his advisory post in China. He was also one of the people who acquitted himself the best in the early days of the battle, even managing to counterattack and drive back the Germans for a while and to help mastermind the defense of Moscow before he was captured and turned. Again, another major "What If?"
And I could go on, but I think you get my point. I'm not one to swoon over the quality of Soviet leadership in WWII, especially not during the early days. But it was nowhere near as uniformly bad as many people act like, and *it in and of itself* is not enough to explain what happened. These people certainly made mistakes and learned from them during the war, but they weren't "Very poor" beforehand.
B: The fact that the Axis leadership- especially the Central/Eastern European auxillaries like Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania- was not exactly all perfect either. We tend to overlook this because- surprise surprise- up until very recently our main reliable sources were from Axis archives that were still avalible before the Cold War ended.
Unfortunately, this also featured a lot of propaganda, collective arse covering (even by some of the "greats' and actual greats), inaccuracies, and rose tint. In other words largely what we see with the Soviet archives. It's just that without the ability to see both sides, we weren't the best equipped to understand this, and even in the early days of the war the Axis war machine had issues. The farq ups at high command and logistics are the ones everybody knows about (like the dismal failure to prepare for winter warfare), but what many seem to overlook ar things like the (surprisingly, perhaps) inadaquacy of many Axis MBTs, especially against beasts like the lumbering, ineffecient, but powerful KVs. The Battle for Baltic States in the early war stalled for a bit because an entire German wing was held up by a KV until it ran out of ammo from knocking out multiple tanks of Germany's vaunted armor corps and had to be abandoned.
C: The "Huge Material Advantage in the first half" needs clarificaiton, at minimum. I agree that the USSR suffered majorly from its' centralizaiton, purges, underdevelopment, and the wonders of Communist Collectivization, while Germany benefitted largely from its' more industrialized state.
But the idea that Germany had a "material advantage" in the first half- much less a huge one- can only be accepted once defined. And accepting it as the defining reason why the Germans won so decisively in the early days of the war simply doesn't cut it whatsoever.
The simple fact is that in many crucial areas, the Soviets were actually the ones who started out with a material superiority. Certainly in manpower and small unit equipment, but also most likely in tanks, artillery, and possibly planes and ships in the theaters of war they were fighting at (especially the Black Sea). Attributing German victories to a "huge material advantage" doesn't work when that material advantage was nonexistant if not inverted.
A classical case of this would be this (my apologies for using Wiki, I hate it as much as anyone else but it gets the point across). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brody_%281941%29
So, how did the Germans win this? How did they kneecap and cripple the numerically superior VVS at the onset of the war? Etc?
Because of doctrine, training, experience, leadership, and other things that go well beyond "the material." And in particular, I think it lowballs the achievements of the German leadership and how they were successful to the (at least early war) Soviets and undermines the very points you tried to make.
D: The idea that the Soviets by the end war were "almost as good" as the Germans raises my eyebrow at best. I think the point can be argued well, but I don't think the blanket statement works. Operation Begration and the effective clearing of Berlin itself (to name just two) points to something very different from a just-good-enough Soviet officer corps. And in particular, it ignores the rightly formidable nature of the Soviet war machine in the post-war years, when it was probably the single dominant land military on the planet.
It also lowballs the mistakes the Axis made, which were even more clear by the second half of the war.
Yes Yes Yes, that is all very nice and I agree with most of it, but several crucial parts of it are wrong. And more importantly, I find it is ignoring the major point of the response you were trying to make.
For one, the divide is not Muddy-East/-Steppe West. It's more akin to "Steppe South, Rocky Southeast, Plains far West, East, and mid-North, Tundra North,, big honking forests and swamps in the middle of them (especially Belarus), and seasonal mud." Those very same Steppes that Gudarian favored for lightning war turned into boggy messes when the muddy season(s) hit, as the history of the Ukrainian campaign shows.
Secondly, it's irrelevant to the point I was getting at. Yes, Eastern Europe has varied degrees of terrain that are varying degrees of difficult to work with and through. But it's also been more or less like that for centuries, and it's not exactly unique (just look at Central or Southeast Asia) in the annals of military history. So why did-say- even the Eastern Front of WWI or the French/Swedish invaisons of Russia not see such unstinting brutality as we saw in the Eastern Front of WWII? Why did we not see the practice of throwing units forward until they are utterly anihillated happen at the brutal Battle of Borodino (when one of the biggest blunders was probably Napoleon's *refusal* to even risk that happening with the Imperial Guard)? Why did we not see the rampant butchery of prisoners in any and all wars, such as the "Cabinet Wars" with Frederick the Great or the Crimean War?
And remember: a lot of this brutality was carried out *away* from Eastern Europe itself, in completely different logistical situations and terrain. So how do we explain that?
I commend you on your knowledge of various parts, but some of the mistakes here are glaring enough to drastically change the picture.
A: First and foremost, the idea that "German armor had hard hitting power" is dubious unless we're talking about the Big Cats or later incarnations of the Pz IV and mayyybe III, and was especially so during the most startling victories the Germans won in the early days of the war. Like I said before, they had limited ability to counter Western Allied tanks like the Matilda II or the Char Bd1 (especially bis), or the Soviet KV series. Especially the latter since the nature of the war and poor logistics meant that while the former they solved by outmanuevering or slamming with the 88, the latter they generally didn't have such an easy counter for in the early days.
B: I can say similar for the technological superiority and the economic situation. Germany has a long, long history of the doctrine of offense (at the very least, the Electors of Brandenburg-Prussia and maybe as far back as the Teutonic wars with Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic tribes). The economic model of the Third Reich was something of a "Rob Peter to pay Paul" on a grand scale, being basically a looter economy that needed new resources or else it would collapse under its' own weight as things stood. Hitler's own economics guru (Schacht) said as much.
As for the technological advantage, I can certianly point to a few examples like their use of some airpower and innovative tanks (especially in the East), but even that was dubious, especially in the early days and especially against the Western Allies of 1940 (who had equivalent equipment between the British and French if not superior in several cases, but were just mishandled, outgeneraled, and demoralized so much it didn't matter). This nitpick is less important int he East during the early days,but it is still worth hammering home.
C: The "preculiar feature" of the Russian railroads is nowhere near as prominant or as important as you make it out to be. Particularly since just 30 years ago, the Germans and Poles ran into few if any such problems navigating the Russian rail system compared to what the Axis would suffer in WWII, up to and including a well-oiled system to cope with the gauge differences made by a a paranoid Tsarist state.
Yes, many of them (likely even most) do run North to South and thus are of comparatively less use, but even those are still of grea tuse to holding the central position the Germans wound up holding for most of the war.
But there are also more than a few that run East-West, and in fact run more or less the whole length of what was then Soviet territory from Poland to the Pacific. We know this because (again) just thirty years later the Czechoslovak Legion did exactly that during its' Katabasis from European Russia to Vladivstok.
Here is the best online treatment of the subject I have yet found. http://www.allworldwars.com/Comments-on-Russian-Roads-and-Higways-by-Max-Bork.html
But all of that aside, I think your post misses the forest for the sake of the trees. You are clearly a rather well educated person (because even if you did make a lot of mistakes, they're not the kind of mistakes someone who flatout doesn't know or care makes), but 99% of your post is beside the main issue I was trying to raise.
And that is this:
The strategic reality of the day, tactics, tech, logistics, terrain, etc. all have a role in every single military (and many non-military) endeavors I can think of, and you are correct to point out the correlations. And of course, attrition plays a role on virtually all conflicts.
But none of that explains why the Eastern Front was conducted so attritionally, beyond the limits of normal battlefield combat, beyond even the sordid history of then-modern Eastern European warfare, and beyond the bounds of even an actual battle itself.
Why did we see ingrained cultures on both sides fight their units well beyond the point of annhilation in order to obtain often overly stringient objective sor timelines, when even bloodbaths like the First Day of the Somme rarely saw that?
Why did we see both sides wage war in such an unmistakably brutal fashion, both on the battlefield and often off it, with the aim of utterly destroying not just the enemy's military capacity but the civilian population (note the utter destruction; it is normal to target enemy civilians in some capacity or another, but it is rare, rare, rare indeed to outright try and exterminate a population in modern warfare)?
And why did such an overwhelming proportion of of soldiers on both sides- divorced from the higher ends or their mentality- fight until the point of destruction rather than surrendering like we often saw throughout military history (even in cases where they were butchered anyway, like with the Mongol invasions of this very same territory)?
That is "attrition" well and beyond the norm, or any particular justifiable explanatio, beyond the normal problems with military campaigns, beyond incompetence, and beyond the combat fields. Those are the points I was trying to make and am waiting for you to answer now. Those things are utterly alien to most wars in history, and were all but unheard of on the Western Fronts. And that is the key problem I tried to point out about porting Unity of Command ot a Western Front setting.