-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Within the limits of what can be done with the Hearts of Iron engine (the AI isn't very smart and is rather jittery), I would say that the answer is approximately yes.
There are always going to be issues with Germany being grossly overpowered, but within the limits set, Core does a good job.
Well, Germany was really powerful; historically they took on all the major nations of Europe and came surprisingly close to winning.
And they likely would have won, in spite of Ultra, had Hitler let his generals do their jobs their own way. Luckily for the world, Hitler was an idiot when acting in the role of general. (Politicians almost always make lousy generals, and vice versa.)Simon_Jester said:
Of course, had Hitler let the high ranking Generals run Fall Gelb WW2 may have looked a lot like WW1. There is also pretty good evidence to suggest that Hitler had a much better grasp of the balance of political, logistic and military concerns in Africa then did Rommel.ShadoWarrior said:
It is never as simple as "let the generals do their jobs." Given Germany's industrial and logistic situation, I'm impressed they got as close to ruling the free world as they did.
The problem with judging the realism of CORE is that it is difficult to determine which outcomes are the result of incorrectly calibrated economic and military variables (techs, IC and unit values) and which result from sh*t poor AI.
I would be ecstatic if Paradox focused on making a better AI instead of adding additional features. This strategy may even pay off since many features must be recreated for every game but a good core AI can be reused.
Hitler did let the generals *begin* that campaign, according to the plan devised by von Manstein. The plan would have worked better if midway through he hadn't overruled Guderian and Rommel and let them crush the Allies at Dunkerque.grendel2 said:
As for Africa, Hitler was clueless. Had he listened to Rommel and gotten the Italians to seriously commit their naval and air forces to securing the logistical pipeline to North Africa, Rommel would have kicked the UK out of Egypt.
Hitler's only strength militarily was in knowing when to start a campaign. After that he should have let the professionals do what they were far better trained at than he was as an ex-corporal.
That was Rommel's view too. He kept pressing the Italians to put supplies into ports closer to the front lines. The Italians did the best they could and were more or less successful.ShadoWarrior said:
The problem wasn't Italian shipping--something like 90-95% of supplies got through. The problem was the size of the ports, which just couldn't be unloaded fast enough.
Rommel outran his supply lines, virtually guaranteeing German/Italian failure.
On the other hand, Hitler wanted Rommel to wage a defensive campaign to keep the Italians from failing. In retrospect this was the right decision.
Hitler did make significant mistakes, but calling him "clueless" is fatuous. People tend to make the best decisions based on the incentives and situations they are in.
Van Creveld has made his share of mistakes--especially with his "decline of the state" thesis--but this is an excellent piece of scholarship.
Taking the advice of your astrologer over that of generals with combined experience totaling hundreds of years is ... fatuous.
Thanks for the link, though. Grabbed a copy from Half.com. I'll see what he has to say about the situation in North Africa. But I'm not wrong on the foolishness of Hitler's repeated meddling in matters of which he was far from qualified to judge, let alone personally plan in detail.
But getting back to the topic of this thread, CORE is realistic if one assumes that the best generals in the Wehrmacht were running the war (along with better direction of the Reich's armaments ministry) rather than what actually happened historically. This is a major part of why playing Germany in CORE tends to be a romp over all opponents. Germany begins with a great industrial base, more and better generals than pretty much everyone else, and almost everything on land at up-to-date 1936 technology.
Thanks for the link, though. Grabbed a copy from Half.com. I'll see what he has to say about the situation in North Africa. But I'm not wrong on the foolishness of Hitler's repeated meddling in matters of which he was far from qualified to judge, let alone personally plan in detail.
But getting back to the topic of this thread, CORE is realistic if one assumes that the best generals in the Wehrmacht were running the war (along with better direction of the Reich's armaments ministry) rather than what actually happened historically. This is a major part of why playing Germany in CORE tends to be a romp over all opponents. Germany begins with a great industrial base, more and better generals than pretty much everyone else, and almost everything on land at up-to-date 1936 technology.
Weellll....ShadoWarrior said:
I'd say that Hitler was consistently right to overrule his generals up until Dunkirk. Dunkirk was the first case where he clearly made a mistake, and even then it lay in trusting one of his generals (Goering) to perform a task rather than assigning that task to another (Guderian).
It wasn't until the invasion of Russia that Hitler really started making mistakes, and it's not clear that the German High Command would have done much better on their own. They might have, but they might not have.
In fairness, there was a fairly good reason not to commit the Panzer forces to the destruction of the Dunkirk pocket.ShadoWarrior said:
At the time, the German mechanized divisions had pulled ahead of the main German field armies. The Panzer divisions themselves were not well suited for the task of launching a set-piece offensive against a dense enemy troop concentration; they had little or no genuinely heavy armor and were short on artillery. Moreover, the British were in a good position to cover the Dunkirk pocket with air support and naval gunfire.
So if Guderian's panzers had pressed the attack against the retreating troops at Dunkirk, they might well have gotten bloodied. They would probably have won, but unless the Allied troops were even more disorganized than Hitler had any right to expect, they could not have succeeded without serious losses in equipment.
Germany could not afford heavy losses to its panzer units. The bulk of the French army was still out there in southern and central France; once the Dunkirk pocket was gone the Germans were going to have to deal with that army and break it up before it could establish a strong defensive line. Which meant that the Germans needed their elite maneuver element intact and ready to keep fighting, rather than chewed up after fighting a major battle against an enemy with nowhere to run and a fairly substantial amount of heavy weapons left to it.
Shrug.
Kicking the UK out of Egypt probably wouldn't have had as dramatic an effect on the course of the war as some might think; it would have marginally strengthened the Germans but would likely not have improved their position decisively. Moreover, the North African campaign was very much a sideshow compared to the war in Russia, and it was not at all unreasonable for Hitler to be far more concerned with Russia than with Egypt.
Generals with a knack for mobile warfare and a love of pursuit, such as Rommel and Patton, will always tend to blame supreme command for not getting them the supplies they wanted. That doesn't mean they're right, or that getting them the supplies will produce the results they promise.grendel2 said:
Of course they would have done better. They wouldn't have issued conflicting orders, such as pulling panzer divisions out of one portion of the front to send them elsewhere (where they weren't asked for or needed), and then shortly after they arrived at their new sector sent them back to do what they could have accomplished had they been left in place originally, wasting enormously valuable time and scarce fuel. They wouldn't have kept shifting the focus of the campaign back and forth from Leningrad, to Moscow, to Leningrad, to destroying encircled pockets, to Moscow, etc. In short, if you have a plan, and the plan is working (the enemy has not rendered the plan obsolete), and there are no changes you can make to the plan to better accomplish the campaign's goals, then stick to the darn plan, and don't change the goals midstream without sound military reason.Simon_Jester said:
{snip} Well argued.Simon_Jester said:
Egypt isn't important (though the Suez canal is). What it's worth is as a gateway into Palestine, which itself leads to Iraq and Persia. Denying the UK the Middle East doesn't hurt the UK much. But having the oil fields would have drastically altered matters later on in the war. Not to mention the Africa Korps not having to fight its own two-front war in North Africa. It would have been far easier to defend North Africa with the Eastern Med solidly under Axis control.Simon_Jester said:
In all fairness, Patton never failed to deliver on his promises. He had a keen sense of what his troops and equipment could and could not accomplish, more so than most other generals. Which is why he frequently did the "impossible" ("impossible" according to other's expectations, and "rulebooks" written in an earlier war where mobile warfare hadn't yet been invented). He especially learned from his enemies (what worked for them, and what mistakes they made that he must avoid). A trademark of the very best generals such as Guderian, von Manstein, etc.Simon_Jester said:
Come to think of it, I'm hard-pressed to think of any WW2 generals with a hallmark of maneuver warfare who did fail to deliver when properly supplied. Unlike some set-piece style generals who failed to accomplish their objectives in spite of having all the supplies, troops, equipment, and air support they asked for.
Back to the original question:
I think that C.O.R.E. adds a lot of realism to the game, especially due to the detailed tech tree and the additional events. Or, at least, that makes it feel more realistic to me.
Only problem I see is that in some cases there are maybe too much details, e.g. the single ship approach. Basically a fantastic thing (IMHO), but as the AI is hard coded to use 2 DD units as ASW flotillas, I cannot see how they ever could make CORE to simulate a good Battle of Atlantic.
I think that C.O.R.E. adds a lot of realism to the game, especially due to the detailed tech tree and the additional events. Or, at least, that makes it feel more realistic to me.
Only problem I see is that in some cases there are maybe too much details, e.g. the single ship approach. Basically a fantastic thing (IMHO), but as the AI is hard coded to use 2 DD units as ASW flotillas, I cannot see how they ever could make CORE to simulate a good Battle of Atlantic.
To answer the original question; I think its reasonably realistic, with the exception of the Far East, where Japan always without fail manages to defeat and puppet Nationalist China.
In my current game it's mid-1941 and Japan hasn't defeated NatChi yet.Chris783 said:
Snowmelk said:
I also think that the singleship approach is too much. Haven`t played a whole campaign but I can only imagine the lag with all those units. But oterwhise this is an excellent mod, perhaps not as good as Mod 34, but that`s only my opinion.
I have played a whole campaign (or several) and I haven't seen any lag that's appreciable. OTOH, I'm also playing on a 3.5GHz system.
Would that have made a decisive difference, though? The Germans might have taken Leningrad, or they might have taken Moscow, or they might have done a more thorough job of destroying the pockets. But would the gains made on one front offset the lesser gains on other fronts, and would they have made much of a difference? It's possible that the fall of Moscow would have been decisive, or at least potentially decisive, but it's also possible that the Russians would have rallied and kept fighting. And nothing but the fall of Moscow was to prove decisive.ShadoWarrior said:
Not really. The British couldn't ship much in the way of goods along the length of the Mediterranean anyway because of the danger of interdiction by the Italian navy and air force. Until Italy was beaten, the Mediterranean was simply not safe for Allied shipping. Most of their stuff had to go the long way around Africa anyway.
That's a very large area that the Axis would have to control, with poor infrastructure to support a campaign. They could have done it, but the advantage might not have been as great as you'd think. Moreover, the Allies would likely have made it a priority to drive the Axis back out of Mesopotamia, and could probably have done it given time. The Torch landings would have proceeded more or less as they did historically with or without British positions farther east in the Mediterranean; the Eastern front would likely have proceeded in more or less the same general pattern. So the Axis would not have had permanently secure control of the Mediterranean (with the Allies operating out of Gibraltar) for long, nor would they have been able to stop the Russians from eventually wearing them down in the East.
Well, when Patton ran up against the fortifications around Metz, he ended up banging his head against them for about three months, no?
Maneuver has limits. It can achieve things that can never be accomplished by set-piece tactics alone, but it cannot achieve unlimited results. So at a certain point, the maneuver generals' promise to keep chasing the enemy until they reach Berlin or Alexandria is irrelevant; they end up running into a position they can't outmaneuver and must therefore break into.
Conversely, set-piece tactics have their limits, for well known reasons. A successful war requires generals who are proficient at both, and there are times for each.
Yes, capturing Leningrad (and even more so Moscow) would have been decisive. First, it would have been a terrific morale boost to the Germans, and a stinging defeat to the Soviets. Second, it would have freed up many divisions that could *then* be used to push towards one of the other goals. Third, even the loss of an industrially unimportant, but politically sensitive city like Leningrad (not to mention the home port for the Soviet Baltic fleet) would have so shaken support for Stalin's running of the war that he might not have been able to mount an effective defense of the rest of the country, or have emboldened someone like Beria to replace him. Stalin's personal security was nowhere near as tight as that around Hitler, and Beria, unlike Himmler, coveted Stalin's position. Stalin committed publicly and politically to hold Leningrad. Failure to do so would have had a cost. He assuredly wouldn't have survived (for long) the loss of Moscow, even if he somehow did retain power after losing Leningrad.Simon_Jester said:
I don't recall exactly why that happened, but IIRC, he wasn't allowed to maneuver around them. Don't recall if it was a fuel issue or an issue with sticking to his assigned sectors. (Kind of like the Soviet generals who were ordered to go "over the hill" and not permitted to go "around the hill".)Simon_Jester said:
Remember, this is the guy that still managed to cross the Rhine ahead of the other Allied army commanders (with the exception of the lucky break at Remagen). He wasn't explicitly ordered *not* to cross, just was denied the resources so no one expected that he'd be able to do so. (He was very good at violating the spirit of his orders by carefully sticking to their letter.)
Were the German generals likely to commit to taking Leningrad if they had been given their head? How likely was their commitment to succeed?ShadoWarrior said:
And how likely was it that all these adverse political consequences would follow as you describe?
These are partly rhetorical questions; obviously the answers cannot be certain. What I'm saying is that while the Germans could have won without Hitler's meddling, or perhaps even with Hitler's meddling if they had been somewhat luckier, they weren't a sure bet to win by any means. The Russians would have been just as big and nearly as difficult to knock out entirely even with the German general staff doing every last bit of the planning.
So while it's all very well to say that the Germans would have gotten away with it if it weren't for that meddling Fuhrer, that kind of position is expressing a lot of faith in the German generals, perhaps even more than they deserve. Remember that this idea traces back in part to the efforts by those same generals to make themselves look good after the war.
Well, he had his sector of the front. If he pulled out of that sector and left it uncovered, Bad Things could happen (like a nasty German counterattack).
It is by no means guaranteed that he could have outmaneuvered those forts. Patton despised forts, but that doesn't mean that he was entirely right to do so or that he could always easily defeat forts.
Patton, Rommel, and other high-reputation commanders of World War Two tend to attract a certain amount of fannish behavior. People show a lot of faith in them, assuming that their genius would have allowed them to win any victory they expected to be able to win but were somehow denied the chance to win. I try to be cautious about that sort of thing, because these same generals tended to ignore what was going on outside their own area of operations.
That's not giving very much credit to the ability of historians to sift fact from wishful thinking, and assumes they mostly rely upon testimony rather than documentation of orders, plans, and most of all divisional reports.Simon_Jester said:
That assumes he'd be foolish enough not to leave a blocking/covering force. Patton was bold. He wasn't reckless. During the Ardennes offensive, he did pull out of his sector(s) and moved next door. In the process he did not leave his prior sector completely undefended. You're using the same argument that his own (cautious) superiors used. Which vastly underestimates the value of tactical surprise, and also gives too much credit to the ability of the Germans to mount a counterattack in force in the face of withering Allied air supremacy.Simon_Jester said:
Just for the record, I'm not a huge fan of Rommel. He was reckless (his own subordinate commanders attested to this after the war), and his reputation is, IMO, overblown. He's certainly not in the same league with the likes of Guderian, Manstein, Model, or Patton (just to name a handful). Rommel had good success against what were essentially incompetent and/or inadequately supported opponents. As soon as he encountered opponents of good quality with good support, his successes more or less ceased. This is not to say that he wasn't a good general. I just don't think he was a *great* one. (I certainly don't think he deserves a "5" skill, and 4 is likely pushing it. Most of the generals in CORE with a 4 rating were, IMO, better than Rommel.)Simon_Jester said:
I don't know if you're familiar with the Peter Principle (from the 60s or 70s), but I feel that Rommel was promoted far in excess of his abilities. He shouldn't really have been more than a divisional commander, and likely not even more than a regimental one. His command style simply wasn't suited to managing large formations. He wasn't a very good corps commander, from the aspect of being on top of what's going on in his own corps. It's a common problem with charismatic leaders who like to be at the front rather than at their HQ where they can properly direct things. So Rommel having a 5 as a divisional commander, and reduced by 1 each step he's bumped up the chain well represents him IMO. Which is precisely what CORE has done. OTOH, guys like Guderian, etc. didn't lose effectiveness as they were promoted. On the contrary, they became even more effective as they were given control over larger and larger resources.