Nick's WW2 Multiplayer Realism Mod

[Altruist]

Steel mills are typically located in close proximity to ore and coal. Within in-game provinces, they coincide with deposits.

Tell that to Germany and Sweden

I don't know about Sweden but in Germany the most heavily industrialized areas Ruhr and Saar are (were) above coal mines.

In Germany, at least in the area I grew up in, it was standard school stuff: steel making needs coal : iron ore = 2 : 1, so if you have to choose where to build your steel mills, it's not where the iron ore but the coal is located.

 

[Nick3210]

I don't know about Sweden but in Germany the most heavily industrialized areas Ruhr and Saar are (were) above coal mines.

And that's a thousand kilometers from Kiruna, isn't it?

Putting steel plants on the map instead of ore mines is not even worth discussing, it's nonsense.
Any country can build a steel plant. And no country can cast ore or coal reserves on its territory.

 

[Altruist]

At Kiruna is the iron ore.
If you haven't got coal and iron both nearby, you move the iron ore to the coal.

 

[Nick3210]

At Kiruna is the iron ore.
If you haven't got coal and iron both nearby, you move the iron ore to the coal.

Exactly.
Therefore, it is necessary to put exactly primary resources on the map - ore and coal, and not steel mills.
In Hoi2 mechanics the Ruhr steel mills are represented as IC, not as energy or metal.

You bring high-quality Swedish ore to the Ruhr, mix it with poor German ore, and local metallurgical plants convert ore, coal and rares into IC.

In Germany, at least in the area I grew up in, it was standard school stuff: steel making needs coal : iron ore = 2 : 1, so if you have to choose where to build your steel mills, it's not where the iron ore but the coal is located.

I do not know these ratios from memory, but I have read that using poor French (German) ore required 3-5 times as much energy as smelting high-quality ore.
Therefore, Swedish ore was mixed with a bit French ore to reduce coal consumption for processing of occupied French ore somewhat.

So, the ultimate feat of Realism/Historicity would be to set additional energy consumption on processing poor German ore, but I'm still too lazy to do that. But I don't rule out doing it someday.

 

[Nick3210]

In Germany, at least in the area I grew up in, it was standard school stuff: steel making needs coal : iron ore = 2 : 1

But didn't they teach you that the cost of 1 Energy in all Hoi2-based games should be always equal to the cost of 2 Metal, and not the other way around?

Actually, in Germany, I've been to Berlin, Dresden, Trier, Bonn, Würzburg and unknown town on the Dutch border. After I started modding Hoi2, I found out that Würzburg is the province where Guderian's 2nd Panzer Division must be located at the start of the game. But the guides didn't tell us anything about it, they showed an old castle and not a word about Guderian.

 

[Altruist]

You bring high-quality Swedish ore to the Ruhr, mix it with poor German ore, and local metallurgical plants convert ore, coal and rares into IC.

Well, initially they had rather problems with the Swedish Kiruna ore or to be exact Magnetite in Germany. Germany was, in comparison with the UK and France, a bit late industrialising and thus behind. So they lacked several procedures they were already mass-using in Britain. But a bit good old industry espionage (called field excursions) of several people who later would become the steel and coal magnates of Germany helped a lot. This way they acquired the Bessemer process. Unfortunately exactly this process was good only for ore with a very low concentration of phosphor. Bad luck because Kiruna magnetite was/is the opposite, one of the ores with the highest phosphor concentrations in the world.

Further on the fat stone coal of the Ruhr area had too high concentrations of some other stuff with was really very bad for steel making. Thus, while sitting on all this masses of coal, they were forced to use still charcoal instead. Bad for the forests around and not really good for steel making, either. Some more "field excursions" to the UK solved that problem as well: coking! Bring coal to red glowing which will make the bad stuff gaseous and leaving the coal, then dump the high red glowing coal into water before it is used up. Now, finally, post 1850 Germany was ready to build all their famous artillery and Krupp cannonry to make battleships and guns to show the Brits and French that Germans also wanted a piece of the world. Well, that backfired "a bit" and thus it weren't the Germans who kicked the Brits and French out of their colonies but the natives themselves (just watched the movie "The Battle of Algiers").

I grew up in the Ruhr area. Back then still with lots of coal mines, coking factories, steel mills and all the follow up steel and chemical processing industries, chimneys everywhere puffing out great clouds constantly. The air a nebulous dirty mess and nobody as stupid as hanging wet cloth outside for drying. 24h a day all around the clock in endless shifts hundreds of thousands of people working in a highly integrated industry centered around coal and steel. As a child I was fascinated and when darkness came, you could see the coking installations even from far away when the tons and tons of bright red glowing coal made the night sky dark red before being dumped into the water with huge steam clouds exploding to the sky: I always imagined that the entrance to the abyss would look exactly like that.