This is the second part (I) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and also one of the most popular strategy games currently on the market.
Last week, we looked at how HoI4 simulates combat, particularly its focus on operations (rather than tactics or, as we’ll see in later weeks, strategy). Much of Hearts of Iron‘s success is due to its effectiveness as an operational simulator and its operational model is by far the most developed part of the game.
This week we’re turning to the question of how Hearts of Iron IV handles what is going on below the operational level that the player operates at. Because the player does not themselves handle – or even really see – how their armies function below that division-level operational simulator, the granularity here comes from how Hearts of Iron IV understands ‘doctrine,’ which is to say the practices, guidelines and expectations that militaries use to guide their function in the field. The player is thus notionally given some ability, by choosing doctrines and determining the composition of their divisions, to shape how their units fight in the small scale (or at least how those fights are abstractly simulated). In practice, however, as we’ll see, HoI4‘s approach to doctrine is less developed than its approach to operations and never quite succeeds in really capturing the different ways that armies in this period understood themselves and functioned.
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This is, to be clear, historically speaking, a fairly absurd idea in practice, but the game makes it possible. Pursuing it early on is a significant handicap as it is necessary to bank around 500 political power before taking the major decision to hold the Imperial Conference (you need a few hundred for the decisions themselves, but also several hundred to run ‘improve opinion’ diplomatic efforts to get all of the relevant countries to agree).
I was finally in a position to fire the conference in January of 1941, while my armies continued to hold the line in the Low Countries.
Also, Iraq decided to go fascist at this point in the run and it went very badly for them, as you may be able to see in the background.
What is Doctrine?
Now military doctrine is a concept we have been meaning to get to here on the blog for quite a while and – at last – we have a good opportunity! Military doctrine, as a concept is one of those famously tricky to define concepts, but also absolutely essential for understanding how a military in any period – but perhaps especially in the Second World War – operates in practice. Parshall and Tully1 offer what I think is one of the most accessible and useful definitions of doctrine, “At its simplest, doctrine is the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight…doctrine is bigger than tactic in that doctrine encompasses not only the means for actually handling forces in battle, but also augments it with command structure and communications procedures.”
Doctrine is thus the term for the ‘standard operating procedures,’ as it were, of an army or indeed of an entire military.
The reason doctrine is essential is because, as Clausewitz says, everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult (drink!). The concept of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very simple. The execution of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very hard. After all, a real army does not actually consist of a few dozen units that, as in a video game, respond more or less instantly to the precise, clear and unambiguous commands of a single leader. Instead, a real army consists of many thousands (or hundreds of thousands or even millions) of human beings, each of whom is in their own experiential little universe – unable to read their minds and often unaware of the positions of their fellows.
If you want a large group of people to execute even the simplest of commands effectively, they need to already have some common conception of what the orders mean and how they carry them out. If you want two units, with different commanders, to coordinate effectively – often when they cannot be in direct communication – those commanders (and their soldiers) need to share some common conception of the normal or correct way to attack or defend. If I am commanding, say, a division’s artillery support (probably split into half a dozen or more batteries) and I am supposed to support a brigade’s attack in the morning, I need to have the same conception of what an attack means as the brigade commander. On the battlefield, armies cannot ‘make it up as they go along,’ they need to function according to standard procedures, a shared understanding of what an attack looks like, what a defensive line looks like, how to call out information on a radio, what orders mean and so on.
That shared conception is at the core of the concept of doctrine.
By the Second World War, this sort of doctrine had been largely formalized in nearly all of the militaries of the major participants. That body of formal knowledge consisted of training materials and best practices often laid out in an extensive catalog of field manuals, complete with their own bespoke jargon. As the war progressed, changes to doctrine could be promulgated the same way, with After Action Reports and ‘Lesson’s Learned’ summaries flowing ideally up the chain of command and new doctrine publications, updated field manuals and such flowing down the chain of command.
That said, as a pre-modernist, I have to note that while formal military doctrine – written out in field manuals – is a relatively modern invention, informal military doctrine is as old as warfare itself. Pre-modern armies also had ‘standard operating procedures,’ – often every bit as rigid as modern doctrine – which were learned informally, with older soldiers teaching newer ones (and young officers practically ‘apprenticing’ to more senior ones).
In short doctrine is necessary for armies (and navies, and air forces) to function. While it can be constraining, a ‘straitjacket’ that imposes standard approaches (sometimes to non-standard problems) there is simply no other way of coordination battles that might involve tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals who need to act in concert in order to be successful.
In terms of what doctrine includes, we run the real risk that because almost everything a military does (or has) interacts with doctrine, there’s a sense in which everything is doctrine and so nothing seems like doctrine in a kind of ‘the fish doesn’t know it is wet’ situation. Instead, while it is the case that doctrine tends to be evolutionary (smaller changes, iteration on iteration) rather than being designed ‘from scratch’ from first principles, it is helpful to think about building a doctrine from first principles to get a sense of what it entails.
Beginning at the operational level (we’ll put strategy aside for now), doctrine begins with a theory of victory, a sense of how an army defeats an opposing force. That theory of victory could be, for instance, attritional in nature (“we win by inflicting more casualties on the enemy until their force collapses”) or it could be based in maneuver (“we win by breaking through enemy lines and then maneuvering to cut off enemy forces or disrupt their logistics.”) Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war (or engaged in non-violence or terrorism), the theory of victory may be entirely abstract, focused on public opinion or popular will. Naturally armies with different theories of victory are going to construct very different doctrines for achieving those goals.
For instance, an army that has a theory of victory based on maneuver is going to need to concentrate a lot of force and coordinate it to create that breakthrough at a specific spot in the enemy line and then the ability to go fast once that breach is made, which is going to demand different command structures and procedures than an army that is focused on simply inflicting attrition. In particular, the maneuver army might want to push a lot of command authority down to lower ranks so that they can go fast in situations where communications with high command are difficult and conditions on the ground are rapidly changing. But a different army might want to pull command authority up to enable very large, well-coordinated, intricately planned ‘set piece’ battles, perhaps in order to try to shift the attritional balance in their favor (or achieve a very choreographed advance).
That theory of victory in turn is going to shape the conduct of a battle. To take our ‘maneuver’ theory of victory army, the next question becomes “what is the force structure of the sharp forward edge of your breakthrough force?” Do you want your tanks distributed widely or concentrated into a handful of units? What is the role of infantry in this attack? If the infantry and the tanks are expected to coordinate closely, they probably need to be placed together into the same divisions so that they can train together and be commanded together. What about the artillery? Do you want each small unit to have a little bit of artillery of its own, or a really big ‘grand battery’ at the disposal of the division commander, which can be unleashed in a coordinated manner, perhaps focused on a single objective in a larger battle? Doctrine is going to play into the structure of your army: what capabilities, equipment and troops does a given division (or corps or brigade or army group) have? What is its command structure? Which elements are subordinate?
Those concerns then flow downward into the fighting procedures for individual smaller units. When the divisional commander orders his armored brigade to ‘take that hill’ – what does that look like? Do the tanks have a formation to advance in? Does the infantry expect to go first in front of the tanks or to follow in their wake (or is the infantry not in the same command chain as the tanks at all and so will just struggle to mutually support each other – a persistent problem for the British Army for much of WWII). How does air power and artillery factor in here? What level of ‘fires’ support does the company commander advancing his company expect to get – and how does he expect to get it? Doctrine gets all the way down to “how does the company commander’s signal officer call for an artillery strike?” because in the chaos of battle you need standard ways to indicate a specific location and call a specific strike (grid squares, usually).
And again, the ‘best approach’ here may differ if the theory of victory is different! We might ask for instance, during a large offensive, what is the best use of your close air support aircraft? Are they best employed to focus their attacks on the point of breakthrough, contributing to the massed firepower at the decisive point? Or perhaps it is a better idea to have them striking deeper along an enemy’s operational depth, hitting reserves, reinforcements on the move, supply depots and rear echelon units that might be softer targets? The balance between those missions (with implications for what the guys on the ground expect from their aircraft) is going to depend on what you are trying to achieve (that theory of victory) but also how you are trying to achieve it.2
(As you can see, doctrine for land troops, navies and air forces are going to interact here too: these elements often need to be mutually supporting, so they need doctrines that link up effectively. Shore bombardment support gets a lot more effective if the troops ashore have a way to signal rapidly to the ships where they need the big guns.)
Mixed in with these choices are also just a ton of ‘best practices.’ Often the ‘best’ way to do something is not obvious or cannot be reasoned out easily from first principles but emerges slowly with experience. Something like, for instance, the ‘combat box‘ bomber formations, which enabled greater coverage and fields of fire from heavy bombers’ defensive guns (thus limiting – though by no means removing – the damage enemy fighters could do) had to be developed and refined based on experience from the field. Already mentioned but shore bombardment doctrine in the United States Navy evolved a lot during the war, particularly the somewhat counter-intuitive realization that often cruisers and destroyers provided the most effective shore support because their lighter (though still massive by land-warfare standards) guns could be quick, accurate and responsive, whereas the Big Guns on battleships were harder to fire ‘danger close’ and slower to get effectively on the target.
But what I want to stress is just how expansive doctrine ends up being. It isn’t just a simple tactical field manual – for one, by World War II, tactics are so complex that the ‘simple tactical field manual’ for a combined arms division with motorized, mechanized and armor elements supported by artillery and anti-aircraft along with maintenance and logistics elements would be enormous (in practice that’s dozens and dozens of field manuals). But equally command structures, communications practices, unit structures (what elements go in what division at what level), operational concepts and training procedures all fit into doctrine too.
And all of that matters because it gets to how two armies with broadly similar equipment can fight very differently, because they understand what they’re doing with that equipment differently, because they have different practices for its employment and different training to set up those practices. So doctrine is really important.
In the meantime, I focused on locking down North Africa and dealing with the Italian Navy, the Regia Marina. I had split my navy into two main battlegroups, a home fleet (organized around my more modern, deadly fast carrier group) and the Mediterranean fleet, organized around eight of my big ol’ battlewagons. The French navy was a lot less helpful than expected, so my fight with the Regia Marina ended up being somewhat attritional: the Mediterranean fleet won a series of battles basically trading screens favorably with the Regia Marina. Under normal circumstances, the way naval battles work in HoI4 is that damage accrues first to the smaller screening ships, so for the most part you have to ‘burn off’ an enemy’s supply of destroyers and cruisers before getting to put away their capital ships.
The Doctrine Tree
Sussing out how Hearts of Iron IV handles formal doctrine is actually really easy: it is a specific, discrete game mechanic called ‘doctrine,’ which is then split between land doctrine, air doctrine and naval doctrine.
That said, I think it is fairly clear that this is a set of mechanics the Hearts of Iron IV team has never been fully satisfied with. You can tell because the doctrine system has undergone more changes than most core Hearts of Iron IV systems, getting two major overhauls and a ton of minor tweaks. On release, doctrine was part of the research system and so doctrines were basically technologies which thus competed for research slots with every other kind of technology. However with the 1.11 patch (in 2021), doctrine was moved out of the research tree into its own space and used ‘army/air/navy experience’ as its currency instead of research time. Then with the 1.17 patch (in 2025) the system was massively overhauled again to drop much of the ‘tree’ structure entirely.
I want to talk about both the system as it existed post 1.11 and post 1.17, because I think both doctrine systems help understand what the developers are trying to do and also expose some weaknesses with the end result. We’re going to focus here in particular on Land Doctrine, but in each case the Air and Naval trees work basically the same way.
Let’s start with the ‘old’ doctrine tree:
Basically the structure here was a series of doctrine paths. Players first had to choose a tree (you could only develop one of the four doctrine categories) and then spent army experience (or air experience or navy experience for those trees) to ‘buy’ each progressive notch on the tree (originally this was research using technology). At a couple of points in each tree, it branched and the player chose one of the two branches (losing access to the other branch). Each stop on the tree confers a set of statistical benefits, making your divisions (or air wings, or ships) slightly better in a given way. The currency for this is that army/air/navy experience, which can be gained in peacetime slowly through having theorists in your high command or by doing military exercises, but is gained rapidly during a war simply by fighting, representing the battlefield’s role as a harsh teacher.
And you can see what this system is trying to do. Each of the four major ‘trees’ is meant to represent the military doctrine of one or more of the major powers. The Mobile Warfare Doctrine tree is meant to reflect German doctrine through the war (generally called by its German name, bewegungskrieg, ‘maneuver warfare’), with split branches favoring offense or defense meant to reflect the potential for Germany to get in over its head and have to shift to a more defensive approach to warfare (as it did, historically). The Superior Firepower Doctrine tree is meant to reflect the American approach to the war, with split branches that honestly don’t make a whole lot of sense and mostly gesture towards late- or post- Cold War doctrinal revisions (AirLand Battle was a 1980s US military doctrine and a significant depature from what came before while the phrase ‘Shock and Awe’ is most often associated with the 2003 Invasion of Iraq). The Grand Battleplan doctrine is meant to reflect countries that stuck closer to WWI tactical approaches (France, Britain, Japan), with one line for increasingly artillery and armor heavy British doctrine and another for Japanese infantry infiltration tactics. The formal doctrine it most clearly evokes is French Methodical Battle (La Bataille Conduite). Finally, the ‘Mass Assault’ doctrine was supposed to encompass both Chinese and Soviet approaches and that’s just…a real problem for reasons we’ll get into in a moment.
The update changes this system, recognizing that it was way to rigid. So the new post-1.17 system replaced the single doctrine tree the player must choose with a ‘grand doctrine’ and then supporting modular doctrines for each combat ‘arm.’ Thus a country’s army doctrine becomes the sum of its ‘grand doctrine’ (representing overall operational concept), plus a choice of one of several infantry, support, armor and operations sub-doctrines. That said the main four ‘grand doctrines’ retain the names and framing of the doctrine trees.
A country picks a doctrine for each of these categories (spending army experience as before) and then as that unit-type (or any unit from the grand doctrine) fights, they accumulate ‘mastery’ which unlocks progressive tiers of bonuses. The idea is that you spend army experience to pick the kind of warfare you want to do and then get better at it over time as the approach is practiced and refined.
There’s clearly a second intention to this system which is to enable players to try to recreate historical doctrinal systems. That is very evidence in the original ‘four trees’ system, where each tree (or branch) is clearly themed after the doctrine of a specific combatant. But it remains true in the post-1.17 modular system. Players are going to quickly pick up on, for instance, in the ‘armor’ subdoctrine, that ‘Armored Spearhead’ shows an American tank (a Sherman), while ‘Armored Infantry Support’ shows a German tank (a Tiger) and ‘Streamlined Deployment’ shows three Soviet tanks (T-34s, I think, though so small and in profile they could also be IS-2s).
And on the one hand, I think this is a noble attempt to actually model something fairly complex and on the other hand I think quite a few problems remain.
The first problem, somewhat reduced but not removed by the new system is simply that the ‘grand doctrines’ don’t necessarily map on well to what major powers were doing or at least thought they were doing. Both the United States and the Soviet Union understood themselves to be attempting to do a kind of maneuver warfare, the USA attempting to reverse-engineer German maneuver warfare doctrine, whereas the USSR came into the war with its own maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), which it needed to refine but also actually train and implement because Stalin had purged most of the officers who knew and developed it. It is certainly the case that the United States pursued a firepower-based solution to generating maneuver, enabled by the USA’s much larger industrial base, but the goal was still breakthroughs and maneuver, not merely blowing things up for blowing things’ up sake.
Meanwhile, placing the USSR under ‘Mass Assault’ is honestly borderline insulting given that the USSR would finish WWII with what is generally now regarded as the most sophisticated maneuver warfare doctrine around. While Soviet armies often took huge casualties and Soviet commanders – especially early in the war – often didn’t seem to understand their own doctrine and engaged in under-prepared, under-resourced infantry attacks (not infrequently because Stalin demanded counter-offensives before they were ready), the USSR was not doing ‘human wave’ attacks a la Enemy at the Gates (2001) and indeed by the time we are at Operation Bagration in 1944, it is very easy to argue that the Soviets are better at maneuver warfare than the Germans (indeed one could potentially try to make that argument as early as Operation Uranus in late 1942).
Likewise, ‘Grand Battleplan’ as the umbrella for France, Britain and Japan is equally odd. The British Army struggled a fair bit with infantry-and-armor coordination through the war and generally preferred carefully planned ‘set piece’ battles, with a pretty clear legacy reaching back to the lessons of the First World War (alongside the French Methodical Battle approach), but the Imperial Japanese Army was devoted to the cult of the offensive and favored quick marches, surprise and tenacity in offense, rather than a slow operational tempo characterized by intensive planning. If I were to place the IJA anywhere on the doctrine tree, it would be as a kind of alternate branch of the Mobile Warfare tree: Japan was trying to do speed, infiltration and maneuver, just with infantry (for the most part) rather than with armor (for the most part). The limitations of a ‘light and fast’ approach become pretty shockingly clear as one gets into the back half of 1942 and the IJA starts tangling with well-supplied Americans and Australians who have a lot of firepower at their disposal. In short, the Imperial Japanese Navy may have favored baroque, overly complex and choreographed battleplans, but the IJA was very much a ‘cult of the offensive’ organization that prioritized speed and surprise – albeit with a lot less trucks and tanks than what European armies were using.
So in the notional layout, these doctrines are often a weak match for the historical countries they are supposed to represent. The bonuses also often do not line up clearly either. Admittedly, the new doctrine system is significantly better in this regard. One of the classic balancing goof-ups of the old system was the ‘Mass Mobilization’ branch the Mass Assault Doctrine, which offered bonuses to manpower and reduced frontage for infantry brigades (enabling a country to get more infantry in the fight on a given section of front), which was meant to represent Nationalist China and (to an extent) the USSR reaching deep to mobilize enormous amounts of manpower – a ‘muscle not metal’ approach – but actually was basically useless for those countries (they have plenty of manpower anyway) and extremely useful for small highly industrialized countries which desperately needed the huge boost to recruitable manpower.
The new tree avoids these kinds of errors, but in playing I have generally found the connections between doctrine choices and actual operational concept to be fairly weak. Part of the problem is that doctrines are presented as a confusing collection of tiered bonuses to a bewildering array of things. Which is better for building armored divisions arming for decisive breakthroughs: +5% breakthrough, +10% soft attack and a flat +5 organization for medium and heavy tanks or +10% breakthrough, +2 organization and +0.05 recovery rate? I have six hundred hours in this game and I would still have to consult a guide to figure out which was the better option for that specific concept.
Meanwhile, balance remains a problem. Ideally, this would be a case where different countries would find that different doctrines supported their own mix of industry, terrain and strategic needs. In practice, each balancing patch tends to just alter the array of ‘meta’ choices with entire grand doctrines almost invariably assigned to the scrap heap of ‘never pick.‘ This is a problem that, as we’ll see, is intensified greatly by the division-designer. From my perspective, this system could actually do to be a lot simpler, with the player being tasked to think about their intended operational concept and then guided into choices that fit that concept, rather than having to confront a bewildering array of stat bonuses which often don’t do what they are supposed to historically model in any event (and do almost nothing to really tell the player what they are supposed to do).
The final issue here is very strong path dependence in doctrine choices. Historically, armies frequently tried things, realized they didn’t work and then tried new things. American amphibious operations doctrine – which by 1944 was an absolute marvel of efficiency in managing enormous and extremely complex operations – largely emerged by getting it wrong a whole bunch. The marine landings at Gaudalcanal in August of 1942, for instance, failed to load supplies so that they would be unloaded in the order of the most essential to the least, leaving the marines in the lurch when Japan contested the waters around the island, stopping unloading prematurely. That problem was fixed for the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November of 1942, but the major takeaway of allied commanders from the Torch landings is that if they had been facing truly fierce, determined resistance, they probably would have failed. In short, no one set out in 1939 to plan D-Day: the doctrine for Operationa Overlord emerged out of a process of trial and error.
And while the current doctrine system allows for lessons learned and experience gaining through the ‘mastery’ system (which ‘levels up’ existing doctrines to unlock new bonuses), it heavily penalizes shifting doctrine in response to changing conditions. A player that goes in with an ‘Armored Spearhead’ oops-all-tanks armored division concept only to have to realize they need to back up to a more combined arms ‘Armored Infantry Support’ doctrine – which is exactly the experience Britain and the United States had with their armored doctrine! – is basically forced to reset to zero as if they hadn’t learned anything at all.3 The player is aggressively penalized for trying an operational concept, realizing it doesn’t work and trying to shift tracks (because it resets their bonuses and costs more currency), but this is exactly what the most successful armies in World War II did.
However none of these issues are, in my view, the biggest issue for Hearts of Iron IV‘s concept of doctrine. The biggest issue for HoI4‘s doctrine is that the most important – for the game itself, at least – parts of doctrine do not take place in the doctrine system.
However, the near total destruction of the German surface fleet the previous year gave me the ‘trump card’ which I now played, moving the Mediterranean fleet into repair, while shifting my fast attack fleet into the Mediterranean to keep the pressure on the Regia Marina.
The result was suitably lopsided: by the end of June, 1941, the Regia Marina had largely ceased to exist except for a smattering of submarines and a handful of surface ships that would be badly outmatched by my repaired Mediterranean fleet. That was important as it bought me the opportunity to now transfer my fast battle group East.
The All-Powerful Division Designer
As noted in the first part of this series, the basic unit of Hearts of Iron IV‘s combat is the division. Now, as we’ll see, divisions can vary a lot in size – indeed, divisions can be as small as a single brigade or practically as large as an entire corps. But the game treats all of these units as divisions, which cannot either be split or merged.
This is actually a significant change from previous entries in the series. In Hearts of Iron III, countries actually produced brigades (each of a single type) which were then combined into a division (which could have 2-5 brigades in it). A player could thus pull a brigade out of a division and attach it to another, or cobble together a division from available spare brigades, or produce new brigades and attach them to existing divisions and so on.
By contrast divisions in Hearts of Iron IV are produced to templates. Each division has a template which determines what its components will be and it will automatically attempt to pull the necessary manpower and equipment to bring those components to full strength. In essence, the actual ‘brigades’ in the division structure are really mostly notional: a division is actually a container for battalions (the sub-units of brigades in the division-designer). In addition to the core ‘line’ battalions (which determine a division’s combat width – the amount of frontage it takes up), a division also can have support battalions, which boost its capability (and raise its equipment and manpower cost) without adding frontage, but it is limited to five of them.
As divisions go, this configuration makes for an effective defensive unit, with high enough piercing to stop light and even medium tanks and enough soft attack to mulch infantry, however its low breakthrough means it should not be used to attack much (or you will eat manpower losses).
Because the United Kingdom is very much ‘long’ on industry but ‘short’ on manpower, I’ve opted for a template that emphasizes metal over men, thus the full raft of regimental and divisional support (including a field hospital to limit manpower losses). That equipment makes this a fairly expensive template, but Britain can pay for it. I’m sure a player could punch these divisions around, but the AI really struggles to make offensive headway against 3 or 4 of these divisions on good terrain.
Divisions go into training as whole units (the entire division is trained together before deployment), but once deployed, they remain ‘attached’ to their template. If the player changes a division’s template, that instantly changes the expected composition of every division using that template. All of those divisions will immediately request or return the necessary equipment and manpower from (or to) the national stockpile to reinforce up to their new expected components. In practice, because being under-strength for a given composition can impose pretty significant penalties, it is a wiser idea to copy an existing template, upgrade it, and then swap divisions over to the new template when they’re out of combat.
Now this needn’t necessarily be a problem if you could have infinite division templates, but you generally can’t. Modifying a division template requires army experience, the same currency used to buy doctrines (and also to modify vehicle templates – so designing a new tank or creating an upgraded version of an old one burns this currency too). In practice, of the three ‘experience’ currencies, army experience remains precious the longest in the game, because it is used for the most things. That means that unnecessary division template changes burn a real and limited resource.
Again, I make no claims to this being an ideal division template – like all of my division templates, it’s a design I got stuck on quite a few versions ago and it works well enough in single-player not to be worth changing.
That will matter to a different degree to different countries. France and Britain, in particular, tend to be ‘starved’ for army experience prior to the start of the war where they then suddenly have to face Germany. You can see the resulting incentives play out in the UK run I have been showing in the screenshots: my army experience was very carefully ‘budgeted’ until well into 1942. I needed enough army experience to have two effective infantry division templates (one for UK infantry, one for units recruited from India) ready in 1939, plus enough to create templates for one armored and one motorized division, to design the tanks and self-propelled artillery to go in those divisions and finally to buy all of my sub-doctrines. That leaves functionally no space for specialized division templates.
Now what the AI does is it ‘versions’ its division templates (because it costs nothing to copy an existing template you already have), causing the AI to end up with a dozen or more templates, which are all incremental changes on each other. But my sense is most players do what I do: they maintain a handful of division templates which they work hard to get to a ‘final form’ before deployment and then subsequently make on minimal changes to.
Otherwise, this is a 4-4-1 on 26 width; the meta is for larger divisions, but honestly this division is already unusually big compared to historical armored divisions (300 tanks!). Whereas the leg infantry division has ~100 breakthrough and the mechanized infantry division ~200, this division has 745 breakthrough, enabling it to attack while taking relatively little damage, while its high attack value ensures that the defenders will absolutely take heavy damage.
Note that I am exclusively using medium armor – no light armor or heavy armor – for both my tanks and self-propelled. This is to save on research. Britain has good research ability, but is pulled in many directions, needing to maintain top of the line ships, aircraft and land warfare, so any simplification (like being able to ignore heavy and light tanks) is welcome.
The result are, frankly, ‘cookie-cutter armies.’ In that UK run, by the summer of 1944, my army consisted of 305 divisions (roughly 3 million men) using just seven templates (two of which are actually identical ‘colonial’ templates to pull manpower from India and Malaya; they stay unique even after those countries are absorbed, so it is really five templates). My main force in Europe thus consists of 130 exactly identical infantry divisions, backed by 13 exactly identical mechanized infantry divisions and 13 exactly identical armored divisions.
This is, to put it lightly, not how actual divisions generally worked. Of course divisions might be of different sizes and strengths due to combat losses (something HoI4 considers), but while most countries did have a standard ‘template’ sense of what an infantry division or an armored division should look like, that was no guarantee at all that every such division did look like that.4 The division template, for instance, treats light, medium and heavy tanks as no-substitution battalion types, but actual Panzer Divisions varied quite widely in how many light, medium or heavy tanks they had. Pretty much everyone threw divisions forward that were effectively missing elements, either because those elements hadn’t been stood up yet or were still in transit or had been detached for some other job. Hearts of Iron IV has no way to represent that: you either have all of a division or you have nothing. A division can be damaged, but it cannot be incomplete and it can never be ‘non-standard.’
The larger problem is the degree to which the division designer – the screen where you decide what battalions go into your division templates – largely usurps the role of doctrine. In the Second World War, having the right doctrine and training to get tanks and infantry to cooperate together effectively what substantially more important than the simple question of deciding to have armor divisions – command structures, communications, tactics all mattered. But the lion’s share of the work in Hearts of Iron IV is simply accomplished by placing motorized infantry and armor in the correct quantities into the division designer in a single division. The job of learning how to coordinate armor and infantry is now mostly complete; having the right doctrine provides a noticeable but decidedly smaller bonus to that ‘correct’ division template’s performance. But in fact, as was repeatedly demonstrated in World War II, having the ‘right’ division structure was not enough to produce victory, not without soldiers and officers who understood how to use that structure.
The importance of the division designer is, of course, most visible when it ‘breaks.’ For the first few years after release, for instance, due to the way frontage was calculated, divisions at exactly 10, 20 and 40 width functioned much better than any other configuration. That has long since been patched, but the example (especially in single-player) that remains is what the community refers to as ‘space marines:’ a leg infantry division with a single armored battalion in it (typically heavy armor, because who cares if it goes fast). Because battalions do not have stats, divisions do, the one battalion of armor has its armor value averaged across the entire division, which can push it just enough enough to get over the armor-piercing break-points for regular infantry or infantry with just support anti-tank, which triggers a massive reduction in the damage that division takes. Thus the label ‘space marines’ because the division fights as if its infantry were wearing powered armor. ‘Space marines’ can thus easily outmatch basically any division the AI will produce, although in multiplayer, players are well aware of this trick and can counter it.5
The irony is, of course, that this idea – distributing heavier tanks across the entire infantry force more or less evenly – was tried in World War II, but it was famously ineffective. This was the French and British approach to armor, the ‘Infantry Tank’ and the actual observed effect was that there were never enough tanks at the critical point when they were ‘sprinkled’ like this.
As a game design element, the division designer gives the player so many buttons and knobs to twist and turn that it is almost inevitable that players are going to min-max divisions out of the system that grossly outperform the more-or-less historical division templates the AI has to work with. On the flipside, the division designer has some trouble really representing historical differences in unit composition. If you want an ‘artillery heavy’ army, for instance, you have to add ‘line artillery’ (artillery used as a main ‘line’ battalion rather than a support company) as a co-equal element with the infantry brigades – you cannot just expand the ‘support artillery,’ but in practice American and British divisions remained ‘triangular’ (three infantry brigades) in structure, with division artillery (‘div arty’) simply expanded to include more batteries. The line/support distinction in the division designer doesn’t seem to have a real world parallel (unless there is one in the Red Army? I am admittedly less knowledgeable about the Soviet military).6
Meanwhile the system is again incapable of representing Soviet practice well. While Soviet divisions might notionally be close to the same size as German, British or American divisions, in practice they tended to be substantially smaller. Importantly, a lot of the heavier supporting elements (like artillery) were concentrated not at the division level but at the corps level, with the result that a Soviet corps almost functioned like a jumbo-sized western division. You can sort-of-kind-of simulate this in Hearts of Iron IV by using relatively large division templates for the USSR and simply pretending they represent corps instead of divisions, but HoI4 simply does not have a level of organization for a corps.
And while division-size may seem relatively minor – what is the difference between two twenty-width divisions vs. one forty-width division – the way that Hearts of Iron IV calculates damage reduction via defense (when defending) or breakthrough (when attacking) has typically meant that oversized divisions are better, particularly for attacking. So whereas in the war itself, the Germany, Britain the USA and the USSR all settled on a similar size for an armored division (or for the Soviets, a tank corps), with around 200 tanks and 8,000-10,000 personnel, the current HoI4 ideal tank division is a monster with nearly 20,000 personnel and around 450 tanks. There’s a reason no one in the actual war made their divisions regularly that large.
The end result is that a lot of what in the real world we would term doctrine is expressed through the division designer, but that frankly the division designer feels like one of the ‘gamiest’ elements of Hearts of Iron IV that doesn’t do a great job of expressing differences in doctrinal approaches between countries (‘meta’ division templates are often used quite regardless of the country or the doctrine) or in modeling the divisions that, by war’s end, most of the combatants had settled on as ideal.
The key problem was actually airpower: the Luftwaffe still had the attritional edge int he air over the front lines. Fortunately, I was developing a strong industrial lead, so I would spend the next six months or so not only building up my armored forces but also increasing my rate of fighter production so that I could run Germany out of planes.
No Obligation to Follow Doctrine
A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine
(An apocryphal quote generally attributed to an unnamed Soviet observer during the Cold War)
On the one hand, Hearts of Iron IV makes a real effort to try to model the way different countries approached doctrine. I’ve focused here on land warfare doctrine, which really at the time mostly meant maneuver warfare doctrine, as for the major combatants in Europe the defining question was how ought the tank be used – but there is a matching set of questions for air and naval doctrine.
On the other hand, I don’t think this model succeeds particularly well.
By the war’s end, the maneuver warfare doctrines apparent in Europe really were visibly different. German maneuver warfare doctrine emphasized devolving command authority downward to create rapid moving, agile forces (a concept that regularly goes by its German name, Auftragstaktik, “mission-tactics”), which aimed to achieve breakthrough by focusing all of its firepower on a key point in the enemy front line. Soviet maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), instead pulled command authority up, focusing support materiel up at the corps and even army level. It also aimed to produce mobile breakthrough, but by engaging the enemy across their operational depth, using infantry, armor and air power to simultaneously hit front lines, reserves and rear areas to induce a broader frontal collapse. American doctrine was, in some ways less developed, but – motivated by the limits of how many divisions the United States could realistically deploy in Europe – focused on packing as much firepower as possible into the smallest frontage and divisions possible, often using absolutely smothering quantities of airpower and artillery.7
And Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t really draw that out. Infantry divisions with line artillery isn’t a cute trick for just Superior Firepower doctrine armies to pack a ton of firepower into a small unit, but a fairly standard template choice you’ll find used by players running a lot of countries. Deep Operations doctrine doesn’t actually provide a way for players to strike across the operational depth of an enemy: damage accrues to enemy divisions reinforced into the front lines regardless and there isn’t any simulation of collapsing rear areas. Even the basic question of ‘should the infantry or the tanks go first in an assault’ (‘armored spearhead’ (USA, Germany) vs. ‘armor as exploitation force’ (USSR)) isn’t really modeled in terms of which divisions take damage.
Meanwhile at the level most visible to the player – at the operational level – the player is under no obligation to follow their own doctrine. Playing as the United Kingdom on the Grand Battleplan doctrine which should mean a strong preference for exhaustively planned set-piece battles, I find often launch far quicker, less planned operations which ought to be something out of the Mobile Warfare doctrine tree. Sure, the bonuses from Grand Battleplan make my planning cap somewhat higher, but the difference isn’t large enough to offset other momentary advantages.
The result here is a valiant attempt to model the way doctrine shapes how militaries conduct themselves in war that feels like it falls short, in part because it is too afraid of actually constraining the player, to force them to actually follow their doctrine. In particular, the game is afraid of ever having units simply function badly because their doctrine is poor or because they’re being used in a way not suited to it, but of course that absolutely was the experience of various countries which tried to use armor without the necessary coordination and communications doctrines. As a result, the doctrine trees end up mostly as a set of bonuses which may or may not be optimal rather than something more closely approaching playstyles.
I am, at this point, however, in a rather stronger position. Victory in Ethiopia and North Africa has meant that I could move a potent field army East, meaning that Singapore is actually unassailable by land (indeed, I’ll be invading into Siam instead) rather than only notionally being so. Meanwhile the neutralization of most of the Regia Marina means that my fast battlegroup could move east, basing out of Singapore and aiming to hold the Straits of Malacca. Essentially my goal is to keep the IJN ‘trapped’ in the Pacific Thunderdome with the United States Navy (as Japan has attacked the Philippines and thus brought the USA into the war), where attrition will swiftly destroy them.
Operating close to your bases is a significant advantage in HoI4 naval warfare and so my squadron – with four fleet carriers – is more than strong enough to keep control over the waters around Malaya and Indonesia and deals some stinging defeats to the IJN in the process, hastening the failure of Japanese naval power in the face of the inevitable American naval grinder.
- Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (2005), 83.
- In the event, to grossly oversimplify the complex, the German preference in the war was to focus that air support on the decisive point (the Schwerpunkt), while Soviet doctrine focused on using air assets to strike the enemy’s ‘operational depth’ (while their front line was hopefully being plastered by the assault itself). At least by 1944, the American approach was in some ways just more, using heavier air frames (up to and including massive strategic bombers) to plaster enemy rear areas, while artillery buried the enemy front line and fighter-bombers made it impossible for the enemy to move anything by daylight for fear of being bombed. In some cases, such as the demolition of the Panzer Lehr division as part of the Operation Cobra breakout, US commanders assigned more bombers to hit an enemy position than the enemy had men (the 2,200 remaining Germans in Panzer Lehr got hit with about 3,000 aircraft in a single day). But of course that doctrinal choice has strategic implications in terms of production and how much manpower is going to the front versus going to the factories!
- There is an irony that, as of right now, the Armored Spearhead doctrine is actually a fair bit stronger than Armored Infantry Support, so far as I can tell.
- Players of other WWII strategy titles, like Eugen Systems’ Steel Division series, where the player has access to the components of one specific division at a time, will be immediately and quite strongly aware that divisions, even divisions notionally of the ‘same type’ did not always actually have the same components! 16th Panzer, 116th Panzer and Panzer-Lehr (130th Panzer) were all notionally Panzer divisions but in June of 1944, they had wildly different unit and equipment complements, which Steel Division represents fairly well.
- Before anyone asks, no, I do not use space marine division templates in single-player. You can see my infantry template up above.
- The irony is that Hearts of Iron III did have a real parallel: you researched ‘superior firepower’ which added one more brigade slot in the division and then added a second artillery support regiment to create something like the artillery-heavy British infantry division structure. For what it is worth, I feel like an obvious change here would be for a ‘superior firepower’ doctrine to work not by giving bonuses to ‘line artillery’ but instead to double or triple the size of support artillery components (thus also requiring you to have more artillery to supply them with), with a matching increase in firepower (but not frontage), to reflect what the United States and Britain were doing late in the war, which was massing a lot more materiel on a significantly smaller frontage.
- Though everyone used a lot of artillery, to be clear.
What’s that old meme? Might as well bring it up now, it’s classic.
In order to tell whose troops you’re fighting, fire a couple rounds at them, then hang up a dummy and leave.
If you come back to find the dummy with a trio of rifle rounds through its helmet, they’re British.
If you come back to find the dummy riddled with machine gun fire, they’re Germans.
If you come back to find the dummy standing guard over an enemy POW camp, they’re Italian or French.
If you come back to find the dummy decapitated with a sword through the gut, they’re Japanese.
If you come back to find the dummy stabbed, covered with treadmarks, with a red star painted on it, they’re the soviets.
And if you step away only to watch the entire horizon explode into burning fire as airplanes, battleships, and artillery reduce the grid square into shrapnel and ruin, they’re American.
On a more serious note, the division designer and equipment designer in particular are bewildering design choices. It’s simultaneously too gamified to be realistic, too granular to be fun, and too impactful to ignore. I honestly miss the days when you didn’t design equipment at all, and just unlocked different tanks and guns directly.
For a second there I thought you said that last dummy was hit by gridfire. Don’t mess with those guys.
Hilariously it’s fully in character for the Grey Area to be poking around WW2 incognito.
One of the problems I feel with the game is that it kinda *over* emphasizes the “produce one good/meta thing”. Which to be fair is probably at least partially incentivized (better have one tank model that you build a lot of than 15 where you have a small number of each)
But it’s especially notable for more “specialized” equipment: Especially the specialist armored stuff (SPART, SPAA, TD etc.) where both designing and producing them is often just not efficient (or not efficient *enough*) in SP. (or sometimes creates weirder incentives, like for a bit you were better off just building SPART rather than tanks, IIRC)
Similarily, I feel you don’t see motorized divisions to the extent that you should, for a varietyof reasons. (as contrasted to HOI2)
Theoretically that was part of what was supposed to have been solved by the chassis system. Basically every self propelled gun and tank destroyer was mounted on a modified tank chassis, which means that factories were able to assembly line out different components and have them assembled elsewhere, or at least work off of known blueprints and preserve technical knowledge. It didn’t cost a lot of retooling downtime to produce an upgraded version of a tank or gun, or to take a tank factory and start making self propelled guns.
The problem is that the lack of granular control and benefits on the sub-division level mean that you’re often better off never producing a lot of specialized chassis to begin with-it’s not too hard to also produce Stugs as well as Panzers, but why take the time to design a Stug? You don’t really need one to begin with, and it costs army experience. Better to just give your Panzers bigger guns so they can perform the same role well enough. The load of stats and such are so esoteric the player doesn’t ever really understand if they were better served by creating a dedicated system anyway, you’d realistically have to do dedicated testing with controlled combat situations to figure it out.
I think I am agreeing with the host when I say that part of the solution here is to devolve these decisions off of the player. Have the focus tree create recognizable weapon variants and then give the player a limited pool of resources to modify them. This more correctly models what the military procurement process generally looks like, which is more of a push pull system between various levels of the system and often highly dependent on the eccentricates of the countries military general staff or civilian manufacturing sector. It wasn’t really an option for Nazi Germany to not produce the STUG, Mannstein was personally involved in the project and the need for the weapon was recognized by a bunch of veterans, so on a bunch of levels there was impetus to make either that vehicle or something derived from it. Hitler didn’t need to say “I want a Self propelled gun!” nor have his generals draft up specifications from on high, the knowledge of what was needed and wanted was more diffuse than that.
And, of course, the times when the process did work from on high, with Hitler demanding bigly weapons[1] (See: H-Class battleship, Maus, etc.) it went absolutely terribly. This isn’t to say it shouldn’t be a part of the game, there’s a Wunderwaffle expansion for a reason, but the fact that the *default* procurement system in fact resembles the procurement process of deranged lunatics more interested in prestige than effect is a mistake.
As for motorized in particular, IIRC they were/are meta for the tank divisions because you can build them for cheap at the game start, while mechanized is too resource and research intensive to matter.
[1] Okay, so in fact the process was often more granular; the Germany industrial sector and General Staff would basically compete for Hitler’s attention for approval, and one of the surest ways to get approval was to promise to make something bigger, rather than Hitler directly saying “I want that but bigger” (which did happen more rarely). In any case it’s a failing of fascism and authoritarianism in general that decision making is pushed in this direction.
since your equipments are never obsolete in the game (you can always upgrade a panzer 3 to a panzer 4), there is less need to convert chassis to specialized variants, unlike in real life.
Your take on Hitler’s equipment preferences is ahistorical memery, I’m afraid.
– Plan Z was proposed by the navy prompted by its own desires. That Hitler didn’t care becomes rather obvious when looking at, y’know, the Anglo-German naval agreement
– Hitler approved of Plan Z, sure. He also approved of dropping it a few months later when the war started without making a fuss. Almost as if he didn’t actually care
– and some years later, he demanded getting rid of the big boats altogether
Coming to the air force, the emergent Luftwaffe did initially go for heavy bombers… But that was Walther Wever’s idea. Then people noticed that it was economically impossible and the effectiveness basically nil, and the strategic bomber approach replaced with stukas (originally an American concept that Udet fell in love with). Hitler loved it.
And army planning was still trying to keep things as light as possible straight into 1942, still focussing on the Panzer III above all else. Hitler did eventually interfere in the development of the Panther and Tiger to add armour – though inhowfar this was a bad idea is debatable, since given German demographics and the strategic situation (not enough manpower and in a defensive grind), focussing on survivability wasn’t exactly what I’d call an irredeemable error.
The famous super artillery in the 54- 80 cm range wasn’t Hitler’s idea, either. The army contracted the industry to produce maginot line crackers. It did.
The V2 was initially disapproved of by Hitler, as he recognised the considerable resource expense, although witnessing a test launch managed to win him over.
The V1, which Hitler did approve of from the start, was so staggeringly cost-effective, the Brits thought – correctly – that it’d just obsoleted the heavy bomber.
‘Hitler only liked it big and heavy’ is a nonsensical meme more disconnected from reality than Hitler in April ’45.
…Sorta?
There is scholarship that, at least with the H-Class battleship, Hitler specifically pushed for bigger guns until reigned in. Source: Garzke, William H. & Dulin, Robert O. (1985). Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-0-87021-101-0.
I am not deep enough into the topic to speak about the *validity* of this scholarship or review the primary sources, but I consulted it before posting to make sure that at least one of my remembered examples was true.
As you acknowledge with the other examples the question is a matter of degrees. There were situations where decision making process was more rational versus more irrational, but Hitler’s contributions were firmly on the irrational side. This didn’t always manifest in Hitler stenciling in bigger guns or anything, but it did manifest in how the upper levels of the procurement and design process worked. Hitler’s influence is not merely that he approved the V2, but that the people who made it were in power, thought that it had a purpose, and thought that he’d like it.
This, of course, wasn’t a feature of just Hitler or Nazism. Mussolini is documented as being a meddler too, who created procurement systems that were irrational and personally helmed that irrationality. It’s not an isolated trend. But there is actual scholarship on Hitler being part of this history, even if it was more complicated in most examples of *how* he contributed.
The Nazi knew they couldn’t win the war if they tried to outproduce the Allies with the same kinds of vehicle. Superweapons were the only hope they had, as other options were even more irrational.
Hitler does get a bit too much flack sometimes in military terms. By the very low standards of populist dictators with only low-level military experience he wasn’t bad at all (certainly better than Mussolini!). Earlier Hitler while rather risk-seeking was not always the incorrect one in arguments with his generals. But his judgement grew worse and his meddling greater as the war progressed.
One first hand account (I believe Erich Kordt?) has it that Hitler’s decision making method was to issue vague and possibly contradictory instructions, leave his ministers to interpret them, and then take credit for everything that he thought turned out well and blame the ministers for everything that didn’t. I think that may explain the ambiguity in what Hitler did or didn’t directly command.
(The account also says that Hitler claimed to have read all of Clausewitz – the account doubts that Hitler ever read anything.)
Tbf, you do actually see quite a bit of conversion of obsolete tanks into specialized roles in hoi4. It’s uncommon to see someone make a Pz4 and a Stug on the same chassis at the same time, but it’s pretty common to see them turn the pz4 chassis into a cheap Flame tank/tank destroyer once you have your Panthers being made. Overrall i do agree and it’s still pretty niche though.
Hmm…probably still nowhere near as far as it should go, given that the actual story of so much German WWII ground equipment is squeezing every last drop out of obsolete chassis: not just Panzer III -> StuG (and StuH, for that matter), but Panzer I -> Panzerjager I; Panzer II -> Marder II and Wespe; Panzer IV -> StuG IV (yes, that was also a thing) or several varieties of Jagdpanzer IV (another tank destroyer; the best version carried Panther’s gun, but many were actually just straight-up downgrades which were simply cheaper to build, and got called “Guderian’s ducks”) or Flakpanzer IV (three whole varieties as well; the initial one with an open platform instead of a turret (known as Mobelwagen), and two with proper turrets Wirbelwind (quad 20 mm) and Ostwind (one 37mm, same as Mobelwagen). There were about 400 Flakpanzer IV vehicles in total (only about 100 less than Tigers II!) so they weren’t exactly a footnote either.)
And then, of course, there’s everything they did with foreign equipment; not just the fairly well-known Pz. 38(t) and its afterlife (to Marder III, then to Hetzer; as well as a number becoming “Grille” self-propelled artillery pieces or Flakpanzer 38 AA platforms), but also the original Marder being based on a captured French gun tractor; the initial generations of all three Marders carrying captured Russian guns; many infantry units generating self-propelled anti-tank support by mounting (some) of their assigned ~70 PaK 36 37mm guns onto the tankette-style Renault UE gun tractor (and for a short while in the USSR, onto the slightly larger and more capable T-20 Komsomolets gun tractor); and the repurposing of dead-end underpowered French tanks into self-propelled artillery. The below is perhaps the most interesting example – but there’s really so much to pick from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reihenwerfer
I really hope our host sets aside some time to discuss this in a later post: if the mechanics overlook the pressures which drove all of the above, then it really does indicate that Paradox is selling a certain fantasy about WWII; a fantasy which must be zealously shielded from any halfway accurate depiction of Germany as thieves practicing what they themselves called “Robber’s economy”; always scrambling to squeeze not “just” the people and the environment (natural and built) of the captured territories, but also everything they have already produced (see also; building whole factories in Western Europe just to produce shells for the Soviet artillery they captured and how the Renault trucks, regularly supplied from still-operating factories ended up practically everywhere the Germans went (except the Soviet territories fought over in 1942; French vehicles utterly failed to tolerate the Russian winter of 1941, so any still operational were generally withdrawn the following year.) For shame!
I admit, this is more a question of game mechanics than the historical implications of the game, but how were you able to grind down the Regia Marina so badly even with a superior fleet? I would have thought that land based air power would be what dominates the Mediterranean, and unless you could win control of the skies, it would be hard to sortie out, but if you did, I imagine the Regia Marina would stay home at port under cover of their own fighters? Or am I importing too much WiF into HoI?
Also, what’s the situation with U.S. entry? How does the game model the political aspects there? (Or is that for a later post in the series?)
Technically you’re probably right, in that the Mediterranean can be dominated by land based anti naval bombers. In multiplayer this is the meta, meaning that if the allies lose their airports they basically cede the Mediterranean, and is how Germany is expected to invade Britain in a winning game too; dominate the channel with cheap naval CAS from land.
However the issue is that the AI isn’t terribly smart and can be suckered into fighting away from it’s land based air force, or at their extreme operational range, and tends not to use land based craft effectively at sea anyway. This isn’t unrealistic as the Axis powers were not terribly rational or effective when it came to using their air power, but it’s a marked difference from optimal play.
The USA typically gets brought into the war via one of two mechanisms. In a fully ahistorical game the extreme (Silver legion or Communist party) American focus paths eventually lead to intervention in Europe or Asia, at which point the cascading alliances almost inevitably pull them into a broad side of the war. Alternatively in basically all games Japan will almost always end up at war with the Philippines eventually, as even democratic Japan gets incentives to support their independence, and the Philippines are American puppets so that brings them in
Regardless of if the US goes to war or gets attacked you almost always end up with either the axis versus the allies, or communism versus democracy. It’s rarer but possible to have some sort of monarchist versus democracy war in Europe that the US is uninterested in and a separate communism versus democracy and or fascism war in the Pacific, which means you can end up with a very different world by the mid 40’s and a new, scarier, cold war. Every once in a while you see some truly epic final battle between the Pacific and Atlantic to end the game, if different sides win the two theaters.
And of course with ahistorical focuses you also occasionally see a south American war flare up that either starts or ends with a war against America, or Britain going full fascist and sucker punching America. America is actually quite vulnerable at game start because of it’s small army and the great depression, so it’s not fully suicidal to try that.
The “world tension” mechanic controls how Democratic countries enter the war. Tension goes up when countries do militaristic things, and Democratic countries aren’t able to take certain actions until tension hits certain thresholds. Fascist and Communist countries have no such constraint, which means they have some control over when and how WWII starts.
The US also has options in its national focus tree to give it a choice between neutrality (boosts their economy, but raises their tension threshold) and interventionism (lowers the threshold but makes it harder to build up the economy), so on the historical route it’s the slowest to get into the war.
I wouldn’t be surprised if national focuses get a post in this series, since they’re the main way the game presents “what ifs,” where a country could have taken a different route through history if its leaders did something different.
Actually the neutrality act doesn’t really improve the economy, not directly. It kinda averages out.
What happens is three fold.
A. Passing Limited intervention lets you switch off of isolation to the Civilian Economy mobilization law immediately (well, you need political power, which accumulates over time, but you can save it up). The benefits of that are myriad, as it basically gives you greater government control over the factories-the biggest effect is that it directly frees many of your civilian factories from making consumer goods, letting you make weapons or construct more factories. The game basically models the consumer economy as dead weight, with the only benefit being that it uses less energy than the mobilized economy, so this is a massive positive.
B. You then have to have *much* higher war support to mobilize further, I.E. from civilian to partial or total mobilization, unless you are in a defensive war. In practice, you’re usually technically defending yourself even if Japan declares war with a decolonialization focus, IIRC, so this effectively just stops you going directly from isolation to total mobilization. You aren’t really slowed much more long term, as you’ll bypass all the restrictions eventually.
C. The neutrality act line has further focuses that both give you the civilian economy law then add in extra military factories and infrastructure. In practice there is a delay between getting the next focus, often of half a year or so. Theoretically being at civilian economy for that period is worth a few factories to begin with, but the additional military factories and dockyards the later focuses give a little more than that, except dedicated to specific types of infrastructure instead of being controlled.
So you eventually end up the same place, either because you mobilized sooner and had more time to build factories, or got free factories later.
The actual *immediate* benefit is that limited intervention causes stability hits unless your war support is high already, and neutrality act gives bonus political power. Limited Intervention then makes that up by letting you meddle sooner, when it has more effect, and giving you some mildly effective bonuses to spotting and espionage that you miss out on otherwise.
Land-based air is certainly capable of being used to great effect at sea, with bombers and torpedo planes getting to participate in naval battles and make independent air strikes against enemy ships at sea or in port, but it’s rarely decisive. Part of this is that the AI doesn’t throw enough planes to seriously threaten a well-designed fleet, and part of this is that there are severe limits to how much damage planes can do to stop players ‘cheesing’ the naval system by just bombing everything. As long as you have enough fighter cover or AAA batteries on the ships to avoid losing too many capital ships, the air power kind of fades into the background.
US entry is kinda weird. Basically, the big international alliance networks of WW2 exist as ‘Factions’, the historical of which mostly exist at the start of the game (modeled as the ‘Allies’ led by the UK, ‘Axis’ led by Germany, ‘Comintern’ led by the USSR; more factions both historic and fictional can be created over the course of the game like Japan’s GEACPS or the Chinese United Front). Each country has a limitation on how they can join factions, and which factions they can join, limited by their Ideology (Democratic/Communist/Fascist/Non-Aligned) and geopolitical conditions: being in a defensive war allows basically everyone to join factions at war with a common enemy, and high enough ‘World Tension’ (caused by wars and other acts of aggression) can allow a country to join factions with matching ideologies.
The way this works out is rising world tension combined with the discrediting of the US isolationist bloc (done through the USA’s National Focus tree) will eventually allow the US to join the Allies on their own, usually once Japan and Germany are hip-deep in their respective wars of conquest, which incentivizes but does not require Japan’s historical preemptive strike. Japan’s AI script, in a game with historical AI settings applied, will tend to declare war on the Allies and the United States at the same time around late 1941, which will cause the US to join the Allies.
This may be of interest to people here as it involves “War People” author Lucian Staiano-Daniels. He’s also poet (prose poet?)
https://thecollidescope.com/2024/06/09/a-dogs-head/
and soon to be a published novelist
https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/the_quiet_death/
The novel is about an officer in the 30 Years War solving murders which seems laser-targeted to us
If you want to see how fine-grained doctrine can get, a lot of US Army field manuals are freely available online. I once took a look at the manual of operations for the Stinger missile launcher, and it not only explains how to load, aim, and fire it, it also explains how to watch for incoming airplanes effectively, how the weapons team should divide up tasks when engaging a target, how MANPAD teams fit into larger formations, how the missiles should be stored and transported, etc. etc.
There are also a lot of WWII reenactors and YouTubers that provide fantastic overviews of the primary sources if you don’t want to read them yourself. Not as academically rigorous, but for those of us who passed 40 and had to pick a war to become obsessed (old joke about men, if you don’t get it) with it’s good enough and far more informative than most media. There are also US Army training videos that have been declassified and put out for public consumption. They go into great detail. The US military didn’t always follow the doctrine, but they had it!
I also had the opportunity to read my wife’s grandfather’s WWII Naval manual. There was a lot of really interesting information in there, from how to protect hemp rope to how to stand watch as a lookout (starting with the hour before you were on duty) to how to wash your cloths (surprisingly useful information for me). They really tried to think of everything–and then revised it as the GIs and sailors found new ways to make problems!
Honestly, we live in a golden age for the sort of history that professional historians gloss over–the actual lived experiences of people. It’s just that a lot of it is being done by people with webcams for the pure love of history, rather than professors in lecture halls.
This army cook doctrine from ww2 even dictates how you’re supposed to organise produce in your refrigerators
https://archive.org/details/14110590R.nlm.nih.gov/
“Which is better for building armored divisions arming for decisive breakthroughs: +5% breakthrough, +10% soft attack and a flat +5 organization for medium and heavy tanks or +10% breakthrough, +2 organization and +0.05 recovery rate?”
Despite being very far apart in their approach to history, this is something that the total war series and paradox games share in common. There’s an underlying “simulation” based on a huge barrel of stats that creates a huge complexity overhead for understanding the consequences of your choices, even while those choices often have obvious right answers once you know the actual consequences.
This seems completely backwards to me as an approach to game design (complexity is a cost and interesting choices is the reward, and this approach “spends” that budget very inefficiently), but clearly there’s a big audience who like the idea of an underlying simulation. It makes me wonder if there’s a way to implement the (pseudo-)simulationist approach that doesn’t have this issue; unfortunately the two main companies that are known for it don’t seem to appreciate or care about the problem at all, as both take these systems and then layer on a lot of “+1 to floop or +1 to florp” choices that make the problem much worse.
While I can’t comment on how Total War handles it, I for a moment thought about Age of Wonders 4, because it indulges in the same issue.
On the one hand, there’s these huge complexity of possible choices of unit types, how your culture’s units can be complemented by the tome units (tomes are the game’s version of a tech tree) and how different unit enchantments can interact. There’s a lot of combos possible that can be absurdly powerful.
But on the other hand, despite all these possible ways to add extra rules to your units, my “doctrine” never particularly changed. Early or late game, my armies consist of 3 melee units, 2 ranged units and 1 support units, and I always form the same tactical battle line with them. Playing a High Culture with Order tomes doesn’t really amount to that much of a different gameplay than being a Dark Culture with Chaos tomes.
It’s funny; I generally keep hearing people praise the newer Age of Wonders, but much like how some on here keep advising our host and others to play HOI2 over 4, I keep wondering if the 2nd one (especially with the Shadow Magic expansion) was actually better, for many of the same reasons (i.e. factions with hardcoded units that were fairly diverse even if it perhaps didn’t necessarily make sense why some factions would spur certain military technologies – rather than “generate your own doctrine” which ultimately causes everyone to do the same thing regardless of who are they are playing – whether in AOW or in HOI) and if I should just get it again instead of buying one of the newer ones.
P.S. Oh, and IMO, Mason B. Fisher is a superior composer to Michiel van den Bos. Granted, Fisher’s music has my childhood nostalgia working for it…yet still, just listen to this!
I would never in a million years seriously consider the second game the superior one. I actually don’t care too much for the notional fantasy of making your faction from semi scratch either. I play AoW4 purely because it has such a solid tactical layer, with overall well designed units (especially with the MP Balance mod, but it makes such overall small changes on the whole it works fine either way; the balance mod mostly just makes it so I actually take older mythics sometimes, and buffs the AI players + creeps when it inevitably overloads on them.) I do not care one bit about the notional fantasy in most cases; while I do tend to plan a build in advance, I do it because that’s what makes sense to me, I draw no special joy out of the act of doing so compared to other plans made in other games. I actually went back for AoW2 at some point after Planetfall, having started with 3, and the utter lack of QoL and the sheer overwhelming power of t4 units in iterations prior to planetfall made it entirely unpalatable. With the exception of the Theocrat, Necromancer, and Rogue in AoW3, pre-planetfall unit comp was entirely just ‘squish the t4s into doom stacks, disregard all other units, everything else is just a trip to the doom stacks.’ Rogue that’s not true because they lack t4s, Necromancer will win the game well before t4s are on the table (Except for the ones they steal.) It also used to be true of Theocrat, before they nerfed shrines of smiting into their devout-dependent forms.
I’d actually disagree heavily that all the cultures play the same in 4, in terms of tactical setup, but if you’re building them the same I obviously can’t stop you. I generally consider faction mechanics core to whether or not a particular build is best served in culture X or Y. I usually don’t even run the same distributions of ranged and melee units within a given faction in 4 (Although to be fair, it’s rare to go under 3 melee). The imperium and to a lesser extent cosmite taxen on t4s and 5s, and the higher durability and synergies of t3s make unit comp an overall much bigger part of especially 4, less so PF, with t2s even sometimes having a reasonable place at the table (Though not often. Network Links, my beloved…)
Only commenting on the issue because requested though.
I fully agree with your assessment regarding the previous titles and especially their “T4 everything” balance issue.
I’d like to get a more detailed explanation of where you see differences in doctrine in AoW4, though. Here’s my thoughts regarding that:
But here’s the reasons why the game more often creates forces that constrain doctrine:
I would say that’s largely not how the melee differences play out at all, to start with. Shock broadly has problems with poles, but usually the force isn’t all poles and this isn’t that big of an issue (except…) Shields are (hypothetically) about beating ranged (Except really just archers…), ranged kills isolated shock or poles, shock kills anything but poles on a free reined charge (and has more tools to charge generally, it’s hard to countercharge them.) In practice, last I checked the actual meta, outside the balance mod poles were just overall the best because of Damage bonuses on nearly every high tier unit that isn’t strictly racial, and shields not being able to do their job at all and just plain losing once enchants were factored in (With non-Big Fighters as the other serious contender, though there weren’t many before the def/res change). Shock was dominant the time I checked before that, but that was before there were even consistently available t3 poles. I don’t actually think that’s why, but I’ll concede I’m not sure what else would have changed there. And I don’t know where the actual meta is rn, though I assume shields are still a bit weak given <s>spellblades</s> magic fighters and mages, but much healthier now that they do just fine against enchanted melee units.
In practice, I usually decide individual stack compositions around a hero. Ranged heroes typically mean ranged heavy stacks (by which is, meant, strictly, ranged _even_ stacks), melee heroes mean melee heavy stacks. Precise composition might change depending on the setup, with rally units more likely to replace whatever I’m not focusing on. Morale in vanilla I really can’t comment on – It’s one of the few things that specifically gets tweaked in the balance mod, so that being on the winning side is less automatically ‘high morale’ on everything and losing meaning a lot less breaking. I have had units break on the winning side because of it (Helped by taking Coward for bonus points, admittedly, specifically to see if it was less ‘free points’ with the changes.) Sometimes, I decide things on much more narrow and uniform grounds (I’ve done a High-focused counterbuild that had _extremely_ uniformed stacks with almost zero rally units, etc) but normally I do have more flexibility than that, with a focus around some specific t4 and then surrounding units around it, with some flexibility based on what the hero brings tot he table.
While some tomes do indeed like those kinds of combos, plenty are basically free-standing; EG the tome of alchemy, and will ultimately end up working fine regardless (For instance, the tome of blood seems like it demands blood cultists to enable blood drinking blades, but in practice they’re just insurance against skelemen, golems, etc. The real bleed is on Rite of Bloodletting). Not going all ranged or all melee is for more practical reasons surrounding space (100% melee tends to have problems losing damage to positioning) and durability (100% ranged will generally lose too much damage without having at least some sacrificial summon fodder or something). The core I build the stack around depends on the build, but usually the things surrounding it are malleable.
Also IME, zerg rush is absolutely a real thing; the issue is massing units _FAST_ (The gold standard for this was actually Feudal with its two for 1 levies), and secondarily sustaining stuff; that said, in a player’s hands, you’re meant to actually get kills with that army of el cheepos, then move in the second group (But to be fair, vanilla’s morale probably _does_ make that harder); something like either feudal, swarmers, tome of the horde, tome of the whichevergivesmightymeek, or maybe oathsworn if I feel cheeky*. And I’ll be real, I usually feel the benefits of overall comp more than I do tier differences; but to be fair, I don’t actually play MP more than very slightly, because I’m a poor loser; I may be off base, but I’m pretty sure unit typing and specific play is far more important than tier (Though of course, you don’t want to stay tied to shrimps forever.) Without the balance mod, the only early t5 I heard of anyone ever using is Reapers. Because with extraordinarily few exceptions, they’re mythics that don’t take enchants. That said a lot of the later ones are actually pretty good in spite of that, like Exarches.
*Last I actually tried a quantity build, it was actually around having large groups of t3s with a warlord in the mix. No idea if that would work for real.
Now now, sometimes the improvements are labeled, in sequence
1. More Rockets
2. More Rockets!!
3. MORE ROCKETS!!!
There is a certain type of player who greatly enjoys reverse engineering these systems and finding the correct meta in them. That is the game to them as much as any of the rest.
The part I can never get over is how the internet makes it so you only need a couple of those guys… then everyone else just plays the “meta” and you’re back to “why not just make the choices obvious.”
A huge advantage of modifier-stats based game design is that it’s a flexible framework allowing endless permutations without needing bespoke rules to be codefied for every occasion. It’s not just Paradox games that do this. It’s how many cRPGs work and for much the same reason, it allows you to combine different skills and equipment in a way that is guaranteed to work, without a tailored system for each possible load out.
From the developers’ point of view, it’s easy to create a game element (ie, armoured battalion) with a bunch of numerical variables (eg, breakthrough, soft attack, hard attack, etc…); these are the effects. It’s then also easy to have other game mechanics modify those stats: you can have doctrine give +5% breakthrough, a particular general giving +10%, winter weather in Russia giving -20%, logistics problems -5%, a truck related tech +10%, etc…. These are the causes. If your player base is clamering for more complexity, just create more causes for the existing effects. A bespoke system that treats the interaction between each part uniquely (eg, the truck tech has a different effect in Russian winters than Malaysian summers, but only if the general has the petrolhead trait) or which give/remove playing options to the player might be more realistic (or fun); but that’s unfeasible to do when there is an exponentially large number of combinations of causes possible.
However, in a stat-modifier based system cause and effect are separate, so they can be mixed-and-matched freely, with the guarantee that the system will work no matter what happens in the game (provided you have some cap to not only -100% modifiers and division by 0 errors). You don’t need to test them all independently. It even allows different devs working on different parts of the game (or different DLCs) to do their own thing independently, “plugging into” a modifier without affecting its compatibility with anything else. Balance is hard to maintain, but you can keep producing content and be fairly sure that the game will work in a predictable, though not necessarily desirable, way.
For the players this gives a huge freedom of action (at least theoretical freedom even if most choices will be suboptimal) that players typically love, especially those who like to role-play in their gaming.
It also gives a fairly straight forward game plan which makes them feel smart. The good’old min-maxxing. Pick a small handful of stats to focus on (ie, medium tank breakthrough) and _make every other decision in the game based on what will modify those stats the best_. That gives a clear holistic drive for a campaign that informs every other decision you have to make, which if anything reduces cognitive load. Always pick the tech that increase medium tank breakthrough, ignore the others. And if you manage to get -95% cost modifier to something (eg, factory construction cost) then you feel like an absolute strategy gaming god. This modifier-stacking playstyle is a huge part of the eco-system around paradox games, because breaking the game is how you “beat” it on a meta level. This might only be true for the small minority of the community that is vocal, but Paradox is obliged by its shareholders (voted on in a 2024 resolution iirc) to implement things popular with its audience: so the sweatiest of 2000+ hour neckbeards who prowl its forums have huge sway.
As for the drawback of too much complexity, that’s more a problem of having too many stats in the first place. Specifically, of having stats that compute things “sub surface” which the player only experiences multiple degrees removed. Eg: I care about how good my armoured divisions are at attack, whether they’re good because the side armour of the super heavy tank is +5mm thicker or because radios in medium tanks give +7% coordination is irrelevant. Sadly, Paradox’s doctrine seems to be that adding more detail means a better simulation which means a better game. Neither of those are true of course: a simulation draws its power from knowing what to abstract, and a game is more than the engine powering its simulation. EU5 took that to its logical conclusion, and the sharp drop in that game’s reception over the last 9 months seems to be making Paradox reconsider – based on what’s planned for the next patch (1.4).
Ah, yes, EU5, where I got it near launch and within the month basically gave up between constant huge patches and the fact that I wanted to play the Netherlands and my trade income crashed rapidly and I had no idea why or what to do about it.
And CK3 has the issues that the AI does not appear to know it should get modifiers and basically all the modifiers are uncapped, so I pay basically no attention to 90% of the mechanics to the point in a game about vassals I don’t remember even how many dukes I have because I just stack +opinion until it doesn’t matter.
There is always an underlying simulation, the question is whether to give the player the levers to see and fiddle with the numbers.
For example, in any TW game, there must be *something* to make cavalry perform better during a charge than when bogged down. Any player who cares will therefore want to know how to trigger this; what is the minimal thing I can do that will still constitute a charge?
In a newer total war game this is a mix of mass, speed and a bonus to melee attack which decays over 10s. Understandable predictable factors that the player can play around to get mostly reproducible results.
Older TW games still had to deal with charges. They did similar things but they were much more tied to the animations of the unit models. So it wasn’t “you get a charge bonus for 10s”, it was “you get a charge bonus til the rider pulls his sword out” (don’t trust me on the specifics, I’m not a Medieval 2 expert).
The advantage of the older system is that it feels less gamey. Missile block is tied to the physical shield model of the unit, not some silly abstract armor stat. The disadvantage is that its very hard for the developer to balance things. If the testudo is ineffective, you can’t just crank a defense bonus from 100 to 200, you have to go make the shield hitbox bigger (and who knows how much that helps, it may be 5%, it may be 200%). In the end the players will still endeavor to understand what makes a unit die (melee swing animation #3 which has an unusually long recuperation period) and how to avoid it (never make your unit a veteran, because only veterans use animation #3); it’s just that it’s now much harder for the developer to predict or affect these factors.
I suppose you can remove the simulation altogether, say that division A has 1000 combat power and division B has 1200 combat power and subtract one from the other. Or discard even that and throw a dice. At least for Total War, that would remove all reason to play for most players.
AFAIK the notion that the testudo physically blocked things (at least in Rome 1/med 2) is a myth. Shields worked slightly different, but it was basically a dice roll, just like in newer TW’s. (AFAIK it’s armour+shield defence?) if a projectile comes from the approporiate angle.
Bounced off HoI 3 completely but am playing TWW right this second (CYBORG RAT OGRES WITH GATLING GUN HANDS!!)
So with Total War Warhammer at least, I am only vaguely aware of the underlying math but I can still basically tell what +4 melee defense does; it makes my dudes less likely to take hits. And admittedly I don’t know exactly how that compares in value to +7% weapon strength, but I know I want my dwarven infantry to be sturdier and I use my gun units for damage. And having a bunch of small bonuses does mean they aren’t very impactful individually but it gives me a lot of decision points about whether this Lord is gonna be a melee monster or a coatrack for army buffs and what kind of army he’ll do either with, and almost all my choices make something straightforwardly better. And the exceptions generally have their downsides in big angry red and when I’m deciding whether to switch my guy’s rifle for a shotgun I may not be able to do the math but I know what a shotgun is.
Meanwhile in Paradox games I am often less equipped to figure out precisely what the bonuses do, but on the other hand in the ones I do play when it’s Victoria 3 I know +10% kill rate is good and it accumulates over time as I research so if I want to do a lot of wars I should spend research on the tree. Stellaris is the only one where I really feel unmoored, mostly in that I know what each weapon/shield/armor type does but I have no intuition for which type of energy weapon is best so I just kinda use whichever type I’ve researched the most. Also not clear on Imperator unit type strengths, but if I’m Rome I get a bunch of bonuses to heavy infantry so I just have all my combat units when I make a Legion be heavy infantry because my levies are going to be loaded up on heavy infantry at all times anyway. Although on the research side of Imperator I have absolutely no idea what any of the +x to foo in the economy parts mean in terms of how much more money I make so I basically just research in the direction of stuff I do understand
Typo hunt:
“Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war”
ITYM “protracted”
The practice of sending reports up the chain and new doctrine down is also an institutional standard operating procedure. Would that practice itself be doctrine or does it belong to some other category?
“Air crew surveys” is an Air Force Spirit if you have the DLC (main effect is kinda silly, you spend air exp now to get more air exp in the future).
Officer Corps spirits are kinda unimprovable doctrine – you have a slot for the category, you spend exp to buy an option and it is not obscenely costly in exp but you only have one in each category – do you pick more air exp or better air coordination? Do you pick the extra torpedo attack or extra heavy cruiser and battleship gun attack?
If the main doctrine is a tree, then officer corps spirits are more like a garden patch that takes less investment but also gives smaller, faster rewards.
I think that’s an incomplete description, and the actual doctrine is much more complicated. For one thing, doctrine moves up as well as down: there are LOTS of cases of “hey we figured out a better way to do X” becoming official doctrine (or simply being passed laterally and widely adopted without ever becoming official).
But yes, broadly, there are doctrines for how information moves through a military organization. For an easy-to-find example, you could look at AARs.
One thing that hasn’t been explicitly commented on but which I think is implied on all the shuffling around is that the game obviously has limits of movement, but doesn’t appear to significantly charge you too badly for shipping units around.
I see that penalties accrue for the British using Indian Troops in Europe to *fight,* but there doesn’t seem to be much downside to having them in Europe. Nor does shuffling troops around SE Asia seem to interfere with merchant shipping in the region, though historically it very much did involve commandeering ships that would normally be carrying merchant cargoes.
Limited oil stocks constraining how much the US, Britain, and Japan were willing to shuffle their Naval forces around during certain periods was a thing during WW2 to my understanding, and that doesn’t seem to be a factor in the game.
In RL, shipping ground forces imposed a lot of costs – not only in ships and fuel (and the opportunity cost of not being able to use those ships to move food, munitions or other supplies while they are on troop transport duty), but also in needing to provide convoys and escorts for that shipping to prevent it from being jumped by submarines or airstrikes or even enemy surface groups en-route.
Parshall’s recent book notes pointedly that the US always prioritized escorting troop shipments over supply shipments (meaning the USN de-prioritized escorting war material shipments to the UK as a distant third after protecting it’s own heavy units and protecting the ground forces), whereas Britain was perhaps less sensitive to the PR damage from losing troops during transit, or perhaps just more desperate for material.
Convoys are a game mechanic, treated as basically a “capacity” used by your country to trade, transport troops, plan naval invasions and the like, and these can be destroyed by ships or planes, lowering your convoy count, and if a convoy transporting troops is lost killing a lot of the troops and destroying their equipment. I expect he’ll go more into this when he gets to the economy.
Fuel is also a mechanic, working as a stockpile you build up over time based on your access to oil, and which is spent down by all your vehicles, planes, and ships when they do things.
Games are not simulations, people have to want to play them. The game needs to offer problems which are interesting and challenging to solve, preferably fitting in with the overall theme of the game. Problems which are just difficult aren’t fun.
Shipping problems existed in the real WW2, but for me, and I suspect most potential or actual players, detailed logistics scheduling would not be enjoyable. Players want to command mighty armies doing battle, not be travel and logistic clerks.
There are people still out there playing Grigby’s War In the Pacific. And gameplay there is heavily focused on getting troops and especially supply in place to use effectively.
“Mr. Roberts”, the computer game?
Getting ready to start my 5th PBEM campaign. Each campaign only takes three or four years!
At the same time, the existence of “logistics sim” games like Factorio suggests that there may be some wiggle room here. Furthermore, when there are already complicated minigames like the division designer built into your “command mighty armies” game, it suggests, again, wiggle room.
The existence of games where logistics is the focus doesn’t mean that Paradox should add more logistics to HoI. I would argue the opposite, that if a logistics game exists 1. that’s great for people who do want to play a logistics game and 2. this doesn’t diminish HoI.
Games, like other creative works, benefit from conceptual clarity or design integrity or whatever you want to call it. What’s the game about? What’s the main theme? What do you want players to focus on?
For movies, Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are both about the Arthurian legend, but they’re very different. Excalibur would not be improved by adding Monty Python sketches, and MP and the HG would not be improved by adding scenes from Excalibur. For books, Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice are both widely read, but P&P would not be improved by adding an epic LoTR style siege, and LoTR doesn’t need a comedy of manners ballroom chapter.
And I as a viewer don’t have to choose between one movie or the other, or one book and the other. I can appreciate both.
That said, there is a certain zero-sum aspect in that as a player I have only so many hours in the day and only so much money to spend, so there is a temptation to try and appeal to as many players as possible in any single game. The ideal game, from a publishers point of view, would the universal game that can be anything a player wants, so it’s unnecessary to buy any other game.
This runs into the other problem, which is finite resources for development. So again, the game developers have to decide what it’s worth spending money and time on. For a creative work, not a simulation, I firmly believe that designers should be leaving out as much as possible, not trying to jam more stuff in.
“The ideal game, from a publishers point of view, would the universal game that can be anything a player wants…”
Depends on the publisher. The Dark Souls series is built on the idea that the ideal game should cater to a target audience–and if people outside the target audience don’t like it, that’s okay. A game that tries to be everything to everyone typically falls flat, because there’s not enough to differentiate it from the masses of other games trying to be everything to everyone. Finding a niche and building the game around the tastes of that target audience, on the other hand, can yield significant profits. Dark Souls is hardly a rare indie game; it’s a huge franchise.
I will also argue that there’s room for weird games. Go back and look at NES or SNES games sometime–they were far more varied than games today. Okay, some of them didn’t work all that well. But some of these experiments spawned franchises that are still going (look at why Final Fantasy is called “final”). And truly novel experiences in gaming, because they are rare, are given more leeway. Portal, for example, is a fairly short game with fairly basic puzzles, but it was unique enough that people ignored these aspects and just enjoyed the game.
I’ll grant that for now publishers tend to avoid logistics simulators in war games, but that doesn’t mean that such simulators are inherently bad, it just means no one’s tried it yet.
And I think there would be an audience. There’s a fairly large number of guys (and women, but let’s face it, this is a male-dominated aspect of history) that spend their time watching old training videos, reading old army manuals, and studying exactly the kinds of stuff you say should be left out of gaming. I think there would be an audience for a game that told the war from a logistical angle.
Probably the best way to do this is either to have an indie game studio produce it and see if it gains traction, or add it as an optional expansion packet or small side game to the main series of games. Something like the Fallout base-building simulator.
Now (Sep 2026) would be a great time to release, or at least announce, such a game, as the Hormuz / Bab al-Mandab have made disruptions to logistics chains much more prominent in our daily lives than usual.
Overview of the problems the USN has had trying to support operations:
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-us-navy-gulf-supply-chain-uss-abraham-lincoln-diego-garcia/
(No criticism of the USN intended by me. They’re doing the best they can in an extremely dumb war.)
If anything, a (publicly-conscious) war going on makes it the _worst_ time to announce/release a game with connections to that war, as Advance Wars shows (It was supposed to release on April 8, 2022, but the game have one of its protagonist be Not-Russia that wasn’t demonized to high hell, and so when the Ukraine situation happened it got delayed indefinitely, and ends up releasing the next year.).
“If anything, a (publicly-conscious) war going on makes it the _worst_ time to announce/release a game with connections to that war….”
Agreed. The focus for most people in an active war is going to be the fighting spirit. From the nation’s side, we want people to have a high fighting spirit and willingness to do what’s necessary to win, and while paperwork is necessary it’s hardly going to make people feel heroic. From the individual’s side, seeing the fighting and then being asked to do the manifesting is going to feel rather anti-climactic. We have a very good example of exactly this process, by the way: Eisenhower wrote to Patton because Eisenhower had been put in charge of training troops instead of being allowed to go to Europe and fight.
A logistics game would be niche, but not so niche that we can ignore these sorts of considerations.
This is why something like WWI or WWII is a better option for a game focusing on logistics. Both are prominent in our cultural memory (WWII more than WWI, but WWI has some very interesting ideas that can be played with), and both are long enough ago that it’s not going to feel anticlimactic to deal with the paperwork. In addition, enough games exist focusing on the fighting that a game focusing on the logistics can be an interesting change of pace, especially if it’s done right and the player isn’t fully aware of what they’re shipping supplies for until later.
That said, scifihghf does have a point: Our culture is far more aware of logistics and supply chains than we were pre-pandemic. We’ve experienced a number of shocks that have rocked the economy, including a ship blocking a canal, the issue with shipping containers a while back, computer chip shortages due to data center construction, and the like. I think a game allowing the player to experience the impact of supply chains on war would have a better shot now than it would have in, say, 2020.
Apologies to everyone else for going off on a tangent, but that’s a really bold claim. For one thing, given the enormity of contemporary Steam output (something like 30 games daily was the case circa 2022 – and it likely became even greater by now) and the other platforms on top of it* it’s very likely that just about anything someone had ever felt fondly about on those consoles has had a spiritual successor (or over a dozen of them) by now.
The other side of it, of course, are the whole game genres which simply didn’t work on those platforms due to their technical limitations. FPS is the ultimate example, of course, but so are most forms of strategy games. Likewise, while classic roguelikes have already existed at the time (Beneath Apple Manor dates to 1978, preceding NES by 5 years) I don’t think any one of them worked on those, since much of the genre famously required more-or-less the entire keyboard (the earliest console-adapted one I know of had been Powder, designed for 2004’s Nintendo DS.)
For that matter, I am not aware of any contemporary (S)NES games we would now describe as roguelites (perhaps the most ascendant (super)genre of the past 10-15 years) – even though that ought to have been technically possible. For another example of things that ought to have been possible on those consoles but (probably) weren’t yet conceived – what is their predecessor to Papers, Please or Undertale?
* I.e. there’s an untold number of things you can attempt to download or play online, whether on Itch, or more niche platforms like that Doom wad repository, the MUGEN (open-source fighting game engine) database or the text-based stuff**. And RMN, which is more-or-less the primary place to look for (S)NES nostalgia nowadays (since it’s devoted to the RPGMaker engine, which was essentially designed to allow people to “make their own Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest“) has over 4,000 games you can download (though most are very short and not all are made with the engine specifically). Even if you limit your browsing to its Featured Games, that still leaves you with over 200!
https://rpgmaker.net/games/featured/
**Even something as niche as Fighting Fantasy interactive fanfiction still has over 50 playable works, as I kept pointing out in the tavern Fireside. I think the database of IF is considerably larger. (Meaning interactive fiction – referring to works where you actually have to type short commands in, effectively guessing what the game would allow your character to do. Emily Short is probably the most famous creator there – even if that’s in no small part because with her works’ multiple endings, you can at least get some kind of a narratively satisfying resolution, as opposed to getting stuck and failing to figure out what the game expects from you. Compare and contrast something like Alabaster*** or Galatea with some other creator’s work about time travel.***** Either way, I also doubt any of those were ever on (S)NES.
***The vampiric reimagination of the Snow White tale; I think you (as the Huntsman) are supposed to figure out how to cure her and/or allow her to usurp the Wicked Stepmother, but the endings which I did manage to get, like where you simply escape, or get the proof of vampirism before she eats you and kill her as the Stepmother instructed you, feel like complete endings in their own right.
****A work about visiting a museum, encountering the titular Ancient Greek statue in a museum and suddenly having her start talking to you. Without even knowing that’s possible, I actually managed to get Aphrodite to visit us and make her a living woman on the first attempt. I assume was meant to be “the golden ending”, so I haven’t tried further to leave on a high note.
***** It begins with a Back to the Future reference, as you nee to get your time machine charged via a lighting strike – but first you need to clear your table to find the schematics on there (typing “look at the table” does not work until you type that first) and then you need to ensure you set the critical orb for the time machine on the ground before connecting it to the lighting conductor – else it assumes you are still holding it in your hands when the lighting strikes, killing you. You are then teleported inside a dumpster in the future, hear voices on the outside, and if you peep out of it, you’ll witness a leather-bound woman shoot a good guy – and then yourself. (Or, more likely, you’ll first attempt to search inside the dumpster – and the woman will hear the rustling, open the lid, say “Huh, that guy was smarter than I thought – at least he asked for back-up” and shoot you, which is how you’ll learn to sit quiet.)
Then, you’ll need to pick up the murder weapon she left on the scene, or else you’ll be knifed by a girl punk at an abandoned subway station later – but you cannot actually shoot her, since the weapon is so sci-fi it does not have a conventional trigger, thus if you try that, she’ll figure out you don’t know how it works and also kill you – so you just need to point it and pretend you know that it works. I think I read that you’ll eventually need to dump the murder weapon sometime after that, as the police would end up stop-and-frisking you at some point – but I don’t think I got that far, having failed to figure out the verb it expected you to use in some completely non-dramatic scene well before that. Something like that had been my experience with the genre more often than not.
ok but, tangentially, now that you say that, I would like to play a game all about managing cargo ships’ travel, passenger train’s erlang, etc. in the chaos of war. Imagine having to barely put your dock under capacity because a ship just sank and you need to conduct the transfer from ship to anbulances as smooth as possible, or having to desperately radio a train that the track ahead just got cut off by enemy bombardment and you need to reverse NOW.
Then again that might just be me being high off the heels of playing 僕の航空管制官.
It’s somewhat represented. (“Convoys” has to be produced and are used both for foreign trade, transportation, and supplies) fuel is also somewhat simulated. (while convoys themselves do not consume fuel, divisions/airplanes and *especially* navies do) convoys can be intercepted and sunk by enemy shipping (especially submarines) etc.
There are abstractions (fuel is a global stockpile, f.ex.) and in practice the allies at least tends to be able to just produce /trade enough for it to not really be a constraint (the Axis can, depending on situation, be a bit more constrained since they don’t have easy access to oil producing areas)
“Parshall’s recent book notes pointedly that the US always prioritized escorting troop shipments over supply shipments (meaning the USN de-prioritized escorting war material shipments to the UK as a distant third after protecting it’s own heavy units and protecting the ground forces), whereas Britain was perhaps less sensitive to the PR damage from losing troops during transit, or perhaps just more desperate for material.”
I haven’t read the book, but this may be partly about two other factors:
1) Britain wasn’t shipping vast numbers of troops all over the place, at least not compared to the US. The US had to ship two armies worth to Britain before Normandy under BOLERO. Britain didn’t need to because, well, the British army was already conveniently located in Britain.
2) Britain tended to use its fast liners a lot for troop transportation, and these didn’t need escorting.
And there’s also the point that Britain was in the war to win it – the US did not have the same perceived existential commitment. Losing a few hundred troops when a transport was torpedoed would be unfortunate and tragic to Britain but it wouldn’t cause MPs to start undermining the government. (Giangreco is very good on just how bored with the war Americans had got by late 44-early 45.) The perception that Britain was losing the war due to lack of materiel, on the other hand, would.
having doctrines affecting the division designs would be a great idea!
Nitpicky sort of point, but “Auftragstaktik” is not the WW2 German term for something roughly akin to mission command- that would be “Fuhren Mit Auftrag” or “Selbständigkeit der Unterführer”. The US Marine Corps deliberately chose an ahistorical direct translation to avoid having words directly related to ‘Fuhrer’ in their manuals in the 1980s; but for historians looking to consult primary sources using the correct term can actually be very helpful.
Editing error:
Looks like “what” here should be “was”.
“My first attempt at an offensive breakout in Europe came in September and it did not go.”
-> did not go well(?)
“Luftwaffe still had the attritional edge int he air”
-> in the air
Thought: Since the military meaning of “strategy” isn’t really a great match to the game meaning of “strategy”, wondering if the game meaning of “strategy” is closer to the military meaning of “doctrine”?
I’m not sure strategy in gaming means anything as specific as the military meaning of doctrine. It seems mostly to mean “plan”. Any aspect of a game that isn’t about reflexes, reactions, or muscle memory (or role playing / narrative) typically gets called strategy; strategy games (going by steam tags) are those where planning makes up the majority of gameplay.
tactic, operation, strategy, how do your rifles and machine guns look like… are all parts of doctrine.
In common parlance, the term “strategy” seems to mean something like “An approach to accomplishing a goal,” with the implicit implication that there are multiple approaches available and a choice has to be made. My strategy in answering this question has been to speak somewhat formally and to the point (as opposed to snark, etc.).
A tactic is something like a technique, a method. Often, this comes down to equipment chosen and methods for their use. My tactic for accessing the internet involves a laptop running Linux.
Operations would seem to relate mostly to question of timing and place. I happen to be in a coffee shop, using it’s wifi.
These are obviously not hard and fast distinctions, but rather “more like guidelines than actual rules.”
Was the post truncated? The ending comes rather abruptly (I’m used to Collections series posts saying what they’ll discuss next week, or giving a conclusion if it’s the last post). The title and content also led me to expect a discussion of the tank designer as part of the game’s… gamey approach to doctrine.
« Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war »
That looks like a typo, you meant protracted war, did you ?
I would contend that there’s actually a third component to how the game simulates doctrine, beyond what it labels doctrine and the division designer: officer corps spirits, and these can cause “units [to] simply function badly because their doctrine is poor” but only for a few countries (to my knowledge, just the RoC and USA) and in a fairly limited way. I think there’s even an argument that the choice of military advisors is a fourth component to this, but I don’t know if there’s much that is meaningful to say about that.
Would it have been possible to have the early war British/French tank configuration in which tanks were scattered to support infantry if there were better doctrine in how to use those tanks? How much of this doctrine not working was it being a fundamentally flawed idea and how much of it was because they didn’t have good doctrine for infantry/armor cooperation?
WW II history is one of the areas I struggle with the most. In general my knowledge of history is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. So even if I don’t know that much about any one thing, I can generally bring in the context of knowing a bit about everything that connects to that one thing and get a decent sense of it pretty quickly. But WW II is so sui generis and massive that it’s harder for me to get a handle on it that way.
I think that on a very low level, the infantry support centric tank doctrine was not a bad one. It was building firmly on the experience of the First World War, where small infantry cannons had proven their value, and tanks had demonstrated their ability to destroy machine gun nests reliably. For example, the French 1918-style method of assigning light Renault tanks in pairs, one with a machine gun, one with a cannon, was a prudent way of providing infantry with support both in anti-machine gun and anti-personnel missions. In the Winter War, when the Soviets learned to use such combined arms tactics in February 1940, the method of attacking with (mostly T-26) tanks followed closely by an infantry screen worked quite well on a tactical level against Finnish infantry that didn’t have much anti-tank capability, although the Soviets never achieved a strategic breakthrough.
So, if your idea is to wade through a fortified enemy with infantry, this is not a bad doctrine. It worked on the Western front in 1918, and again for the Soviets in winter 1940. It only fails when you end up having an enemy that puts all its tanks in a two or three divisions and hits one part of your front with that armoured fist and then exploits the hole in your front. (Although there was a lot of luck involved in the German attack. With better Entente leadership, it could have become a Western Stalingrad.)
If you look at how the Russian pre-Ukraine mechanised infantry doctrine worked, it included, on company and battalion level, essentially a doctrine of using tanks and IFVs with dismounted troops in a way that looked very much like the French WWI doctrine: a thin screen of infantry advancing with IFVs, with tanks behind with a fire support mission. This is not a bad way of fighting infantry, because of your vehicles don’t have an infantry screen and there are hand-held antitank weapons on the other side, the armour will not survive for long.
BTW, this historical newsreel shows, from 3:54 onwards, very nicely the French-style WWI tank doctrine in idealised conditions: peace time training exercise. As such, it tells very well how it should work, and allows you to understand why somebody would like to fight like that.
>(Although there was a lot of luck involved in the German attack. With better Entente leadership, it could have become a Western Stalingrad.)
Depends on what you mean by ‘Better Leadership’. In a white room scenario, in which the military gets to plan without political constraints and has the funds & industry to pull it of, starting to draw up (new) plans, doctrines and equipment around 1935, yes.
In a real world scenario, much harder to pull off.
– the lack of radios in the French army will take some effort to fix (though it is by far the most easily fixed issue)
– armoured warfare doctrine was in the process of being fixed, but well, too bad the war started in the middle of fixing
– crucially, political constraints. Strategic plans for TWENTY YEARS demanded that the next war not be fought on French soil. The maginot line was built with the express purpose of forcing the war to be fought on Belgian soil. You go and tell your superiors (or worse, are the superior who has to rethink the doctrines his entire career is based on) that actually, let’s trash twenty years of plans, ignore the whole idea behind that absurdly expensive maginot line project, just sit on your butt doing absolutely nothing while the Germans march into Belgium, because you just had a bad dream where the Germans cut off the French army as it advanced into Belgium.
That’s not even going into Germany’s advantage in the air leaving the Anglo-French forces effectively blind to German force concentrations. The severe restrictions to allied reconnaissance in early 1940 should not be underestimated.
What I’m getting at, Germany wasn’t simply relying on ‘luck’, on the French and English making exactly the wrong decisions. Rather, it was making an informed guess that the French would stick to their pre-war planning (since the alternative was no plan at all). Then the advantage in communication and information piled on top of that.
The campaign could’ve failed, and some of the issues in the allied command (chiefly the dramatically inferior level of radio communications; something that’d haunt the Soviets in ’41 and ’42 as well) had relatively easy fixes.
But it wasn’t a natural 20 in a desperate situation. Germany had a very good idea about what the French were going to do, and the French did in turn have very good reasons to want to do these things (which was avoiding another WW1 slugfest on their own soil).
Frankly, the exact same people who proclaim bright-eyed and fully convinced of their own brilliance that France shouldn’t have taken the bait and marched into Belgium in ’40 are typically also the same people yelling about idiots not reading Sun Tzu.
What does Sun Tzu say about fighting wars on your own soil again?
I think that the Battle of France was still undecided by the 15th or 16th May, and better tactical leadership could have prevented the French collapse. The German attack from the Meuse breakthrough was such that it could have been cut off, and the motorised units would have lost fuel in a matter of days, if not hours. As it included the best divisions of the German military, its loss would have been devastating.
The German victory in Fall Gelb was not predestined. A more layered distribution of units during the advance into Belgium (which was a political necessity) and the capability to handle enemy breakthroughs with your reserves would have made it possible to stop the German advance.
>The German attack from the Meuse breakthrough was such that it could have been cut off, and the motorised units would have lost fuel in a matter of days,
Between two roughly equivalent armies, yes. But the Meuse breakthrough is exactly the go-to example for the communicative failure of the French command – it had no idea what was going on, it thought it was being scouted by light formations that’d soon be captured at the same time that the front was collapsing.
In terms of material, the French/British force was close enough that it should’ve been a slugfest considerably worse than the Italian campaign. That it wasn’t, however, was not so much a matter of luck but of systemic failure on the part of the French, whose approach to fighting was too static and slow to react. Where they did fight, the fighting was hard. But once the line had been broken through, French command didn’t even know it had been broken through for a while, and thus utterly failed to react.
Given a five year leadtime, this is absolutely fixable. Changing the outcome with the army and command structure the French had historically, otoh, is IMO a rather tall order. Any fix that relies on the French command actually knowing what’s going on in something approaching real time (or what passes for it in 1940) is going to fall flat on its face.
With regards to a more layered defence… where do those divisions come from? Which sections of the front will be weakened to allow this, and what’ll the effects be?
I feel like this is an exercise similar to saying that Desert Storm was luck – if the Iraqis had implemented a different command structure, devolved decision making to lower ranks, possessed a high morale & cohesion army and had had access to GPS, their material and manpower resources should’ve made Desert Storm a slugfest with tens of thousands of dead coalition soldiers.
It wasn’t luck. For all its armour and artillery, Iraq just didn’t have that kind of army.
It’s interesting that the failure that @Rezo describes is impossible to model in HOI IV: Because you can always see where each unit is, a state of “They broke through but we don’t know that until it’s too late” can’t be modeled. Which makes it hard to simulate the collapse of the French without fudging with their army strength.
You wouldn’t get a Western Stalingrad this way, of course, but imagine a scenario where the French say “Yes, we *know* the Ardennes are impassible, but just in case let’s plan to put a couple of infantry divisions in there rather than just leaving it to a bunch of Belgian border guards.”
The problem there was that the Belgium king was being an idiot and refused to join the allies, believing that neutrality was possible. This meant that the French and British had to rush to get into position, which meant their understanding of the tactical situation was still developing even as they committed to deployment.
And, of course, the Belgian king had every tool to know better and was firmly working off of wishful thinking and stubbornness. He made the decision to try for neutrality in 1934 and didn’t move even as the Czechs and Poles were invaded. Even as Germany built up he did nothing. Even as German plans were leaked, nothing.
Even without hindsight the Belgian decision was folly.
All the tactical flaws were downwind of that. If the French and British had been integrated earlier they could have kept their mobile forces in a reserve, allowing them to contest the ardennes even if they’d made the same mistake, instead of having committed them to a madcap sprint to the border. And they could have moved more troops to reinforce all points of the border, potentially reinforcing the ardennes as well.
@Terry: Agreed that they were having to adjust to the tactical situation in a way that they shouldn’t have had to, but they had a plan for moving into Belgium after the Germans did, and deploying troops into the Ardennes should have been part of that.
Even putting one infantry division in there probably would have held up the Germans for two or three extra days at the minimum.
Agreed. Although I’m skeptical a single division could have held, as the Germans did brush aside some resistance, literally any further delay might have been enough to torpedo the German plan. It cost little.
I perhaps view history in an overly equipment-centric way – yet to me, it seems like one of the things which the French could have done to reinforce/secure the Ardennes at almost no extra cost would be to accept that their beloved FTs were now basically useless, and to instead repurpose all the vehicles they had left (well over 1,000, AFAIR) into cheap fortifications over there.
I.e.
a) The first scenario is to simply strip everything from the FT that it wouldn’t need anymore (i.e. the engine, fuel tank and other propulsion system components – the engine might even be repurposed as an emergency electric generator for military equipment if the efficiency isn’t too awful), dig it in up to the turret and encourage the gunner to shelter/recover in the now-more-expansive buried hull when not directly in combat. (If it’s a “male” FT with a 37mm gun, that gets replaced with a newer machine gun, since it was too obsolete by then). The advantage is that it’s cheaper than digging in and concreting a proper underground bunker for the gunner, while still being better than e.g. a simple foxhole (the insides of the buried tank would probably be drier, for one – at least if insulated properly.
b) You do in fact dig out and reinforce a properly comfortable bunker for each such turret. In this case, you also do not need the hull in that place; though, since it’s still bulletproof, you might want to reuse it elsewhere and get two fortifications for the price of one. (I.e. if there are places like road hub villages or w/e, where you want to have MG support but do not think bunker-level artillery protection is warranted, you might be able to move the FT hull there and place an HMG in the hole where the FT turret ring used to be. The gunner might be vulnerable to overhead shelling, but is much better-protected then e.g. placing the same MG behind the sandbags.)
Either way, at a very limited cost, there are suddenly whole lines of MG fire, which either require tanks to drive up to and shoot at every turret and/or precise artillery fire at hundreds of small targets (or perhaps the Germans could strain the 88s again and hope they would not be necessary for their actual intended purpose.) Regardless of the option, crucial time is eaten up, hastening the German strategic failure. (And additional investment on top of that brings multiplying returns; i.e. mixing in proper AT gun emplacements with these turrets (perhaps inside dedicated turrets, like what was done at some points of the Majino) largely puts paid to option 1 for the Germans.)
P.S. The French actually did use some FT turrets for this purpose – and as you can see from the image, they are really small and hence hard to hit at any distance, especially with indirect fire. However, they only seem to have done that with a small fraction, and to reinforce the already-strong Maginot Line.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Renault_FT_turrets_in_the_Maginot_Line#/media/File:141003-Hatten-04.jpg
Around 1935, eh? OK, I’ll take that. I actually did a thread over on Bluesky last year for how France would have probably done much, much better militarily even with the same (grand) strategy by altering only equipment choices (and while trying to stay within a similar-ish budget, too). It wasn’t tied to a specific year, but the logic is similar – and conveniently, 1935 is the year a lot of French tanks go into production. To recap:
1) Reuse ALL Renault FTs as cheap fortifications – and place as many as is reasonable to reinforce the troops in the Ardennes/Meuse area (see another comment for elaboration.)
2) Renault’s tank assembly got nationalized in 1938. Here, Louis Renault is slapped around* so that this is fast-tracked as much as possible – and, crucially, as soon as it happens (if not earlier), the company/tank assembly is made to stop wasting time, resources and production line space on a myriad of crappy, little designs and instead focuses on one or two things that were actually good.
2a) I.e. first and foremost, a tank historian below argues the greatest French mistake was to slow-walk the French medium tank design, D2, in favour of B1-bis – memed as “the world’s first heavy tank”, yet ultimately an incredible example of scope creep (designed as an assault gun until they decided it got so heavy and powerful it might as well become “a land battleship” and have a turret on top as well) which got so complicated it literally was only produced at an average rate of three per month before the invasion of Poland; (“Only 32 tanks were built from December of 1935 to July of 1937, and 130 more were built with the efforts of 4 companies by September of 1939.”)
https://www.tankarchives.com/2017/06/renault-d2-de-gaulles-workhorse.html
In contrast, while D2 was far from perfect (it had the terrible one-man turret like most French tanks, and it was underpowered and thus very slow – though not much slower than the Matilda or the R35. Further, it was very unreliable when deployed, but that would have most likely been overcome if more than 100 actually got built, similar to other tanks’ teething issues.), it had a better armour and a better gun than any German tank in 1940 – and every tank had a radio. (That was true of B1 as well, of course – but see the production numbers above.) Thus, B1 is cancelled ASAP and D2 takes precedence; all the efforts poured into B1 are thrown into D2 instead.
2b) Likewise, R35 is also cancelled as a slow, undergunned, radio-free dead-end. Just about everything Renault/AMC (nationalized tank factory name) does must go into more D2s.
2c) And I mean everything! Amongst all the other things, Renault also spent a lot of time experimenting with AMR recon tank(ettes) which were frankly terrible (imagine Panzer I, except it somehow costs way more and gets produced at a small fraction.) Those also ended up bafflingly unnecessary, since Panhard developed 178 series of armoured cars which were superior in just about every way. Admittedly, those do not enter production until the end of 1937, but nevertheless; boost those and cancel AMR.
2d) I am not quite as sure about this one, but I think Renault UE production ought to be suspended too. I am only hesitant because it’s unclear if the production lines of that tankette-tractor would have necessarily helped much with accelerating the production of much heavier D2. Nevertheless, it was a very miserable compromise (a tractor for only mortars and the lightest anti-tank guns; so weak and short-ranged, it was transported on trucks outside of combat anyway) and I think France could have done better.
2e) On the other hand, AMC 35 was a very small-series Renault design (only 60 models), but it might actually be worth expanding – assuming it could have been fitted with a radio. (Because otherwise, while it had slightly worse armour than the German medium tanks in 1930, it had a better gun, was just as mobile – and crucially, it was the only French design with a two-man turret.)
3) That is, D2 is an “infantry tank” under the French classification, and they also need a “cavalry” one. (1935-1940 isn’t really enough timeframe to replace that system without making things worse.) OTL, their most common cavalry tank was H35, which was faster than R35 but otherwise had the exact same problems. Moreover, it was made by the same Hotchkiss that was the sole manufacturer of France’s light AA and AT guns. The others were the aforementioned AMC 35…and S35. The latter is often considered WWII France’s best tank…but it apparently cost twice as much as D2, while its only advantage was in speed – it still had the same one-man turret. Hence, difficult questions arise.
3a) I.e. which is better; letting Somua do the same as OTL and pay them to deliver ~400 tanks by 1940, and hope that all the other changes stop the OTL outcome (they are powerful but insufficient) – or cancel the contract and get Renault/AMC to expand AMC 35 output at the same time as D2, wagering that 5 years is enough time for the (presumably) cheaper AMC 35 to be built in markedly greater numbers than OTL-S35 (even as it competes with the D2 production you are also trying to expand to the max), while Somua goes back to their truck/gun tractor business and thus helps to motorize French artillery to a greater extent than OTL? The latter option seems more appealing, but it’s not clear without additional number-crunching.
3b) Besides, while it would be nice for French artillery/logistics to become more mobile thanks to potentially thousands more Somua prime movers, it’s far from clear if that would make more of a difference vs. getting more Hotchkiss weapons. (In particular, French defences around Meuse reportedly broke under the intense Stuka bombardment – placing a ton of AA there is the way to stop it, and unless France signs a massive contract with Bofors (technically easily conceivable, but the contemporary French politics might well be too protectionist to allow for that) Hotchkiss is the only real option.) However, cancelling both H35 and S35 probably results in a “cavalry” tank shortfall (relative to OTL) too great to counteract by any AMC 35 expansion, so it might be the case that one of them would have to be kept on.
3c) Perhaps a way to resolve the conundrum; expand the AMC mostly to make up for the cancellled Hotchkiss tank – while Somua is primarily ordered to focus on their assault gun proposal, which ought to be substantially cheaper than their tank. (Probably produced small-scale as assault gun platoon leader.)
4) There’s also an production option the OTL France largely ignored. That is, Berliet did a lot during WWI – so much, that its truck production fell by half as soon as the war ended. Presumably, that’s a lot of spare capacity that could be reactivated within those 5 years; the question is for what specifically.
4a) One conceivable option is to force Renault to cede truck market share/military logistics contracts to Berliet so that it could focus even harder on tanks.
4b) The other is that the Berliet weird pseudo-APC/armoured car proposal is revived – not as an APC (it was quite slow and altogether not very good, and it’s unlikely enough could be built in 5 years to make a great difference), but as a wheeled tank destroyer. Essentially, the flip side of the Renault UE question is to make it irrelevant by placing all those light (Hotchkiss) AT guns it was meant to pull directly onto that (lightly) armoured Berliet chassis – with the bonus of making infantry AT support much more responsive/capable/resilient in general.
4c) And of course, France could simply just get replace more horses with trucks and get closer to British levels of full mechanization. Probably costs extra funds and is unlikely to be the big secret behind averting the OTL collapse, though.
5) Another weird French tank design of the time was FMC 36. It was made by a shipyard and was essentially the world’s first serial NBD-proof armoured vehicle. (Well, OK, perhaps not really nuclear, but it was designed with negative pressure to keep airborne contaminants out.
If Germany did in fact deploy chemical weapons, it would have been very useful. Otherwise, though, it had slightly worse performance than R35 while being one of the most expensive French tanks, and only 100 were made. Thus, the question is whether one can convince the other French commanders the horrors of gas attacks won’t recur (or that if they will, giving tank crews is cheaper than building a bespoke tank not guaranteed to be where gas is deployed anyway), for long enough to not fund that thing at all.
5a) If that is in fact possible; one thing FMC could actually be very helpful for is manufacturing just their tank turrets for fortifications. This is like an expanded version of the FT plan; it reuses the same guns that got stuck into so many French tanks OTL and hardens such defences at Ardennes or w/e vs. both armoured assault and shelling.
6) So far, this had been operating within the approximate fiscal constraints of OTL French army funding. However, we might also imagine looking at other services. If so, it’s extremely tempting to cancel the totally useless battleships the French were building in the 1930s and turn all the saved money, steel and resources into more of the above. The problem is how to get that past the public opinion which would accuse you of repeating “Jeune ecole” mistakes and of ceding the contest of will to Germany over Bismarck/Tirpitz construction. One possible solution is to build aircraft carriers instead (not only more useful, but back then, they were cheaper than battleships) – but it’s unclear if their airwings could actually be complemented in 5 years. (Admittedly, even a totally empty aircraft carrier is no more useless than the “Dunquerque” battleships were historically, so at worst,, you get the same non-performance while also saving money to invest into the ground army instead.)
I could almost certainly keep going (i.e. this does not cover the French Air Force at all), but I think it shows just how many smaller decisions were there for the French to make, and just how many of them had all the potential to avert their terrible defeat.
*(metaphorically, but perhaps literally too – you are still doing him a favour compared to OTL, where he ends up collaborating with the Germans so enthusiastically after capitulation that he is ultimately found beaten to death in a Free French prison cell not long after their victory)
Given how long the Brits tried distributed armor and how much it failed almost every time, versus how well concentrating armor worked, I’m inclined to say that distributed armor is a failed idea unless you have such a wealth of industry that you can have overwhelming tank numbers everywhere along the line.
Ultimately, isn’t the IFV basically doing the job of the infantry tank (plus that of the APC)? I’m not sure the concept of distributing armor in support of infantry is inherently flawed. It’s not a substitute for concentrated armor, but it is a viable way to enhance the capabilities of your infantry.
I think part of the problem was the limited capabilities of vehicles in the interwar/early war periods, and the British designs were probably too slow and too heavily armored for what they needed to do: some mix of light tanks and assault guns would have probably worked better. (Actually, didn’t the Soviets more or less do that?)
The doctrinal issue is that the IFV emphasizes speed and firepower over armor, whereas infantry tanks were often up armored and under gunned.The trade off is accepting that IFVs will get shredded when fighting heavier enemy contact.
Part of the tactical picture here is that CAS serves great in tank destroyer roles, but only with techniques and tech developed during and after the war. We don’t have heavy tanks or tank destroyers now, because we know that ground attack helicopters and planes like the A-10 can absolutely destroy any armored target that can move under its own power. Plus guideed missiles completely change the calculus, as do attack drones.
However even dive bombers can and did shred tanks, and proved quite capable even early in the war. The issue was doctrinal; CAS is *hard* and risky, and focusing on interdicting enemies and bombing factories from the air seemed safer the air planners. Of course the failure of strategic bombing has been argued to death, but most air.forces were long on it. Interdiction, striking targets not in contact with ground forces, is a better idea and forms part of modern techniques in particular, but without ground identification concealment is quite effective. It works better against static targets, but still.
You also can’t just directly use tactical bombers for CAS without doctrinal integration. It’s hard to figure out how to target enemies for the planes from the ground, and it took a few years of trial to get it right.
Only the Germans and maybe the Americans entered WW2 with a doctrine with room for CAS, with those challenges tackled. The other allies had tactical bombing, but the lack of support for units in contact was telling. The Germans actually hit on one of the key advantages of CAS, which is that you don’t strain your logistics line for your tanks like artillery support did which was critical. If you use planes for tactical bombing and artillery for targeted fires you end up with more logistical load on the front. That, and the artillery needs to be self propelled or motorized, or it can’t keep up with tanks.
In game this is modeled. Strategic bombing is not very good, not until nukes.Tactical bombing works but because the planes are bigger you risk losing more to air defense. The meta is spamming small, cheap, CAS, supported by fighters armed with as many machine guns as you can possibly fit. The only other plane built are also light naval bombers in two types, one with floats which operates from land airfields, and one without that operates from ships, each armed with torpedos and nothing else. That and transports if you want to do air supply or para dropping, both of which are fine but niche.
You don’t even need to research medium or heavy airframes. You can, and you can be annoying with strat bombing and do some damage with tac bombing, but CAS and air superiority are more important.
Which, as pertains to the topic, means that heavy tanks are more vulnerable than most planners realized, so smaller tanks with less armor are better. Because players arrived at “oops all CAS” sooner than in history they also arrive at “oops all mechanized and medium tanks” sooner too.
The single most-produced military plane, ever was Il-2, the textbook definition of a CAS plane. “Sooner than history”, indeed.
This is somewhere on par with a number of War Thunder players getting to genuinely believe that the best WWII vehicle was Germany’s Puma armoured car, because the game mechanics totally omit supporting infantry and because it conditions players to move fast and “snipe the weak spots”. In real life, of course, the most widely produced version of even that armoured car wasn’t the meme model B the players think of (the one with a late-Panzer III long 50mm gun), but yet another PaK 40 carrier.
No piloted plane can be produced cheaper than a truck (or half-track, or perhaps even a light tank chassis) with an anti-air gun in the back – especially not when you consider that training a single pilot costs more than training both the driver and the entire gun crew. Vs. the ITL WWII America specifically, that would just be feeding more mince into the “meat chopper”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_Multiple_Gun_Motor_Carriage
In fact, consider that the ITL US simply stuck .50 cal Brownings onto everything; not just onto every tank “before it was cool”, but also on much cheaper stuff, too; from M20 scout cars to essentially every single gun tractor it built! Granted, the US had the advantage of figuring out the technology early (producing high-caliber machine guns or autocannons had been surprisingly difficult in the 1930s; the USSR only managed it circa 1940, while the Japanese 20mm autocannons were notoriously useless) – but if your opponent’s air defences are not “distracted” by needing to build heavy AA guns to protect cities from strategic bombing, then every other nation would also iterate through light autocannon designs correspondingly faster. (And those like Germany or even Italy, which already had pretty good 20mm stuff, would simply build more of it. The IRL level of 11 AA guns per German division (a little less than 1:1000) was hardly some immutable ceiling.)
And conversely; the more you rely on “fighters with as many machine guns as you can possibly fit”, the more your opponent is incentivized to produce APCs to negate nearly all of that investment.
P.S. Have you really not noticed that not only are many in the US desperate to retire “planes like the A-10” – but essentially no other country is even trying to build them anymore? Even though their technology is actually quite simple? There are literally more countries that we know are attempting to break into the stealth league (Turkiye with KAAN, South Korea with Boramae, some European nations + Japan with FCAS/GCAP – not even counting the countries which already possess stealth) than those trying to make their own A-10-like (maybe Brazil, if you are really generous and count their “anti-cartel” plane, Tucano.)
At the outbreak of WWII, no-one really had proper assault guns, and the USSR was no exception. I suppose there was the artillery support variant of BT-7, armed with a short-barrelled 76mm gun that was essentially incapable of using AP rounds, but only 155 are recorded to have been made. Likewise, there was a total of 503 T-28s, but a considerable number of those had the somewhat upgraded (though still short) gun which really made them more akin to a 1940/1941 Panzer IV (but with two extra machine gun turrets to the sides because the rejected British blueprint the licensed also had those, and that seemed like a good idea at the time). During the Winter War, there was also a larger 76mm gun mounted on a truck chassis, but fewer than 100 were made. A few more were attached to turretless T-26, but that didn’t really go anywhere. (Though after Barbarossa, the idea got another look, and near Leningrad, about 100 damaged T-26s got rebuilt to carry the short 76mm gun in an ersatz turret.)
Still, to give you an idea; even by 1941, there were about twice as many “chemical” (AKA flamethrower; the assumption behind the name was that they could also theoretically spray poison or set up smokescreens for allies, but neither had really panned out) tanks on T-26 chassis in the Red Army (three varieties; KhT-26; KhT-130; KhT-133; ~1200 in total) than there were artillery support vehicles of any kind. To give another example; there were more flamethrower conversions of the terrible 1932 tankette (KhT-27) than there were BT-7As (189 vs. 155).
You are right that so many problems lay in limited capabilities, though. Specifically, the US (and to a lesser extent, Germany) managed to leapfrog so many European militaries which had continuously worked on tanks earlier than they did because so many of them were wedded to the notion of somehow making a functional tank with an engine below 100 horsepower. To really understand WWII, it’s kinda important to know that what the Americans called a light tank in 1941 (M3 “Stuart”) had nearly three times as much horsepower as the light tanks of the UK, France and the USSR; 220 vs. 82-88 HP. (Same goes for Panzer II with its 250 HP; although it was actually outnumbered by the 100 HP Panzer I back in 1939). And in each case, those tanks (Mk VI; Renault and Hotchkiss 35; T-26) have been the bread-and-butter of the country’s armoured forces at the war’s outbreak. Then again, at least they weren’t like Japan, Italy and Poland, all of which made big bets on 30-60 HP tankettes for much of 1930s, and had to fight with those for the shortage of alternatives. (At least Italy earned something when they sold some of that garbage to Hungary, I guess.)
And the thing is, while it’s easy to say now “Just don’t build underpowered tanks with next to no long-term modernization potential, are you stupid?”, back in the early 1930s it was hardly crazy to build up something today, as opposed to holding out for when your industry masters larger engines at a reasonable price tomorrow and risk getting stuck with basically nothing if a war were to break out then and there. Procurement is only easy in hindsight! (And IMO, the actual best “hindsight” option for many of those nations would have been to “use up” these kinds of engines in gun tractors and APCs; as tiny as it was, the British Universal Carrier also had 85 HP, and unlike all of the above, it was beloved by whoever operated with them and knows of what the alternatives were.
P.S. One of my wilder alternate history ideas is where the USSR builds only a “token” number of T-26s (maybe 1,000 or 2,000, as opposed to >12,000 of all varieties) and instead the chassis is primarily used as an armoured frontline gun tractor/AA/radio platform. That is, even OTL about 200 T-26Ts were already produced without turrets to be used as gun tractors – but they were meant to pull fairly large guns, which they weren’t good at. My idea is that this is done by an unarmoured version of the chassis (but which still carries a machine gun or two for self-defence – see what I noted in this comment section about WWII American gun tractors and .50 cals), and the chassis akin to OTL T-26T instead “merely” pulls the 45mm AT gun. (That task was done by the tankette-sized T-20 Komsomolets in more modernized formations, but was more commonly up to horse carriages; one of which pulled the gun and the other its ammo.)
Unlike Komsomolets, though, T-26T is large enough to actually carry the gun crew and its ammo boxes onboard, protected by armor (Komsomolets armoured its chassis and cabin, but the gun crew sat in the open) – and it ought to have had enough weight allowance left over to carry the quad AA Maxim (which carried by unarmoured trucks OTL). If it is produced in comparable numbers as the OTL T-26 and if it is attached to infantry with the aim of replacing all AT gun horse carriages and T-20s alike, then we are essentially looking at every infantry company getting integrated anti-armor, anti-air and infantry suppression support (a quad machine gun is very, very bad to be on the receiving end of, after all.) While I guess it looks weird to strip a tank’s turret only to basically make it pull the exact same kind of gun on a carriage mount, the idea is that this formation would discourage tank adventurism and force integrated tactics – alongside greatly increasing the unit’s overall resilience to air attack.
Moreover, its presence essentially allows the Red Army to eliminate a ton of horse carriages – not just for AT guns, but also a whole lot of horse-transported machine guns attached to Red Army company/battallion rosters (the quad Maxim is so much more effective than all of them, especially since it’s on armoured platform and would not shy away from the enemy bullets the way horse-transported machine guns have to) and the horse carriages for infantry radio operators. (The radio fits on the same chassis, and everyone in the company knows the orders from above would emanate from the T-26T. Besides, since a tank is a surprisingly smooth ride, this saves on radio maintenance – a surprising amount of early Red Army radios got their lamps shattered from rough rides on those horse carriages.)
To “dehorse” the Red Army infantry even further, the aforementioned Komsomolets chassis could instead be repurposed as, yes, a very light assault gun (after all, that chassis actually fit the 57mm anti-tank gun during the actual WWII, albeit not very well – as well as the 37mm AT gun in German hands – the short 76mm “Ognem and Kolesami” gun is lighter than those) and and another Komsomolets would act as the company mortar carrier. (With the side effect of encouraging the adoption of proper-sized 81mm mortars, rather than the foolish “every platoon gets a 50mm mortar which barely does anything, all of which still fit on the same company’s horse carriage). Obviously, the force just gets more resilient when all the short-range artillery is armoured and is far more likely to withstand enemy shelling or getting strafed; not to mention all of those would carry self-defence machine guns, both making them harder to capture, providing even psychological discouragement to “CAS” strafing and helping to reverse any hostile infantry breakthroughs that aren’t properly supported by their own tanks/AT weapons.
At that point, virtually all the remaining horses are in logistics (i.e. field kitchens) rather than on the frontline units – this saves A LOT on horse maintenance (way fewer grooms, horseshoe blacksmiths, veterinaries are now needed) and as a bonus, the horses get to go back to the civilian agricultural economy. (Another benefit of that is the way horse manure is either useless or actively harmful for the military, yet precious in civilian agriculture.) The savings/reinvestments could help pay for too many other military things to list here. Either way, this ideally lets the USSR rush the pseudo-T-70 by the 2nd half of 1930s (i.e. concentrated armour does not go away, but it is done with platforms that have decent capability for it) and the “MBT” T-34/KV hybrid somewhat earlier than the 1940 timeline (assuming e.g. minimal distraction with BTs besides what is needed to progress to T-34.) A T-28 is potentially reworked to shed turrets and just become a 1941 Pz. IV counterpart but several years earlier, the rejected BT alternative from Kharkov (notable for a Pz. II-sized engine, vs. the much larger and hungrier airplane one on BTs) is adopted as an SPG chassis (so that the tank divisions get equally mobile fire support), etc.
As an armchair general raised on WRD, I am also surprised to hear that distributed armor is a failed idea. Basic WRD doctrine is distributed pockets of probing/screening infantry supported from behind by heavier weapons (APCs, IFVs or a tank depending on available resources).
I guess it makes sense; at a tactical level an infantry screen is great, but operationally you’d get farther faster if you mass the tanks, drive down a road, and hope your air force can protect you from recreating the highway of death.
Arguablly, a lot of modern military IS doing distributed armor. Wealthier nations like the US have reached the level where you can support every infantry squad with armored vehicles. It is just that, most of the time that armored vehicle might be a M113 box with a machine gun on top instead of a MBT. Modern IFVs can easily outperform the Panzer 2s and 3s Germany is using at the start of WW2, and a BMP-1 can outdo a FT-17. The standards got higher as technology improved.
Hot take: It’s not armoured support if it is something enemy infantry can defeat at machine gun range. If dug in infantry can destroy your armour just as easily as it would your infantry, you haven’t actually brought armour, you’ve brought a self-propelled field gun.
In that respect, a Bradley can destroy a Panzer III in straight up combat, but the Panzer III was working against anti-tank rifles and grenades, while a Bradley is expecting to face a Javelin or whatever equivalent the Americans expect their notional opponent to field. A Panzer III was basically invincible to anything smaller than a crew-served weapon. A M1 is, as far as I understand, likewise impervious. A Bradley isn’t, and so is not armoured support.
Brett has an older post here arguing that tanks *are* glorified self-propelled field guns. The problem in WW1 was that the artillery could destroy any part of the line and create a breakthrough, but couldn’t follow up on it; the equipment would get stuck in the shattered terrain.
The Panzer II and Panzer III conquered France with their silly short guns because they could follow through and provide direct fire against the machine guns nests and anything else.
You need armor even for blowing up machine gun nests because the nests can fire back at you. On the advance you also need some minimal resistance to artillery shrapnel, mines etc.
When you optimize for something that can destroy enemy tanks in straight up combat, you get a tank destroyer. You make the gun bigger and move all the armor to the front in a low silhouette that wins any exchange against another piece of “armor”. The cost is that you now have a huge gun which can’t easily swing around in an urban or forested environment. You often don’t even have a turret that would let you provide quick fire support.
The MBT is a compromise that tries to be everything at once. It has a long gun that gets stuck on street poles so it can blow up other tanks. It has MGs and rear armor so it can fight infantry and survive artillery blasts.
It still must be vigorously protected from enemy infantry (think urban combat). It’s just not possible to effectively armor all sides; even ERA can be stripped by gunfire (what caliber of bullet triggers American reactive armor is presumably classified info). We bring the MBT into the city because it’s very useful to have all that firepower, and the firepower is protected, but it’s still vulnerable.
The trick is to find what degree of protection is acceptable; apparently the Russians introduced the BMPT because BMPs were vulnerable even to .50cal.
Part of the calculus with MBTs is also that guided missiles, i.e. the TOW, Javelin, etc. can defeat any amount of armor that can move on the ground. Plus, Helicopter gunships and both modern and period planes can strike tanks effectively. You don’t need a big tank gun when you can pop targeting smoke on a position and call in an a-10 to go hunting. Even with WW2 tech a dive bomber could rip even the heaviest tank apart once up gunned with a cannon, and even the “small” bomb loadouts often did enough to cripple the target.
This basically means that heavier tanks are a lost cause. You’re just a big target. MBTs are a compromise to try to preserve the ability to force strongholds with cost, weight, and performance. IFVs accept vulnerability to some things MBTs can shrug off in exchange for even better agility and speed, optics, and troop integration. And both are suffering greatly against drones, although their battlefield role is still needed.
“A Panzer III was basically invincible to anything smaller than a crew-served weapon. A M1 is, as far as I understand, likewise impervious. A Bradley isn’t”
A Javelin is in fact a crew-served weapon.
“Hot take: It’s not armoured support if it is something enemy infantry can defeat at machine gun range. If dug in infantry can destroy your armour just as easily as it would your infantry, you haven’t actually brought armour, you’ve brought a self-propelled field gun.”
But this is another way of saying “there is no such thing as armour”. Because any armour can be defeated by infantry within MG range, with NLAW or Javelin or something similar.
Or, you could argue conversely, no armour can be defeated as easily as infantry – a modern infantry platoon could defeat advancing infantry with a Pz II in support, but not as easily as if they didn’t have the Pz II!
“But this is another way of saying “there is no such thing as armour”. Because any armour can be defeated by infantry within MG range, with NLAW or Javelin or something similar.”
Part of what we should be talking about here is hard versus soft kill, too. A lot of tanks are technically vulnerable to machine gun fire, in that if you unload into the tracks it’ll stop moving until at least field repairs are done. Conversely some tanks can resist anti tank weapons, denying a hard kill, neither being destroyed utterly nor killing the crew, but still take significant damage often including loss of turret or gun control or track destruction.
Hence tank armor is a continuum. So is offense. A squad level weapon that can disable a tank long enough for accurate fires to be delivered or the squad to run is better than nothing, while armorr that converts a flaming wreck to a concussed crew and stuck turret is extremely useful because you can repair that tank and continue the assault later.
Part of the modern issue is, as I mentioned, that planes and helicopters can deliver killing blows, including converting tracked vehicles into dead ones. This is aided by incredibly quick fire support turnabout, aided by a ton of modern innovations ranging from the ubiquity of radio to gps.
The M113, at least in Israeli experience, has too bad survivability to be used manned. It has the reputation of basically being a Pinto.
These days, they normally use armored vehicles (both tanks and APCs) with active protection systems, which are reasonably resistant to anti-tank missiles and drones, but are basically tank-sized rather than M113-sized.
I’m not sure what Israel has to contribute to this analysis. They’ve faced hundreds of drone strikes, compared to Ukraine’s tens of thousands. They lack real experience here.
Israel is also much more vulnerable to certain…inefficiencies in their procurement as they aren’t facing existential threats and hence have less push towards effectiveness versus political concerns.
Part of this is casualty tolerance. Ukraine accepts some casualties. They’re still trying to restore maneuver, but their simplest theory of victory has always been to attrit Russia until they give up. In that style of war you have to accept the best effect for cost.
Israel isn’t fighting for its life (though they so desperately want you to think they are), they’re fighting offensive wars of conflict and volition. The casualty tolerance for that by the civilian population is inherently much lower; the population is propagandized enough that they’ll tolerate some, but that has limits.
The other factor is that Israel often complains it needs the new American system X not because it needs X, but because there’s a pretty clearly mapped deal for Israeli politicians to get kickbacks from defense manufacturers if they order X. Meanwhile American politicians golden parachute and political campaigns are funded by lobbying from Israel and defense contractors, in exchange for them dedicating aid to Israel. Israel will always ‘need’ new stuff because otherwise the quid pro quo stops.
Ukraine’s need for effectiveness against the existential threat of Russia cuts through some of that incentive structure.
From what I understand of the Ukrainian consensus m113 is fine. It can be fitted with anti drone systems because it’s frame and power train are solid, the simplicity of its power train means it’s familiar to Ukrainian mechanics and there’s enough Ukrainian know how to repair its dead simple construction. Plus there’s enough repair parts in circulation due to it’s ubiquity to keep a fleet running on the cheap.
Fancier systems might be better able to survive direct hits from dedicated fpv strike drones, but the 113 can move enough to frustrate spotting and can survive being winged or hit by light payloads. That’s enough.
My understanding of the WW2 problem is that at the time they weren’t able to rapidly redeploy the distributed tanks in the face of concentrated German attacks, so the Germans had many more tanks at the point of contact while the early Allied tanks mostly sat around not doing much elsewhere due to a combination of poor communications in both doctrine and equipment and the fact that they were supposed to stick with infantry who mostly didn’t even have unarmored offroad trucks, much less APCs or IFVs.
And Bradleys are armored, but to my understanding they’re not actually meant to slug it out with tanks; they carry troops with reasonable protection against bullets as their main role, and secondarily have a gun for chewing through cover and somewhat armored vehicles, and they have some anti-tank rockets because they fit. But mostly they’re so you can keep an infantry screen with your tanks and redeploy infantry quickly without needing a train. And in WW2 during the invasion of France apparently Germany put its infantry screen on anything vaguely drivable for the same reason we use IFVs operationally.
On the right track, I guess, but the comparison is still incredibly silly. Even the ~16mm side armour of BMP-1 is at worst equivalent to Panzer II (most likely better due to improvements in alloying) while the front armour is superior to all Panzer IIIs (or IVs, for that matter) which invaded Poland and France; those had 30 mm, whereas BMP front armour is sloped to be equivalent to 40mm. (Depending on how much the alloys have improved, it could well be equivalent to 50mm of Barbarossa-era Panzer IIIs/IVs.) Most importantly, though, its 73mm 2A28 Grom with then-advanced HEAT shells is superior to just about any tank gun of the entire WWII.* This is before we consider all the other improvements, of course (i.e. being >1.5X faster than Panzer II/III and >6X faster than the Renault FT, being amphibious, better comms/navigation/sights, etc.) BMP-2 has the same armour, and while its 30mm autocannon is far more optimized for infantry support, it still has the same anti-armour effectiveness as 1941’s Panzer IIIs with the short-barrel 50mm – and besides, it comes equipped with a reliable ATGM, which no WWII tank could counter at range.
As for the other “modern” IFVs…even the conceptual dead-end that is BMP-3 (or its somewhat superior Chinese version) still has comparable-ish armour to 1941 Panzer III models – while its weaponry ludicrously outmatches any WWII tank in terms of anti-tank capability, and offers heavy tank-level anti-fortification/infantry-suppression capability. Bradleys, CV-90s and the like (i.e. the Korean thing which our armed forces are buying and designating Redback, after the notorious poisonous spider) have much less high-explosive firepower, but their armour is practically Tiger-level nowadays. (And all of these get still better protection with ERA.)
…No? The whole point of a Javelin is that it’s virtually impossible to armour a tank to stop it, since it just strikes the top armour. Now, top attack isn’t trivial to program (even if it was initially done by the end of 1970s – there are archived interviews with IDF of 1982, probing them on the performance of brand-new US-provided top attack weapons after the rousing success of that year’s “Mole Cricket”) so e.g. all but the most recent versions of the standard Russian ATGM, Kornet, lack that ability. Even so, ISIS (!) blew up an Iraqi-operated M1 Abrams with an older Kornet as early as 2016 – so predictably, a number of M1s were destroyed by those in Ukraine as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161104034009/http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-destroying-us-tank-active-protection-2016-11
Pretty sure even the oldest Soviet Kontakt-1 that actually went into production doesn’t react to small arms, no – otherwise, the insurgents in Chechnya and elsewhere would have long figured out that you could kill soldiers standing near tanks en-masse by simply shooting a rifle at their tanks and letting the ERA detonation do the work.
That vulnerability was mostly a product of the Soviet military’s post-WWII obsession with making everything amphibious, which forced lighter armour as a trade-off. Besides, BMP-1 was also developed under Khruschev, when the doctrine assumed that any conflict worth deploying BMPs to would also smash everything with nukes anyway – the contemporary Soviet “tactical” nuclear bomb had twice the yield of Fat Man at Nagasaki! (40 Kt vs. 20, respectively – and Little Boy was 15 Kt.) Hence, side armour only capable of resisting small arms is just fine if you only expect to encounter dazed survivors of such a nuclear blast ineffectually firing their rifles at you, as opposed to minimally cohesive 12.7mm machine gun teams and such.
If anything, “Terminator” is mostly a reaction to the trauma of the infamous tank column massacre in Grozny of 1994 (which could well have been the intended political outcome to justify the wider war – its legal status at the time was that of “volunteers” assisting loyalist Chechens). Like many other designs inspired by that period, though**, only a handful were produced anyway.
See my other comment.
No, not really. I presume you are referring to Ju-87G, which carried 37mm guns; enough to destroy T-34s if it hit them on the roof, and effectively nowhere else. The odds of destroying a KV-1 or IS-2 in that manner were very limited; and the odds of hitting any tank’s roof in the first place were not that great. All in all, WWII-era CAS was notoriously ineffective as long as the ground forces had just about anything to shoot back with.*** There’s a reason why USSR’s Il-2, which experimented with a variety of cannon layouts, eventually just adopted small HEAT bombs as its primary anti-tank weapon.
Even with them, it was mostly a waste; all the effort invested into producing 36,000 of these and training its crews would have done much, much more if it went into producing even half as many APCs instead. After all, the USSR already had far more tanks; slightly increasing German tank attrition mattered much less next to what increasing divisional operational mobility + all-but-eliminating those divisions’ own attrition from the air & artillery while on the move would have done.
…I don’t think even the Soviet anti-tank manuals for the infantry recommended that! If so, that would say a lot, given how much of their advice (i.e. on “Molotovs” or grenade bundles) was in practice little better than a placebo, more helpful for preventing disorganized rout than for actually destroying tanks. Or to put it another way; would various tank crews have placed spare tracks on the front as extra armour if those tracks weren’t even bulletproof?
Their doctrine on this long predates quadcopter drones.
Not relevant here! The IDF isn’t actually using anything American whenever it substitutes M113; on the contrary, their first such design had been converted out of the T-55s they captured in 1967 and 1973 (and maybe in 1982 also?); it is known as Achzarit (‘Cruel Woman’; much like how they called the standard T-54/T-55 “Tyrant” when inducting it into their service), and it is in fact an APC with Cold War tank armour and 14 more tons of additional armour. Moreover, several hundred exist; as well as a similar modification of the old British-made Centurions (Puma) and the indigenous Namer (‘Leopard’), which does a similar thing to Merkava chassis.
Indeed. Though, I would say economics are the most important. Israel can afford to fight only across very short distances, so it does not care too much about conserving fuel. For everyone else, the economics of placing a handful of infantry into a tank chassis, propelled by an engine with several times the capacity (and consumption) of one used on a typical APC/IVF had been prohibitive to date.****
Sorry, but when was the last time you looked at Oryx? M113 losses are genuinely not that different from those of BMPs or BTRs from either side, especially when treated as a proportion.
*There’s some case for heavy tank guns being preferable at longer ranges or vs. soft targets due to stronger explosive shells, but that’s about it – and a number of BMP-1s had automatic grenade launchers attached to them to improve high-explosive infantry suppression capability.
**I suppose my favourite was the proposed conversion of an untold number of BMP-1s to fuel carriers. I.e. raising the costs of a successful fuel convoy attack from some small arms and/or some barely aimed strike of just about any artillery (even mortars) to at least 12.7mms and/or much more precisely aimed artillery strike with heavy artillery. (As well as potentially allowing the fuel convoy to go off-road or even to “swim.”) The drone age arguably made this idea irrelevant again – though perhaps the March 2022 convoy to Kyiv would have worked a lot better if those had in fact replaced the fuel trucks.
***Perhaps the most successful instance of German anti-tank CAS occurred during the brief Lepel’ counteroffensive soon after the start of Barbarossa in Belarus; German planes simply sprayed pseudo-napalm, since the prewar Soviet doctrine only placed one anti-air machine gun per every fifth tank or so, and the hastily thrown together corps in that counteroffensive probably weren’t scrupulous about that, either.
****Arguably, if there was any single one technological change which might have allowed the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to succeed as planned, it would have been the mass conversion of all the T-55s and T-62s into Achzarit-style vehicles, thus enabling the convoys to overwhelm Kyiv and other cities with mass; a hit which burns the APC and kills all 7-10 soldiers suddenly merely forces them to disembark at worst. Of course, any version of Russian Federation actually capable of such organization and foresight (and care for its troops) would have most likely been too well-run to even want to invade in the first place.
Correct. The only thing I would add to that paragraph is that the Bradleys or equivalent IFVs are generally armoured to resist other IFVs up close; specifically, the 30mm gun on BMP-2 (or BTR-82 more recently + the various Chinese vehicles which also carry their derivation of that gun.) (BMP-1/2’s front armour was in turn designed to resist 20mm gun on an early West German APC/proto-IFV – which got left behind by progress by now.)
From what I’ve heard sustained machinegun fire can mess up the tracks on an MBT, though I think just making the tread come loose. Tank crews just shoot the gunner and his friends, stay buttoned up until support shows up, and get out to fix the treads. Tanks throw treads often in general so the crew is prepared for this. Great moment in a 40k book where a tank has possibly thrown a tread and the crew waits in silent horror to find out if it has because the planet is soaked in the Life Eater virus so if they were to open up to fix it they’d just melt like the poor bastard earlier in the book who didn’t wait for decontamination to finish. They have biohazard suits but the Life Eater will eat through the seals in seconds at most.
As for using the treads as armor, I suspect the main point is triggering fuzes in HEAT rounds and rockets before they touch the main armor. This can work with much lighter material than needed for stopping it cold and battleships could have thin “shell decks” for a similar purpose.
Main reason to fire at a tank with a machine gun, though, is so the commander can’t pop the hatch to look around for guys with molotovs sneaking up. When the hatch is closed the crew is nearly blind; even in modern tanks visibility is bad while closed up, hence the infantry screens they need. And for WW2 tanks the molotovs could disable a tank and force the crew to bail if the burning fluid got into the right places; I’m told Abhrams are immune to this but it was what molotovs were mostly for.
Ludicrously unlikely. I actually found a video of a track link section from M3 Light Tank (more commonly known as “Stuart”, having been named that way by the British to make it easier to distinguish from the M3 Medium in common parlance*) getting shot at with modern rifles – from a 7.62mm AR all the way to the .50 cal Barrett. Even the latter did next to no damage when fired from about 10 meters (i.e. basically point-blank in military terms); standard rifle caliber bullets basically didn’t even leave a mark even at those distances.
https://youtu.be/vz0LHxx2sgo?t=531
If you say “well, what if 200 bullets all hit”…the whole point of a machine gun is that the recoil sprays bullets over a very wide area, and you are not getting more than a handful of bullets to land into the general track area from any halfway realistic combat distance. And remember, this was the resilience of a track on a WWII light tank with a mass of 15 tons. The contemporary MBTs weigh from about 3 times (T-72 and derivatives) to over 4 times (Western designs, from Abrams and Challenger to Leopard and Merkava) as much, so presumably, their tracks would have to be correspondingly stronger.
Ironically, doing that actually makes HEAT more effective – it gives the molten copper jet more time to form the ideal shape. If you look at post-RPG-7 HEAT warheads, they are generally tipped with standoff probes – thin hollow rods of ~10-20 cm, whose only purpose is to trigger the fuse earlier. Again, spam filter blocks more than one link per comment, but if you look up “The most misunderstood weapon in the world”, you’ll see that even for late-Cold War HEAT the peak effectiveness was at 0.5-1 meter stand-off, and the meaningful drop-off in power generally does not begin until 1.5-2.5 meters!
That page does admit that spaced armour (specifically, the “skirts” on some German tanks – and more recently, on more modern ones like the Challenger 2) helps against the (then)-conventional anti-tank munitions by stripping the soft-metal outer surface before the hardened core had dug into the armour, which increases the odds it simply shatters instead of penetrating. Given that the “skirts” were just 5mm, presumably the spare tracks would have worked similarly. However, that was at its most effective vs. the small anti-tank rifle projectiles, and the greater the caliber, the greater the risk of the exact opposite happening – the “skirt”/spare track barely impedes the core and instead helps it to maintain its shape as it’s going in.
Mostly true – but for most of WWII specifically, the most important reason was really to impede aiming. As you noted, tank crews couldn’t even see other tanks at a meaningful distance outside of a very narrow sight arc if they stayed with the hatch closed; hence, the tank commander generally needed to pop out of the hatch, spot the tank (or any other target, pop back down, and tell the gunner where to turn to so that he could aim the weapon at the target. This had also placed substantial numbers of prewar designs at a massive disadvantage, as they opted to deal with with the inevitable weight constraints by reducing crew size in the turret from the ideal three (commander, gunner and loader), thus forcing the commander to take on the duties of either the loader (T-26 and BT models) or the gunner (the T-34, Panzer II, the Japanese Type 97 Chi-Ha and those Czech tanks which got taken over by the Germans and are better-known as the Pz. 35 and Pz. 38 nowadays), with the latter functioning much worse.
This issue hit its apotheosis in the French tanks, nearly all of which had just one man in their turret (even the comparatively few tanks with radio operators generally placed them in the hull, next to the driver), and so the commander had to take on both duties. This meant that in a tank fight, the commander had to a) pop out of the hatch to see where the enemy tank even was; b) pop back in, look through the narrow gun scope and try to turn it to where he just remembered the enemy tank happened to be; c) if he failed, he might have to pop back up again to be sure; d) finally get a semblance of a bead and fire; e) reload; f) potentially repeat from a) if d) had missed/failed to penetrate/there are multiple enemy tanks. Furthermore, that tired them out very quickly compared to the other tank crews. (Japanese Ha-Go had the same design flaw – but it was mostly deployed in places where the enemy tanks were either not present at all, or in the jungle where all the foliage meant the sight lines were awful regardless of whether you peered out of the hatch or not, making the issue less acute. On the other hand, the wide open sight lines of Khalhin Gol had been devastating for them.)
Admittedly, this constraint did enable the most common French tank (Renault and Hotchkiss 35) to have much stronger armour compared to what e.g. the T-26***** or Panzer II had. There’s a story on Wikipedia of a tank battle in 1940 where a Panzer II drove up to one, couldn’t destroy it even point-blank and in frustration, the German commander got out, climbed onto the turret and tried to hit the sights or w/e with a hammer – only to fall off and get crushed by the tracks. On the flip side, the fact that the French tank had “allowed” the Panzer to drive up to it without being able to destroy it also speaks a lot of both how miserable it was to aim from it – and of the effectiveness of the WWI-era 37mm guns those tanks were equipped with as a cost-cutting measure.
There’s even some archived letter online from another German tank commander deployed to the USSR circa 1942, where he dismisses the hundreds of French tanks they captured (and were attempting to deploy during Barbarossa) as “only fit to frighten the peasants”**. The same letter notes the T-34 is technically much stronger than their tanks, but its crews “advance like bulls”, ineffectually firing on the move, so they still have the edge. (While the original T-34 turret was larger than the French ones and fit two men, the shells of the 76mm gun were too heavy for one man to both shoot from it and reload it***, so that 2nd man was the loader, while aiming was otherwise as miserable as on the French tanks. This was finally rectified on the T-34-85, which did have a 3-man turret.)
Thus, having nearby machine gun crews who could keep spraying the enemy tanks and thus force their commanders to stay buttoned-up was very helpful for the tanks in general – and for one-two man turret tanks facing the three-man turret tanks in particular. And yes, at the end of the war, once the bazookas, panzerfausts and the like (including truly extreme approaches like the notorious Japanese nikuhaku – the “human mine” suicide bombers which carried a massive explosive charge atop a bamboo pole) entered the scene, spotting them from the hatch became important as well. Nowadays, though, it’s a largely solved issue – not only are the modern rotating digital sights very, very good compared to WWII observation slits or cupolas, but basically every single tank made in the past 15 years or so does not even require the commander to speak to signal a target – s/he is able to simply click something of interest on the screen, and it would immediately be highlighted on the gunner’s screen. Ideally, that is a lot faster than popping out of a hatch and shouting an order!
That was theoretically conceivable, but far more likely to kill whoever attempted it than to hurt the tank. As their name suggests, Molotov cocktails were/are an artifact of a very specific conflict (the Winter War) and some very specific circumstances; That is, the Finnish domestic arms industry was largely limited to small arms, but Finland did have a state alcohol monopoly that could be immediately ordered to produce and bottle high-spirit ethanol for optimum ignition qualities; on the other hand, the T-26’s design (licensed from British Vickers; same as the Polish 7TP/9TP) placed its engine at the very back and had a flat engine deck there, only covered by a metal grid, where a big fan sucked the air into the engine. Essentially, it was hard to conceive of any design more vulnerable to having a glass bottle shatter against that deck and pour burning liquid directly onto the fan working hard to pull the fluid into the engine (or perhaps even into the crew compartment.)
No other tank (besides those Polish ones and the original Vickers design bought in small numbers by Finland or, remarkably, Thailand) had that design element, so none had this vulnerability. Even if you did get the burning fuel from the Molotov into an observation slit or the like, you had to either be lucky or rely on the crew to panic; otherwise, they could well have used a flamethrower on it, which many were trained to carry to deal with engine fires. (And even before Barbarossa, some BT and T-28 tanks already had automatic fire suppression – although it was remarkably toxic, forcing the crew to wear gas masks.) Furthermore, diesel engines are practically impossible to set on fire in this manner – hence, even Finland essentially gave up on Molotovs once the T-34 predominated, and as you said, the modern armoured vehicles are practically invulnerable to it. (In February 2022, the one attempt to fight Russian mechanized infantry with Molotovs in a Kherson park ended up as an absolute massacre of the unfortunate territorial defence squad.)
*Remarkably, both of the M3 tanks – Stuart and Lee – were named after the Confederate Generals. (Although the version of the M3 Medium produced to British specifications (which mostly consisted of repositioning the radio operator from hull to turret) was named Grant instead.) Admittedly, since the American-style tanks were seen as the successor to cavalry, naming them after cavalry Generals made sense – and virtually all the Mexican-American War-era cavalry Generals had defected in 1861. Remarkably, Stuart was one of the few senior Confederates who actually got killed in battle – sadly, the Union sharpshooter who managed it was also killed at the end of that month. I think the only other WWII-era US military vehicle with a Confederate name was the M36 (“Stonewall”) Jackson tank destroyer – which was quite effective, but didn’t enter service until the final 6 months of the war. (It later served in Korea and even with Pakistan in the 1960s, at which point it was almost totally obsolete – yet, that still wasn’t as sad as when some got brought out of storage for the Yugoslav Wars.)
**That insult actually echoes how the trophy French tanks were soon withdrawn from the occupied USSR and were ultimately mostly deployed in anti-partisan operations in the Balkans and the occupied Norway. The tanks which were kept in France itself almost universally had their turrets torn off, with the 105/150mm field guns bolted on in their place, making for a crude, yet operationally useful self-propelled gun.
***In contrast to even T-34’s predecessors. Since the 45mm shells on T-26 and the BT were much lighter, it was a lot more feasible for the gunner to reload it, and the commander could in fact observe from the hatch and give orders. The resistance much of the Stavka had to adopting the T-34 looks utterly crazy nowadays, given how it kept the frighteningly vulnerable T-26 and BT-7 in production until 1940 – up until you consider such factors. Many of those who didn’t want the T-34 instead favoured the T-50, which was a Panzer-III style design with fairly similar capabilities (at least until that tank was upgunned with long-barrel 50mm – though by 1942 there was a long-barrel version of the Soviet 45mm gun as well) and would have rather had a force consisting of it and the KV-1. In practice, though, T-50 production ended up delayed, fewer than 100 were made before the invasion, and it soon became clear it cost about as much as the T-34 while generally being much less effective (especially vs. the non-tank targets.) There was also a plan for a T-34M with a three-man turret (and a mandatory flamethrower, interestingly enough), but Barbarossa cancelled it until the T-34-85 happened.
IMO, the real solution would have been to cancel the KV instead and merge the T-34 and KV designs into one (a 1940 “main battle tank”, if you will.) After all, KV-1’s armour thickness wasn’t chosen in reference to any particular weapon, and so the end result was that most German weapons were already largely useless vs. the T-34 in 1941, while most of the tank/anti-tank guns they developed afterwards were only somewhat less effective vs. the KV than vs. the T-34 (i.e. an upgunned Pz. IV or a StuG needed to engage at a significantly shorter range to destroy a KV vs. a T-34, but they could still do it at a distance not far off from one the KV itself needed to fight them from the front) – all while the KV had the same gun as the T-34, yet weighted a lot more, making it more expensive to produce and maintain, slower, and, crucially, being much more likely to have some of its transmission break and immobilize it, especially in that prewar early production period. However, it did have a three-man turret and every single model was fitted with a radio, as opposed to only the platoon leaders’ tanks on T-34. In all, an “MBT” with a three-man turret, radio, KV-1 front armour yet T-34 side armour, built to a unified template across every factory, would have likely been more considerably numerous in June 1941 than both T-34 and KV-1 combined – and more importantly, it would have been far more maintainable (much easier spare parts situation) and operationally responsive (unless a radio production bottleneck would have emerged – though the wartime increase in their production suggests otherwise.)
The difference that alone could have made is staggering. Recall that Germany invaded with only around 3,500 tanks/assault guns, and only about 700 of those (439 Pz IVs and 259 StuGs, all with short barrels) were somewhat effective T-34 killers “of last resort”; some 600 short 50mm Panzer IIIs could also manage it via flanking at a great risk to themselves, and for the rest (the remaining third of 973 Pz IIIs committed to Barbarossa, 337 Panzer Is, 890 Panzer IIs, 155 Pz. 35(t), 625 Pz. 38(t)s and a few hundred French tanks) it was largely hopeless. Meanwhile, the USSR had produced 1,100 T-34s and ~500 KVs – but many were still in transit, undergoing crew training, lacked new fuel/munitions or even already broke down by June/July 1941. In this scenario, we would most likely see >2,000 of the “MBT” at a significantly greater availability (unified spare parts supply and not needing to allocate diesel/oil for KV’s larger engine would add up across the force) and overall effectiveness (even the “killers of last resort” aren’t particularly effective anymore) – as well as faster replenishment after the start of the invasion.
P.S. Having said that, the USSR could have also been in a stronger strategic position if it actually went a bit more French and swallowed the issues of one-man turrets a bit earlier. That is, it had already produced thousands of scout amphibious tankettes with one-man turrets by 1941 and by the end of the year, the latest version (T-40) was upgunned and uparmoured (giving up amphibiousness), to produce T-60 (like a Pz. II with better armour and no radio, and ultimately next to no utility by that point) and then a T-70; the same gun as the prewar tanks and really cheap (less than half of T-34’s price and 8 times cheaper than the upgunned Pz. IVs).
The T-70’s tragedy is that it arrived only a couple years too late: for all the aforementioned one-man turret flaws, the tank would have still made a massive difference if it had entered production in 1938 or even 1939 and replaced several thousands of T-26s and BTs in frontline service by 1941 – simply because unlike those thinly-armoured tanks, its 35mm heavily sloped front armour was 37mm-proof (even as the sides were just as vulnerable), meaning that the median German anti-tank weapon was useless against it outside of ambush tactics. Hence, so many counterattacks that were historically beaten back with just the integrated anti-tank weapons of infantry formations and/or with the light tanks (German and trophy) would instead bite far deeper and require medium tanks and/or air support to contain, generating much, much more friction. And assuming that the T-70 production exceeds the combined T-26/BT production in 1939/1940 (quite possible, since they were mechanically simpler than BTs and used much cheaper and smaller engines; two truck ones vs. a single aircraft one), they displace hundreds of older tanks which instead go into reserves and/or are dug in, reinforcing some fortified areas. I.e. even more friction, again.
Instead, of course, by the time T-70 actually entered service, the median German infantry anti-tank weapon was the 50mm PaK 50, the median tank was the long-barrelled Panzer III, and PaK 40s and Panzer IVs and the like were becoming more widespread with every month. Hence, while the already-completed tanks still had some support utility, the production was soon suspended in favour of SU-76 on its modified chassis.
Dammit, I actually wrote this down, where I obviously meant to refer to a fire extinguisher! Oh well. (I guess I was thinking at the time of whether there were tank-infantry flamethrower engagements; apparently, some British polygon tests have shown that the weapon itself ought to be very effective, but there are virtually no reports of that actually happening, given how much a backpack flamethrower slows down its wearer and makes it hard to seek cover. Likewise, most flamethrower tanks didn’t have enough armor to close in to flamethrower range with another tank without getting destroyed by it first; the main exception were the flamethrower-equipped KVs at Stalingrad, which did have some recorded tank kills to their name (massively helped not just by their armour, but also the confines of street fighting.)
Oh, and another typo – I wrote “50mm PaK 50” when the actual name was PaK 38. (Notably, unlike the PaK 40, which was more-or-less the same as the upgraded Panzer IV gun, this had the longer barrel than any Panzer III versions, and so was considerably more effective. You can sometimes see people use the “50% of T-34s destroyed by mid-1942 were destroyed by 50mm” stat to argue that the Panzer III was still competitive with them – disregarding that the PaK 38s were both more powerful than Panzer IIIs (as long as they were positioned in the right direction in advance, and did not have to relocate suddenly – thanks to the disparity in operational planning, recon, etc. between the two armies in 1941-1942, that wasn’t an issue very often at the time) and were significantly more numerous due to basic economics.)
P.S. I also realized that my recap of why stand-off does not actually protect tanks from HEAT warheads fails to explain why we nevertheless see slat bars and the like so often and why that work – and not just on tanks, but also on much lighter vehicles (i.e. slat “cages” eventually mounted onto Strykers deployed in Iraq have reportedly protected them fairly reliably from RPGs). The reason is not stand-off, but nearly the opposite – it’s not the bar which protects the vehicle, but the empty space in between! (Apologies for the long quote, but it’s genuinely fascinating):
https://euro-sd.com/2024/06/articles/38841/the-most-misunderstood-weapon-in-the-world-mythbusting-heat-warheads-and-their-countermeasures/
”As an armchair general raised on WRD, I am also surprised to hear that distributed armor is a failed idea”
It is not, everyone used it in WW2 and even today, like the Americna regimental combat teams, German Kampfgruppens, Soviet independent tank battalions, etc… it depends the context.
That, and the fact that air support has gotten so good massed armored assaults are right out (ask the Russians). Deep Battle was good right up until an A-10 pilot could talk to a forward observer on the ground. Then its day had passed.
Wow, (at least) two separate people on ACOUP (you and Terry) still believing in the A-10 myth?! I’m kinda surprised!
A-10 entered service in 1977 – 9 whole years after Strela-1. Here’s what that 1968 vehicle could do:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112105118647&view=1up&seq=60
By 1977, the more capable Strela-10 had entered service as well. Meanwhile, the event described above – the capture of an exported Strela-1 in Angola – did not happen until 1983 – i.e. 6 years after A-10 was accepted into service. On the other hand, it also took place nearly 8 years before Desert Storm – i.e. the US had that much time to develop countermeasures to the standard system protecting Iraqi armor. Moreover, the well-known collapse of Iraqi command (both due to action of aircraft more advanced than A-10 and Saddam’s own notorious purges) didn’t spare the early warning system required for these systems either – and yet, they still downed a couple of A-10s during this campaign.
In contrast, under most “Cold War Goes Hot” scenarios (i.e. the Fulda Gap), achieving this collapse of early warning would have been a lot more difficult (for one thing, air superiority fighters would have had a lot more air cover to chew through before ground attack jets could have began targeting the command posts) – and if it took place between A-10’s introduction and the capture of that Angolan Strela, their flares and the like are a lot less effective. If it takes place later, their effectiveness gets considerably closer to Desert Storm levels – but the Soviet armoured forces ALSO get the far more capable Tunguska (and, from 1986, Tor*) systems covering them, neither of which were possessed by Saddam’s Iraq. Moreover, after 1980, the notoriously inaccurate hand-held Strela is increasingly replaced by Igla – with the Soviet/Russian (and probably other post-Soviet) manuals eventually calling for one to be assigned to essentially every armoured vehicle crew – from BMPs to self-propelled artillery. (How often that density was actually observed on the ground is another matter.)
Add it all up, and it shouldn’t surprise you that one of our host’s natsec mutuals on Bluesky claimed that NATO’s estimates for a Fulda scenario were of 9% A-10 attrition per sortie – i.e. almost nothing would have been left after less than two weeks of daily combat operations. (And by now, of course, Tor became standard-issue for Russian armoured forces, with Strela moved to backline. There’s a reason Lloyd Austin was reported telling Ukraine’s then-Defence Minister that the “old-fashioned and slow” A-10 would be a “squeaky target” for Russian air defenses! There’s also a reason Su-25, which is smaller than A-10 but otherwise is meant to do the same thing, had achieved very little in the actual war in spite of being possessed by both sides.)
P.S. For that matter, combat helicopters are similarly vulnerable to the same kind of systems, and are now remarkably niche. Sure, the need for anti-submarine patrols from naval helicopters isn’t going anywhere, and in the ongoing war, Ka-52 had at times been extraordinarily effective…as a defensive tool, sitting well behind the frontline (and within its own air defence envelope) and launching anti-tank missiles from ~20 km away (thus accounting for e.g. that “Bradley graveyard” at the start of the notorious 2023 Ukrainian summer offensive.) Essentially, it became a successor to the original tank destroyer (also by far at its most capable when waiting for tanks to come to it, not the other way around), as opposed to the brief peak of assault helicopter capabilities.
*An Iranian derivative of which was rumoured to have been the system which hospitalized that one F-35 pilot this year.
Perhaps the doctine system would work better if it just had the armies better at doing things they had done or practiced before. And worse at doing things new to them. Presumably that was what was really happening during the war, after all.
“In some cases, such as the demolition of the Panzer Lehr division as part of the Operation Cobra breakout, US commanders assigned more bombers to hit an enemy position than the enemy had men (the 2,200 remaining Germans in Panzer Lehr got hit with about 3,000 aircraft in a single day).”
A common fallacy. This is a misunderstanding of divisional strengths. According to Zetterling (Normandy 1944, the bible of information about German divisions in Normandy), the strength of Panzer Lehr before Cobra was around 12,000 men (probably slightly above). According to casualty and replacement reports, it had suffered around 2,500 casualties since D-Day, so its strength was much reduced from its original 14,600 (approx). However, most casualties were amongst the infantry, so it’s possible that Bret’s figure is infantry combat strength. Tank strength was severely depleted (though not much more by the bombing).
One thing touched upon here, that I’m unsure if you’ll mention again in the next parts, is about Paradox attempts to recreate historical events like the Battle of France.
I’ve seen in my own games and others accounts that HoI IV turns out to be pretty good at recreating WWII, with reliable Battle of France, Invasion of the Soviets that stop before Moscow, Stalingrad, Soviet pushback and the invasion of Italy and D-day at close enough dates, but the problem is how such feat is achieved.
They achieve the Fall of France, like you said, by “nerfing” the Allies since recreating the historical reasons would both be really hard and railroad the player too much, so in HoI (all versions really) France is weakened so that Germany has a game.
And I believe something similar is going on with the doctrines, where in part they recreate the surface level understanding of the doctrines and in part they nudge the nations to have their historical results, I think this explains the Mass Assault Doctrine, as the Soviets did have tremendous casualties, but recreating the beginning of Barbarossa and the Sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad (as well as Soviet’s complete unpreparedness) would be too hard and “railroad”, so the Doctrine both simulates the ideas while enforcing the historical results.
This is admittedly my own view on the issue, so I would be interested in hearing if anyone thinks I’m off mark here.
France has to be weak so an human player on the Allies side has a game. A Human playing Germany can overcome a historical strong France and allies by playing the game better than the AI does. But if you play i.e. the US and France wouldn’t fall and you expect some kind of historic pacing in which the US can conduct Overlord you would be disappointed because Germany never grows strong enough to be a proper adversary.
And the Soviets have some temporary debuffs to achieve an successful Germany in the East early on.
There’s a reason many WW2 games start 1941 December 7th as TORA! TORA! TORA! is signalled.
Thinking about it, this all reminds me of Ben Kite’s book Stout Hearts: https://helionbooks.wordpress.com/2024/06/06/stout-hearts/
This book is about, not the Battle of Normandy, but an anatomy of one of the units that fought it, 21st Army Group, and the attached naval and air units. So it is essentially a book about how things like infantry, medical services, engineers etc actually worked i.e. doctrine as applied in practice.
Unfortunately, I know of no similar books about the American and German armies in Normandy. Can anyone suggest any?
>moving the Mediterranean fleet into repair, while shifting my fast attack fleet into the >Mediterranean to keep the pressure on the Regia Marina.
You had your hastati retreat, then engaged with your principes?
If I’m reading Bret’s picture captions correctly he’s actually reversed Roman doctrine. The old WW1 battleships are the triarii, and they got sent in first. Once the enemy has been weakened, it’s the young fast hastati 🙂
Oh, yeah, I missed that!
…so, Stellaris next right? 😛
I’ve not played HoI but I wonder if the solution for doctrines is to make them basically identical to traditions in CK3, in that they enforce certain bonuses and penalties and also open or close options and unit types. You start with some dependant on who you are, and while you can change them or adopt new ones it requires time and in game currency to do so. The game could price that time and currency more expensively or cheaply to represent how ingrained in your military culture the relevant doctrines are, and perhaps having one doctrine might affect the price of another. The game could maybe make it comparatively easy to revert to an old doctrine vs adopting something completely new. Nations could also start part way through certain changes – Imperial Japan maybe has a doctrine focused on surface battle fleets, but it is in the process of changing to one focused on carriers, for example. If we wanted to get more granular, make it so that the benefits of the new doctrine apply to a limited number of divisions until it is fully adopted. So maybe Imperial Japan can build as many carrier fleets as it wants, but initially only the first two / three / four of them get the benefits of the carrier doctrine, to represent the number of old guard who don’t understand the new way of doing things, the dearth of officers with up to date training etc. (I may have read Shattered Sword recently…)
2nd vote for a stellaris series though its a LOT to cover I feel with both the breadth of the game experience and how much the game itself has change over the last 10 years.
“not merely blowing things up for blowing things’ up sake.”
Known as “the Hegseth doctrine”
Hi!
Do you have bibliography notes on the doctrine of the major powers? I’m kinda curious and would like to read more
I think that simply because of how video games work; the player has so much knowledge and fine control of all his forces that having a ‘doctrine’ in the conventional sense. The player can more or less ‘think on their feet’ and respond case-by-case without needing to commit to a specific doctrine that might sometimes be a hindrence.
The player is effectively ‘post-doctrinal’ in a way no real army can be, save in the hypothetical future of huge drone armies controlled by centralized AI.
The only way I could come up with to model doctrines in-game would be if ‘doctrine’ was constructed from a series of traits that all had strong positive effects and mild-to-moderate negative effects bundled together.
I have 2 thoughts.
1- I would be curious to know the player count that is driven by mods. There are several highly rated mods that alter some of the underlying mechanics of the game significantly (Fallout, Kaiserreich)
2- When you talk about not being able to detach and move supporting elements such as armor or artillery as distinct components, you could simulate this by designing templates that both have and do not have these elements, and switching between the templates as you need them. There’s no cost to change a division’s “design” besides the experience of the division (which i like as it pertains here as a unit might need to learn how to operate with an asset it’s not familiar with). I’ve never tried this as it’s a lot of micro, and I’m sure a multiplayer expert will know why it’s not great, but it does offer and option to moving “brigades” around.
I am reminded of the time someone here last year linked a Perun run of Victoria 3 which had the goal of liberalizing and modernizing Russia (“Fixing Russia with human rights and paperwork”) – and the progression tree essentially implied there were zero schools of any kind (not even the religious ones, which are the first step to unlock on the tree) and zero police (and I think healthcare and bureaucracy too?) in the Russian Empire of 1836.
https://acoup.blog/2025/10/31/miscellania-europa-universalis-v-confirmed-first-impressions/
All of that is very trivially disprovable, even as I was told to essentially “take it seriously, not literally.” The bureaucracy part is especially damning, since while the Russian Empire was behind its Western European rivals on the other metrics, Nikolay I created perhaps the most baroque and self-indulgent apparatus of the era, with every military rank being matched by a civilian bureaucratic one. Not to mention the notion of “No Migration Controls” in a place where the “Pale of Settlement” had been a thing for 45 years by 1836.
To clarify; this was primarily a forced response to the scale of defeats at the start of Barbarossa. Russian Wikipedia actually has a page for “Red Army rifle division” (link not included because it appears to break the word filter) – and it includes a fairly detailed comparison of its divisional vs. a German infantry one as of May 1941. The Soviet division is 14 483 soldiers to 16 859 in a German one – i.e. a difference of almost 2,400 or 14%. Moreover, a lot of that difference is eaten up by “tooth-to-tail” – while the German division wields 1080 more “rifles and carbines” (11 500 vs. 10 420), the Soviet one has 718 more submachine guns (1 204 vs. 486) and slightly more heavy machine guns (166 vs. 142) – even if the German one has more LMGs (434 vs. 392). In terms of artillery, the differences are again minor; 66 Soviet mortars and 54 German, whereas for artillery of all types (“standard”, anti-tank, anti-air) the count is 144 Soviet, 161 German (the latter is larger mainly because of the 20mm and 47mm AA guns, whereas the Soviet division of 1941 still relies more on quadruple 7.62mm machine guns and then-brand new 12.7mm DShKs (33 of both types, vs. none in German divisions by 1941.) A Soviet infantry division attaches more armoured recon units (13 armoured cars and 16 tankettes, vs. 16 German armoured cars) – but it essentially lacks any anti-tank rifles at this stage, while the German division has 81 of them. (The iconic Dragunov and Simonov models were an emergency response to the massive anti-tank gun losses at the start of Barbarossa.) Logistically, the Soviet division has 1.5X as many tractors (99 vs. 62) but the German division has almost twice as many cars and trucks (902 vs. 558); unfortunately, the page only provides the number of horse-driven carts (842) for the Soviet division.
In all, not that great of a difference quantitatively at the outset of Barbarossa. By August 1941, however, the USSR was forced to scale down each of the newly drafted and reconstituted division to 11,447 soldiers – and just 8,844 of those were riflemen, while the number of LMGs and submachine guns drops to 162 each (halving and dropping by sevenfold, respectively – simply because a DP machine gun and a PPSh were obviously more difficult to produce than a Mosin rifle, yet were of similar manufacturing difficulty relative to each other even as DP obviously had more impact, so reestablishing DP production lines had taken precedence. SKS, the approximate Soviet counterpart to Garand, was present in a number of prewar units, but its production was even more complicated than that of DP/PPSh, and so it got halted outright and only comparatively few soldiers had possessed it after 1941.) The large stocks of Maxim heavy machine guns allow them to not decline so much (from 162 to 106) – but all in all, properly staffed German infantry divisions now have approx. 50% advantage in small-caliber barrels – which is why there are both more Soviet than German divisions whenever possible, and why there’s more attention on artillery. Speaking of
It depends.
So, if we take the WWII-era US infantry division as a baseline, then it has four artillery batteries of 12 pieces – 3 of them 105mm and the 4th 155mm. (I think the idea is that each brigade gets a “light” battery at its immediate disposal, and the division commander gets to reinforce the most important one with the 155mm). Notably, each of those batteries are apparently formally called “Field Artillery Battalions” – and moreover, they are said to belong to a separate “Artillery Regiment” with the same number – it’s just that those are the regiments with a single active battalion, instead of three.
Now, as it happens, which contains rosters for 1935, 1939 (peacetime and wartime strength – the latter meaning deployments at Khalkhin Gol and in Finland), 1940, – and then two of the wartime revisions (there were ultimately 7 of those by the end of the war – and then the Red Army was renamed to Soviet Army right after. Later still, “rifle divisions” all became “motor rifle divisions” by 1970 or thereabouts.) No matter the year, they always have three rifle regiments (not brigades, which got abolished in the Red Army in 1922, which is why the divisions are a bit smaller altogether) – whereas the artillery composition varies a whole lot!
In 1935, each division has an artillery regiment which is actually slightly larger than the rifle ones – 2491 soldiers vs. 2485. Like with the US divisional artillery, it includes 12 comparatively heavy (152mm) guns (split into batteries of 4) – but instead of 36 105mm pieces, there’s 12 122mm pieces and at least twice as many 76mm ones. In 1939, there’s a light artillery regiment (1052 soldiers in total) divided into three “squadrons” of three 4-gun batteries each. One of those is purely 76mm, and the other two have a 76mm battery and two 122mm batteries; i.e. 20 76mm and 16 122mm guns altogether. There is also a howitzer artillery regiment, which consists of two 12-gun squadrons; one of them 122mm and the other 152mm; so the division ultimately fields 20 76mm, 28 122mm and 12 152mm guns. By 1940, there were enough 122mm guns to make one of the two mixed 76-122mm squadrons into a pure 122mm, so each (properly staffed) division now fields 16 76mm, 32 122mm and 12 152mm guns.
Then, though, the same August 1941 downsizing hits the artillery roster as well; now, each division still fields 16 76mm but only 8 122mm ones and the 152mm howitzers are removed from each division entirely to corps level! (This is partially compensated by the spiking numbers of more scalable mortars, from 66 to 153* By March 1942, the roster is expanded to 20 76mm and 12 122mm – though the more important change is the formal addition of dozens of anti-tank rifles to the division.) Hence, what you say the game does not really allow you to simulate is something the USSR itself was never planning to do in the first place if it had a choice!
Admittedly, even the prewar doctrine still placed more artillery at corps level than the other nations did; the divisional-level 152mm guns were fairly short-barrelled, whereas the long-range (by the standards of the time) 152mm and even 122mm pieces were at corps level. (And the heaviest pieces, like the 203mm “Karelian Sculptor/Stalin’s Sledgehammer”, could only be deployed on generals’ or even marshals’ orders.) On the other hand, even that was another forced move; those long-barrelled guns simply weren’t in production until the 2nd half of the 1930s (and it’s taken until 1938 for the annual production of most of those types to cross into triple digits), so there simply weren’t enough to dole out on a divisional basis in the first place. This happened for the exact same reason why the USSR was still relying on 76mm guns for the bulk of its artillery in 1941; as I noted a couple of weeks earlier, while Tukhachevsky might have been the father of deep operations doctrine of maneuver warfare, his conceptions of military technology were often outright disastrous, and that included the conviction a new generation of artillery would require polygonal rifling.
Hence, the artillery development in 1920s and early 1930s practically froze as nearly every bureau had to chase this dead end. In the meantime, there was nothing to replace the Tsarist artillery with, so the 76mm design dating to just before the Russo-Japanese war had to re-enter production with a longer barrel, road wheels for motorized towing (i.e. metal discs and tyres instead of spokes), etc. and the existing pieces modernized to the same standard – but it was still nowhere near good enough. There’s a reason why the only other major militaries to still use 75mm/76mm caliber for field guns (as opposed to anti-tank) were the Italians (no comments needed?) and the French (who managed to both invent artillery as we now know it in 1897, with recoil compensation allowing for unprecedented reload speed and accuracy in indirect fire – and to eventually decide that those 75mm guns from 1897 were still good enough to be kept in service in the 1930s.) The ongoing internal debate over the best replacement caliber didn’t help either (there were Soviet advocates of 90mm, 107mm and the ultimate winner 122mm), but in the absence of polygonal (and recoilless, though that push was mostly for (anti)tank and aircraft weaponry) goose chase, it would have most likely been resolved fast enough for more capable guns to enter service.
As for whether there was a line/support distinction; it might depend on whether you count the “Ognem i Kolesami” (literally “With Fire and Wheels”) principle, where the infantry regiments were directly assigned 6 very small 76mm guns; they had similar dimensions to the contemporary anti-tank guns and so could (and were meant to be) pushed by hand by infantry troops as they advanced into position. The obvious trade-off was the short range (no more than 4 km) and an effective inability to be fired indirectly; even if that was theoretically possible, there weren’t enough soldiers with sufficient trigonometry knowledge at regimental level to make it practical.* I suspect you shouldn’t count them, though, since those were really more akin to anti-tank guns (though they lacked the muzzle velocity to be used as such against anything with better-than-bulletproof armour). Moreover, Germany also had very similar guns, and also assigned 6 of them per regiment – though they did have the knowledge base to fire them indirectly.
Perhaps another example which kinda fits the idea of a distinction were the anti-tank brigades. Those had around 5,000 people, were commanded at corps level and above, and their combat strength was almost entirely focused on their ~70 or so artillery pieces – so all of this seemingly makes them more of a “line” artillery than “support” one. However, they were formed on a borderline ad hoc basis; after the intelligence had concluded that enough of the German tanks had their front armour reinforced to 50mm to render then-ubiquitous 45mm anti-tank gun (54 per rifle division – which was still about 50% less than the number of 37mm guns in German infantry divisions), which would have cut through the tanks of 1939 and 1940 largely ineffective, just about any “spare” pieces with high velocity (mostly the maligned “universal” 76mm gun, but also the heavy AA guns and even some corps-level 122mm guns) were pulled together in the spring of 1941 to form 10 of those, so that the commanders of each front (those facing Army Groups North, Center and South) could pull those to whenever the biggest tank assaults were and thus plug the gaps. More of these were formed after the invasion – but it was again an emergency response to the apparent deficiency of integrated anti-tank defence of rifle divisions, and the doctrine would have preferred to simply upgun that defence organically.
This is somewhat ambiguously written. It implies the main issue was their distribution – but in fact, their very design made it largely impossible to use them in any other manner, since they literally couldn’t move much faster than infantry and therefore do independent breakthroughs. Even combined-arms breakthroughs were complicated, as their guns were simply too weak to do much infantry support; the British ones literally had no HE shells at all, and the shells on the French ones were comparable to rifle grenades. The premise was that they would suppress infantry in the open with just machine guns, and clear the machine gun bunkers by simply driving up to them and shooting directly in the embrasure; of course, that’s not how they ended up being deployed outside of some North Africa engagements. They were comparatively good at tank-to-tank combat (Matilda II was practically unbeatable in the first couple years of the war; the French R/H-35s were worse, but also similar in cost to e.g. Panzer II, which was both less numerous and could do nothing to them) – but could never catch up to German tank spearheads moving 1.5-2x faster than them if they headed where they were not. (Assuming they even got the news in time, given the limited number of radios.) Essentially, they were at their best protecting infantry from enemy tank assaults – which tank destroyers were found to be more cost-effective at anyway. (Even if their crews were generally much more vulnerable to even stray artillery, given how many had to operate with no armoured roof due to weight + gun smoke constraints.)
Some Soviet armour was designed as exploitation force. By far the most common prewar Soviet tank, the T-26, was actually also an infantry tank in terms of doctrine (even if its design was quite different, prioritizing firepower with then-impressive anti-armour and HE capability while only possessing bulletproof-level armour); the aforementioned 1935 rifle division roster attached 60 to each one – on top of 84 recon tankettes. (Note that 1935 is before Tukhachevsky’s purge, and so this at least partially reflects his vision.) The logic was that they go first, the infantry follows right after – and once it’s clear where the enemy is weakest, the BT tanks push through that point en-masse. In practice, anti-tank guns were already frequent enough from mid-1930s onwards that this hardly ever happened. (During Barbarossa specifically, the BT models ended up less practical than the T-26, since they consumed far more fuel only to be destroyed just as quickly if it encountered virtually any anti-tank capability; the greater speed became irrelevant when either tank could only operate next to infantry or even from ambushes.)
Hence, by 1939, the T-26s were struck off from rifle divisions (as well as most of the tankettes), and they and the BTs were instead being concentrated in “mechanized” divisions during 1939-1941; essentially, a dumping ground for these rapidly-aging tanks as the proper tank divisions were only intended to consist of T-34s and KVs. Presumably, the logic was to have the “mechanized” divisions as the second echelon behind the tank divisions, adding mass to their breakthrough and expanding like an inkblot to target everything in the rear less likely to have proper anti-tank weaponry. In defence, they would presumably still represent a fairly mobile and comparatively capable reserve. It might have even worked – but in the summer of 1941, whichever tank divisions did get re-equipped with brand-new T-34s and KVs still generally lacked shell and diesel supplies, so it was mostly up to mechanized divisions to counterattack or provide infantry support.
*Though over half of that were the 50mm ones, widely produced by the USSR and Germany alike, but ultimately found out to be largely useless; the smallest mortar caliber still in production anywhere post-war is 60mm, and even that is quite rare next to 81mm and 120mm.
**There’s a story that in the 2nd half of 1941, perhaps the single most important moment in the life of many young Soviet men was when they were conscripted, sat in front of the table and asked to write down “Sinus”. Those who wrote it down phonetically were sent to infantry. Those who wrote down “sin” (i.e. sine) joined artillery – since they had proven they knew enough trigonometry that they could be taught to calculate trajectories comparatively quickly.
P.S. This now really makes me wonder what would happen if more of the (in)famous Crusader Kings mechanics were moved to this series. In particular, you would struggle to design both divisions and especially the individual vehicles/guns/ships – as no matter what your “spirit of the nation” might want, the personalities atop your war ministry would gravitate towards their personal desires.
Pretty sure the intended reading is more that the countries without those Institutions at the start just don’t have nationwide government-run schools and suchlike, at least not up to the standards of the Victorian Era. No police I’m pretty sure is true for basically everyone at the start date in the sense Victoria 3 means; yes, people enforced the law, but you didn’t have a bunch of beat cops on the national government payroll until later on and that’s what the Institution represents. Depending on what laws you pass you can set up various different systems representing different ways to run schools and law enforcement, but when Education is at zero there are still religious schools but not enough to educate a large chunk of poor people, and if you switch to religious schools and activate the first level of Education this represents the government systematizing them in a form that lets peasants train into mechanics (very important part of gameplay). Same with the others. Incidentally, religious schools aren’t the “first step on the tree” per se; there are several different education laws and you can enact any of them in theory immediately. It’s just that the Religious IG supports religious schooling and the Landowners who represent Russia’s aristocrats don’t care if the peasants go to religious schools so it’s the one you can pass at the start, with the downside that long-term you probably want to push both those groups from power to get better other laws and Religious Schools tend to entrench the religious IG in power. Pattern replicates across every law category, more or less, but when your economy is agrarian and resource gathering you’re stuck with the Landowners for a while even though every law they like is the worst law because this is the Industrial Revolution and tenant farming isn’t gonna be a good base for your economy anymore.
As for bureaucracy, no one in Victoria 3 who is playable does not have bureaucracy, represented by Government Offices that consume paper to boost local tax capacity and produce the “bureaucracy” mana that funds the Education and Healthcare Institutions as well as other global things. However, since as you mention Russia’s bureaucracy at the time sucked at the start of game they’ll be on the worst “production method” so each office produces the lowest possible amount per worker and is paper inefficient and also I assume they have Hereditary Bureaucrats, so they pay less for their bureaucrats but they tend to be Landowners instead of the IGs you want and have other problems. So probably they’re in the red on mana (global tax penalty) and can’t collect nearly as much tax as is owed in theory in their main population centers. And my experience with Japan and China is that low-tech, high-pop nations may just never get to the point of collecting taxes from everyone in full.
As for “No Migration Controls”, there’s multiple laws influencing if people actually migrate such that I’m pretty sure Russia only actually gets migrants their discrimination laws treat as near-full citizens, not Africans. And internal peasant migration, the thing I know Russia restricted for sure, is controlled by the Serfdom law they have in their economic system, one of the many Landowner laws you want to get rid of.
Overall Victoria 3 of course has to abstract things and is made by game devs, not a council of PhDs in the history of the era for every country, but from my amateur-who-reads-ACOUP position they seem to have done all right with getting a working politics simulation within the limits of what’s practical to have in a game. Only caveat I’d put in is that you’re supposed to actively work against the interests of the starting government everywhere except basically Britain to get those damn Landowners out of here as fast as possible. Most dramatically in Japan, where you want to quickly lose a war to kick off the Meiji Restoration event chain that nukes the Landowner’s clout so you can rapidly switch to free trade and capitalist industrial laws and such. There’s a reason the Victoria Teaching Paradox series and Victoria 3 first impressions series was much less harsh on the politics aspect; unrealistic bits are more errors implementing a good system rather than Meme Politics.