How A&A corresponds to WWII history

Well that’s why it’s called a game :-)

@Admiral_Thrawn:

Baghdaddy, I agree with what you are saying but, I also find extremely unrealistic to be able to raise the infinite infantry as long as you have IPC. Like getting 12 or 13 inf. a turn. At some point you run out of men who can fight.

okay the population fit for man service is about 20%. 54,609,050 /300,000,000 this is only males btw https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html#Military.

the poulation of the us in 1940 was 132,164,569. .2(132,164,569) = 26,432,914. with 100,000 sized infantry(about 2.5 time the size of a corp) then you would yeild 264 infantry foe the us for the whole game. this is not. inculding rreplacements.

2,143,873(number reaching military age anually for 2005)/300,000,000(pop) = .71%

.007*132,164,569(pop 1940)=925,152 thats 9 infantry a year. a year is 4 turns( 3 months). that is 2 infantry increase for the next 72 rounds uninterpated. (18 years)

the war ended in august 1945. thats about 12 turns. or 9 turns for 4 month turns. 
if you added up all the infantry of the us would you come close to there being 275 infantry for the whole game? (264+24=288) thisd is not inculding the fact 100,000 men dead is way more than one dead infantry.

@cyan:

@Admiral_Thrawn:

Baghdaddy, I agree with what you are saying but, I also find extremely unrealistic to be able to raise the infinite infantry as long as you have IPC. Like getting 12 or 13 inf. a turn. At some point you run out of men who can fight.

okay the population fit for man service is about 20%. 54,609,050 /300,000,000 this is only males btw https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html#Military.

the poulation of the us in 1940 was 132,164,569. .2(132,164,569) = 26,432,914. with 100,000 sized infantry(about 2.5 time the size of a corp) then you would yeild 264 infantry foe the us for the whole game. this is not. inculding rreplacements.

2,143,873(number reaching military age anually for 2005)/300,000,000(pop) = .71%

.007*132,164,569(pop 1940)=925,152 thats 9 infantry a year. a year is 4 turns( 3 months). that is 2 infantry increase for the next 72 rounds uninterpated. (18 years)

the war ended in august 1945. thats about 12 turns. or 9 turns for 4 month turns. 
if you added up all the infantry of the us would you come close to there being 275 infantry for the whole game? (264+24=288) thisd is not inculding the fact 100,000 men dead is way more than one dead infantry.

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=7302.0
I hope you don’t meind darthmaximus and Fox but i’m using your game. it berlin would of fallen on round 11 so average and allies owo. just what i’m looking for. 6 inf for america to start with exculding china. then all subsent inf purchases. us went 9 times game ended on japan 10.

6+ (6,9,5,0,8,2,6,4,5)+ (lets say all 44ipcs wnet to inf. on round 10) that would be 14 inf.

65 inf for the whole game. nowhere close to the 275 inf limit. 200 inf off to be excat or 4 times the amount. i think inf rescritions shouldn’t exist because if there needed your playing way too long.

@Admiral_Thrawn:

Baghdaddy, I agree with what you are saying but, I also find extremely unrealistic to be able to raise the infinite infantry as long as you have IPC. Like getting 12 or 13 inf. a turn. At some point you run out of men who can fight.

Tactics and strategy don’t appear out of thin air.  There is a cost associated with training people.  If the first three IPC spent on an infantry unit is actually raising the man power, the second three IPC spent to add a second army to the first could just as easily be teaching them to do more than stand in a line in a trench and shoot.  Infiltration tactics, mechanized support, combined arms philosophy, small unit leadership training; all these things increase combat effectiveness.  That Turn 4 infantry piece could be a division that has all the most up to date training, tools and skills to face down a Turn 1 infantry piece that represents a Russian conscript army corps.

The pieces on the board represent combat capabilities, not men, tanks, planes or ships.  We have already noted the ability for land based air pieces to instantly become carrier based air pieces.  Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of landing an airplane on a flight deck would recognize the difficulties.  It becomes obvious that the Fighter piece on the board represents a combat capability that is comprised on men, machines and tactics.  There is no point in assigning numbers since the entire US carrier air wing at Midway barely exceeded 100 planes yet that would be only a drop in the bucket in the air combats that occured when Operation Barbarossa started.

A&A is a game.  It does a reasonablly good job of feeling like WWII with out all the mind numbing details.  If you want to get into the details get a computer based game that handles the conflict week to week and tracks the pieces and parts down to individual submarines and airplanes.

BTW, ever wonder how many submarines one submarine piece really represents?

I’m quite sure a full German infantry division at WW2 was much more than 10.000 men, rather 16.000-18.000 men, and consequently I believe the average German field army (at least before combat) was very much bigger than 150.000 soldiers. The average German Army corps was about 60.000- 120.000, more or less the size of a russian army.  The Russian equivalent to a German army was called a “front” and could number as much as 350.000 men. I also believe The German 6th army at Stalingrad initially numbered 200.000-300.000 men. Tell me if I am wrong.

German infantry division 1944=12,352
VG division=10,072
panzer division 1941=15,600
panzer division 1944=13,276
German infantry division 1939=17,200

Corps=3-5 divisions
Army=3-5 Corps

At Stalingrad germany lost 225,000 KIA plus 90,000 captured

note: Soviet Infantry=9,619
Soviet tank corps=10,980
Mechanized corps=15,020

Thats also why their is varience on 3-5 corps/divisions

And those figures are only german. The soviet establish infantry divisions at about 10,000 supporting my conclusions, where as the germans are a bit higher while the standard is going down all the time. BY 1942 the germans division is not

German infantry division 1939=17,200

, but rather probably about 13,000-14,000 and we are after all talking 1942 figures and not 1939.

At El Alamein – Panzer Armee Afrika OOB was about 14+ divisions (on paper)

4 corps:
DAK= 2 Panzer divisions
XXI= 1 mot./ 1 inf
XX=2 italian armor/1 Italian mot. div.
X=2 inf and folgore airborne division.

plus 2 infantry divisions, 2 light infantry divisions and a brigade for reserve

i’m agreeing w/ Baghdaddy, and i’ve said this before.
That lone guy at Midway or the Soloman’s and etc. is not a unit of x,000 troops, but rather a given unit of combat capability.  You might send in 2 inf and a ftr squad to take that unit, and this may represent 3-4 times the number of attacking troops you have otherwise as the defending unit is dug-in, knows the terrain, has wired the area, is hiding in caves etc.

You might only have a couple dozen ftrs guarding an AC (as opposed to the hundreds comprising what is thought of as a ftr unit), but one might consider that there are several carriers in the flot, anti-aircraft guns, and supporting vessels - corvettes etc.

The dice come in to demonstrate variables that lowluck will not account for - commanders, morale, terrain, espionage, weather etc.

@cystic:

i’m agreeing w/ Baghdaddy, and i’ve said this before.
That lone guy at Midway or the Soloman’s and etc. is not a unit of x,000 troops, but rather a given unit of combat capability.  You might send in 2 inf and a ftr squad to take that unit, and this may represent 3-4 times the number of attacking troops you have otherwise as the defending unit is dug-in, knows the terrain, has wired the area, is hiding in caves etc.

You might only have a couple dozen ftrs guarding an AC (as opposed to the hundreds comprising what is thought of as a ftr unit), but one might consider that there are several carriers in the flot, anti-aircraft guns, and supporting vessels - corvettes etc.Â

The dice come in to demonstrate variables that lowluck will not account for - commanders, morale, terrain, espionage, weather etc.

I think back to an old game my brother and I played called USN, Pacific Campaign.  It had week based turns and aircraft points where one point represented 10 aircraft.  It also had regiment and battalion size USMC units that were of similiar combat strenghts as army size Chinese units.

That 1 US Inf sitting on Wake island is not the same number of men as the 1 US Inf hitting the beach at Normandy nor the same as the 1 Russian Inf sitting in Moscow.

This is a strategic level game and it is focused more on playability than any solid connection to the historical events.  For as simple as the game system is, it is astounding that it plays as much as the historical war did.  That is a tribute to the skill of the game designer and the patience of the play testers.

If we get bogged down pinning a number of men to each Infantry point, we are truly missing the point of how this game system works.

As a prime example, nowhere in this game system can you simulate the British evacuation of Dunkirk yet every historian points to the rescue of the men of the BEF as being crucial to the ability of the Brits to re-arm and field an army as quickly as they did.  Instead this game states that ground forces committed to an amphibious assault can not retreat.  This, at first glance, is ridiculous.  Getting men back of the beach would not be risk free but surely not every man would die.  On closer examination, it becomes clear that what is really being tracked is not the number of dead bodies in the surf zone but the loss of combat capability due to lost equipment, scrambled command structures, missing supplies and demoralized men.

To take this one step further, combat losses on a front do not mean entire armies of men are destroyed.  Instead it means they are no longer combat capable.  Equivalently, the infantry, artillery and armor units built represent equipment and supply replacements for those combat losses as much as they represent newly trained recruits.

These same concepts carry over to fleets and air units.  Consider the fighters that are lost in a offensive combat operation.  Their bases and ground crews are still intact.  If those same fighters were lost in a defensive combat operation, those bases and ground crews are presumed lost.  Obviously the game system does not model this as well as more complicated systems that track airbase construction and maintenance seperately.

I’m just happy that the game plays as easily as it does yet provides this level of realism.  To be honest, anything much beyond this level of play, and I will be looking for a computer based game to assist in tracking all the game mechanics so as not to overwhelm and bog down the players.

Using Midway as an example…

That 1 INF also represents, in addition to actually INF soldiers:
Artillery, a small number of aricraft, support and radar instalations, mines, barbed wire and other fortifications.

When/If the INF is move from Midway via a TRN, the TRN can be assumed to have additional reinforcing personnel on board (if advancing to attack) to bring it up to offensive combat readiness, or to be transporting the heavier equipment and seasoned personel to the US to be augmented with new units in preparation for re-deployment elsewhere.

Thus, as has been mentioned earlier, specific units at specific locations are NOT equivalent in terms of numbers, but ARE equivalent in terms of combat capability.
So…
a Russian INF on the German Front represents a LOT of men with small arms and limitted support and heavier elements.
a UK INF landing in Norway has light sea-born support and air support for a smaller number of men
a USA INF on Midway has defensive entrenchments, aircraft, technology and artillery with a small number of men.

And as units are moed around the board, the “invisible logistical element” comes into play, where units are augmented (or depleted) as they move through various terrain and enter various theaters of combat operations.  That invisible logistacal element is where a Pacific INF get boosted in the several turns it takes to get to Europe, or where heavier elements (especially mechanized elements) are stripped from European units as the manpower moves into the Pacific.

Of course, the only real breakdown of that is in terms of Japan’s land units that enter Asia, which SHOULD deplete as they cross Siberia, but instead miraculously become European grade units (though perhaps justified by Japan forcing local peoples to join the war effort to augment the advancing forces on the march to Moscow…)

I have learned that trying to translate the A&A units into actual military units doesn’t work.

You could always set a standard amount for the units (total number of men throughout the war for each nation, divided among the respective pieces and averaged out to assign a static number of “man power” per piece).

Then just change the number of pieces on the board until they match “historical” numbers in terms of placement and troop strength for Spring of 1942.

As for finances, perhaps even the cost of pieces could be changed.

But I’m just throwing out ideas here and if I have the time maybe I can get around to doing a project like this (shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to figure a(n) “manpower” per nation, but several more hours to assign pieces to the board to reflect those numbers accurately).

@Imperious:

Harris made everything to have balance and those ‘values’ have very marginal relationship to real economic capabilities. The allies should have a 2 to 1 advantage in IPC, but of course that would inbalance the game unless you made some method where the conversion of this money could be impacting the game in any significant way. The Soviets are way too low in IPC as they were twice as strong as Japan, while USA is too weak.

it would be 16 ipc japan and 56 ipc US, with everthing else the same.

yes right like it is already in AAP.

something should engourge more plane buys.

:-o
  Back in my Classic AA days, for the first three or four turns I thought of the figures as Army Groups or even Corps/ Air Wings/ Naval Squadrons or Flotillas’, but once the chips stacks began to throw long shadows across the board I made a mental switch and looked at them as the divisions and the special support units of that Corps/Air wing/ Flotilla.
  As far as a time frame is concerned, I thought a full turn consisted of a campaign season, about 6 months of actual conflict time, not months per say.
  AA is a combination of; Risk, Monopoly and Chess, not a true WWII game recreation. If that is what you seek, there are other games that do that very well. We play it because we like its’ playability, not for accuacy.
  Thats’ my thoughts.
    Crazy Ivan  :roll:

I think that if one tries to figures units sizes and times for A&A he/she will go insane.

:-o
  My point exactly, that is why I kept it rather vague, and flexable.
    :roll: