Then maybe motorized units should not stay in close terrain during the winter after the critical oil situation. In fact, historically several German motorized units were (HINT) "downgraded" in 1944/45 thereby losing many of their trucks and tractors only to be replaced with horses and mules. Horses might be slower, but they do not need fuel. And it looks like at least half of the German tanks and the majority of the heavy tanks and tank destroyers were destroyed or abandoned by their own crews due to mechanical breakdowns and the lack of fuel from mid 1944, instead of being destroyed by the enemy. So this concept might feel harsh, but it is quite accurate, given the limited possibilities of the game engine.P210 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 05, 2018 11:31 am Uhu, I'm really interested about your oil crisis concept, but I also really, really dislike the -4 fuel/per turn script
For example, in Normandy save in the winter in close terrain you can't do anything except to try to refuel every single motorized unit on every turn and still end up first with immobilized and then quickly annihilated army.
Yes, someone else already suggested this, but unfortunately it is not possible to do it like that due to the afformentioned game engine limitations. I could only do it like this with the naval units because naval units cannot be upgraded to something else. So I could be sure that for example the Tirpitz will remain the Tirpitz at any time in the scenario. Then I just had to replace this unit with another downgraded Tirpitz with less maximum fuel by adding a script which does so. But when it comes to tanks, the situation is not so simple. It is impossible to tell what would happen to a unit which starts the scenario as a Pz.II or Pz.38 in 1941. Will it be upgraded to a Pz.IVH or maybe a Panther by the player? So then what should I replace it with in 1944? And the equipment file cannot be modified during the scenario, the game saves it in the savegame file so it remains the same throughout the whole scenario. Therefore the only thing I could do to is to add a script which reduces the fuel of all ground units by a small amount in each turn. Some units are more affected by this, obvioulsy those with lower fuel. But those units which do not normally use fuel, like infantry or horse transport are not affected at all. Which in the end tends to create a more infantry based and less mechanized army, exaclty as it happened in 1944/45 with the Wehrmacht. And those mechanized units which are nevertheless forced to start offensive operations are doomed to fail and lose the bulk of their tanks destroyed by their own crews. See Ardennes offensive and Spring Awakening.McGuba and Uhu, Therefore I suggest using the same system for land units as for the capital ships - A fixed fuel cap for all units in the class. For example, most armored units have fuel capacity around 40 or so. That could be nicely capped to 20 for all. There are some exceptions like the Tiger I unit, but that is likely the highest priority unit in the whole army and therefore likely has the highest priority for fuel.
It surely affects AI thinking time, but I am also (almost) sure that it could be increased. The problem is, PzC was not desinged to be used with such massive scenarios and the designers never intended to make and release such DLCs so they never really had to change this limitation. For the small scale scenarios of the official campaigns 32 AI zones are more than enough. When making my other mod (RHA: Turan Campaign), which is a more conventional one, I always had enough AI zones for each scenario and felt this limitation.
Still, I would not complain as when I started making this mod, I could not believe that in the end it will be able to do so much without crashing the game. So the PzC game engine is extremely flexible.
It is somewhat debated by historians how useful the capture of Baku could have been for Germany, but since it did not happen, we will never know. What we know is that Japan did capture a number of oil fields from the Dutch and the Brits in the Far East, and although those oil fields were also destroyed, the Japanese managed to get many of them back to work after a few months or one year the latest, even if not at full capacity. Their main problem was how to take the fuel back to Japan as the US submarines sank most of their tankers. I think something similar would have happened to Germany as well. They had enough experts and resources to repair and reach at least a partial capacity after some time. And they did not even need to reach half capacity as their needs were significantly lower:The share of Baku oil was about 2/3 of all oil produced.
This may mean that the seizure of southern oil fields would not bring additional fuel to the Germans,
since the entire infrastructure would have been destroyed. And its full restoration would take several years.
But it would also deprive the Soviet side of this oil.
This would be more of a negative option for the Soviets than a positive one for Germany.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EsW ... 1.&f=false"Even though Germany’s 1938 oil consumption of little more than 44 million barrels was considerably less than Great Britain’s 76 million barrels, Russia’s 183 million barrels, and the one billion barrels used by the United States, in wartime Germany’s needs for an adequate supply of liquid fuel would be absolutely essential for successful military operations on the ground and, even more so, in the air.
At the outbreak of the war, Germany’s stockpiles of fuel consisted of a total of 15 million barrels. The campaigns in Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France added another 5 million barrels in booty, and imports from the Soviet Union accounted for 4 million barrels in 1940 and 1.6 million barrels in the first half of 1941. Yet a High Command study in May of 1941 noted that with monthly military requirements for 7.25 million barrels and imports and home production of only 5.35 million barrels, German stocks would be exhausted by August 1941. The 26 percent shortfall could only be made up with petroleum from Russia. The need to provide the lacking 1.9 million barrels per month and the urgency to gain possession of the Russian oil fields in the Caucasus mountains, together with Ukrainian grain and Donets coal, were thus prime elements in the German decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The smallest of the Russian oil fields at Maikop was captured in August 1942, and it was expected that the two remaining fields and refineries in Grozny and Baku also would fall into German hands. Had the German forces been able to capture these fields and hold them, Germany’s petroleum worries would have been over. Prior to the Russian campaign, Maikop produced 19 million barrels annually, Grozny 32 million barrels, and Baku 170 million barrels.
Grozny and Baku, however, were never captured, and only Maikop yielded to German exploitation. As was the case in all areas of Russian production, the retreating forces had done a thorough job of destroying or dismantling the usable installations; consequently, the Germans had to start from scratch. In view of past experience with this type of Russian policy, such destruction was expected, and Field Marshal Hermann Göring’s staff had begun making the necessary preparations in advance. But a shortage of transport that was competing with military requirements, a shortage of drill equipment as well as drillers, and the absence of refining capacity at Maikop created such difficulties that when the German forces were compelled to withdraw from Maikop in January 1943 in order to avoid being cut off after the fall of Stalingrad, Germany had failed to obtain a single drop of Caucasian oil. Nevertheless, the Germans were able to extract about 4.7 million barrels from the Soviet Union, a quantity that they would have received anyway under the provisions of the friendship treaty of 1939."
So they did not need the whole production capacity of the Baku region, they just needed to increase their own home + Romanian production by 25% to satisfy their needs, which was significantly smaller than that of the Soveit Union or Great Britain. It is true though, that they would not have been able to start oil production immediately, as it is currently depicted in the mod. So I am thinking to change this in the next version by adding a skip turn parameter before the player would get the additional prestige after capturing the oil fields. I think it should take at least 6 months to get some capacity and maybe another 6 months to get some more. Or maybe on realistic level it could be one year minimum.
Yes, sure I wanted to write Grozny, just made a mistake. I am only thinking now if it is possible to increase the number of oil fields in the mod to better reflect their importance compared to each other.
Currently in both single and multiplayer mode from 1944 the Axis player can still lose prestige due to bombardment even if the Allies capture one or more German cities. But the Allies need to position more and more planes for bombing to get this effect and once the Allies capture at least 3 German objective cities the Axis player no longer gets the prestige penalty for the bombing of the cities from. For example the if the Allied player can capture one German objective city in 1944, he needs to position at least two bomber units over German objective cities to make the penalty - for instance one over the captured city and another one over another city which is still owned by Axis player.Intenso82 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:15 pm Probably the system of strategic bombing of Germany in a single version is not subject to such a feature.
But in the case of the multiplayer version, when the Allies seize the cities of Germany available for strategic bombardment
is it possible to bomb them further and get a penalty on the prestige for the Axis?
But for the Allied player it is still better to capture at least one German objective city with the "+" as soon as possible as in that case the Germans cannot get more free replacement units for the time being.
On the other hand, for planes, it is not an option to have the -4 fuel/turn, because the system could not calculate this, how far a given plane can fly, so eventually many plane would perish because they could not fly home for refuel...
