(TFT) WWII

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

So I had budgeted a couple of sawbucks toward getting the Sid Meier
Pirates! remake sometime around now but the best part of that got sank
in two GURP supps that claim to deal with issues I've been messing
with for quite some time now.
As I'd already riled the little people with the mass combat stuff I
went ahead and got the city stats supp when they woke me a bit after 4
in the morning.
The mass combat stuff is really not so very far from my own approach
and I was hoping for something similar from the city stats stuff at
the least but this one started in stupendously poor fashion.
In the intro there's this.

''This isn't a design system for cities, like that for planets in
GURPS Space. That would take a much longer supplement! Rather, City
Stats provides a checklist for making up metropolitan locales, a list
of questions that need to be answered in creating an urban setting.''

So City Stats doesn't provide a design system for cities but rather
gives a check list for making up cities?
Ooooookayyy...
Then they show us an example, Lhasa (1850) noting the city as being
under Chinese control.
I thought at first that this was just a typo with the date at 1950 but
setting the population at 55k and talking about the Dalai Lama's
martial forces suggests otherwise.
I wonder if they knew that China started a 14 year long civil war that
killed something like twenty million souls.
Chalk that hot mess up to Yrth I suppose.

Then we get ''A city's population is its single most important
stastic...'' followed shortly by ''The most important effect of
population on game mechanics is as a modifier to search rolls.''

That slobber-knocker is followed by a table and description that makes
the whole fiasco significantly worse.

First the modifier chart is just rotten in its scope.
On the population side it runs from city populations of less than 100
to 100,000+.
I live in a bcityb of well less than 5,000 people and am only
considered part of that population via the postal service.
Sunset Beach can't be considered a bcityb because it lacks a post
office but the population easily exceeds 100.
In England grading seems to involve the presence of a church to become
a village and a market to be marked as a town with cathedrals in a
city (and a Charter) as a loose rule of thumb.
And 100,000+ as a upper limit?
As far back as Rome at least there have been cities that top 100k by
an order of magnitude.
The modifiers range of -3 to +3 rings alarm bells in the same manner
that the fella complaining to me that a d6 system was too simple
compared to a d20 system set off the alarm.
But that pales against the fact that the search roll seems to be used
to find if or not a given type of establishment is present in a
bcityb.
Is it that there is no grocer at all if I fail my IQ check looking or
is it that I just can't find 'em?
Saying I can't locate the grocer sounds more reasonable than equating
a failed check with a total lack but why would it be harder to locate
an establishment in a smaller city?
On top of it I have even less chance of finding city hall w/o the
admin skill or a bank w/o the finance skill or even worse w/o finance
I stand a better chance of assuring the bcityb has no bank at all just
by checking.
If the latter is the case the Dark Lord is sending Prootwaddles out to
look for stuff like guard towers, armories, forges, and similar
structures in any city that opposes him.

''This includes both rolls to determine whether such an establishment
is there at all (the usual application), and rolls to locate a
specific establishment the GM has already decided is present.''

Just wow... complete and total fail here.
It's literally the worst of both worlds.
Even worst there is no metric given for a missed check.
It seems the usual check is boolean but a check for location doesn't
give any information at all for resolving checks.
If I miss the check to locate an establishment that has already been
deemed present how do I read the checksum?
Is it just a boolean 'you can't find it today, try again tomorrow' or
is it something more like 'your lost for an hour per point you failed
the check by'?
The text is silent here.
It seems the best defence against the Dark Lords Proots would be to
heavily advertise the structures you want them to find and man each
building with 101 people for a +8 mod.

How much more of this must I endure?

This is section 1
POPULATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Search Modifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT . . . . . . . .5
Terrain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Appearance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Hygiene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
MAGICAL ENVIRONMENT . . . . . . . .6
Mana Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Enchantment Level . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Language. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Tech Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
ECONOMY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Wealth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Status. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Low-Tech Wealth and Status . . . . . 8
POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT . . . . . . .8
Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Control Rating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Corruption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
MILITARY CAPABILITIES . . . . . . . . .9
Military Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Defense Bonus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
A Rabble in Arms . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

That's half the document counting the three front pages with little of
nothing and the last index page.
Why does a document that has only 17 pages of nominal content have an index?

So a quick glance at the table of contents shows terms like
population, terrain, hygiene, culture, tech level, economy,
government, corruption, and military capabilities that are all handled
in playable manner in 4x models.
I suppose I'll end up finishing this at some point but this is so
disappointing as to convince me that my time is better spent on other
tasks currently.

So back to the mass combat stuff.

>From the GURPS WWII stuff the German CoC in 1939 looks something like
the following

Hitler

Direct reports

I; OKW Keitel

Ia; OKH Brauchitsch
Ia1 Generalstab
Ib; OKM Raeder
Ic; OKL Goring

German Military Districts and garrisoned Units 1939 Aktiv Dienende
I East Prussia * b 1, 11, 21 Inf; 1 Cav
II Pomerania, Mecklenburg * b 2, 12, 32 Inf
III Brandenburg b 3, 23 Inf; 3 Lt, 3 Pnz
IV Saxony, North Sudetenland b 4, 14, 24 Inf
V Southwest Germany b 5, 25, 35 Inf
VI Westphalia, Lower Rhineland b 6, 16, 26 Inf; 1 Lt
VII Upper Bavaria b 7, 27, Inf; 1 Mnt
VIII Silesia, East Sudetenland b 8, 18, 28 Inf; 5 Pnz
IX Hesse, Thuringia b 9, 15, 29 Inf; 2 Lt; 1 Pnz
X Schleswig-Holstein * b 10, 20 22 Inf
XI Hannover, Prussian Saxony b 13, 19, 31 Inf
XII Middle Rhineland b 33, 34, 36 Inf
XIII Franconia, West Sudetenland b 10, 17, 46 Inf; 4 Pnz
XIV Special Magdeburg b 2, 13, 20, 29 Mnt
XV Special Jena b 1, 2, 3, 4 Lt
XVI Special Berlin b 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pnz
XVII Upper and Lower Austria b 44, 45 Inf; 4 Lt; 2 Pnz
XVIII Tyrol, Carinthia, Styria b 2, 3 Mnt
XIX Special Vienna (reserved for new units)
XX Polish Corridor occupied
XXI Western Poland * occupied
39 Inf, 1 Cav, 4 Lt, 6 Mnt, 5 Pnz divisions
* Maritime District

A Division has a Generalstab Leader who serves as a Chief of Staff
with Leaders of each troop-type in the Division reporting to him in
the Tactical Group.
At the Field Command level with multiple Divisions and supporting
Units the staff command structure was broken into 5 sections.
General Staff (Generalstab)
1 Chief of Staff
1a deputy
1b supply
1c intelligence
1d training
2 Adjutant (Generalstab)
3 Legal
4 Supply
5 Chaplain

Infantry: ~17,000 men, 400 cars, 600 trucks, 5,000 horses
3 regiments (~5,000 men) of 3 battalions (~1,500 men) each.
Panzer: ~14,000 men, 324 panzers
2 regiments (~7000 men, 162 Panzers) of 2 battalions (~3,500 men, 81
Panzers) each.
Light: ~14,000 men, ? trucks
(Infantry support for Panzer divisions, so my best guess is that the
structure mirrors the tanks but this isn't stated in the text)
Mountain: ~13,000 men
2 regiments (~6,000 men) of 3 battalions (~2,000 men) gebirgs
(mountian) and jager (rough terrain) divisions both with ''Much
lighter baggage train than conventional infantry''.
Cavalry: District I lists the b1 Cavb as a supported division but Cav
isn't listed in the Key nor is a cavalry division listed as a type in
the section on the Heer structure, but the info on a standard infantry
division suggests that a Cav division

Musterung
Reserve I: under 35 fully trained
Reserve II: under 35 partially trained
Ersatzreserve I: under 35 untrained
Ersatzreserve II: unfit
Landwehr I: 35 to 45 trained
Landwehr II: 35 to 45 untrained
Landsturm I: over 45 trained
Landstrum II: over 45 untrained

The German army in 1939 was about 3.75 million souls.

Aychwawa! little wonder they never seem to have bothered describing
the German army at the start of WWII much less 1944.
Still, the command structure fits into Illuminati pretty nicely.
I'm translating the main NPC's into TFT and describing the commands as
Illuminati groups.
Most Illuminati actions are possible role-play scenarios not just
attacks but even something as simple as a money transfer can provide
adventure, especially if the roads are lawless.
The real headache looks like describing the 300 to 400 thousand
'elements' of the German army.
Let's see what I can see from my 4x sources.

Well Civ4 with the first expansion has a 'Road to War' scenario that
starts in 1939.
As the designer didn't take advantage of the option to name units
individually this is going to take some slogging to crunch through and
see how historic the setup is.
The map is pretty obvious though, lets do the counts...
I get 113 squares e/w by 85 n/s over an area roughly 9000 miles e/w by
4000 miles n/s.
This gives a rectangular tile of well under 50 miles across n/s by
approaching 80 miles e/w.
Squaring that up suggests each tile is roughly 60ish miles across.
Of course that messes up the maps dimensions quite a bit.
This happens pretty frequently when analyzing realworld based scenarios.
It's my guess that this results from not defining the base tile size
when mapping.
I realize that the tile size is abstract for mod flexibility but
failure to acknowledge scale at all led to the disaster of Civ5.
And the hex-tiles looked SOOOO promising.
One unit per tile killed it however.
I saw some knuckleheads site trying to claim that there was no
possible overpopulation because the world population (6.5 billion)
could all fit into Rhode Island with each person having 4 square feet
of space which is 4 people per Melee-hex.
He conveniently forgets to mention anything about arable land vs. the
80% that's not gonna feed anybody but the packing problem gives an
idea of why I have real problems with the idea of 1 unit per tile at
the scales Civ implies.
The concept of a tile being able to hold a major city but limited to a
single unit is fundamentally broken.

So anyway, if anyone is interested I'm going to spend the evening
seeing what I can get done with the order of battle in detail.
I'll be using the Road to War scenario from Civ4, the GURPS WWII supps
(mainly Iron Cross and the Weapons Supplement) and Illuminati to get
my working data to drop this all into TFT.
http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/179431-The-Road-to-War-Ultimate-Edition!
http://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/img/illuminati_rules.pdf

Oh, and in this day and age it's probably not a very good idea to name
your working file for translating the German command structure into
Illuminati 'germ ill cards'.
Just about got Steve Hatfill'd over that.
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"