Manpower Rework

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    • Manpower Rework

      I believe that the way manpower works in Call of War, is not only inaccurate and not realistic, but also straight up unfair.
      I have too points I would like to bring up, first being that if manpower represent the amount of drafted men, an Infantry division consists of 10 thousand to 20 thousand men, not 1300. As for tank divisons, they usually consisted of a couple thousand men, not 600. These sizes should vary based on country.
      Another thing which is inaccurate, would be division using up manpower after they are produced.
      If a Division is not fighting, there is no reason that troops should be added to it.

      My second point is this, one of the reasons the Soviet Union was able to fight the Germans so effectively in the second world war is because of the sheer amount of men they had. I have played as the Soviet Union in the Historic Games and found that I often had manpower shortages, which never happened in the actual world.

      What I suggest is a system in which different Nations start with different Manpower, for example, the Soviet Union might start with 20 Million, while Germany only starts with 6 Millions. These numbers could accurately represent the amount of drafted men that Nation had at that time.
      This would cause the Germans to use their men more carefully, as they did in real life. The Germans would produce more effective weapons such as tanks and artillery rather than Infantry.
      The Soviet Union on the other hand, would be able to mass produce Infantry due to their massive manpower amount.
      This would accurately represent the real world, and due to the more realistic manpower cost to produce divisions, it would allow the player to create an army which is realistic to the army that Nation had at that time.
      It would make sense that manpower would still be generated and produced, but countries would start off with more realistic amounts. And bigger countries such as the Soviet Union would naturally be producing more than Germany for example.

      In conclusion,
      -More realistic Manpower costs to produce division.
      -Division not eating up manpower after they're produced.
      -Countries having various starting Manpower (Soviet Union: 20M, Germany: 6M)

      This is just my idea, but I feel it would add much more to the game.
      Specifically to the 25 Player Historic Game Mode, and would create certain tactics to be more effective to certain types of countries.
      I know this would take time to create, but it's something I would love to see.
      It would add just that much more realism and appeal to the game.
      Hope you think about it.

      The post was edited 2 times, last by Luka George ().

    • Luka George wrote:

      Infantry division consists of 10 thousand to 20 thousand men, not 1300. As for tank divisons, they usually consisted of a couple thousand men, not 600. These sizes should vary based on country.
      I doubt this would be changed since it seems like a mammoth task for a small team, especially for 100 nations game. Also balancing is a big issue. I do agree with the "Division not eating up manpower after they're produced." I guess its their way of caping unit production and forcing people to use gold, it is a free to play game in the end and they do need to make revenue to exist.
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    • Your second point is wrong check history ....lend lease program...


      "Your decision, Mr. President, to give the Soviet Union an interest-free credit of $1 billion in the form of materiel supplies and raw materials has been accepted by the Soviet government with heartfelt gratitude as urgent aid to the Soviet Union in its enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy – bloodthirsty Hitlerism," Stalin wrote to Roosevelt.
      The first convoys with American goods were already being sent to the USSR by August 1941.
      More than 14,000 U.S. airplanes, 8,000 of which came from Alaska, were given to the Soviet Union in the course of the war.
      The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies made their way into the Soviet Union.

      Here is a quote from a Russian general about the program...


      "Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
      "We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."

      it was suppose to be repaid in 5 years and never was.
    • In the 1.5 games manpower is also needed for research. This is an interesting concept as you have so many man hours to create certain things.
      War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin keep out of the way til you can. - Winston Churchill



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    • VorlonFCW wrote:

      In the 1.5 games manpower is also needed for research. This is an interesting concept as you have so many man hours to create certain things.
      Thinking about changing it to use normal resources though (the ones that also the units need to be produced), as the balancing had some issues with manpower (if you didnt research you had too much manpower, if you researched a lot you had too little manpower).

      The manpower rework suggested in the beginning of this thread is a pretty big task though, probably wont be done in the near future.
    • It is relativity that is important. Manpower also needs to relate to the training the manpower is used in.
      I find the manpower costs for infantry too high for the game and gives the armies an unrealistic ratio of Infantry to other units in the game.

      Also the maintenance costs. I believe it was not till the First World War that battlefield casualties surpassed 'strategic attrition' in major conflicts. In the Napoleonic wars for sure the battlefield losses were much smaller than the cost of simply existing in the army in field conditions.... look at the Russian campaign for one.
    • Luka George wrote:

      I believe that the way manpower works in Call of War, is not only inaccurate and not realistic, but also straight up unfair.
      I have too points I would like to bring up, first being that if manpower represent the amount of drafted men, an Infantry division consists of 10 thousand to 20 thousand men, not 1300. As for tank divisons, they usually consisted of a couple thousand men, not 600.
      Multiply by a factor of ten and see what you come up with as a result.

      Luka George wrote:

      My second point is this, one of the reasons the Soviet Union was able to fight the Germans so effectively in the second world war is because of the sheer amount of men they had. I have played as the Soviet Union in the Historic Games and found that I often had manpower shortages, which never happened in the actual world.
      This game is more arcade than a historically accurate ganme. You should play the Blitzkrieg map if you want a more accurate game, but it still "suffers" from balancing. I prefer it this way tbh, especially since some maps are random choice sometimes.

      Luka George wrote:

      -Division not eating up manpower after they're produced.
      What do you think KIA, MIA and WIA are?

      Luka George wrote:

      -Countries having various starting Manpower (Soviet Union: 20M, Germany: 6M)
      Unfair advantages which lead to game imbalances. Only possible in matchs like the Blitzkrieg map.

      Luka George wrote:

      would create certain tactics to be more effective to certain types of countries.
      When I read to this point I think you would be better suited to reading a book than playing a game.


      Overall you have some good ideas but most are just taken too far or are dumb.
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    • @Luka George, I entirely share the basic spirit in your wish, but not the suggestions you made to achieve the goal of giving manpower the significance it really had.
      Note that if I speak of manpower here, this is in the CoW1.0 sense of number of available soldiers, not in the CoW1.5 sense of available persons as workers OR soldiers.

      Since all units in CoW are almost similarly powerful (sure, for example a tank unit in CoW is a bit more powerful than an infantry unit, but not so veeery much), we have to imagine a CoW infantry unit as containing clearly more men than a ordnance unit and an ordnance unit as containing more men than an armoured unit.
      Because if you had artillery/AA/AT guns and even more so if you had tanks, you needed less men in a division for bringing the same relevance to the battlefield than if you had only rifles, hand grenades etc..
      For example 100 tanks with 400 crew members and 600 accompanying support personnel had a way stronger impact on the battlefield than 1000 infantrymen.
      On the other hand, infantry had lower costs in terms of economical resources. So for a country with a large population, but few resources and/or money, it made sense to primarily go for infantry and to build only few heavy weapons. The other way round, highly developed nations with a strong economy wouldn't let their precious men go to war by foot and without a lot of ordnance, tanks, planes, ships and so on.
      The issue is that this is not reflected in CoW. Even if you have a lot of spare manpower in CoW1.0 (which you usually do), you still won't want to build a lot of militia, reg./mot./mech. infantry, because the economical costs of these four units are equal or even higher than those of other units with comparible usefulness.
      To get this straight, food costs of the infantry units should be clearly reduced, while their manpower costs should be slighly increased. Details on this proposal I wrote in --> this post <--. That's a very simple change, which would aditionally have other positive effects.

      Now after that change is done, then a historical map with differences between the nations as you (and I) desire them can be created. However for playability reasons, I wouldn't make a big difference in the amounts of manpower each country has at the start (as you suggested), but rather set the manpower production in relation to the population each province had at about 1932 - that would be awesome. For example province Leningrad on a historical map should produce 100 times more manpower than a tall province in the Sahara, a rural province in central England would produce more manpower than a province in the Romanian mountains and so on.


      P.S.: About your suggestion to reduce or remove manpower upkeep costs of units, I wouldn't do this. Because maintaining a large army for a long time was - as @EZ Dolittle already said - a big effort. And thus it was a major strategic decision for nations when to do the mobilization / call to arms. Upkeep costs for economical resources and manpower are required for CoW players to face the same decision. And they make it important to have a lot of production sites, which is also an aspect of real-life WW2 times.
    • In most games, I never have manpower problems. In fact, I usually have too many, but you can’t sell them. The only game where I had manpower problems was when I was UK in 25p. I think a lot of people have manpower problems in that one.
      If I had Canadian Soldiers, American Technology, and British Officers, I would rule the world. -Winston Churchill
      FORUM GANG Second Lieutenant :00000461:
      CALL OF WAR TECHNICIAN THIRD GRADE
    • Killer8282 wrote:

      In most games, I never have manpower problems. In fact, I usually have too many, but you can’t sell them. The only game where I had manpower problems was when I was UK in 25p. I think a lot of people have manpower problems in that one.
      Well, I usually have manpower problem in 100 players map as I leverage my economy like crazy and have so much steel / goods that for infantry / AA / Arty / AT my limit is infantry.

      For instance here day 18-19 :

      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943
    • Chimere wrote:

      Killer8282 wrote:

      In most games, I never have manpower problems. In fact, I usually have too many, but you can’t sell them. The only game where I had manpower problems was when I was UK in 25p. I think a lot of people have manpower problems in that one.
      Well, I usually have manpower problem in 100 players map as I leverage my economy like crazy and have so much steel / goods that for infantry / AA / Arty / AT my limit is infantry.
      For instance here day 18-19 :

      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943
      You know that you can build barracks to increase manpower, right?
      If I had Canadian Soldiers, American Technology, and British Officers, I would rule the world. -Winston Churchill
      FORUM GANG Second Lieutenant :00000461:
      CALL OF WAR TECHNICIAN THIRD GRADE
    • Killer8282 wrote:

      Chimere wrote:

      Killer8282 wrote:

      In most games, I never have manpower problems. In fact, I usually have too many, but you can’t sell them. The only game where I had manpower problems was when I was UK in 25p. I think a lot of people have manpower problems in that one.
      Well, I usually have manpower problem in 100 players map as I leverage my economy like crazy and have so much steel / goods that for infantry / AA / Arty / AT my limit is infantry.For instance here day 18-19 :

      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943
      You know that you can build barracks to increase manpower, right?
      Yes, +10%/+30%/+50%, after that the maintenance cost of the barracks starts to be steep after level 1

      A city in your core bring around 1000 manpower a day, a normal province 160.
      A city not in your core brings around 250 manpower a day, a normal province 40.

      So barracks level 3 in a non-city core or in a city not in your core brings +120manpower a day, so every 5-7 days you can get one more ground unit for some 7K to 10K food in barrack maintenance + barracks building cost. No way it is a good strategy, even if short in manpower.



      Long story short, it is only worthwhile to build baracks (level 3 barracks) in your 4 core cities, and that brings you + 2000 manpower total a day, for 4 800 food a day + building cost. That's why I do, and I still run out of manpower.
    • Chimere wrote:

      Killer8282 wrote:

      Chimere wrote:

      Killer8282 wrote:

      In most games, I never have manpower problems. In fact, I usually have too many, but you can’t sell them. The only game where I had manpower problems was when I was UK in 25p. I think a lot of people have manpower problems in that one.
      Well, I usually have manpower problem in 100 players map as I leverage my economy like crazy and have so much steel / goods that for infantry / AA / Arty / AT my limit is infantry.For instance here day 18-19 :
      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943
      You know that you can build barracks to increase manpower, right?
      Yes, +10%/+30%/+50%, after that the maintenance cost of the barracks starts to be steep after level 1
      A city in your core bring around 1000 manpower a day, a normal province 160.
      A city not in your core brings around 250 manpower a day, a normal province 40.

      So barracks level 3 in a non-city core or in a city not in your core brings +120manpower a day, so every 5-7 days you can get one more ground unit for some 7K to 10K food in barrack maintenance + barracks building cost. No way it is a good strategy, even if short in manpower.



      Long story short, it is only worthwhile to build baracks (level 3 barracks) in your 4 core cities, and that brings you + 2000 manpower total a day, for 4 800 food a day + building cost. That's why I do, and I still run out of manpower.
      What map are you talking about and what country?
      If I had Canadian Soldiers, American Technology, and British Officers, I would rule the world. -Winston Churchill
      FORUM GANG Second Lieutenant :00000461:
      CALL OF WAR TECHNICIAN THIRD GRADE
    • Chimere wrote:

      100 players map - Tibet for instance. Check link.
      Hmm... That's interesting. I never had any problem with manpower in 100p maps. Can you tell me your troops style? Like do you use a lot of infantry? Tanks? Planes?
      If I had Canadian Soldiers, American Technology, and British Officers, I would rule the world. -Winston Churchill
      FORUM GANG Second Lieutenant :00000461:
      CALL OF WAR TECHNICIAN THIRD GRADE
    • I have played most of my recent games in the 1939 historical map. An observation on the last two games: I played South Africa my last game. Though resource rich, it was relatively manpower poor- as compared to India in my current game. So, may be some countries need a bit of tweaking as compared to others. And this tweaking may take some time, as pointed out by Freezy ... 8)
    • Killer8282 wrote:

      Chimere wrote:

      100 players map - Tibet for instance. Check link.
      Hmm... That's interesting. I never had any problem with manpower in 100p maps. Can you tell me your troops style? Like do you use a lot of infantry? Tanks? Planes?
      Again, check here:

      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943


      It depends on who I play. With Tibet which is oil-poor, I have to play infantry.

      If I had been Nigeria or South West Africa or another oil rich country, it would be different.
    • Chimere wrote:

      Killer8282 wrote:

      Chimere wrote:

      100 players map - Tibet for instance. Check link.
      Hmm... That's interesting. I never had any problem with manpower in 100p maps. Can you tell me your troops style? Like do you use a lot of infantry? Tanks? Planes?
      Again, check here:
      rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?…32309/page-3#post-6633943


      It depends on who I play. With Tibet which is oil-poor, I have to play infantry.

      If I had been Nigeria or South West Africa or another oil rich country, it would be different.
      Try to balance it out between the tanks and the infantry. Meanwhile, produce more planes.
      If I had Canadian Soldiers, American Technology, and British Officers, I would rule the world. -Winston Churchill
      FORUM GANG Second Lieutenant :00000461:
      CALL OF WAR TECHNICIAN THIRD GRADE