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Discussing the Point System


Evangeline Anovilis

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The primary areas of the initial point system that I'd like to revisit is in the navy and air force. I'd like to keep it simple and easy to understand. The focus of nation creation shouldn't be the points, in my opinion. They should be a supplement to RP.

 

To this end, I'll be submitting a revised rule system to Uber later today.

Post it here. An open discussion of both systems is probably a good idea. Hell, maybe some kind of compromise could be reached between both systems that makes everyone happy. :P

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This isn't a fault. An easily understood points system is one where everybody knows exactly how to do things so that more people have better defense forces, rather than you and whoever you decide to share information with knowing what's "best". It only took me a few minutes to figure out what you did, because you more or less did spell it out... you made it so that people who forgo 5 years in tech and armor can have armies 4-5 times the size of the people who go 1940 and want medium or heavy tanks. Not to mention that your buffing of this philosophy goes hand-in-hand with French military designs of the interwar period, but that's more or less irrelevant to whether or not the system you proposed based on that is good or not. You also tried to make navies and air forces better, but they're still going to be useless because the reality is that they were supplementary to ground systems. Sorry, it's going to be very hard for the Europeans to colonize when the colonized nations are 1:1 strength parity. Such is life.

First off, forsaking all tech can double your army. If you throw out all kinds of mechanisation, then you can have your five times as large army. But doing this will mean that a person that knows what they are doing with 1940 tech will rip you to shreds unless you also commit such large parts of your army. Naturally, if a person with five times the army knows what they are doing, they'd most likely kick an inept high-tech nation.

 

Buffing abandonning tech is not going hand-in-hand with French RL developments, which is actually tech-intensive, tank-intensive and will need decent amounts of aircraft. France IRL was a country that could not field the soldiers needed to engage in a new extensive grueling war of attrition and thus boosted its mechanisation and support elements to one of the highest degrees in Europe. France was since WWI one of the greatest supporters of tanks (not one of their best users though) and the French and Soviet tank fleets were unparalelled at the start of WWII.

 

Airforce and to some degree navy (though the navy is mainly there for other things) are maybe not able to 100% substitute for boots on the ground, but they certainly can act as force multipliers. Just like correctly used tanks and artillery are force multipliers. They are not entirely useless, if employed correctly.

 

My point system is maybe not "easy" to figure out as the original one, but what is the point of giving people points when in 5 minutes you can calculate an optimum distribution for everyone sea-based and one for everyone land-based and know that deviating from this will be actually hurting you? The way my system works, it actually gives options. Do you want to follow the developments of armoured warfare or do you rather go with good old infantry tactics? Do you want to have a smaller highly capable force, or one that's massive enough to just crush in numbers? Do you want to focus on navy or on army? These are options. The 80 point system penalises you for not realising an optimum. The 800 points has not this narrow an optimum and allows more options to be explored. I could go and be France with an armada of tanks, like IRL. I could be France with an immense number of infantrists that fight the next war in the trenches. Both are routes that come with advantages and drawbacks, but they are viable. There is no point to customisation in a system were deviation is punished.

 

And your notion on colonialism is not really adressing anything here. This is not about colonialism, it is about a more flexible set of customisation that gives options. The current set priorises exactly one style of warfare, which is the deployment of bulky armies which fight each other WWI-style, due to the utter waste of points aircraft currently are. And tanks alone don't make a Blitzkrieg.

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First off, forsaking all tech can double your army. If you throw out all kinds of mechanisation, then you can have your five times as large army. But doing this will mean that a person that knows what they are doing with 1940 tech will rip you to shreds unless you also commit such large parts of your army. Naturally, if a person with five times the army knows what they are doing, they'd most likely kick an inept high-tech nation.
 
Buffing abandonning tech is not going hand-in-hand with French RL developments, which is actually tech-intensive, tank-intensive and will need decent amounts of aircraft. France IRL was a country that could not field the soldiers needed to engage in a new extensive grueling war of attrition and thus boosted its mechanisation and support elements to one of the highest degrees in Europe. France was since WWI one of the greatest supporters of tanks (not one of their best users though) and the French and Soviet tank fleets were unparalelled at the start of WWII.
 
Airforce and to some degree navy (though the navy is mainly there for other things) are maybe not able to 100% substitute for boots on the ground, but they certainly can act as force multipliers. Just like correctly used tanks and artillery are force multipliers. They are not entirely useless, if employed correctly.


French tanks were equipped for dealing in North Africa at the time. They were also extremely expensive even though they were fairly light, and so did very well in the lower weight classes that you want to give large boosts (numerically as well now) over heavier tanks.
 

My point system is maybe not "easy" to figure out as the original one, but what is the point of giving people points when in 5 minutes you can calculate an optimum distribution for everyone sea-based and one for everyone land-based and know that deviating from this will be actually hurting you?


Rewarding people for sitting down and code-cracking isn't what I think a points system should be about. It should be easy to figure out so people don't have to sit there and mess with it.
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Rewarding people for sitting down and code-cracking isn't what I think a points system should be about. It should be easy to figure out so people don't have to sit there and mess with it.

And this is exactly why Eva proposed this new system??? With the 80 point system, you'd just have everyone investing their points identically, and it would be boring. Her proposal means that you can actually customise the composition of your armed forces and not cripple yourself in the process.
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And this is exactly why Eva proposed this new system??? With the 80 point system, you'd just have everyone investing their points identically, and it would be boring. Her proposal means that you can actually customise the composition of your armed forces and not cripple yourself in the process.

 

I never said otherwise.

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French tanks were equipped for dealing in North Africa at the time. They were also extremely expensive even though they were fairly light, and so did very well in the lower weight classes that you want to give large boosts (numerically as well now) over heavier tanks.
 

Rewarding people for sitting down and code-cracking isn't what I think a points system should be about. It should be easy to figure out so people don't have to sit there and mess with it.

The vehicle weight class suggestion was actually mine, due to the consideration that with Eva's original suggestion, you could get 100 KV-1's for the same price as 100 Panzer III's.

 

I do agree that the system should be transparent, and perhaps I'm naive, but I think we can reach a good balance of transparent-yet-comprehensive.

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What are you smoking? French tank doctrine, just like overall French doctrine first and foremost concentrated on the challenge that was the most immediate, which was Germany and Italy. Confrontations in Europe, where it is one highly developed combatant versus another highly developed combatant. I don't even get how the French were focussing on North Africa at the time, a territory, where they no doubt would fight, but which was of far less importance and which proved that German and British designs would work too. Not to mention that these tanks aren't invulnerable monsters. The reason Uberstein brought up the nerfing in heavy tank numbers is so that we don't get people throwing up 100 heavy tanks per point, which actually are damn hard to kill. You are pretty much accusing me of trying to influence the system in my favour through a proposal brought up by Uberstein. Not to mention that I never heard of the French designs being that game-breaking. As we saw in the Battle of France, the Germans with less tanks managed to defeat them, arguably on terrain that wasn't a desert. If I can kick others around with tanks, then it would be more dependent on a difference in skill than a difference in tank quality (just like the German tanks did over the French and later the USSR and USA did against Germany).

 

I'm not rewarding people for cracking code. Whether you use tons of infantry or a smaller highly mechanised force, both have advantages and drawbacks. People can go and focus on the kind of development that they find most useful for themselves. In the end, what's important is whether you can properly make use of what you yourself chose, but fundamentally, either way you go, you should be about as strong, just in another aspect. As said, a points system is a system for customisation. It should not have one optimum solution, but multiple. If you can calculate in 5 minutes the one optimum solution of which to deviate means penalising yourself, that's not really a good customisation system. It should be that I can actually make choices and still be fine.

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I'm self-interested in that I want to make a system with which I can work. However, any notion of this proposal or Uber's tank tonnage adjustment being suggested solely to give France benefits over others has no basis in reality.

 

And what philosophy? That people should have different choices what to spend their points on? Choices that don't penalise them? Well, the alternative would be to give everyone the same set of stuff, without customisation.

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There will always be a "best" way of doing things. Even games put out by companies have obvious ways to maximize your effectiveness. Pretending as though we're somehow more capable than professionals is silly. For our purposes, all obfuscation does it mislead people into accidentally picking the wrong thing until they lose their first war, after which everybody will start complaining that everybody has figured out how best to minmax their forces.

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There is a "best" way to do things, which is by taking into account

  1. where you are,
  2. where you want to go,
  3. what you know,

and to construct a force based on this. There is no single minmax for all of us with 800 points. For example, people in Japan or Great Britain will most likely be best off with a strong naval force, a strong airforce and a weaker army. People in Russia or Central Asia will rather sacrifice navy for army needs. A nation like France or spain with overseas holdings will also rather need a navy. Lastly, for example, I personally did in CNRP always go low on armour and rather emphasize artillery, merely due to this being more manageable to me. With the 80 point system, there's two minmax states, which is only divided by whether you go for a navy or not.

 

And honestly, if people get beaten, they'll hopefully larn from it. But most of the time, countries will have different enough agendas and geostrategic positioning to not just adopt a new point allocation. If Russia beat Britain or Britain beats Russia, the other isn't going to shift their complete focus.

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Errr, point of fact, the 80 point system (while a bit low) does still have strategic rock paper scissors between army, artillery, armour, air, and navy. A slight buff to aircraft and naval purchases with points would still make it just as viable to use that system, as to use yours, for the purposes of having period accurate navies and air forces (in terms of size). Army points, after all, can be applied to either soldiers, mechanized vehicles, or artillery.

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Errr, point of fact, the 80 point system (while a bit low) does still have strategic rock paper scissors between army, artillery, armour, air, and navy. A slight buff to aircraft and naval purchases with points would still make it just as viable to use that system, as to use yours, for the purposes of having period accurate navies and air forces (in terms of size). Army points, after all, can be applied to either soldiers, mechanized vehicles, or artillery.

In its current form, there is not much rock/paper/scissors. Air is utterly useless. If you want to buff aircraft to realistic levels, nothing below x10 would do and even then you are quite low, but that's no "slight" buff. We know what 45,000 soldiers is, we know not what number of tanks/artillery pieces/etc. we get per point really. It says an equivalent to an army corps, but there is no equivalent to an army corps merely in artillery or armor, and if such a level existed, the number of pieces in it would be varying far too much to be a measure. For ships you'd need a way to get more than 1 ship per point, otherwise it'll end up with 40 ships maximum. That I threw out the number of 800 is not because I like ridiculously large numbers, but because I rather avoid decimals, if possible. The issue with the current system is that it would require rebalancing on a level that it would hardly be the same system anymore. But feel free to make a revamped proposal, so we can actually have another viable option.

 

 

Ah...are you sure about this? Be careful about making absolute statements, because I'm sure somebody is going to figure out a way to minmax 800 points.

Find the universal minmax that cannot be disproven and you get 6 million. 9 million if you own a FAC. Only collectable when at peace, but I doubt I need to worry about that.

 

Yes, I am very confident with that.

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Ah...are you sure about this? Be careful about making absolute statements, because I'm sure somebody is going to figure out a way to minmax 800 points.

Of course they are, people are going to minmax the best thing for them, but due to the flexibility eva's proposal allows and the unique situation every single country is in that best thing is going to be different for everyone. Thus rather than having only one or two ways you can actually go with you can adapt it to best fit what you need.

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17:08 Markus_Wilding i disagree mostly with the splitting of mostly ground forces into so many different options
17:09 Uberstein Hrm
17:09 Uberstein Perhaps a simplification of that then?
17:10 Uberstein artillery/at guns are considered "common sense", you pay points on if a division is mechanized or not (so maybe 2-3 points for a mechanized division as opposed to 1 for infantry.), and then division of tank weights?
17:10 Uberstein cause I feel that making tank weights matter is well, useful
17:11 Markus_Wilding like, i think it can be assumed that each nation maintains a reasonable amount of trucks, whether those are used for supply or moving troops is kind of irrelevant
17:11 Markus_Wilding either way once the infantry gets to the battlefield it's on foot the rest of the time anyway
17:11 Uberstein eh mechanized vehicles can support in ways trucks and horses can't
17:11 Markus_Wilding not mechanized
17:12 Uberstein light armor + machine guns
17:12 Markus_Wilding just regular trucks
17:12 Uberstein ah, that's reasonable
17:12 Centurius I don't think her proposal regulates those
17:12 Markus_Wilding it does, one point is separate for a fleet of 200 trucks or half tracks
17:12 Markus_Wilding it's grouped in with arty and tanks
17:13 Uberstein Markus, would my quick suggestion solve that issue for you?
17:13 Markus_Wilding i could run with that
17:13 Markus_Wilding mechanized divisions SHOULD cost more to maintain imo, certainly not one point like eva has (even though we do get 800 points to work with)

 
After talking with Markus, I think it would make sense to simplify Eva's system's handing of ground forces slightly in terms of logistics and the like. It could reduce what I would call unnecessary bookkeeping. Edited by Uberstein
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I put even such simple transport vehicle into this not because I like to have all supply lines and such RPed out, but because it does kind of make a difference whether your infantry walks on foot or uses vehicles for transport. That was the logic behind putting them in, so that people don't use tons of trucks and halftracks in a time when they weren't that common.

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Honestly, the only advantages you get out of motorized infantry is you get troops there faster and you can tow field artillery/anti-tank guns in alongside them. Other than that, the infantry still fights on foot and they're as vulnerable in the trucks as they are on foot. The average rifleman on a truck is gonna go down to a rifle round even if he's sitting in the back of a truck.

 

Common sense for trucks. That really shouldn't be a problem.

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