Rich Hamilton is taunting us

[ComradeP]

Not wanting to get into a big disagreement here, but this was a very meticulously calculated aspect of EP14's early campaign, one that I spent many months figuring out.

The underlying rationale is fairly straightforward: the Russian Army in EP14 has effective soldiers and they outnumber the Germans in the early campaign by over 2:1 in all things (infantry, MGs, cavalry, guns). On paper, they should have annihilated the Germans. However, it is well established that the Russians were suffering from abysmal supply at the start of the war, as it was a monumental task to supply their colossal forces in East Prussia and Galicia.  This supply problem was mostly worked out over time, but apart from their command structure, their logistics is what failed them the most, at least in 1914.  It is completely unrealistic to expect that the Russians were in a position to provide significant replacements to their massive forces during the early 1914 campaigns, at least not during their offensive in East Prussia.

Anything less would create a purely pro-Russian fantasy situation as far as I am concerned -- something that would not be balanced, nor produce a *possibility* of a historical result. But this is the tough decision of a game designer; to have to (hopefully) create a situation that can allow for a historical result, but at the same time allowing enough flexibility to also create a-historical results as well. It is a constant dance.

The easiest thing for me to have done there would have been to give the Russians generic command, and good supplies, but then make the entire Russian Army be poor D quality or less.  But I don't like easy approaches, and in the end I decided on being more elegant, I think, because the generic/mediocre approach makes perfect sense for the communist Red Army in WW2, but not for the Imperial Russian Army of WW1. There needed to be subtle differences between how the Russians behave in FWWC vs. PzC.

Apart from that, who is to say that the Russian Army in East Prussia should have +5% more supply though, I just can't get bogged down in that though.  I am satisfied with the result.

I agree with the approach in theory, particularly the decision to not make most Russian units D quality like in PzC, it's the cumulative effect in practice that hurts the balance.

Changes were made to France '14 based on how casualties can quickly become very high (like in virtually all PzC titles) and the Entente forces being able to hold their ground in northern France and Belgium beyond the Ardennes. WWI units lack offensive punch besides assaults, which makes it difficult to break through defences. It can make a 1914 campaign resemble the trench phase of the war on the Western Front, instead of the dynamic phase. 

In East Prussia '14 the Russians face an opponent with an excellent supply situation, whilst having a mediocre to bad one themselves. Though that might indeed be mostly historically accurate, there are many mechanics tied to supply which in EP '14 all work in favour of the Germans.

In many PzC and FWWC titles, ahistorical loss rates are paired with ahistorical replacement rates as a sort of stabilizing factor, though the replacement rates can also be too good compared to losses like in stock Kharkov '43.

A constant stream of replacements in FWWC would depending on the local supply level amount to about 10-30 men per turn of rest, not that much for ~1000 men units that can lose dozens of men per turn. The attack might then decide to dig-in, becoming the defender, at which point the defender-turned-attacker runs into the problem of not really being able to deal with strong entrenched positions without copious amounts of artillery ánd shelling out of sight units to prevent them from recovering Fatigue.