General attrition

[wodin]

Not talking about the method of Warfare but sickness. Troops at Gallipolli suffered terribly with dysentery etc and then we had lots of illness in the trenches during winter with frost bite, colds and general flu. Then we have things like trench foot (esp in muddy\waterlogged areas) and finally towards the end of the War Spanish Flu. So I think the game needs attrition and things like this. The first winter during the War I know the Allies on the Western Front suffered enormously from troops falling ill as they didn't have the techniques to deal with it, alot of trench foot was because we were on the lower ground in fields that required alot of drainage through a system of drainage ditches (The Germans had got to the higher ground first so most of the War allied trench system was overlooked. Instead of pulling the line back abit onto ground not overlooked the generals weren't willing to give an inch so overlooked the PBI stayed. With the Germans pumping water out of their trench and down the field into the allied trench with a chuckle I'm sure). The drainage system was obviously damaged though shelling so water was soon pouring into he trenches. eventually they rebuilt all the trench system above ground in the parts of northern France and Belgium that where flooded.

Anyway will this sort of attrition be modeled?

[BigDuke66]

"Wear & Tear" is to some degree already modeled at least in CW and NCP, troops suffer so called hits that lower there manpower and I'm sure we see something similar here too, maybe even refined.

[Altaris]

Beyond regular attrition modeled in WW1, there's not an extra attrition factor set up in EAW currently. I have considered at times having a Map Alea reflect illness, and have it's chance of effect be vastly reduced by having a field hospital unit in a stack. In this way, the Western Entente and Central Powers could greatly reduce attrition since they have a bigger force pool of field hospitals, but it would take time to build them, while the Eastern Entente would struggle more with this aspect. But this is unlikely to be added in prior to release, as it requires substantial testing, and has some drawbacks to take into consideration, primarily adding a great deal of micromanagement which all players may not enjoy.

[Searry]

How will attrition from general warfare be modelled? The war wasn't full of big battles you know. Just normal stupid charges and counter charges accros the no man's land in quiet sectors also.

[Altaris]

To keep the Western Front fairly static, while remaining important and still entertaining to play, it's possible to keep offensives going for quite a few turns. It's hard to "win" as the attacker, but casualties tend to be relatively equal when attacker outnumbers the defender by 1.75:1 or more. In this way, the Western Entente can bleed the Centrals if the Centrals are busy attacking the Eastern Entente. In my beta test PBEM, we had the entirety of 1915 pass with only a few turns having no action on the Western Front. The French and British did manage to take 2-3 regions, but it was mostly static, and casualties were very high on both sides.

So in this regard it doesn't really model the attritional battles from things like sniping and no-man-land raiding, but instead simulates the same effect by allowing for constant "attritional" battles to be fought along a fairly static front.

[wodin]

Mainly line straightening or trench raiding though usually by a General wanting to make an impression. Once the tench system came along really it was mainly large offensives during campaign season of any note at Grand Strat scale.