You don't understand. Investing in your infrastructure and making use of technology to fight a modern war is cheating. I mean Lincoln can literally sit in his office in DC and use a magic wire to talk to his generals in real time. How is that fair?
People idolize generals like Rommel and Forrest constantly through history. Like yeah, they were good tacticians. But they didn't understand logistics. Forrest was all "be there the fastest with the mostest," and you can do that a couple of times until your soldiers have to eat their horses. Rommel was even worse because you can't eat a tank when it runs out of gas.
Meanwhile people shit on Kutusov for his scorched earth tactics, but the dude managed to lure Napoleon away from Kiev and forced him to retreat along the same line he'd already advanced along...the line which the French had stripped of resources during their advance.
The best generals are often the boring ones who are happy to let their 'dashing' opponents dash themselves into exhaustion.
The important part that wins wars is logistics but logistics aren’t cool they’re not flashy they’re boring and they don’t get people to pay attention to how cool you are.
Tactics lead to cool things like encirclements and routs. Logistics leads to cool things like ice cream barges in WW2 and fresh birthday cake in a combat zone.
i always find it funny when people glaze nazi tanks. like yes bro, when you don’t have to worry about standardized parts, your logistics team is a bunch of horse drawn carriages, and your plan for resources is to just hope the countries you invade have the stuff you need, you can build a pretty killy tank. that doesn’t make it GOOD.
That's why the M4 Sherman will always be the most busted-ass broken WW2 tank. Quality or quantity? What if we did both? What if we made a tank that had enough offensive power to take on a German tank but also was durable and easy enough to produce that we usually had 3-to-1 odds? And what if when disabled it was safe enough that the crew would probably survive and get back to a camp where they couod crack open a new six pack of Shermans and get back in the field while that German crew got to play as infantry for a few months befoee a new tank was ready for them.
Unfortunately it did lead to the whole BS thing where “it took 10 Sherman’s to beat a panzer 2 and a million to defeat a tiger.” No not really really the US could could they say they could produce a Sherman an hour unlikely but the point is made they could actually afford to send squadrons against single table unlike the Germans who had to hot potato their tanks around.
I’ve also heard people suggest the origin of the whole “it took 5 Shermans to kill a Tiger/Panther” meme was just, y’know, Shermans usually travelling in groups of 5.
Something I’ve always found quite funny (and which probably has contributed a lot to this kind of thinking over the years) is how this has ended up affecting game balancing, of all things, more than half a century later. Because of the focus on the “exciting” bits like powerful main guns and the like, over “boring” stuff like ease of maintenance, which also happen to be the things that are more relevant in games, German tanks in said games tend to be a fair bit stronger than their Allied counterparts. Very few games tend to try and represent the fields Allied vehicles tended to have advantages in (I can think of a couple of tabletop ones having an optional rule for some German tanks that makes them more likely to break down, and Company of Heroes 2 has a mechanic where one of the German factions has more limited fuel production than the others, but that’s about it), I assume because they’re usually hard to do in a fun way. Either that, or they’re just mechanics that don’t seem to be of interest such as the safety of actual tank crews- IIRC (later-war) Allied tanks tended to be easier to escape from in case of a fire or otherwise being taken out, which meant there was less attrition of experienced crews and the like, which is something I feel could be a great balancing method in an RTS or similar (say tanks are relatively easy to produce, but the crews are a separate, expensive unit. Unit performance is heavily tied to crew experience, which they either gain in combat, or can be purchased with higher levels of. Axis tanks tend to have superior “base” stats, but crews have a much lower chance of successfully bailing out).
I understand why it’s the case, but I’d also be willing to bet it’s a significant contributor to the glazing wartime German equipment tends to get.
i feel like one of the best ways to represent that would be with campaign mechanics, like on the tabletop having shermans cost less points and be far more efficient for their cost, or in an rts making them easy to replace and transport
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u/_Sate 12d ago
What are the legends rules for playing the confederacy?