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Old 05-03-2016, 09:52 AM   #8
HeatDeath
 
Join Date: May 2012
Default Re: Socio-Economic Factors Influencing the Last War

Quote:
Originally Posted by ianargent View Post
Population limits and time limits. Even if you draft every possible person at 16, the kind of meatgrinder envisioned chews them up faster than they can possibly be replaced (and people can't be fabbed - there's a 16 year lead time). Not to mention the awful morale effects; Napoleon's dictum about the moral and the physical applies.

Time - it takes time to fab the gear, time to deploy them to the front, etc. Molecules are expensive to move, and the more complex the molecule, the more expensive it is to move.
Time would explain it, especially if they got caught by surprise, and possibly lost a significant amount of manufacturing capability before they could organize a proper continental defense.

Even without human beings, a large enough industrial complex combined with enough time lets you put at least a disabled HVY in every hex on the GEV map. (Recall that disabled units are conceptualized to be tanks under the command of non-Ogre AIs - they have no initiative, and will not perform or participate in cross-country maneuvers, but are perfectly capable of local sector defense, including counterattacking during overruns.) I wouldn't want to have to drive an Ogre, or even a small force of Ogres, across a field of tanks like that. I mean, yeah, I could blow myself a path using my MBs, but it'd be slow going, especially if the AI HVYs have just enough smarts to move into hexes I've cleared.

Though of course the fix for that is a dozen or two cruise missiles (which might explain why the orange map looks the way it does).

Though of course the fix for that is a cluster of 3 laser towers, separated by 2-3 hexes from each other, every 60-100 miles, covering the entire continent. Certainly the entire civilian population will be living under laser umbrellas like these. We would expect even more concentration along the coasts and over large/prestige cities and factories. [To my mind, a Combine armor force advancing on a tower complex like this would be /the/ typical engagement of the ground war.]

Last edited by HeatDeath; 05-03-2016 at 01:08 PM.
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