Another feature I’ll have to stop myself from abusing because the AI will be terrible at using it. History of Paradox.
Edited to include: Because i play them as singleplayer games, if I ever possessed 8 hours of free time I’d never use them to play games. Not an option.
In the combat changes, they seem to remove the core unrealistic mechanical advantage of larger divisions. Which is a great change that a lot of people have been calling for since forever. The exact way they do it seems like it might have a lot of weird corner cases, but we will have to see.
However, there is complete radio silence on whether smaller division still have their offsetting unrealistic org advantage. Surely they wouldn’t forget that, or we will end up with tiny divisions and a lot of support artillery…
YES! That’s bugged me for a long, long time.
Weird corner cases? In a Hearts of Iron combat system? I find that hard to believe! :)
I guess it’s basically tradition at this point!
How do you figure? I thought you gained org from infantry, and especially special forces, and lost it form tanks, and guns.
There are still benefits for large division, you amortize the benefits of support companies, like supply, recon, logistic over more front line battalions, but they benefits are much smaller than they were in the past?
It’s a math optimization thing that I didn’t bother to memorize, so I googled and copy&paste
Someone did a thing with 5inf a while back, it turns out org has diminishing returns the larger the division gets, ie 5inf has about 75% org of 10 and similar majorities in all other stats. Also once a big ass division runs dry it’s done; smaller ones prolong the fight which gives CAS carte blanche to butcher the other side.
The main thing is the ORG is currently average ORG. So if you take a 20-width division of INF, you can make it stay in the fight for twice as long by splitting it into two 10-width divs. This used to be counteracted by the concentrated firepower advantage of larger divisions, but they are (rightly) doing away with that.
Support companies complicate the picture, it’s true. It makes less sense to have say a supply company for a small division. On the other hand, support artillery and rocket artillery are really good bang-for-the-buck additions to any division, and two 10-width divs can bring twice as many as one 10-width div. Sure their per-division ORG would be a tad lower, but they start with twice the ORG, so they can easily afford more dilution.
You’re right. They have to fix it. It shouldn’t be better to have a smaller division be better than larger, although they went overboard with the bigger ones being so much better.
That certainly got me in the mood for HOI4. Looking forward to this expansion. Or rather, I’m looking forward to the first major hotfix after this expansion. :)
I thought the “sub” DD on mechanical changes was also interesting:
It seems like they’ve modified things from last week to once again give larger divisions an effective firepower concentration advantage, though it works a bit differently and depends on coordination and initiative. It looks to me that with high values for these, larger divisions could be even dominant, since two adjacent large divs can focus fire on the most-damaged div, overcome defences efficiently and drive it out of combat quickly.
He has a lot of interesting followup answers to questions raised. Will be interesting to see how this all shakes out at release.
On some level I think it’s interesting, a new angle to optimise! However, I’m not sure how much it does for the game. This expansion is set to introduce a lot more mechanics that are likely to push the AI further behind.
Beyond that, it just makes no sense that small divisions are willing to suffer more casualties in battle. Or really that large divisions have this large-scale targeting advantage, or that divisions have a certain number of “shots” they can deflect above which they take more casualties.
IIRC, the Darkest Hour version of HoI2 actually reversed that, and had excess firepower directed at a division actually reduced the per-shot damage. They argued that historically, beyond a certain threshold, throwing a larger attacking force at a defender didn’t help, and didn’t reduce attacking force casualties the way it does in HoI4.
Overall, I hope they completely overhaul the core combat model for HoI5.
All true, but I think calculating the hit probability of each rifle, mortar, machine gun and tank round is probably excessive so combat needs to be abstracted in some fashion.
I have to say I’m unsure,what happens in real life, if a 20,000 man division attacks or defends against two 10,000 man division are the combat result different than attacking another 20,000 man division. I really don’t know.
I’m looking forward to the expansion, but HOI IV is not EU IV, with decent strategic AI there is no way Poland should be able to take out Germany or Russia, much less both. I understand that is a fun challenge for some advanced players, but it really turns me off.
I remember War in the East actually did this: a battle was divisions firing all the weapons in their OOB at each other according to some fixed schedule with a bunch of modifiers on top. I don’t think it led to more accurate results. In some sense going super detailed on some aspects just makes it harder to find a decent abstraction for all of the stuff you leave out.
So I agree it needs to be abstracted. I just don’t like the abstraction they are using, where divisions have a number of shots they fire at other divisions, and each division has a number of shots it can partially deflect.
If divisions are independent combat elements, I think the optimal size of divisions should depend on the size and quality of your officer corps relative to your army, and maybe on communications tech. If you have plentiful officers and good doctrine and communications, then having smaller divisions should allow a degree of flexibility. I’m a poor student of this sort of thing, but I suspect there’s no shortage of military historians who would be happy to consult with them for free.
In other PDX news,
“Recap” of a change that wasn’t particularly covered, but, sure.
I like the officer changes, and AI improvements are always welcome.
No Step back announcement trailer.
Release date Nov 23
Looking forward to it.
Same! Bring on the DLC and the necessary hotfix or two. :)