HOI4 Dev Diary - Combat and Stats changes

[podcat]

I have a suggestion for all focus trees.
Please mark the "historical" path in the focus tree somehow, so that as a player i can jump in as any nation and when i open the focus tree, i can see what focuses to take in what order for a historical game. I think the best way to do this would be to just highlight the focuses taken by the AI in historical mode and the order they are taken in.

its something thats on my list to do, but I am not sure when yet.

What about gainable traits for generals that reference unit types? Is the whole concept of dominant type gone or just for the high command bonuses?

yeah its everything about dominant type

Am i right to assume that the 60% Infantry Division gets 60% of the buff so that a 15% attack buff from the guy you put in your goverment effectly becomes a 9% attack buff for that Division? Or did I understand that wrong?

yes pretty much

Some decent under the hood changes, though I will echo the sentiment that armour vs. piercing still seems too binary when the former is higher than the latter.

you'd expect something like extra damage for over-piercing right? The reason its like this is so anti tank weapons dont just become fantastic infantry killers basically. I've played with ideas for allocating strikes by hardness but as i said I am not ready to dig into the targeting changes yet because I havent tested or implemented them so I am not sure exactly how it will end up outside of the width spreading of damage needing to be dealt with.

 

[liadal]

I mean there is a slight difference if the batallion have quite big different base stats.

Something like if Infantry has 10 Soft Attack and Artillery has 100.
15% per batallion would mean 60 more soft attack for a like 8/2 division since you get 15% of 200 Soft Attack added.
But with the composition it would just give 8.4 Soft Attack, since you get 3% of all the soft attack so 3% of 280 Soft Attack.
The values of Infantry and Artillery isn't thaat different thankfully, not factor 10, but there is still a differnce between those calculation methods.

Oh, I thought they did the "calculate soft attack of artillery battalions to infantry ratio and apply the 15% bonus onto that ratio". In that case you are right, there is a discrepancy.

Although I do not feel like it is significant enough to warrant the performance hit

 

[podcat]

I don't really get the changes to high command bonuses either. Why don't they just apply on the battalion level?

The idea is that they function more like combined arms (or like hoi3 if you know how it was there). So the whole is greater than the sum of its parts so to speak. So the idea is that the division as a whole performs better because its backed up by artillery rather than just the artillery

 

[Leinad965]

I see the fifth row of line battalions has been sliced off. With current division design restrictions and battalion manpower figures, that means certain very large historical division designs are not possible, like the Russian rifle division of 1939 with a tank battalion that had an authorised strength of 19,350 men.

It was always dynamic to max 5 battalions. So from image you can't be sure, if it is off or not

 

[Nocty1501]

The idea is that they function more like combined arms (or like hoi3 if you know how it was there). So the whole is greater than the sum of its parts so to speak. So the idea is that the division as a whole performs better because its backed up by artillery rather than just the artillery

But you're just blurring the line between having the combat bonus and not having it... Making them much less important to get. You don't average out stats like this to give the player more control.

 

[morodelapaz]

Yes! I hate metas in paradox games, hopefully with this chages we will have to actually think strategically and make things harder than the no brainer spam of 40w tanks strategy. I hope that even the best template will be able to be countered when thought strategically instead of cheesing things.

 

[fighting_falcon93]

Sounds really interesting and I like the changes to combat width a lot

@podcat Can you please also adjust the mechanics of organization regain so that when defending you don't have to manually rotate every division in and out of battle? Maybe you could make it so that units in reserve will regain organization and the units with the highest organization are picked first from the reserve? And entrenchment could be gained only before a battle starts and then maintained for the duration of that battle even if units move in and out of reserve?

 

[evgeniy_kononenko]

There is an idea to make the mechanics of the depth of the formation of troops: 2 regiments in front, 1 in the second echelon (reduces the attack, but increases the breakthrough), in the third art and auxiliary units. And this depth could be manually changed, changing the characteristics and width, depending on the need: all the shelves are in front or placed one after the other

 

[Von Man Steiner]

you'd expect something like extra damage for over-piercing right? The reason its like this is so anti tank weapons dont just become fantastic infantry killers basically. I've played with ideas for allocating strikes by hardness but as i said I am not ready to dig into the targeting changes yet because I havent tested or implemented them so I am not sure exactly how it will end up outside of the width spreading of damage needing to be dealt with.

He is talking about the fact that, according to the dev diary, when armor is higher than piercing even by a slight margin you still get the full damage reduction of -50% damage

 

[Fer_Fer]

He is talking about the fact that, according to the dev diary, when armor is higher than piercing even by a slight margin you dtill get the full damage reduction of -50% damage

So it means that if you want to defend against tanks, you still have to go big into AT guns. Shame.

 

[Madzai]

Currently the effects of having stronger armor than the enemy can pierce, or being able to pierce an enemies armor are binary and give fixed bonuses. This meant that there wasn't really any benefit to have more armor than you needed to stop the enemies piercing, and also that being a single point of piercing under enemy armor was just as bad as having no piercing. So things were quite binary. With the tank designer coming we wanted to make it feel like your investments in upgrades were always worth it, so we are changing armor and piercing to have more gradual effects.

Can someone explain how much it will actually help in piercing armor by something like AT guns, because, unlike in example, it's usually AT lacking enough piercing to deal with Tanks, that, combined with AT high resource price is making them not very viable to add to INF templates. Will this change make them viable, or they still won't be enough outside heavy specialized templates?

 

[Dindomir Eagleshield]

Love the changes, both this and everything that was discussed before. Honestly, I'd suggest making the patch HoI 4 2.0.

 

[bitmode]

Aren't those just different magic numbers, then? I've never really heard a case made for why historical divisions were optimal

Every unit is made up of sub units. The unit commander needs a balance between having enough interchangeable sub units to maneuver them (i.e. at least two) but not too many two be overwhelmed. Whether these ideal numbers where 2, 3, 4, or 5 somewhat depended on doctrines etc. but they were not just made up. Very large, very small or irregularly shaped divisions were worse simply due to their internal command being less effective.

 

[Von Man Steiner]

So it means that if you want to defend against tanks, you still have to go big into AT guns. Shame.

And even then we are still never piercing heavy tanks and AT is still useless. Really confusing change (or I guess lack of change) considering just prior to that podcat says the complete opposite where he implies piercing shouldn't be useless if slightly below the armor value

 

[podcat]

it's not that hard to post a survey so players can actually decide what they want to get fixed instead of you making the game even more convoluted (by fixing what you think is broken instead of what actually ruins the game) than it was 2 seconds ago

No need. If you read any of the hundreds of combat width discussion threads over the years you will see that the two most popular changes are:
* more varied width + less overstack penalties so that it matters less what width you use and if it aligns perfectly
* have targeting and damage allocation not be so advantageous for wide divisions

 

[Fulmen]

It was always dynamic to max 5 battalions. So from image you can't be sure, if it is off or not

Oh yeah, you're right. Guess this shows how little I actually play the game anymore. I'll edit the post accordingly.

 

[GeorgieBest]

but we may or may not have some secret other stuff as well

Viccy. Three. Confirmed

 

[Xerberous]

Stuipid question: Why isn't it possible to implement the damage-reduction due to piercing with a steady function?

Damage reduction = f(Piercing, Armor)

As the most simple – yet not necessarily best example:
Damage reduction [%] = Armor – Piercing.

As far as I understand, the calculation needs to be done only once before the start of the combat so cpu usage should really be no iusse.

 

[Leinad965]

Stuipid question: Why isn't it possible to implement the damage-reduction due to piercing with a steady function?

Damage reduction = f(Piercing, Armor)

As the most simple – yet not necessarily best example:
Damage reduction [%] = Armor – Piercing.

As far as I understand, the calculation needs to be done only once before the start of the combat so cpu usage should really be no iusse.

Dev diary mechanics sounds more realisticaly. Armor > Piercing, you cannot pierce it. Armor > Piercing * 0.9, you can pierce it from medium range. Armor > Piercing * 0.75 , you can pierce it from long range.

 

[Cenwulf]

To quote the wiki:
“When armored units are in combat against targets with insufficient piercing, the organization dice size is increased to 6, representing the ability of the armored unit to move more freely under fire, obtain better positioning and thus deal more damage. This means an unpierced armored unit on average does 3.5 organization damage per hit instead of 2.5, or 40%more damage per hit.”

Are there any planned changes to how this works, will speed or maneuverability be taken into account to make fast lightly armoured tank destroyers designs a viable option?

Or is this simply going to balanced by the fact that lightly armoured TDs will presumably be more reliable and cheaper to produce?