HOI4 Dev Diary - Combat and Stats changes

[Simon_9732495]

you'd expect something like extra damage for over-piercing right?

Shouldn’t piercing just a little bit under armor also be doing something?

Now adding anti tank weapons is only useful if you are pretty sure you can pierce.

Edit: With „now“ I meant before the changes.

 

[Jimmyfeellucky]

But It still did not solve 10 width inf spam. Since only large width divisions get nefted.
I think 10 width inf org wall is still the meta.

 

[GSP Jr]

20 views and 19 replies? Some people haven't bothered reading the DD yet I'm assuming.

They just look at the pictures, lol.

 

[Krey_Lollipop]

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

I've gotten pretty good at the game, but one thing I know I've struggled with as a beginner in other games is the lack of AI-automatization. That said, even now there are features I wish I could just hand over to the AI from time to time. Navy is one such aspect, partially because the ship-builder is a tad uninviting, but also because for some playthroughs the naval side of things just isn't critical to your success, yet seeing as most countries start off with shipyards you don't want to waste it. Espionage is a similar story for me. Seeing as it doesn't give much in terms of notifications and isn't visible on the map by default I tend to forget about it, so in that sense it might be poorly designed. However, for many countries I feel it's good to have, but not critical, so an AI automatization option would be nice.

But to return to topic, I think a marker/automatization for what the next historical-/next AI-focus is could be good even for some veteran players. I remember struggling as both Bulgaria and the Netherlands on my first playthroughs as them because I didn't know how to navigate their new focuses. Bonus points if I can go into game-options and set a path for my country without it removing ironman-eligibility, or something along those lines. Would make things like French monarchist achievement runs slightly less tedious.

(EDIT) I should probably clarify that I'm quite limited on time and prefer my games to be fast, speed 5. Between that and having a head full of studies and other work, I just can't be bothered with every mechanic of the game at once, especially when what I'm looking for is a big land war in continental Europe or diplomatic maneuvering rather than say ruling the waves. Also, look at Victoria 2 and raise a hand if you think the game would have been better without the option to automatize trading.

 

[superrodge]

Vicy 3 Confirmed!

"Since then I've done various things including being lead programmer for Hearts of Iron 3 (and Victoria 2)"

 

[mursolini]

Dislike armor changes.

Issue was that plain infantry was so great at defence, you had to bring CAS or armor to even have a prospect of pushing.
CAS is countered by cheap AA, cheap AT counters anything that isn't a heavy tank, and while costly, Heavy TDs counter any armor, while still not costly enough to not have it on every province.

Heavy tanks also dominate mediums due to piercing.

This change "fixes" space marines, since 8 INF+2HTD+Supp.AA divisions will became Pushable by heavy tanks, due to them retaining some armor bonus.

Problem is, you have to have more piercing then armor to get benefit from AT. Heavies still dominate mediums, unless MTD can be made with enough piercing.

Under old system, tanks were still valuable even if piersed, their breakthrough, hardness and soft attack didn't go anywhere.

AT was a lot less valuable, due to 3 things: having slightly lower piercing was as bad as having none, and AT didn't provide useful stats besides Piercing and Hard attack, both of which are situational, unlike breakthrough, soft attack and hardness, which are always useful.

 

[M.J.]

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.

In BICE said division looks like this:

View attachment 714987

But in vanilla it's far more crammed:

View attachment 714988

And those are actually short of one ART battalion on account of error on my end. The real one had six, not five: three gun, three howitzer, in a gun and howitzer regiment respectively. Now there's going to be no way to get this close to certain historical OOBs. The solution might be to tweak existing battalion manpower values/allow players to do that through laws or techs or something, so that we end up still having the historical battalion count whilst being close to the historical manpower count, removing the need to add extra battalions for more manpower (that need is why the vanilla one is so crammed).

Also, if you're interested in the historical TOE of that particular division type, see my posts here and here for more information.

EDIT: The fifth row probably hasn't been sliced off, so it's probably safe to ignore this first section of the post.



At last! A massive amount of tanks were damaged by breakdowns IRL, but then also repaired. Hopefully we'll see somewhat realistic figures in-game. Also, what about repairing tanks damaged by attrition? That should be a thing as well.

Here's an example of some real-life figures on Russian tank losses on the Karelian Isthmus during the Winter War. It's worth noting the "complete losses" are dubiously low, which might be a result of different interpretations used by the Red Army, but regardless the huge losses from technical failures is telling.

View attachment 714989



I hope the temperatures also get tweaked, as currently the copy-pasted values from HoI3 are more like from the 21st century, than anything from the 1930s and '40s. Currently you'll never see real-life temperatures like -40°C on the Karelian Isthmus (as was IRL e.g. in January 1940), or even Lapland. Or -55°C + wind, which the Germans experienced during some nights at Klin, 85km NW of Moscow in November-December 1941. In fact wind should probably be factored into these temperatures in HoI4, meaning the above historical examples should be even colder in-game than what they were on a thermometer IRL.

Just as an example, here's 5-day average temperatures from the winter of 1939-40 measured in various Finnish population centres. It's also worth noting that the weather is always a bit colder away from population centres, which I'm sure as a Swede you're aware of.

View attachment 714990



Looks like there's a bunch of new things in the interface, including options to sort by XYZ. Good stuff.

Yo, small comment on your artillery comparison. Artillery in HOI4 isnt a battalion, its a regiment which is 3-4 battalions, and thusly 2 HOI4 "battalions" should be enough.

 

[Alberto_woofwoof]

Is this a heatmap?

 

[Viktor Hark]

@podcat is the 'problem' of pure infantry divisions(with no line artilery) being so good on the defense going to be adressed in some later diary?

 

[VoidStaresBack]

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.

This only makes sense on a tactical level, not a divisional level. At the moment there is a "magic number" where you either have enough AT guns or you don't, which people have tried to defend for years with shitty logic. If it was a gradient pure infantry would still struggle to inflict damage on tanks unless in favorable terrain, but AT would be more realistic (the more concentrated an armored push the greater concentration of AT you'd need to properly repulse it, but some good AT is still much better than no AT).

 

[Darehus]

I am loving the changes. Finally, a step in the right realistic direction, and not just 1-2 divisions that win with everything else.

 

[blahmaster6k]

I've gotten pretty good at the game, but one thing I know I've struggled with as a beginner is the lack of AI-automatization. That said, even now there are features I wish I could just hand over to the AI from time to time. Navy is one such aspect, partially because the ship-builder is a tad uninviting, but also because for some playthroughs the naval side of things just isn't critical to your success, yet seeing as most countries start off with shipyards you don't want to waste it. Espionage is a similar story for me. Seeing as it doesn't give much in terms of notifications and isn't visible on the map by default I tend to forget about it, so in that sense it might be poorly designed. However, for many countries I feel it's good to have, but not critical, so an AI automatization option would be nice.

But to return to topic, I think a marker/automatization for what the next historical-/next AI-focus is could be good even for veteran players. I remember struggling as both Bulgaria and the Netherlands on my first playthroughs as them because I didn't know how to navigate their new focuses. Bonus points if I can go into game-options and set a path for my country without it removing ironman-eligibility, or something along those lines. Would make things like French monarchist achievement runs slightly less tedious.

If you really were "pretty good" at the game, you would be capable of using all the features and game mechanics without wanting the AI to do it for you. Navy is easy to manage if you put in the time to learn how to use it.

 

[Razgriz13]

I have a few questions:

First, do you have plans to retouch naval and air values and meta in the same way as you did with ground combat?
Second, really welcome width changes, but I wonder: how land doctrines that receives bonuses on combat width (looking at you mass assault) will deal with it? Will be doctrines touched too to reflect that?
Third and not least, for modders, will be anything new added/unhardcoded related to this?

Now, about what I think about this dev diary, it was pretty consistent, with changes that are simple enough to understand but big enough to make a diference. An elegant solution (I hope) to spice the meta up.

 

[Fulmen]

Yo, small comment on your artillery comparison. Artillery in HOI4 isnt a battalion, its a regiment which is 3-4 battalions, and thusly 2 HOI4 "battalions" should be enough.

I don't think this is the case, because then you'd have entire regiments with only 500 men. Men are not abstracted in the game; they are 1:1, but equipment is not. Artillery equipment is not just the actual guns, but also the shells, horses, tractors, etc. required to operate the artillery. But I do wish they lowered the amount of artillery equipment in ART bns. to 12 (and adjust the price accordingly), so the "1 ART battalion is actually a regiment" crowd would get on the same page.

 

[morodelapaz]

AT is better. With the current system if an enemy division had 60 armour, and your AT guns had 59 piercing, the enemy would get the full 50% damage reduction and you may as well have not had any AT guns at all.

With the new system the enemy would only get a 3.3% damage reduction because of their armour.

i believe this should be a better way, an escaling way to counter tanks, otherwise AT guns will be useless like it is now most of the time, which is a pity and I don´t believe it makes quite sense

 

[Leinad965]

This only makes sense on a tactical level, not a divisional level. At the moment there is a "magic number" where you either have enough AT guns or you don't, which people have tried to defend for years with shitty logic. If it was a gradient pure infantry would still struggle to inflict damage on tanks unless in favorable terrain, but AT would be more realistic (the more concentrated an armored push the greater concentration of AT you'd need to properly repulse it, but some good AT is still much better than no AT).

I think infantry with some molotov coctails are better against Tiger, than any number of 37mm AT guns

 

[Vohen]

Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary! Today is about various changes that affect combat and units. With the Barbarossa update we want to shake up the meta a bit and also change a few stats and other aspects to make using the tank designer more interesting and rewarding.

High Command bonus changes
For a long time now unit bonuses from high command have confused people. Most expect that they apply to battalions, when in fact they apply only if their target unit type was “the majority type”, which was basically a weighted type count. They also could overlap, so infantry, mountaineers and artillery would apply to the same units letting you stack stuff in ways that was never intended and quite unintuitive.

View attachment 714880

This system has now changed, and divisions get bonuses based on their composition, this is a straight up ratio based on the number of non-support battalions of each type, so a 2x artillery 3x infantry division will be 40% artillery 60% infantry.
Battalions are always classified as a single type for this (even though some are scripted with multiple types) based on this priority:
cavalry > armor > artillery > motorized > mechanized > infantry

The exceptions being rocket & special forces, which both act as an addition, so if the 3 infantry divisions in the example above were mountain units, then the division would also be 60% special forces and if the 2 artillery are nebelwerfers it'd also be 40% rocket

When counting the battalions of armies (ie when we have an actual unit and not only a division template), battalions that lack equipment will count as less, so a Light Tank battalion with only half it's tanks will count as 0.5 battalions (and not count at all if without tanks). The total sum of the compositions will still end up 100% (unless every battalion is without equipment).

View attachment 714881

To make it easier to see this we now have an indicator in the division windows showing the breakdown.

Combat Width
As a part of our efforts to shake up the 40/20 width meta, we have made changes to the combat width of province terrain. Province widths now range from 75 to 96. Plains have a new base combat width of 90, while Mountains have a new combat width of 75. Most of these widths will not divide into each other easily, hopefully moving the ideal width away from multiples of 10.

Urban provinces are now the “widest” with a width of 96. But this does not mean they will be the easiest provinces to overwhelm. Mountains, marshes, and urban provinces now have reinforcement widths of ⅓ of province width instead of ½. This should hopefully give these provinces a slight defensive buff, while allowing us to open up pushing power in the more open tiles.


View attachment 714882

In conjunction with these changes, we have also been looking at reducing the overstacking penalty. We hope that this will alleviate some of the need to have divisions that are the perfect width for a given province. But at the same time, smaller countries should now be able to specialize their division width to suit their home terrain more appropriately.

Breakdown (numbers not final etc etc)

• Plains
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Desert
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Forest
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Jungle
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Hills
  • Standard 80
  • Reinforce 40
• Marsh
  • Standard 78
  • Reinforce 26
• Urban
  • Standard 96
  • Reinforce.32
• Mountain
  • Standard 75
  • Reinforce 25

One of the major things that make larger divisions like 40 width armor hit disproportionally harder than smaller ones is also how targeting and damage works inside combat in relation to the enemies defense. Essentially the larger divisions make more efficient use of concentrated damage as it punches through defense. To solve this we are doing a few things. First of all we are weighting the targeting towards wider divisions being more likely targets and also when picking targets to try and match it to have wider divisions spread damage over smaller rather than always concentrating it. They will probably still hit harder, but combined with width changes and other downsides of larger divisions it should make it less clear cut.
However, this part isn’t quite done yet though so I’ll cover it again in more detail in one of the “bag of tricks” diaries in the future when i see how it pans out, but I figured it needed to be mentioned now That said though, to wet your appetites here is a little tease from a debug mapmode in development...
View attachment 714920

Armor and Piercing
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.

Armor > Piercing

• Unit takes half damage (as it currently works)

Armor < Piercing and Amor > 0.75 * Piercing

• Take damage between half damage to normal damage by difference in value

Armor < 0.75 * Piercing

• The unit takes normal damage

Lets break this down with an example:

• A panzer division has an armor value of 52
• Its being attacked by an infantry division with some anti-tank guns. Their piercing is 60
• If this was the old system this armor would be worthless and not reduce damage at all
• Now because its close enough (between 60 and 45), so you get roughly half of the normal effect around 25% reduction of damage.

Reliability
For the tank designer it was important that reliability was more impactful if it was to be a good tradeoff with other aspects of design, so we needed to change it up (lest @CraniumMuppets 0% reliability tank monsters would take over the world). Now it will not just affect rate of loss in attrition but various other aspects:

• Reliability affects losses from attrition like before
• Reliability now affects org regain when moving, and also makes any weather related org effects more impactful when low
• Lower reliability scales up all impacts from weather so if facing extreme weather a unit with low reliability equipment will suffer more of those weather effects
• At the end of combat units with better reliability will be able to get back a certain amount of tanks etc to simulate that simple more reliable constructions would work better for battlefield repair and be less fragile when taking damage. So it's a bit like capturing enemy equipment in combat - but in reverse

View attachment 714885

Our goal is that this creates interesting tradeoffs when designing equipment and will make you have to consider if its worth switching a strategy focused on speed and firepower towards reliability when operating in bad weather and tough areas like the Russian winter or in northern africa or jungles.

Oh, and I figured now might be a good time to point out that there will be a future diary on weather changes and other cool related stuff, so these changes aren't completely in isolation. But one step at a time

But before we go, a few words about the studio...

Studio Gold
Hello everyone, my name is Thomas, but perhaps better known as @Besuchov here

As you saw here we have recently reorganized ourselves a little, moving from a big centralized Stockholm studio to splitting ourselves into Red, Green and Gold. This is mainly an internal org shift to make sure we keep our growing organization firmly focused around making good games. You shouldn't notice too many differences in the short term, we are still PDS making GSG on the Clausewitz engine, but it does mean that we can align each studio to the particular games. Since you will hear the studio names every once in a while, I just wanted to say who I am and what the studio is responsible for.

My role is Studio Manager, which means I'm accountable for the long term success of Studio Gold and working with things like management, staffing, and long term plans. Studio Gold has as its main focus Hearts of Iron (but we may or may not have some secret other stuff as well). Directly making the games though, that's still the job of Podcat and the team, but I intend to do my best to create an environment where we have the best chances to make great games together.

For me this is coming full circle at Paradox. I started as a programmer in 2004 and one of my first tasks was to work on Hearts of Iron 2. Since then I've done various things including being lead programmer for Hearts of Iron 3 (and Victoria 2), Project Lead for EU4 and more recently Studio Manager for PDS. Next to EU, HOI is my favorite game and I'm delighted to be back in a place where I can focus on fewer games and where that game is Hearts of Iron. You will see more of me in the future even though I will mostly take a backseat to the team working on the game.

That’s all, see you all again next week for more dev diary goodness!

Very nice, I quite like it.
Are there any changes planned regarding tactics and recon?

 

[BeauNiddle]

View attachment 715009 Is this a heatmap?

It does look like seasons. Winter up north, Summer down south. Coastal areas more temperate, Continental areas more extreme.

 

[VoidStaresBack]

I think infantry with some molotov coctails are better against Tiger, than any number of 37mm AT guns

Infantry get increased piercing values as tech goes up, to a much greater degree than low-end AT guns, so I fail to see the contradiction here.

The fundamental problem with piercing vs. armor is that it's very much a tactical level statistic being shoehorned into a divisional-level statistic. Yes, making it a gradient might have the side effect of making certain low-end AT guns more effective against armor than they should be (balance dependent), but frankly I find that preferable to the current system where the best designed AT guns in the game are completely useless because either their values are too low or they're treated as magically not piercing tanks due to the infantry dragging down the average value.

 

[minimouse007]

While i overall really like the changes i do feel like infantry got basically no love, it still remains an extremely boring part of the game and that with small divisions becoming meta, the crazy lategame division spam would become even more annoying to face, as currently the only real counter to having the axis/allies 20 div on a single tile is that your 40w armour crushes through before the reserves would be able to reinforce

so yes, i do like the concept, and will welcome the changes, but i do hope land will be touched again after air, at least regarding number of divisions, or some variety for the infantry. armoured warfare was already a lot cooler, now it becomes even more, as previously they had 'additionally" the speed and armour stats to play around, now they will have reliability, too, something that should be not much of a depth for the 10inf holder divisions.....