HOI4 Dev Diary - Combat and Stats changes

[pro.gamer.69]

And nobody is forced to do that in the game either.

they certainly have been complaining about the 20/40 meta like they were forced to do that, though. no one is "forced" to do anything.

I have no idea why anyone would even think that players in general could be bothered to try and create optimal divisions for every situation and terrain, when such a thing would neither work with the battle planner nor be something you could pull off when moving all your units on your own. There is an enemy after all, and you will never have a situation in which you could always be set up perfectly outside of maybe the very first attack in an offensive.

there is definitely a balance between optimizing potential efficiency and actual, post-micro efficacy. and even within the scope of efficiency, it's not like players will necessarily give up veterancy just to get 5% more combat width in a battle. but, as an example, you will absolutely see people making mountaineer divisions which are vastly different sizes from normal ones, and the same is true for other terrains. being able to get 12 more combat width in a battle will absolutely make a difference.

still, it's hard to say how this will really affect gameplay until it's actually been played. after seeing some numbers run i'm far more concerned about the changes to targeting which were mentioned, which seem far more prone to very significant memes.

 

[Zauberelefant]

they certainly have been complaining about the 20/40 meta like they were forced to do that, though. no one is "forced" to do anything.

there is definitely a balance between optimizing potential efficiency and actual, post-micro efficacy. and even within the scope of efficiency, it's not like players will necessarily give up veterancy just to get 5% more combat width in a battle. but, as an example, you will absolutely see people making mountaineer divisions which are vastly different sizes from normal ones, and the same is true for other terrains. being able to get 12 more combat width in a battle will absolutely make a difference.

still, it's hard to say how this will really affect gameplay until it's actually been played. after seeing some numbers run i'm far more concerned about the changes to targeting which were mentioned, which seem far more prone to very significant memes.

Anyone yet thought that you can have different types of division work in the same province, with different width? Like, a big armour and two smaller infantry division in a forest (27x2, 30x1) or even less close when considering second direction (84*1.5=126; 28x3, 40x1)?

 

[blahmaster6k]

If researching ahead is generally optimal, then that's a flaw with both historical accuracy and gameplay. Researching ahead can only generally (ie. by everybody) be done at the expense of other technologies that are "within time". For the research ahead to be optimal, either the thing it is optimal to tech rush must be overpowered in the game or the technologies being eschewed for it are suboptimal/a waste of game coding/a trap option. Tech rushing for certain, limited circumstances is fine, but if it's generally optimal to rush specific techs then that's an issue with both the historical modelling (assuming the correct year has been assigned to each tech) and with the gameplay (having trap options and redundant game elements is never good).

Hard disagree. As someone else mentioned, why would I ever research infantry techs in 1936 when I'm not going to be going to war until 1939? I could be researching something that will actually help me during that time period. That doesn't mean that infantry defense techs are a waste of time or a trap option, it just means that you don't need them until you're at war, since they provide zero benefit unless you're at war. Are naval technologies underpowered and in need of buffs because they're always the worst possible research for a landlocked country or Russia? Every tech is situational.

The game is all about optimal decision making in the context of the game and the various gameplay systems and NOT doing what the various countries did in history, because the goal isn't to get the same result as what happened in history. The whole point of HoI4 is "what if X country did Y thing differently? Could the war have played out another way?" Choosing to focus research on one thing at the expense of others is just another aspect of that. The most powerful Russia builds choose to entirely ignore building an air force. Is that realistic? No. Does it mean that the game is fundamentally flawed? Also no.

And I will say one thing: Realism is sacrificed all the time for gameplay reasons, because having fun gameplay is more important than being realistic. HoI4 is, above everything else, a game. And for a game, the most important thing is that it needs to be fun. Full stop. If something isn't realistic because the devs/players thought it would be fun then that's fine. That's why we have a second American Civil War, communist Japan, Kaiser Wilhelm returning, and King Tigers fighting against IS tanks in 1941.

 

[Balesir]

Hard disagree. As someone else mentioned, why would I ever research infantry techs in 1936 when I'm not going to be going to war until 1939? I could be researching something that will actually help me during that time period. That doesn't mean that infantry defense techs are a waste of time or a trap option, it just means that you don't need them until you're at war, since they provide zero benefit unless you're at war. Are naval technologies underpowered and in need of buffs because they're always the worst possible research for a landlocked country or Russia? Every tech is situational.

If you neglect infantry tech in 1936 the game should punish you by starting a war in 1937. Of course, specific techs are more valuable in specific circumstances; that's why I said it was a problem if the optima applied generally (ie., to be totally clear, for every country, all the time). Finally, I was talking specifically about tech rushing, which should be a possible but marginal pursuit. Picking some techs to keep up-to-date while neglecting others is a perfectly normal thing to have to do, but if rushing one specific tech is "optimal" for every game then that is a problem with the game.

The game is all about optimal decision making in the context of the game and the various gameplay systems and NOT doing what the various countries did in history, because the goal isn't to get the same result as what happened in history. The whole point of HoI4 is "what if X country did Y thing differently? Could the war have played out another way?" Choosing to focus research on one thing at the expense of others is just another aspect of that. The most powerful Russia builds choose to entirely ignore building an air force. Is that realistic? No. Does it mean that the game is fundamentally flawed? Also no.

You don't seem to be reading what I say because you seem to be pigeonholing me as a "LARPer" (as if that's a bad thing, but whatever). Yes, I am saying this stuff is ahistorical, but that's actually a side comment (although, in game that is supposed to be reflective of a specific set of events in history I think it's generally good if it does resemble the circumstances and limitations of that time - but that's a side issue, really).

My objection to the "optimal" meme stuff, however, is primarily that it makes a bad game. A deep problem with multiple "right" answers is a much better game than a shallow one.

Of course doing things differently from the historical route is the idea of the game - but the decisions that the commanders and leaders at the time made were made for a reason. I want those reasons represented at least to some extent in the game, because otherwise all you are asking is "how does this game mechanic work?" AND all you have is a shallow optimisation problem (which is a bad game). If adding a few extra batallions to a division had been the "thing done differently" that might have radically changed the course of world war 2, the leaders at the time would have done it, trust me. It wasn't. So, in aceing a game by manipulating division widths, all you have done is proved that "I have found a way to ace this game system". You have not come even close to answering the question "what if X country did Y thing differently? Could the war have played out another way?" because you haven't even really asked that question. Maybe with a computer game we can never really ask that question. But we can ask questions a damn sight more interesting than "how can we fiddle this combat system?"

 

[Axe99]

It seems that you, like many non-MP players seem to buy into the stereotype that all MP players build the exact same way every game, or that there is one "best" meta template that is used in every game. That is incorrect, and I wish people would stop propagating that narrative. Half the game in MP is spying on your opponents to see what they're doing, and coming up with a division that counters the enemy as best as possible. There are a ton of viable templates in MP. To reduce it all to "one division to rule them all" is to insult mp gameplay.

Apologies - that's definitely the impression that comes off from reading the forum (noting I don't hang out in the MP part of the forum/MP threads, the conversation may well be more nuanced there). I definitely don't intend to insult MP gameplay - MP is almost always harder (human competition making it thus) than SP, so I'd never suggest that the MP game was "easy" or "simple". Rather, I was trying to raise that the barriers to success in MP (limited attention being a much more important factor, as you can't pause whenever you want) are very different to SP - which creates very different challenges in terms of optimising gameplay, due to the nature of the game (it wouldn't be an issue if it was an FPS, say ).

Learning "the meta" isn't just learning a set of division templates someone said were good and then using them every game. Understanding the meta is a state of mind where you know fully how the game works, and are able to craft your strategies around your knowledge of how the game works. For example, I can go hop into a mod that changes the combat width and be able to design a good division accordingly with my own knowledge and player skill, because I know how the game works. I don't need to talk to someone who has played the mod before in order to get ideas for good division templates, I can look at the game and figure out what will be best suited for a situation based on the tools that are available.

Totally - and I'm down with this. Keep in mind, though (and as you say yourself a bit later), there's no reason this can't be done under the new set of mechanics. Everyone playing MP will be in the same situation, and the game's so complex that it's not as if other things won't be simplified in MP to manage as well. Could it not just be a case of different things being simplified to make things work?

My main angle here on the issue more broadly is that why does fixed combat width have to be as mechanically important? It is important now because of the design of the combat mechanics, but in some cases the mathematical relationships within those combat mechanics seem a bit clunky (the binary impact of defence, that is a non-ratio'd figure, for example, being a big one for me). I'm actually not particularly fond of fixed combat widths based on terrain (it's not as if every mountain, plains or city province was the same in terms of combat frontage, and that would be the case even if it the map was made up of equal geographically-sized units (hexes or similar), let alone the situation now - but I'm even less fond of one set of combat widths whether you're fighting in a tiny province in the Netherlands, or a large plans province in North America. As best I understand it, IRL things like weather can also effectively change the combat width (how many troops can engage effectively at once). As a historical plausiblity-ist (I don't want to LARP WW2, but I do want my mechanics to be immersive, and the way division sizes and combat width interact don't do this for me), I'd prefer things combat width to be variable in a historically plausible way, and for divisions to adapt and adjust to this as they did historically (with a degree of abstraction to make it playable).

More broadly, on the plus side, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't possible to mod back in the old widths (I can't imagine the devs would hard-code them) - so if the new combat width approach does mess up the MP game too much, it should be fairly straightforward to create a "uniform combat widths" mod, and get right back into ti.

I have fun in the current system, and I'm sure I would have just as much fun with any other arbitrary number. It's not the 20/40 meta that I like, it's the fact that the combat system is balanced well enough in my opinion, and there's no need to fix what isn't broken. I understand some people disagree with that, most vocally the people who prioritize historical accuracy at all costs over gameplay, but that's just my opinion.

Here's where we disagree (noting that we both have perfectly reasonable positions - mine is no more valid than yours - and it gets back to the point above that there'll always be different interests between the MP and SP community, due to the nature of the type of game) - from an immmersion/mechanical depth perspective, ground combat has always felt a bit over-simplified and un-immersive for me. Bothers me less because I'm more of a ship person, but if I was into the land warfare, I'd be suggesting all sorts of stuff to try and improve the depth/immersiveness of gameplay here. Someone somewhere on the forums talked about different options for balancing the game for MP vs SP - while I think this would be impractical, and make debugging and right nightmare, there's a robust foundation for that kind of idea given that MP HoIers in many ways play a different game to SP HoIers, given the impact that not pausing makes on the game.

 

[blahmaster6k]

Apologies - that's definitely the impression that comes off from reading the forum (noting I don't hang out in the MP part of the forum/MP threads, the conversation may well be more nuanced there). I definitely don't intend to insult MP gameplay - MP is almost always harder (human competition making it thus) than SP, so I'd never suggest that the MP game was "easy" or "simple". Rather, I was trying to raise that the barriers to success in MP (limited attention being a much more important factor, as you can't pause whenever you want) are very different to SP - which creates very different challenges in terms of optimising gameplay, due to the nature of the game (it wouldn't be an issue if it was an FPS, say ).



Totally - and I'm down with this. Keep in mind, though (and as you say yourself a bit later), there's no reason this can't be done under the new set of mechanics. Everyone playing MP will be in the same situation, and the game's so complex that it's not as if other things won't be simplified in MP to manage as well. Could it not just be a case of different things being simplified to make things work?

My main angle here on the issue more broadly is that why does fixed combat width have to be as mechanically important? It is important now because of the design of the combat mechanics, but in some cases the mathematical relationships within those combat mechanics seem a bit clunky (the binary impact of defence, that is a non-ratio'd figure, for example, being a big one for me). I'm actually not particularly fond of fixed combat widths based on terrain (it's not as if every mountain, plains or city province was the same in terms of combat frontage, and that would be the case even if it the map was made up of equal geographically-sized units (hexes or similar), let alone the situation now - but I'm even less fond of one set of combat widths whether you're fighting in a tiny province in the Netherlands, or a large plans province in North America. As best I understand it, IRL things like weather can also effectively change the combat width (how many troops can engage effectively at once). As a historical plausiblity-ist (I don't want to LARP WW2, but I do want my mechanics to be immersive, and the way division sizes and combat width interact don't do this for me), I'd prefer things combat width to be variable in a historically plausible way, and for divisions to adapt and adjust to this as they did historically (with a degree of abstraction to make it playable).

More broadly, on the plus side, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't possible to mod back in the old widths (I can't imagine the devs would hard-code them) - so if the new combat width approach does mess up the MP game too much, it should be fairly straightforward to create a "uniform combat widths" mod, and get right back into ti.



Here's where we disagree (noting that we both have perfectly reasonable positions - mine is no more valid than yours - and it gets back to the point above that there'll always be different interests between the MP and SP community, due to the nature of the type of game) - from an immmersion/mechanical depth perspective, ground combat has always felt a bit over-simplified and un-immersive for me. Bothers me less because I'm more of a ship person, but if I was into the land warfare, I'd be suggesting all sorts of stuff to try and improve the depth/immersiveness of gameplay here. Someone somewhere on the forums talked about different options for balancing the game for MP vs SP - while I think this would be impractical, and make debugging and right nightmare, there's a robust foundation for that kind of idea given that MP HoIers in many ways play a different game to SP HoIers, given the impact that not pausing makes on the game.

Thanks for taking the time to write up a reply like this. Definitely more reasoned than the people who just spam the disagree button or start throwing insults without explaining their positions. I think you have some pretty good points in here. In particular I think a lot (if not most) popular MP mods will mod out the varying combat width, as the MP community tends to be very resistant to change. One of the things I dislike about it is that the stereotype of not wanting anything to shake up their precious meta is unfortunately pretty spot on a lot of the time. Several MP mods remove the spy system entirely because they see it as imbalanced or rng-based, a lot of mods have reverted updated focus trees (some still had versions of Japan's old 1.4 tree long after waking the tiger updated it).

I really want to just take a wait-and-see approach to all of these changes. Up front I don't really like the idea of varied combat width, but I'm willing to see how other unrevealed changes will affect the game as well and how the actual game plays out before I offer too strong of a premature judgment.

 

[DaleDVM]

I like the "concept" of all of the changes. Waiting on more specifics. I will love if the new targeting method and lower penalties for being over the CW makes talking about Division width a minor affair. It would be nice if discussing what types of battalions/support companies were put into our divisions was more important than exactly how big they are. I love the idea of combined arms bonuses.

IMHO the piercing is still broken. While I like the changes which helps medium/light tanks, the all or none nature of piercing needs to be smoothed out in the opposite direction as well. As AT weapons piercing starts to approach the armor level of enemy divisions the damage should start to be phased in instead of a 50% loss in damage as soon as you are 1% below the armor level. As many have said, there is side/rear armor and tank treads and weak points on all vehicles. Piercing is not an all or none affair because tanks are not perfect spheres of armor where angles/positioning/range have no effect. I would think once AT piercing is approaching 75% of the armor value more damage should be phased in.

The last thing this game needs is less reasons to build AT guns. And from what we know so far, the AT guns have actually been nerfed by these changes.

However, I am thankful that it sounds like the gun technology is going to be combined into the tank designer so we might not have to research AT guns separately any more. This will help somewhat to keep piercing up to date. But that 50% drop off if you are the slightest bit behind is a major deterrent to including AT in your INF.

 

[Axe99]

Thanks for taking the time to write up a reply like this. Definitely more reasoned than the people who just spam the disagree button or start throwing insults without explaining their positions.

Right back at you - there was absolutely, definitely no insult intended. Like you, I'm also hopeful that the things that might be problematic with the new system actually aren't for either my lack of cognitive capacity or things we don't know yet. There'll always be a degree of compromise between MP and SP, but I very much hope that we all can have a blast when the DLC/Patch arrive - I don't want game development to neglect MP any more than I'd want it to neglect SP

 

[Balesir]

IMHO the piercing is still broken. While I like the changes which helps medium/light tanks, the all or none nature of piercing needs to be smoothed out in the opposite direction as well. As AT weapons piercing starts to approach the armor level of enemy divisions the damage should start to be phased in instead of a 50% loss in damage as soon as you are 1% below the armor level. As many have said, there is side/rear armor and tank treads and weak points on all vehicles. Piercing is not an all or none affair because tanks are not perfect spheres of armor where angles/positioning/range have no effect. I would think once AT piercing is approaching 75% of the armor value more damage should be phased in.

Well, couldn't you achieve just the same effect by increasing the AT gun piercing by 33%? The core of the new mechanic is that there is an upper band, where damage is at full rate, a lower band, where damage is reduced (to 50% or whatever) and a middle band where it phases. Having an extra band in the middle where it also phases would be redundant - you can just make the band wider by fiddling with the numbers...

 

[SjoerdvDonk]

Since you guys are focussing more on logistics, climate and terrain, It'll be cool to focus on bridges aswell! So far, what I've read in the DD's, I'm really hyped! You guys are doing great work.

 

[sdplissken]

Hard disagree. As someone else mentioned, why would I ever research infantry techs in 1936 when I'm not going to be going to war until 1939? I could be researching something that will actually help me during that time period. That doesn't mean that infantry defense techs are a waste of time or a trap option, it just means that you don't need them until you're at war, since they provide zero benefit unless you're at war. Are naval technologies underpowered and in need of buffs because they're always the worst possible research for a landlocked country or Russia? Every tech is situational.

The game is all about optimal decision making in the context of the game and the various gameplay systems and NOT doing what the various countries did in history, because the goal isn't to get the same result as what happened in history. The whole point of HoI4 is "what if X country did Y thing differently? Could the war have played out another way?" Choosing to focus research on one thing at the expense of others is just another aspect of that. The most powerful Russia builds choose to entirely ignore building an air force. Is that realistic? No. Does it mean that the game is fundamentally flawed? Also no.

And I will say one thing: Realism is sacrificed all the time for gameplay reasons, because having fun gameplay is more important than being realistic. HoI4 is, above everything else, a game. And for a game, the most important thing is that it needs to be fun. Full stop. If something isn't realistic because the devs/players thought it would be fun then that's fine. That's why we have a second American Civil War, communist Japan, Kaiser Wilhelm returning, and King Tigers fighting against IS tanks in 1941.

No offense to anyone meant, but honestly at this point I don't think most of the people disagreeing with you think about hoi4 as a game, they just want to LARP about what they've read on wikipedia about how exactly the war went. There's no point to arguing with them, they will never understand the game at a high level because they don't want to. All they do is complain that the game isn't a time machine to reenact world war 2 exactly the same as it happened in real life.

While true that it is just a game. The game should be based somewhat in reality. If it isn't... then you may as well be playing Warhammer. Being over fantastical with limited difficulty doesn't really make for a good game either. You should feel it if you do something like an American Civil War, it should be nearly impossible, and if you do accomplish it, you should feel like you did something impossible.

 

[blahmaster6k]

While true that it is just a game. The game should be based somewhat in reality. If it isn't... then you may as well be playing Warhammer. Being over fantastical with limited difficulty doesn't really make for a good game either. You should feel it if you do something like an American Civil War, it should be nearly impossible, and if you do accomplish it, you should feel like you did something impossible.

Honestly the ACW is one of the most ridiculous things in the game. The difference between winning easily and the war being impossible is whether or not you take the focus that gives you like 150 free divisions or not.

 

[Harin]

Like @DaleDVM, mentioned, I do believe that it is important that piercing have more impact. From the DD, it seems the plan is for AT fires to have a huge drop in effectiveness once it is one point below armour. I think it would help game play, the AI, and new players if the damage was more gradual, going up or down.

I know things must be balanced, but new players are going to think it common sense that they should add AT to their divisions. The game should reward that common sense to make the game easier to learn. A more gradual damage escalation/de-escalation gives the AI some help, since it is probably easier to tell the AI to build AT guns and tanks than it is to keep up in the research race. A meta will still exist as no one could get rid of the meta if they tried.

 

[FindFloppies]

But we can ask questions a damn sight more interesting than "how can we fiddle this combat system?"

I think the thing about 40w/20w being resented is more because it's so 'gamey'. For some of us, when we ask a question in the forum, and you're repeatedly told "Just use 40w tanks and 20w infantry, and don't deviate" you're no longer getting the answer to "How can we play what-if with WWII" or "How can we re-create history"; the question being answered is "How can we best exploit the loopholes in this game's system?"...and that's not what I play HOI4 to do. If I want that, there are other games I could do that in much better, and actually enjoy doing so.

Min-maxing in this game so much of the time is all about mathing out the exploits left behind in the game's system. If you like doing that and you find that fun, great. When the next patch comes out, go write a mod to put everything back to 80/40/20, and you can exploit the loopholes in peace. I don't really find that fun.

YMMV.

 

[DaleDVM]

Well, couldn't you achieve just the same effect by increasing the AT gun piercing by 33%? The core of the new mechanic is that there is an upper band, where damage is at full rate, a lower band, where damage is reduced (to 50% or whatever) and a middle band where it phases. Having an extra band in the middle where it also phases would be redundant - you can just make the band wider by fiddling with the numbers...

No that wouldn't have the same result at all. Your solution would just give AT a leg up and make it easier to pierce. There would still be a 50% damage drop off as soon as piercing drops just below the armor value. The damage curve would be the exact same. The curve would just be moved to the left or the right on said graph.

Example: Enemy division has 60 armor. Three divisions are matched up against it. One has 60.1 piercing, it does normal damage. One has 59.9 piercing, it has 50% damage reduction. One has no piercing, and also has 50% damage reduction. Does anyone see the problem now?

It is too binary. The division with 59 piercing should not receive the same modifier as the division with 0 piercing. Once again. Vehicles are not uniformly armored. If people think the division with almost enough piercing and the division with barely any piercing should deal similar damage to armored vehicles, that is fine. But, it is simply not true. The calculation should be more gradual than that on both sides of the armor value. The proposed changes fixed one side. Now they just need to fix the other. It should not take more than an hour of programming to change the formula.

 

[safe-keeper]

I think the thing about 40w/20w being resented is more because it's so 'gamey'. For some of us, when we ask a question in the forum, and you're repeatedly told "Just use 40w tanks and 20w infantry, and don't deviate" you're no longer getting the answer to "How can we play what-if with WWII" or "How can we re-create history"; the question being answered is "How can we best exploit the loopholes in this game's system?"...and that's not what I play HOI4 to do. If I want that, there are other games I could do that in much better, and actually enjoy doing so.

Min-maxing in this game so much of the time is all about mathing out the exploits left behind in the game's system. If you like doing that and you find that fun, great. When the next patch comes out, go write a mod to put everything back to 80/40/20, and you can exploit the loopholes in peace. I don't really find that fun.

YMMV.

So much this.

It's ridiculous that so much emphasis is put on a number that has nothing to do with reality whatsoever, as real-life WWII had no fixed combat system that favoured divisions with an arbitrary number of battalions. Neither Patton, nor Rommel, nor Monty said anything about "optimal combat width" during World War II, and you don't read accounts like "...so the Nazis failed to take Stalingrad because the width of their divisions was all odd numbers, while the Soviets had perfected the 20w infantry formation", or "Paulus kept asking Hitler to let him reorganize his 19w, 36w, and 22½w divisions, but the Führer refused, and so the 6th Army could not escape encirclement".

I'm 100% in favour of the devs shaking things up.

 

[blahmaster6k]

I think the thing about 40w/20w being resented is more because it's so 'gamey'. For some of us, when we ask a question in the forum, and you're repeatedly told "Just use 40w tanks and 20w infantry, and don't deviate" you're no longer getting the answer to "How can we play what-if with WWII" or "How can we re-create history"; the question being answered is "How can we best exploit the loopholes in this game's system?"...and that's not what I play HOI4 to do. If I want that, there are other games I could do that in much better, and actually enjoy doing so.

Min-maxing in this game so much of the time is all about mathing out the exploits left behind in the game's system. If you like doing that and you find that fun, great. When the next patch comes out, go write a mod to put everything back to 80/40/20, and you can exploit the loopholes in peace. I don't really find that fun.

YMMV.

Why are you saying that using 20/40w is exploiting a loophole in the game system? It's literally how the game was designed. It may not be realistic, but the game was designed that way.

 

[FindFloppies]

Why are you saying that using 20/40w is exploiting a loophole in the game system? It's literally how the game was designed. It may not be realistic, but the game was designed that way.

And you're providing a perfect example. From my standpoint, it seems that all you see is numbers to match up 'correctly' to 'win' the game. You don't seem at all interested in anything else. And, you seem to, in previous posts, want to keep those 'perfect numbers' the same, rather than change or jumble them up with a patch,, so you can keep 'winning' your perfect number game. That's how it looks from here. I'm not attacking you personally, but it feels like the history, the weapons, the setting, everything else, is secondary to 'having the correct numbers' to 'optimally win the game'.

Again, if that's fun for you, why don't you just run a mod that removes all the 'wrong' numbers from the game, so you can 'win optimally' every time?

If I just want to match the right numbers, I can play sodoku. Again, your mileage may vary.

 

[blahmaster6k]

And you're providing a perfect example. From my standpoint, it seems that all you see is numbers to match up 'correctly' to 'win' the game. You don't seem at all interested in anything else. And, you seem to, in previous posts, want to keep those 'perfect numbers' the same, rather than change or jumble them up with a patch,, so you can keep 'winning' your perfect number game. That's how it looks from here. I'm not attacking you personally, but it feels like the history, the weapons, the setting, everything else, is secondary to 'having the correct numbers' to 'optimally win the game'.

Again, if that's fun for you, why don't you just run a mod that removes all the 'wrong' numbers from the game, so you can 'win optimally' every time?

If I just want to match the right numbers, I can play sodoku. Again, your mileage may vary.

However the game is designed, I want to be able to optimize my gameplay. The game making itself impractical to optimize is something I disagree with. Every strategy game is just a set of optimization problems at its core. If the game discourages optimization by making it basically impossible, then it's not well designed in my opinion. And when they design different widths that ensure players are taking penalties no matter how they design their troops, that's kind of what they did.

The problem with forcing division design that doesn't equal the combat width of a battle is that you're going to be wasting whatever extra division joins the battle above the combat width. In the previous system an extra division would sit in the reserves until needed, but in the new system if there's even a little bit of free width (since divisions will be either a little bigger or a little smaller than some battles) a division will join the fight and take damage while providing no combat benefit to being there. It's just the game forcing you to waste resources.

 

[pro.gamer.69]

It's just the game forcing you to waste resources.

Ahistorically, I might add. It's not like IRL a commander would roll in all their divisions' units into range of enemy artillery and then tell 3/4ths of them to take the day off and just wait to be shelled.

The general idea of combat width is pretty necessary to the game. Unfortunately, without making a system which splits divisions and keeps the others' mp/equipment from being affected (or better yet, lets them recover) having combat width like this will make it so that while bad divisions are less bad, it's much harder and less fun to make/use good divisions. I would have massively preferred a tactics rework with (more) terrain-specific tactics, where tactics were more closely connected to doctrine, where they were easier to understand for new players, and they had varied/dynamic effects, such as contributing to breakthrough/defense, or modifying enemy stats.