Re-examining research priorities
The post has become necessary as a result of investigating the optimal research patterns for Germany and discovering just how extreme the bias is towards certain techs. In fact the bias is so strong that the resulting issues should dominate Polish decision making as well. Just feel relieved the AI doesn't do this analysis.
The first thing we need to do is to consider the value of the various properties of a unit. To do this I am going to look purely at infantry and artillery brigades in the context of fighting the German army as it is in the 1939 scenario. To do this we need to start by listing of this German forces and their softness and examine the implications of fighting it
5 arm 20%
1 AC 78%
7 Mtn
271 Inf
6 LArm 30%
18 Mot 87%
How to aggregate the significance of softness
Since I need to evaluate the usefulness of hard attack I need to estimate the effective softness of the enemy force. To do this I'm going to treat all the brigades as free standing and assume that my side has no hard attack. In those circumstances a unit with X% softness will only take X% of normal casualties and hence will survive and fight me for 100/X times longer than normal divisions. This means they contribute more to the average hardness of the enemy on a per combat day basis. The total can be characterised as
Sum((100/soft) * soft) / Sum ((100/soft)) for all units
which nicely reduces to Number units divided by Sum ((100/soft))
Quick reference to a spreadsheet gets an answer of 89.3% soft. As an average softness this comes over quite a bit harder than you would expect but I did base this on my force having NO hard attack. Since we are definitely going to have (a fair bit actually) the effective figure would come out lower. However for simplicity I am going to continue the calculations using a softness of 90% although in truth I should use a higher figure.
The next question is why on earth did I carry out this calculation. Well the reason is very simple, I want to know how valuable each point of hard attack is to balance against the cost of acquiring it and the simple answer is that each point of soft attack is going to get me 0.9 effective attacks for each point of hard attack getting me 0.1
The conclusion from this is that acquiring soft attack for my units is 9 times as valuable on a point by point basis as hard attack. Please note, if you allow for the unavoidable existence of some hard attack in units the ratio goes up someway above 10:1 and it will be apparent in further analysis that this higher figure should be the one to use. Generally I will refer to soft attack being 10 times as valuable as hard attack.
How about defensiveness and toughness
This is a slightly tougher analysis because it requires us to make a series of estimates that are in fact strongly affected by circumstances and how we exercise our conclusions. The required estimates are
Ratio of attacking combat hours to defending combat hours
This is an easy one requiring us to make a fairly arbitrary decision. In our case we are going to be considering a fairly monolithic force so it is a global value but note that if we had militia / garrison units they would be considered separately (with an attack ratio of zero - eg defence only). I'm going to go for an arbitrary 25% attack and 75% defence.
Fraction of defensiveness / toughness used in a combat
This is a difficult one. Given typical defensiveness levels you will find in a combat maybe 25% of your divisions don't get shot at due to random targeting and of the others, because defensiveness exceeds attack, many will use up only part of their score. I am going to assume we on average only use 50% of our defensiveness points and 66% of our toughness points.
Now how do we combine these into a similar evaluation to hard attack - eg how do we score against attack values?
Each defence point has the effect of halving the effectiveness of one enemy attack so we can calculate the values as follows
1 defensiveness = 1/2 * 3/4 *1/2 = 3/16 = 18.75% of a soft attack point
1 toughness = 1/2 * 1/4 * 2/3 = 1/12 = 8.3%
In both cases I am going to add 10% to compensate for the fact that soft attack is devalued by enemy hardness. The leads us to the following list of approximate equivalents in terms of combat value.
- 1 SA
- 10 HA
- 5 Def
- 10 Tough
The actual scale of the superiority of soft attack in this is all rather dramatic and immediately suggests that our research and build strategy needs to be adjusted to a different focus. My initial views are…
Research clearly needs to focus on soft attack techs and these should be pursued in absolute preferences to expending leadership on the other scores even in the face of significant ahead of time penalties
Research into the secondary techs may have a detrimental effect on IC efficiency as the value of upgrades in HA and tough are sufficiently low that we might be better of devoting IC elsewhere
Despite the previous statement, the infantry / artillery plan has nothing else to expend IC on as it is manpower limited so we may research them anyway
Any plan to use IC on other things can consider a very tightly focused research regime for ground units with a surprisingly small loss of combat effectiveness
Changing the Plan
By now I hope most of you are issuing a few expletives as we have been doing it all wrong. The current plan is based on researching the full range of infantry and artillery techs when they are within date and maybe pushing ahead the soft attack ones. Clearly we can push this much further as when we scale the tech pay offs into the ratios and score how valuable each tech is
infantry
SA = 60
HA = 2.5
Def = 16
Tough = 6
artillery
SA = 60
Other = 6
Given these relative values for the techs it is immediately obvious that we can draw some painful conclusions
It is actually worth completely ignoring infantry anti-tank weapons tech as it is nigh on completely worthless compared to other stuff.
The soft attack techs totally dominate and should be researched continuously irrespective of their declared dates
Infantry defensiveness is worth something but may not be worth even keeping up to date
Infantry toughness (and artillery "other") can probably be ignored completely and certainly should never be researched ahead of time under any circumstances
In this case the new plan is to push the 2 key techs from day 1, drop the hard attack / toughness techs and do infantry defensiveness within date. This results in significant leadership economy and saves some IC on pointless upgrades. The plan could even be pushed ruthlessly down to soft attack techs only and combined with generating some air power. In fact that plan must definitely be investigated at some point in this AAR as similar analysis can be used for air units meaning that a combined ground and air power plan is very much IC limited and not restrained by leadership availability.
