This is a rewrite for 1.3a of a thread that I ran for 1.2 back in October. The original thread is at Old brigade thread
I VERY STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU GO AND READ THAT THREAD FIRST (all of it, as there are significant issues raised later on)
This report is edited from the original to reflect changes, I have removed a number of sub-sections so as to focus more on the key discussion around artillery brigades...
This analysis will take the form of a series of model combats between different combinations of units. I have chosen to use constant manpower as a measure of the alternatives within a brigade building model. If two builds take the same manpower then we only need compare IC costs, TC cost and effectiveness. For convenience I am going to compare models based on the year 1940. This will inevitably introduce some bias but the results remain valid for other years.
I have modelled the TC effects by assuming that the armies will have TC overload and I have then calculated the combat penalty for the higher TC force as if the lower TC force represented 100% TC usage. This means that the simple calculation ...
ESE = average[(Lower / Higher) , 100%]
combat penalty is half of (100%-ESE)
This approach has received some criticism since it is not necessarily true that you are playing with a TC overload. My attitude is that there is always a peak critical phase of the war and you attempting to optimise your ability specifically for this phase. During this phase you will be trying to make optimum use of the IC, manpower and TC available. This may mean extensive use of attack supply and the simple fact is that the bonus for attack supply in total army strength is equivalent to the penalty for a similar TC overload. This means that avoiding TC overload by not placing units on attack supply has the same overall combat penalty as exceeding your Tc and that my penalty allowance applies if your army uses approximately 75% of total TC. If the whole TC is not used then the penalty is simulating the fact that you must forgo some opportunities for attack supply to avoid exceeding TC.
The TC issue is also vulnerable to micro-analysis as the issue subtley changes if you look at having part of your army with brigades and part not. The difference is small but as will become apparent probably significant because the actual differences in combat capability are quite small. But, let's get on with it.
My first example is a straight head to head analysis of artillery brigades. These are used in combination with infantry divisions with the relevant models being 1939 inf and improved artillery. To keep equal manpower I have 10 inf+art versus 12 inf.
inf HA 2 SA 12 Def 18 Org 30+? sup 1
inf+art HA 4 SA 18 Def 22 Org 30+? sup 1.48
If I have these two groups fight against each other then the inf+art has an attack of 180 versus attack of 144 giving the artillery a clear advantage. But if we look at how you win battles then we can see that what counts is attacks per target as you need to eliminate org across all the opposing units. In this case the InfA gets 15 per target whilst the inf gets 14.4 per target. These figures are remarkably close together and the artillery advantage has nearly disappeared. If I selected the previous artillery model then the figures would be 17 SA, 170 total and 14.16 per target. This combination would therefore actually lose a battle to a plain infantry build.
If I move forward to 1941 inf then I have inf at 16.8 per target and InfA at 16.67 per target. In fact it turns out that starting from 1939 the year 1940 is the only one where the current models provide any advantage to InfA in terms of winning a battle. This result has to be looked at quite carefully. What we are seeing is the additional divisions built instead of brigades are providing additional org and ability to absorb casualties which more than compensates for the artilleries advantage in firepower. The comparison yields the following statements about building pure inf instead of using Inf+Art [note that some statements are border line incorrect for 1940 models but see additional material to follow]
1. Your units will move faster (25% faster than inf+art)
2. You are more likely to win battles in a campaign (very slightly)
3. You will win battles more slowly
4. You will suffer more casualties
5. You are more likely to 'win' the campaign
6. Your maximum concentration of force (for attack) is lower
7. You use less supply and less overload on TC
The TC issue is worth a quick discussion. The overall impact of TC consumption in terms of combat adjustment can be estimated by assuming that the lower TC build does in fact use up all TC (they can always use attack supply to exploit any surplus) and the overload by the higher TC attracts a penalty. If we compare the 1940 InfA versus Inf then the InfA build uses 14.8 TC (was 22 in 1.2) and the Inf uses 12 TC. Translating this into a combat penalty we get 81% (was 54.5%) TC availability giving a 90.5% (was 77%) ESE and a 4.7% (was 11.5%) combat penalty. This would reduce the effectiveness of the InfA to the point where the Inf would win (14.29 versus 14.4 for 1940). In fact having an artillery brigade inflicts the equivalent of 4.7% of that units strength as a penalty spread very thinly across the entire army. It is important to understand this principal as an important element in unit appraisal.
This leaves me in the position of considering artillery brigades to still be of quite limited value. The only benefit is that they might reduce my casualties. In this analysis I haven't given any consideration to IC costs, I have only considered manpower and TC. Given the expense of artillery brigades (cost nearly 50% of an Infantry division) I can see no use for them except to improve the stacking limit where this is really important, i.e Marine divisions for amphibious landings and Paratroops (if your not too embarrassed by the implausibility).
There remain some more modifiers to apply which came about from the lengthy discussion in the first thread. First of these is the effect of combat efficiency modifiers. When combat strengths are modified the resulting numbers are rounded down to whole numbers. This means that units with higher basic statistics will, on average, suffer a lower penalty from rounding down (the average penalty is half a point or as a fraction 1 part in twice the base strength). Rather than go into details I will just say that this gives an average advantage of +1% for the InfArt.
There are further adjustments for the effects of random distribution of shots against targets. Not all targets will receive the same number of shots and as a result a few shots will exceed the enemy defensiveness even though the average is below this value. On defence this increases InfArt losses by 0.25% whilst increasing it by 3% for the Inf. (On attack the figures are 2.2% and 3%). [Note: this has been evaluated with a modelling program that simulates 10,000 rounds of combat and collates the results to give an accurate estimate of average effect]
These two additional advantages to inf art have improved their position by 3.75% leaving only a net -1% when rolled up with the TC issue. These leaves an actual and clear combat advantage to the artillery but not by a large margin. It is important to note that the shot randomisation issue is only relevant in close combats where the total attack value lies with 20% (above or below) the targets total defence value. In normal fighting where your force has a clear advantage over the enemy the shot randomisation issue has not effect. [Note: I generally avoid close run fights as battles not really worth winning. Any close run battle will leave my forces incapable of further operations whilst org is recovered and will elicit no real attritional advantage.]
The wording so far has barely changed. Artillery brigades are much closer to being on a par with vanilla and in appropriate circumstances [i.e. 1940 models] a pure InfArt build now wins. The changes made are all improvements to the TC load from brigades which does have a positive impact. Artillery brigades are sufficiently close to neutral in terms of battle winning that the following points become valid.
1. Small numbers of artillery brigades may increase the combat effectiveness of your army as a whole (the balancing equation describes a curve with a maximum of better than zero). I'm not going to fully detail this but it is reasonable to have significant numbers of artillery brigades BUT ....
2. InfArt still has a speed penalty that means that InfArt must be considered as a semi-static unit. They will never keep up with a mobile campaign.
3. Artillery brigades significantly increase your stacking limit. This is a key use for them.
4. Vanilla infantry remain much more flexible. They are only inferior to InfArt in specific circumstances. If movement matters or one side has a significant advantage then the InfArt advantage disappears.
As a result I still will not be using artillery brigades in any significant numbers.
NOTE HOWEVER that the total combat effectiveness of your army will now increase by the addition of some artillery brigades to some of your infantry but not all of them. It is not practical to calculate an optimum ratio as the key determinant is going to be mobility which will, therefore, be dependent on your overall strategy and tactics.
Before going on I want to restate what is wrong with the current brigade arrangement. The fault lies with the fact that brigades only contribute to a division in limited ways..
1. They increase the firepower of the division
2. They may increase the ability to reduce the casualties from an enemy attack that has more firepower than they do. The exact wording is significant here, defensiveness and toughness only have a very limited impact on a battle and in practice have no detectable effect (less than 1 in 1000) if the enemy's total attack is less than 80% of your total defence. This should be achieved in the vast majority of your battles if you are planning to win by winning battles.
3. They may reduce your casualties by changing hardness (see studies of armoured attachments)
4. They do NOT improve their ability to absorb and survive casualties except for specific limited examples (MP and AC)
Point 4 is the key. The only change needed is to make brigades contribute some org to all divisions. As explained in the previous thread this ought to be a ratio of the base org of the division but there is no way to make it vary based on doctrines (is there?). Doctrine tech commands appear to simply add a fixed value to the org of all divisions.
-- InfAt discussion removed--
So far my calculations have all assumed that the objective is to win battles rather than achieve the best casualty ratio. I mention this again to emphasise the point that this may not be what you are looking for in a unit in which case this analysis is not quite right for you. However, I believe that most losses to the enemy will occur as a result of you winning the campaign rather than as a result of direct battle and therefore that winning battles is the key to winning the game. This is an important assumption within the logic of this analysis and needs to be born in mind whilst reviewing this analysis. Also this analysis is about the game, I am not saying anything about the real life value of attached artillery etc. so please focus on the game when responding.
If you want to fight a campaign of attrition within which the key is inflicting battle casualties on the enemy then more artillery may be effective. Unfortunately the consequences of running out of org are sufficiently critical to attrition that my policy of battle winning probably remains key. I can construct a defensive strategy where high artillery usage is effective. If I form a defensive line of InfArt and retreat each force as soon as it has been sufficiently defeated that some divisions have stopped shooting then I can achieve a steady withdrawal with org replenishment that will inflict far more casualties on an attacker over a period than a pure Inf defence. This is a legitimate use of Artillery brigades. In fact during the later part of the war it is likely that...
Adv Art 7sa 2ha
43 Inf 16sa 5ha
43 mil 6sa 3ha
MilArt 13sa 5ha for 7mp is a better defensive unit than Inf43 (16sa 5ha for 10mp). This is taking advantage of the high org/mp ratio of militia and the high defensive value of late war militia (see militia thread ). Slightly odd (to say the least) that militia gives the highest org/mp ratio of any land unit in the game but there you go.
-- other brigade analyses removed --
The other brigades are mobile versions of those already considered and therefore will score worse (due to TC) than their low mobility counterparts. Therefore I have arrived at the interesting conclusion that there are only very very limited reasons for attaching any brigades to Infantry divisions. These possible reasons are as follows.
1. Stacking limit, this only applies in situations where the stacking limit is a genuine limiting factor on operations. This is clearly true for amphibious landing and paradrop but elsewhere is extremely unusual. There is a stacking argument based on the low availability of the best officers which sugegsts that I can have the brigades commanded by better quality officers than I would have to use for the infantry divisions. This is a limited argument and note that it only applies to the extra 2 infantry divisions rather than the base 10. If these two were commanded by a 1 level worse general then the stack as a whole would suffer a -0.83% average combat penalty. Not as significant as you might have expected.
2. Faster movement, it is extremely difficult to put a value on faster movement. Moving faster than the enemy can be turned into a major advantage and InfE in combination with motorised forces may perform a critical role in keeping better with the spearheads. I am not convinced of this as the cost is quite significant and provides no other benefit.
3. Special ability, this really only applies to AA brigades. They may be a good option if you are facing an enemy who has gone to town on air power. I suspect this isn't ever a general situation but that AA brigades may still be useful if combined with special targets, however, so far I am only looking at infantry. Note that the engineer river crossing ability has already been shown as not as effective as numbers from additional divisions.
4. Attritional warfare as described above. A very specific defensive strategy based on inflicting casualties whilst losing ground. Potential subject to severe risks from uneven assault and potential isolation and loss of some units (i.e. risks high losses as a result of the enemy's control of the ebb and flow of battle - probably quite safe and effective against the ai).
Thats it. I simply cannot see any other reason for ever building a brigade for attaching to an infantry division.
My recommended changes remain the same..
1. Look at each brigade as a fractional part of a division and give it some org to add to the base division.
2. Some could give additional morale (MP brigade) - does this work
3. Supply changes are an effective reflection of reasonable supply use by the units involved.
I VERY STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU GO AND READ THAT THREAD FIRST (all of it, as there are significant issues raised later on)
This report is edited from the original to reflect changes, I have removed a number of sub-sections so as to focus more on the key discussion around artillery brigades...
This analysis will take the form of a series of model combats between different combinations of units. I have chosen to use constant manpower as a measure of the alternatives within a brigade building model. If two builds take the same manpower then we only need compare IC costs, TC cost and effectiveness. For convenience I am going to compare models based on the year 1940. This will inevitably introduce some bias but the results remain valid for other years.
I have modelled the TC effects by assuming that the armies will have TC overload and I have then calculated the combat penalty for the higher TC force as if the lower TC force represented 100% TC usage. This means that the simple calculation ...
ESE = average[(Lower / Higher) , 100%]
combat penalty is half of (100%-ESE)
This approach has received some criticism since it is not necessarily true that you are playing with a TC overload. My attitude is that there is always a peak critical phase of the war and you attempting to optimise your ability specifically for this phase. During this phase you will be trying to make optimum use of the IC, manpower and TC available. This may mean extensive use of attack supply and the simple fact is that the bonus for attack supply in total army strength is equivalent to the penalty for a similar TC overload. This means that avoiding TC overload by not placing units on attack supply has the same overall combat penalty as exceeding your Tc and that my penalty allowance applies if your army uses approximately 75% of total TC. If the whole TC is not used then the penalty is simulating the fact that you must forgo some opportunities for attack supply to avoid exceeding TC.
The TC issue is also vulnerable to micro-analysis as the issue subtley changes if you look at having part of your army with brigades and part not. The difference is small but as will become apparent probably significant because the actual differences in combat capability are quite small. But, let's get on with it.
My first example is a straight head to head analysis of artillery brigades. These are used in combination with infantry divisions with the relevant models being 1939 inf and improved artillery. To keep equal manpower I have 10 inf+art versus 12 inf.
inf HA 2 SA 12 Def 18 Org 30+? sup 1
inf+art HA 4 SA 18 Def 22 Org 30+? sup 1.48
If I have these two groups fight against each other then the inf+art has an attack of 180 versus attack of 144 giving the artillery a clear advantage. But if we look at how you win battles then we can see that what counts is attacks per target as you need to eliminate org across all the opposing units. In this case the InfA gets 15 per target whilst the inf gets 14.4 per target. These figures are remarkably close together and the artillery advantage has nearly disappeared. If I selected the previous artillery model then the figures would be 17 SA, 170 total and 14.16 per target. This combination would therefore actually lose a battle to a plain infantry build.
If I move forward to 1941 inf then I have inf at 16.8 per target and InfA at 16.67 per target. In fact it turns out that starting from 1939 the year 1940 is the only one where the current models provide any advantage to InfA in terms of winning a battle. This result has to be looked at quite carefully. What we are seeing is the additional divisions built instead of brigades are providing additional org and ability to absorb casualties which more than compensates for the artilleries advantage in firepower. The comparison yields the following statements about building pure inf instead of using Inf+Art [note that some statements are border line incorrect for 1940 models but see additional material to follow]
1. Your units will move faster (25% faster than inf+art)
2. You are more likely to win battles in a campaign (very slightly)
3. You will win battles more slowly
4. You will suffer more casualties
5. You are more likely to 'win' the campaign
6. Your maximum concentration of force (for attack) is lower
7. You use less supply and less overload on TC
The TC issue is worth a quick discussion. The overall impact of TC consumption in terms of combat adjustment can be estimated by assuming that the lower TC build does in fact use up all TC (they can always use attack supply to exploit any surplus) and the overload by the higher TC attracts a penalty. If we compare the 1940 InfA versus Inf then the InfA build uses 14.8 TC (was 22 in 1.2) and the Inf uses 12 TC. Translating this into a combat penalty we get 81% (was 54.5%) TC availability giving a 90.5% (was 77%) ESE and a 4.7% (was 11.5%) combat penalty. This would reduce the effectiveness of the InfA to the point where the Inf would win (14.29 versus 14.4 for 1940). In fact having an artillery brigade inflicts the equivalent of 4.7% of that units strength as a penalty spread very thinly across the entire army. It is important to understand this principal as an important element in unit appraisal.
This leaves me in the position of considering artillery brigades to still be of quite limited value. The only benefit is that they might reduce my casualties. In this analysis I haven't given any consideration to IC costs, I have only considered manpower and TC. Given the expense of artillery brigades (cost nearly 50% of an Infantry division) I can see no use for them except to improve the stacking limit where this is really important, i.e Marine divisions for amphibious landings and Paratroops (if your not too embarrassed by the implausibility).
There remain some more modifiers to apply which came about from the lengthy discussion in the first thread. First of these is the effect of combat efficiency modifiers. When combat strengths are modified the resulting numbers are rounded down to whole numbers. This means that units with higher basic statistics will, on average, suffer a lower penalty from rounding down (the average penalty is half a point or as a fraction 1 part in twice the base strength). Rather than go into details I will just say that this gives an average advantage of +1% for the InfArt.
There are further adjustments for the effects of random distribution of shots against targets. Not all targets will receive the same number of shots and as a result a few shots will exceed the enemy defensiveness even though the average is below this value. On defence this increases InfArt losses by 0.25% whilst increasing it by 3% for the Inf. (On attack the figures are 2.2% and 3%). [Note: this has been evaluated with a modelling program that simulates 10,000 rounds of combat and collates the results to give an accurate estimate of average effect]
These two additional advantages to inf art have improved their position by 3.75% leaving only a net -1% when rolled up with the TC issue. These leaves an actual and clear combat advantage to the artillery but not by a large margin. It is important to note that the shot randomisation issue is only relevant in close combats where the total attack value lies with 20% (above or below) the targets total defence value. In normal fighting where your force has a clear advantage over the enemy the shot randomisation issue has not effect. [Note: I generally avoid close run fights as battles not really worth winning. Any close run battle will leave my forces incapable of further operations whilst org is recovered and will elicit no real attritional advantage.]
The wording so far has barely changed. Artillery brigades are much closer to being on a par with vanilla and in appropriate circumstances [i.e. 1940 models] a pure InfArt build now wins. The changes made are all improvements to the TC load from brigades which does have a positive impact. Artillery brigades are sufficiently close to neutral in terms of battle winning that the following points become valid.
1. Small numbers of artillery brigades may increase the combat effectiveness of your army as a whole (the balancing equation describes a curve with a maximum of better than zero). I'm not going to fully detail this but it is reasonable to have significant numbers of artillery brigades BUT ....
2. InfArt still has a speed penalty that means that InfArt must be considered as a semi-static unit. They will never keep up with a mobile campaign.
3. Artillery brigades significantly increase your stacking limit. This is a key use for them.
4. Vanilla infantry remain much more flexible. They are only inferior to InfArt in specific circumstances. If movement matters or one side has a significant advantage then the InfArt advantage disappears.
As a result I still will not be using artillery brigades in any significant numbers.
NOTE HOWEVER that the total combat effectiveness of your army will now increase by the addition of some artillery brigades to some of your infantry but not all of them. It is not practical to calculate an optimum ratio as the key determinant is going to be mobility which will, therefore, be dependent on your overall strategy and tactics.
Before going on I want to restate what is wrong with the current brigade arrangement. The fault lies with the fact that brigades only contribute to a division in limited ways..
1. They increase the firepower of the division
2. They may increase the ability to reduce the casualties from an enemy attack that has more firepower than they do. The exact wording is significant here, defensiveness and toughness only have a very limited impact on a battle and in practice have no detectable effect (less than 1 in 1000) if the enemy's total attack is less than 80% of your total defence. This should be achieved in the vast majority of your battles if you are planning to win by winning battles.
3. They may reduce your casualties by changing hardness (see studies of armoured attachments)
4. They do NOT improve their ability to absorb and survive casualties except for specific limited examples (MP and AC)
Point 4 is the key. The only change needed is to make brigades contribute some org to all divisions. As explained in the previous thread this ought to be a ratio of the base org of the division but there is no way to make it vary based on doctrines (is there?). Doctrine tech commands appear to simply add a fixed value to the org of all divisions.
-- InfAt discussion removed--
So far my calculations have all assumed that the objective is to win battles rather than achieve the best casualty ratio. I mention this again to emphasise the point that this may not be what you are looking for in a unit in which case this analysis is not quite right for you. However, I believe that most losses to the enemy will occur as a result of you winning the campaign rather than as a result of direct battle and therefore that winning battles is the key to winning the game. This is an important assumption within the logic of this analysis and needs to be born in mind whilst reviewing this analysis. Also this analysis is about the game, I am not saying anything about the real life value of attached artillery etc. so please focus on the game when responding.
If you want to fight a campaign of attrition within which the key is inflicting battle casualties on the enemy then more artillery may be effective. Unfortunately the consequences of running out of org are sufficiently critical to attrition that my policy of battle winning probably remains key. I can construct a defensive strategy where high artillery usage is effective. If I form a defensive line of InfArt and retreat each force as soon as it has been sufficiently defeated that some divisions have stopped shooting then I can achieve a steady withdrawal with org replenishment that will inflict far more casualties on an attacker over a period than a pure Inf defence. This is a legitimate use of Artillery brigades. In fact during the later part of the war it is likely that...
Adv Art 7sa 2ha
43 Inf 16sa 5ha
43 mil 6sa 3ha
MilArt 13sa 5ha for 7mp is a better defensive unit than Inf43 (16sa 5ha for 10mp). This is taking advantage of the high org/mp ratio of militia and the high defensive value of late war militia (see militia thread ). Slightly odd (to say the least) that militia gives the highest org/mp ratio of any land unit in the game but there you go.
-- other brigade analyses removed --
The other brigades are mobile versions of those already considered and therefore will score worse (due to TC) than their low mobility counterparts. Therefore I have arrived at the interesting conclusion that there are only very very limited reasons for attaching any brigades to Infantry divisions. These possible reasons are as follows.
1. Stacking limit, this only applies in situations where the stacking limit is a genuine limiting factor on operations. This is clearly true for amphibious landing and paradrop but elsewhere is extremely unusual. There is a stacking argument based on the low availability of the best officers which sugegsts that I can have the brigades commanded by better quality officers than I would have to use for the infantry divisions. This is a limited argument and note that it only applies to the extra 2 infantry divisions rather than the base 10. If these two were commanded by a 1 level worse general then the stack as a whole would suffer a -0.83% average combat penalty. Not as significant as you might have expected.
2. Faster movement, it is extremely difficult to put a value on faster movement. Moving faster than the enemy can be turned into a major advantage and InfE in combination with motorised forces may perform a critical role in keeping better with the spearheads. I am not convinced of this as the cost is quite significant and provides no other benefit.
3. Special ability, this really only applies to AA brigades. They may be a good option if you are facing an enemy who has gone to town on air power. I suspect this isn't ever a general situation but that AA brigades may still be useful if combined with special targets, however, so far I am only looking at infantry. Note that the engineer river crossing ability has already been shown as not as effective as numbers from additional divisions.
4. Attritional warfare as described above. A very specific defensive strategy based on inflicting casualties whilst losing ground. Potential subject to severe risks from uneven assault and potential isolation and loss of some units (i.e. risks high losses as a result of the enemy's control of the ebb and flow of battle - probably quite safe and effective against the ai).
Thats it. I simply cannot see any other reason for ever building a brigade for attaching to an infantry division.
My recommended changes remain the same..
1. Look at each brigade as a fractional part of a division and give it some org to add to the base division.
2. Some could give additional morale (MP brigade) - does this work
3. Supply changes are an effective reflection of reasonable supply use by the units involved.
