HoI4’s Broken Meta

[cdub8d]

Tank and airplane designers were a mistake. While cool on paper it's absolutely atrocious for the ai. Might be okay for multiplayer but still it's something that sounds awesome, and probably felt awesome for a week until it wasn't and it was a further nerf to the ai.

It adds flavor/immersion but then adds a bit of micro and balancing nightmare.

 

[Ilyasviel]

Which is kinda strange when I think about it. Ok, tanks are complex. But fighters are broken (in game theory sense) by experiments since about five minutes after BBA release. These legendary 25:1 KDR should not be achievable if AI just used meta design, and meta design can actually be found automatically (from devs perspective) as long as boundary conditions are well-defined.

Everything you say is true, but the problem is that if both the players and the AI are just going to use one meta design, then why even have a designer? The problem with the air designer as opposed to the tank designer is that it's way too straightforward, to the point of laziness. For example, adding more guns to a plane just linearly adds more damage, which shouldn't be the case, without any real downsides. A fighter that doesn't have a full set of guns is just straight up inferior to one that does to an insane degree, while only being slightly cheaper, making them just vastly less cost-effective. In the tank designer, a more powerful tank always comes at a big cost, so in some cases you can end up losing more tanks than your opponent but still coming up on top because you can make way more.

Air combat itself is also too simplistic. You just stack as much attack as possible and then as much armor as possible, and there's no other way to do well. In real life, it was more of a dilemma between planes that could turn well and plane that could go fast, and then after that you had other details like weapons and armor which were more secondary. Admittedly, this is super hard to simulate, though.

 

[Demonthese]

I would say you still have this, especially with the various designers. You can easily research the newest airframe without realizing you also need the newest engine for example.

On your first or second game, then maybe. But looking at the HOI4 tech tree vs the HOI 3 tech tree your average player is going to be able to look at the HOI 4 one and have a much better idea of what's going on. They might choose not the research the latest engine but that's just it. It's much more likely to be a choice rather than their eyes glazing over wondering what the heck is even going on.

 

[PK_AZ]

For example, adding more guns to a plane just linearly adds more damage, which shouldn't be the case, without any real downsides. A fighter that doesn't have a full set of guns is just straight up inferior to one that does to an insane degree, while only being slightly cheaper, making them just vastly less cost-effective.

That is true, three slots of firearms are either 12 machine guns, 12 .50 cal, or 6 cannons. To my knowledge, only some variants (or one variant?) of Hurricane had such armament. Fighters generally evolved into fighter-bombers, i.e. they have their two or one and a half slot worth of firearms, and at least one slot of anti-ground weapons.

Which kinda makes me wonder, wouldn't something akin of 1940 small airframe, 4x cannons and rocket rails do the job of fighter and CAS, therefore allowing to bring more machines to air combat? I guess not, because that would become meta.

Air combat itself is also too simplistic. You just stack as much attack as possible and then as much armor as possible, and there's no other way to do well. In real life, it was more of a dilemma between planes that could turn well and plane that could go fast, and then after that you had other details like weapons and armor which were more secondary. Admittedly, this is super hard to simulate, though.

I think it is not really worth simulating, to be honest. Balance between speed and agility is very technical matter, that influence battlefield in very technical way. In some kind of crossover between grand strategy and War Thunder, sure, why not, but for pure grand strategy it would just replicate problem of every single designer - much added complexity for something that will be broken in first month, because complex math equations tends to have simple solutions.

If I was to suggest one 'simple' change, I would probably make it so overdamage is lost. For example, your Spitfire is in combat against Focke-Wulf, you have Air Attack = 20, while he has Air Defence = 15. If you hit him (opposite Agility Roll), you kill him on the spot, but 5 points of damage are nevertheless lost. If you try the same against uparmored 1936 medium bomber (Air Defence = 24), you have 83% chances to kill and 17% to only damage, so there is incentive to mount Cannons instead - but it will still not increase your KDR against enemy fighters (slightly decrease it, to be precise).

Actually I'm shocked how well numbers seems to align with that idea. Some artifact from simpler (because lacking air designer) times, I guess.

 

[Lamartine]

I think one (the only?) way for a game like HOI4 to avoid having a stable meta is to build more mechanics around a successful rock-paper-scissor dynamic. This is something I vaguely recall the devs aiming for in the naval rework a few years ago (?).

I don't think that the game has successfully achieved the RPS dynamic, in part because the combat stats are so complex, and because the AI doesn't actually play the meta effectively. But there's no reason in principle that the Devs can't take a relook at the land air and sea mechanics to rebalance the combat, then work backwards from there to rebalance the designers.

 

[PK_AZ]

I think one (the only?) way for a game like HOI4 to avoid having a stable meta is to build more mechanics around a successful rock-paper-scissor dynamic. This is something I vaguely recall the devs aiming for in the naval rework a few years ago (?).

I stand in position that rock-paper-scissor at equipment level is absolutely the worst mechanics one could build grand strategy around. First off, it conceptually fails to understand combined arms. You do not throw all-infantry brigade against enemy all-AT brigade. You compose brigade of infantry, tanks and AT so brigadier can decide what he wants where. Second, grand strategies by definition have some inertia between making decision, and enough of fighters being produced. If RPS effect is too strong, it would mean nation that allowed itself to be surprised cannot really react. Which means optimal strategy is to build some amount of everything specifically to not get surprised, a.k.a. combined arms.
It is true that some weapon systems historically were game changers. AFAIK Zero was best fighter of the pacific war for some time, until USA found out it has problems with climbing. USA answered to that weakness by changing their tactics. Tactics, not strategy, nor production lines.

 

[Cornutus]

Why are the battalions different amounts of equipment based on tank type? Wouldn't standardizing it make it easier to balance cost/performance?

Agreed here.

Also it opens road for manipulation of the hardness metric. It's calculated based on a weighted average of unit hardness/number of battalions.

for a big part of that era, partial piercing was not a thing in hoi 4. it was either full pierce or nothing. that was the worst part/unrealistic. anti-tank guns which could not penetrate frontal armor of big cats at 1000m+ could penetrate basically any vehicle of the time from the side. especially at typical distances for actually firing them...from what i understand, a 57mm (even the lower velocity versions the allies used as opposed to zis-2) would be threatening to a tiger 2 from the side at 500m or less. a 37mm would not. that strongly implies that the 57mm has an impact on the battlefield that the 37mm doesn't against those tanks.

partial piercing as a mechanic models this. the inability to pen the vehicle from the front at distances it can fire is relevant for sure, but not as oppressive as if the gun can't penetrate the tank from any angle. when the tank still has to respect danger from side shots, the degree to which its mobility improves is less. it can be more aggressive with positioning, but still has to avoid exposing itself to bad firing angles.

Yeah, partial piercing should definitely exist and it would drastically reduce heavy tank effectiveness.

 

[Kanitatlan]

I think the aircraft meta thing is interesting because in WW2 there kind of was an aircraft meta around armament but it was all built around ability to kill particular targets and production capability.

Early war most aircraft had LMG armament as the rifle calibre bullets were tested as adequate to cause critical damage to the aircraft available at the time. Replacing with .50 calibre HMG was considered not justified because the increased lethality of the bullets didn't balance against the reduced ammunition capacity. As the war progressed aircraft become tougher and relatively early on the was general agreement that the real world meta was 20mm cannon. The relatively slow speed of universal adoption to the 1944 standard of 4 20mm cannon was mostly due to mounting difficulties. The various aircraft that were already designed caused difficulty in working out how to mount the cannon. The exception was the USA which went to .50 calibre HMG but this was principally because they had a really good HMG weapon to install and the truly screwed up adopting 20mm cannon manufacture so that they failed to produce reliable weapons.

Further to this you see Germany deploying 30mm cannon because these were more effective against big aircraft and the Germans wanted to be able to shoot down 4 engine bombers.

As mentioned in previous posts, one obvious change would be make weapon overkill be wasted when shooting at lighter aircraft. This would make a significant adjustment but it kind of requires careful thinking because overkill is about individual weapons rather than total firepower. The argument would need to introduce different firepower figures depending on what you were shooting at which could become quite a complicated set up.

The other thing would be to introduce some sort of mechanism around the weight of a particular weapon that you could put in a weapon slot. This would also be a bit complicated as using a slot to put fighter weapons into the aircraft is very different from using a slot to mount external weapons like bombs/torpedoes.

Introducing some solutions based on the above would get you a whole load of more diverse aircraft but it is a lot of trouble to go to. The lack of these mechanisms means there are these obvious meta solutions.

 

[Ossiv]

Why are the battalions different amounts of equipment based on tank type? Wouldn't standardizing it make it easier to balance cost/performance?

If you look at WWII organization tables, heavy tank battalions had less tanks than medium tank battalions had. That was the reality at least in German and Soviet armored units that both used heavies.

 

[Terracos]

Imho there needs to be a multitude of changes to make tanks and variants better.

For example putting a howitzer on a tank should not net the benefits it does at the moment. The size of the gun and the design of the barrel compared to a normal tank gun has exfects that are not modelled and lead to strange designs. There are many but just to list a few:

The weight of shells and weapon should slow the vehicle.
The RoF would be lower actually leading to less explosives delivered over time while single explosions are more powerful. On the front line a tank gun would do better than a howitzer especially on a movable turret as the weight slows down the turn rate.

What should be done is to make destinct classes of what certain turrets and guns deliver and there has to be a turret less design (like the Stug and Su-122) which had no superstructure.

Turrets
No superstructure: Reduces Defense and increases Armor, reduces breakthrough, increases hard and soft attack. high reliability. Is cheap. Only usable as SpArt or TD. Due to the low profile and easy armour design it can close in and be deadly but is also flanked and can not supress enemies as effective as howitzer artillery due to being close and vulnerable.
Fixed superstructure. Better defense, less armour. More breakthrough but still not ideal. Best suited with howitzer as SpArt as the heavy howitzer can only be mounted on a fixed superstucture medium or the heavy chassis.
Turrets can stay as is.

Guns:
Howitzer have high breakthrough providing supressing fire and medium soft attack.
Tank guns: medium ground between soft/hard attack and breakthrough
Automatic guns: High breakthrough low damage

The goal is to force mixed templates as the pure tank is not good enough anymore due to lack of breakthrough without artillery/SpArt.

Also the LT/MT/HT should only be influencial to armour and speed (as well as gun possibilities) and not the size of the division or breakthrough. Breakthrough is „offensive“ defense reducing the amount of return fire by suppression and not the amount of armour provided which should reduce losses instead.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, partial piercing should definitely exist and it would drastically reduce heavy tank effectiveness.

it is modeled now, it just wasn't back at the point where heavy tank 2s (before tank designer) were basically not countered by line at.

it is still possible to make tanks that contemporary at can't pierce in hoi 4 now, but it's a much bigger cost burden...and partial piercing will still put pressure on that smaller tank count.

 

[Lamartine]

I stand in position that rock-paper-scissor at equipment level is absolutely the worst mechanics one could build grand strategy around.

I'm not sure if you're rebutting my post specifically or just taking it as a starting point to counter RPS mechanics writ-large. How I think of RPS dynamics is simply that certain units, equipment, tactics, strategies, whatever (it doesn't matter specifically what) are more effective at countering other units, equipment, tactics, strategies, whatever, and they are themselves vulnerable to being countered by other units, equipment, tactics, strategies, whatever. Counters needn't take place only on the same level. It's not that one unit type can only counter another, different unit type. Rather than certain units may counter other units, but that unit itself can be countered by certain tactics, and those tactics are countered by strategies, and so on.

I may be conceiving of RPS incorrectly, but for me the alternative to RPS dynamics is that the outcome of a battle is instead decided simply by "bigger number wins". The problem with HoI4's meta right now is that it's just bigger number wins. As the OP points out:

... systems boil down to one optimal design—medium tanks and small airframes—because battles prioritize raw stats over specialized roles. Light and heavy tanks, like medium and large airframes, are redundant, wasting resources and XP on designs that barely add value. The meta is so one-sided that historical roles are unrepresentable, and recent changes making combined arms prohibitively expensive only double down on this mess...

You make an interesting point about combined arms being the opposite of RPS. But to my mind, combined arms has an element of the RPS dynamic, albeit at a tactical level that HOI4 abstracts away. Tanks beat infantry, but AT beats tanks, and AT is weak against infantry, which closes the loop of rock paper scissors. What this means on the battlefield is that commanders want to have all three elements operating in combined arms so their strengths can be deployed while other tactical units compensate for their weakness. HOI4 doesn't get down to this level of granularity and it really shouldn't as it's a grand strategy game. However, it's still the case that combined arms are effective, in part, because they give commanders flexibility in responding to the rock paper scissors of tactical situations.

To your second point that grand strategy has decisional inertia. I agree - it's often said that naval strategy is built strategy for exactly this reason. And you add, if the RPS effect is too strong it makes certain mistakes irrecoverable. I agree again, I too think that RPS effects should not be too strong. I think that RPS should not be too weak either, which they are in the current state of HoI4. What I argue is that HoI4's RPS dynamic should be just right.

For example, Soviet players who face Barbarossa with historically-accurate unpreparedness should be capable of recovering and achieving Bagration-style counter attacks. The dynamic should not solely be the Soviet player realizing - my number was too small, I must more faithfully execute the One True Meta so my number grows larger. The Soviets must understand what specific equipment, units, tactics and strategies are causing them to fail and develop a specific counter. There will be common elements to all counters - ensure your lines are filled, employ combined arms, fight in good supply, etc. However, others elements are contingent on the enemy forces - building more AT will be essential in some scenarios and superfluous in others, paratroopers might give you an edge in some settings but be a costly diversion in others. Implementing that counter will take weeks if not months, as this is a grand strategy game after all, and the Soviet player will need to display great skill in buying themself that time. However, the pivot is achievable. Meanwhile, if the German player is especially skilled, they will anticipate the Soviet's pivot and already have their own counter to the Soviet counter in the pipeline.

That is the nature of the RPS dynamic. Your strategy as a player cannot succeed without grappling with the nature of the forces aligned against you and exploitation of their specific weaknesses. There is no one strategy for all seasons. That's what it means to show mastery of the game's mechanics, much more so than the current meta of bigger number wins.

 

[pro.gamer.69]

technically there is already RPS in all three main combat mechanics, though.

land - soft-attack focused inf will beat an AT-heavy inf unit, an AT-heavy inf unit will trade favorably with a tank, a tank will beat a soft-attack focused inf unit.

air - light fighters beat heavy fighters when range isn't an issue, technically heavies beat lights at some point where range is an issue for both. no air beats both if you don't need navy, win before nukes come out, and have some land to trade up as you lose early battles but AA kill their CAS (not true RPS but still).

navy - traditionally torp spam beats SHBB/carrier/heavy attack focus, SHBB/careier beats light attack CA spam, light attack CA spal beats torp spam. I think torps are still overnerfed right now but still

however, while some people might say navy meta is "true" RPS - as it generally is best to focus your fleet on one of the three main strategies as much as possible (though of course most naval contenders will always have some BB/CV from game start) - in both SP and MP no one is really thinking about if their choices will "counter" the enemy because it is always most effective to have a lot of the roachiest inf possible and a lot of the stat-concentrated-est tanks possible. if you know someone's doing MM tankless roach maybe you'll put cannons in your tanks instead of highvel, and will go down on fighters if they're doing no air, but still - just like real life - it's generally better to be more "combined arms" in that sense

the issue with trying to change this, and make it so that players (at least) have to strategize more dynamically to avoid being "countered" in land combat, is that without some massive rework of combat, there's only really three levers to pull in terms of what makes your units win battles: soft attack/hard attack, hardness, and attack/def/breaktrhough concentration/dispersal (which entails org concentration). and as anyone who's played MP will tell you, as long as tanks are even moderately better at killing other tanks than AT/TD inf are, it's more useful to have more tanks and make more encirclements than it is to have inf that hold/trade somewhat better. the only way to "fix" that would be to make it so AT/TD inf is capable of truly stopping tanks in their tracks, but if you can do that then the Axis will always lose, as the Allies could afford to cover all their territory with AT divs unpushable to tanks, and protect them from soft attack-focused offensives with some reserve tanks of their own.

For example, Soviet players who face Barbarossa with historically-accurate unpreparedness should be capable of recovering and achieving Bagration-style counter attacks. The dynamic should not solely be the Soviet player realizing - my number was too small, I must more faithfully execute the One True Meta so my number grows larger. The Soviets must understand what specific equipment, units, tactics and strategies are causing them to fail and develop a specific counter. There will be common elements to all counters - ensure your lines are filled, employ combined arms, fight in good supply, etc. However, others elements are contingent on the enemy forces - building more AT will be essential in some scenarios and superfluous in others, paratroopers might give you an edge in some settings but be a costly diversion in others. Implementing that counter will take weeks if not months, as this is a grand strategy game after all, and the Soviet player will need to display great skill in buying themself that time. However, the pivot is achievable. Meanwhile, if the German player is especially skilled, they will anticipate the Soviet's pivot and already have their own counter to the Soviet counter in the pipeline

that's the thing - just to address your examples - because divisions are "just stats" and abstract things like tactical AT and arty use, either AT can stop tanks better than tanks, or it can't - you can't really adjust much to dynamize it. I really don't know what you could mess with to make paratroopers a "counter" sometimes but not others.

on top of that, even if it were possible to RPS-ize the game more, would it "improve" it? more intel warring would be fun for me, but if you need months to employ a counter on Barb then (depending on how bad being "counterless" is) you may have already lost. half of all Barbs already end in 1941.

I guess my point is that I don't believe, at least for land and air combat, that the game has levers already which can be adjusted to make it more RPS-like; I don't really think such levers could exist at a realistic level of combat abstraction; and I don't think RPS setups are generally more fun than not, especially given that the buildup to war massively outscales the time you have to "react," and games in general are quite long for people to win/lose because they got luckier with their build.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

if the RPS effect is too strong it makes certain mistakes irrecoverable. I agree again, I too think that RPS effects should not be too strong. I think that RPS should not be too weak either, which they are in the current state of HoI4. What I argue is that HoI4's RPS dynamic should be just right.

The problem with RPS balance is if one miscalculates enemy strategy / build then recovering from one's mistakes would mean trading territory for time in most cases. Your "wrong armies" will be pushed back yet they'd slow down your adversary's "right armies" buying time for you to raise your own "right armies". But this means the side that miscalculated has to have a strategic depth. Yet RPS balance works the same whether a country has this depth or not so ideal balance for countries like Soviet Union will be an instant coup de grace for small ones. And since absolute majority of tags don't have strategic depth you'd end up having to make RPS effect rather weak lest most countries will be unplayable.

IMHO what HOI4 really lacks in this department now is correct representation of intelligence. It's more or less total FOW and the player prepares his/her operations having no knowledge of the adversary's disposition. So the player prepares for everything and that means preparing for nothing. If FOW would be reduced somewhat then this will introduce the need to master calculating and forecasting adversary's intent. IMHO that would make the game more exciting.

 

[Lamartine]

The problem with RPS balance is if one miscalculates enemy strategy / build then recovering from one's mistakes would mean trading territory for time in most cases. Your "wrong armies" will be pushed back yet they'd slow down your adversary's "right armies" buying time for you to raise your own "right armies". But this means the side that miscalculated has to have a strategic depth. Yet RPS balance works the same whether a country has this depth or not so ideal balance for countries like Soviet Union will be a coup de grace for small ones. And since absolute majority of tags don't have strategic depth you'd end up having to make RPS effect rather weak lest most countries will be unplayable.

Trading land for time would be but one means among many to gain breathing room. I share it purely as an illustration. You could also shorten your frontline. And you could redirect production from equipment that's ineffective to guns and shovels, stabilizing your defensive lines. And you could swap out your generals to ones with more countering and more defensive tactics. And you could withdraw behind a naval wall (e.g. to Britain across the Channel, to America, to the Japanese Home Islands, the Dutch East Indies, across the Mediterranean to French North Africa ... ). And before you're attached you could have pursued a strategy of integrating your minor neighbours so that their land becomes your strategic depth if you are attacked. And you could join a faction so that your allies will do the defending and the dying while you reorient your strategy.

And, discovering your enemies strategy + its counter is not only possible after you've been attacked. You can and should play proactively to learn their strategies before war breaks out. You could spy on them. And you could also send attaches to nations they're already fighting, gathering intel that way. And you could also make an educated guess based on that nation's historical strategy.

And, there would be many strategies that are useful in all situations, and which RPS dynamics build upon - not replace. You should always have enough infantry to fill the line. You should always have decent supply. You should always strive to have some form of combined arms. If you get the basics right (unlike, say, the Soviets on the even of Barbarossa) and respond to the AI with any halway decent strategy, then it would be very possible to hold as a well played minor.

 

[pro.gamer.69]

we needed a general/commander micro DLC yesterday... I'm thinking more personality traits? "cunning trickster" beats "brutish attacker" beats "patient defender?" but be careful reassigning a "media diva," his ego might get hurt, and he'll underperform his next command.

 

[Cornutus]

Everything you say is true, but the problem is that if both the players and the AI are just going to use one meta design, then why even have a designer? The problem with the air designer as opposed to the tank designer is that it's way too straightforward, to the point of laziness.

I would argue that there wasn't much meaningful change added since the air designer got added.

Something as simple as "liquid cooled" vs "air-cooled" engines were considered but rejected by the devs. Pretty much the designer became a cookie-cutter thing, with "the right way of doing things" and "the wrong way".

And more importantly, instead of getting ideas from real-life on what to do with the airwar, it seems a lot is basically "made-up with an emphasis on "let's meme"".

For example, adding more guns to a plane just linearly adds more damage, which shouldn't be the case, without any real downsides. A fighter that doesn't have a full set of guns is just straight up inferior to one that does to an insane degree, while only being slightly cheaper, making them just vastly less cost-effective. In the tank designer, a more powerful tank always comes at a big cost, so in some cases you can end up losing more tanks than your opponent but still coming up on top because you can make way more.

To an extent that is realistic. Aircraft cannons cost a fraction of the aircraft, yet drastically increase its combat capacity at a given point in time.

The problem was that when you need "patrol aircraft" capable of sustaining multiple dogfights per sortie, if you are armed with cannons you are likely to run out of ammo very soon.

The real-life "wrong meta" fighter was the famous A6M Zero: it was a great long-range interceptor but its 60 rounds ( I believe 60) for the 20mm cannons was so insufficient, there were cases of A6Ms landing on Japanese carriers just to restock its ammo, with no refuelling. At the same time, it was very fragile, making it vulnerable to even machine gun fire.

American fighters on the other end were "meta", with extremely durable frames & 0.50 caliber MGs that worked well against fragile Japanese fighters.

The time when American carrier pilots started getting British-adapted Wildcats, they were unhappy that they got extra guns and less ammo, which not only added weight but also reduced ability to fight multiple times per flight.



Also one thing missing from HOI4 is air-air rockets. Turns out, Germans as early as 1943 used them extensively against American strategic bombing formations ("Masters of the Air" showed them as fireballs). A lot of German interception was reliant on this.

Air combat itself is also too simplistic. You just stack as much attack as possible and then as much armor as possible, and there's no other way to do well. In real life, it was more of a dilemma between planes that could turn well and plane that could go fast, and then after that you had other details like weapons and armor which were more secondary. Admittedly, this is super hard to simulate, though.

I would argue it was more of a dilemma.

You have an aircraft engine that can produce X power.

You need to choose whether you want range, durability, armament, low cost, handling easiness, climb rate, horizontal maneuverability.

In HOI4 this gets condensed to "range" (where lower range gives just penalties), air attack, agility and speed. Where speed is king and everything else is secondary.

A Bf-109F would cream a F4F-3 Wildcat or an A6M Zero. But they would never meet, as they were meant for different circumstances.

it is modeled now, it just wasn't back at the point where heavy tank 2s (before tank designer) were basically not countered by line at.

it is still possible to make tanks that contemporary at can't pierce in hoi 4 now, but it's a much bigger cost burden...and partial piercing will still put pressure on that smaller tank count.

Yeah I know and agree.

 

[JukkaG]

Also the other problem I dont really see much talk about is XP but not the amount of army XP is needed but how little air and navy XP are used. You need thousands of army XP to do everything you want to and as a result players get used to limiting themselves like creating combined arms templates, it could cost easily over 100 XP to design such template but we just accept it and find ways around.
Meanwhile designing a plane costs up to 20 XP, the spare XP is nowhere to be spent on, doctrines are easy to finish and some can be ignored like those in the end giving bomber defense which is useless in the current state of the game: your bombers are either covered and suffer no casualties or they are not and they get shredded.
It gets even worse for the 2nd arial doctrine because it gives lots of stats for CAS which is useless because either CAS gets to bomb the enemy meaning combat stats are irrevelant or it gets intercepted and shredded no matter the combat stats. Even slightly altering the formula to account for air defense and agility for divisional AA efficiency would at least create a trade off in getting more bombs or survivabilty, now the most efficient design is to dump agility and air defense for ground attack and range (3 bombs, 2 fuel tanks, cheaper materials resulting in 1 defense, 1 agility bomber)

I genuinely edge on thinking that the XP costs in division / equipment designer do more harm than good.

The good side of them is that they slightly delay the adaptation of optimal designs right at start, so that players need to prioritize upgrading their designs. But because you need all the XP you can get to max out your doctrines too, you ultimately want to avoid any unnecessary waste of army XP. And because the game has very little incentives to build diverse divisions, it’s always optimal to make universal cookie-cutter designs.

Basically, there are two problems that reinforce each other: it’s too easy to make universally good divisions and designs, and even if you wanted to make niche divisions or to roleplay just because you want to, the XP costs make it feel really punishing and unrewarding. Stuff like transitioning from light tanks to medium tanks shouldn’t be that costly, so that you’d have at least some reason to use light tanks early on etc.

Same issue also exists on the naval side, but with more weight on research cost than XP. Researching dozens of different techs and making realistic navies feels like you’re handicapping yourself, when deep down you know that you could just spam subs and reach the same end result with far less effort and costs involved. And if it weren’t subs, it would be cruiser spam.

The point of this ramble? People building meta divisions already save time on research and building up production efficiency, and the designer XP costs also make it so that they finish out their doctrine trees faster too. Doing something to reduce the XP costs of designing divisions and equipment (and preferably replacing them with some other limiting factor) would at least encourage more diverse army builds even if meta slaving was still technically optimal.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

And because the game has very little incentives to build diverse divisions, it’s always optimal to make universal cookie-cutter designs.

1. Diverse like what? One country making ten different div designs? Because there IS a diversity right now. A HOI4 tag does not make universal cookie-cutters, as a spherical chicken in vacuum one needs hold-the-line divs, breakthrough divs and exploitation divs plus SFs in some cases. Sometimes this can be reduced to a certain extent if one takes MA or GB yet every country has a uniques situation in terms of manpower availability, generals, production base etc. Then there's a strategy choice, e.g. if whan wants to lean heavy on land divs at the expense of planes or vice verse. This does not provide diversity within ONE country but across ALL of them. But that's unavoidable, there will always be the best strategy for a specific country.
2. Percieved lack of diversity is not due to XP limitations but because fundamentaly there're only these three tasks to perfom -- hold-the-line, breakthrough, exploit. So whatever combination of starting factors a country has it'll still end up having three templates plus may be some SFs.
3. Creating template diversity within ONE country is not necessarily good. Diversity in div TOEs is not for the sake of diversity, it could only be justified if a player TAKES UNIQUE DECISIONS to leverage div specifics. And if you're a Soviet Union and you have like 350-400 divs by Barb time it'll be mighty difficult to command say ten different templates in such a way that it'll factor in their distinctiveness.
4. I'd say the ramble about templates not being diverse enough is like complaining RL WWII did not provide enough diversity in fundamental fighter designs. There was a time when there were monoplanes, biplanes and triplanes but somehow only monoplanes were massively used as WWII fighters. Nobody asked to change the rules of the war so that there will be a place for biplanes and triplanes

if you wanted to make niche divisions or to roleplay just because you want to, the XP costs make it feel really punishing and unrewarding.

1. In game terms role playing is basically inefficient use of resources. You can make life easier for RPers within the current XP system but it'll only let minmaxers snowball sooner.
2. To address the previous point your can create a separate unique limiting "resource" to be spent only on div templates. But it'll mean whoever does a minimal minmaxing will feel s/he is given a "resource" s/he has nothing to spend on. IMHO not a good feeling for a game to create.
3. And IMHO this "problem" does not exist in the first place. In an MP game RPing only makes the player an easy pray for minmaxers so there's no use for RPing in MP. And in SP a RPer can open a console and give himself/herself as much XP as s/he desires. AI won't complain
4. RPers may say that the current system is "broken" and stifles "diversity" but:
   1. The science of warfare made great strides since WWII times and most of advanced armies now stick to uniformity in their TOEs. E.g. US Army has only Infantry, Stryker and Armored Combat Teams. It's a bit oversimplified picture, individual divs may have certain variance but it's limited and to encourage this in game one would need to make it unnecessary complex. Though for different reasons three div templates is about as many as you'd see in HOI4. Sticking to a limited number of templates a player just does what the science of warfare says him/her to do.
   2. There're a fundamental differences between a video wargame and RL warfare
      1. Price of defeat in a wargame is much lower -- couple of minutes to start a new SP run or change a server -- whereas IRL in WWII it meant the end of the world. This makes extreme strategies and experimenting in general much more appealing.
      2. HOI4 has drastically less uncertainly than RL:
         1. Differences in TOE between countries reflected different views on what TOEs would perform best in a future conflict. This variance existed in no small part because WWII commanders could not put their views to RL test, it was an (almost) pure theorycraft. Whereas in a wargame one can start a test playthrough and know for sure what works and whatnot in a couple of hours.
         2. A HOI4 player has either full control -- SP -- or (almost) full transparency -- house rules in MP -- on whom and when s/he will fight. And unlike IRL the players normally did many runs for their adversaries so they know what strategies they'd need to counter.