If you could change things about the combat system, what would they be?

[Metz]

I would add more tools to use when making battle plans such as:

- Button to avoid certain terrain types, which would be useful for armor so they don't go through forests or mountains or vice versa so that mountaineers mainly focus on going through mountains.
- Option to select provinces you don't want your army to "push through" which could be used to create pockets or to avoid draining supplies like when you are trying to get through the marshes in Belarus as Germany.
- Reserve option for divisions in an army, where not all divisions are stacked on the front line but some of them are a few tiles away ready to move in if a division needs help or if a division has low organization/supplies.
- The ability for motorized/armored divisions to abandon their equipment temporarily and fight as a pure infantry unit (with penalties).
- Remove field hospitals as a support company and have them be either buildables like supply depots or movables like rail guns.

 

[Cornutus]

Easy to do:

Land Warfare:
1. Make artillery + SPGs 2 width, give them the role of "Breakthrough/defense providers" instead of tanks
2. Add a penalty for having multiple turrets on the same tank
3. Make all "fantasy content" like war elephants and land cruisers usable, but subpowered compared to more conventional means.
4. Add bicycle infantry to all countries as an option.
5. Make more mobile troops add recon values.
6. Reduce infantry speed to 1.5 km/h. Cavalry speed to 2 km/h.

Air war:
1. Add altitudes for bombing/fighter patrol. Higher altitudes give lower air superiority, but higher air combat and defense values.
2. Tie transport capacity to strategic bombing capacity. All transports doubled as bombers in the war.

Fundamental:
A. Tying org to equipment levels.

Right now you can exploit by building units with no equipment that contribute to org.

B. Adding a "Close combat" attack value applying solely to infantry. Or simulate it somehow.

It's hard to simulate Chinese WW2 tactics that had significant reliance on numbers, grenades and sabres (no joke). Human wave assaults should have be a valid option for low-equipment countries.

Similarly if more depth is added, the whole "Rifle vs Submachine gun" competition will need to get represented.

-C. Splitting "Soft Attack" and "Hard Attack" into two separate factors: "Soft/Hard Attack Targeting" and "Soft/Hard Attack Value".

In a two dimensional system it's hard to represent why anyone used 75mm stuff over 150mm stuff.

 

[ctl3]

Make it possible for modder to add extra combat stat and define how the stat interact with other aspect of the game. The idea is that if people complain about whatever thing should matter in the combat and how thing should work in combat, they can simply mod it to the game.

 

[BeauNiddle]

Constant attrition, harsher attrition and fix the attrition sawtooth graph (it can only attrite complete objects so changes in reliability don't do anything until you pass thresholds)

The game is based around production but you can have a full army sat around in peacetime costing nothing and, with a lot of strategic deployment micro, you can avoid most attrition in the war. Have meta where you have super low reliability tanks is not good and wastes the potential of the production system.

Increasing the difficulty of keeping your units fully supplied would make the late game a lot more complex (but also probably put of a lot of newbies)

 

[L-Histidine]

Seen an idea by LordWahu (e.g. here or here) for land battles to involve territory within a province being captured over time, with attacker winning at full capture progress. This would remove both reinforce meme and org cycling (since attacker's win condition is no longer 'have zero non-reserve defending divisions at some particular moment in time'), and could also make speed an important stat on the tactical layer.

Artillery fix: Either make them 2 width and give them some defense+breakthrough, or actually model indirect fire.

 

[FieryHero]

The biggest change I would make would be creating a sort of equipment replacement option for equipment of the same type (Tank, Mobile Infantry, etc.):

Say I've deployed some mechanized divisions and now I'm running low on Mech to resupply these divisions, how about instead of leaving empty gaps, we were to make do with some trucks on the meantime?

Or what if I'm running low on Panzer IVs? Say I've got a bunch of Panzer IIs in stock, how about we replace those until Panzer IV for now?

As it is now, you have to change and switch the battalions and the moment you do, those few tanks on front would be immediately recalled and it takes a while for the light tanks to take their place.

How about we made sure the best equipment remained on the frontlines instead of the current system?

 

[SAS]

I hate how the front attack is so tied into arbitrary stats like planning. I really dislike the front system in general, but that is because I like managing my battles. I dont like the set plan, press go, aspect of it at all.

I also miss a proper OOB.

 

[Eh up me duck]

Make hardness more important.

Currently there's no point in producing tanks that aren't just stacking soft attack. IRL simply having armour could make a huge difference to the battlefield.

 

[Metz]

Make hardness more important.

Currently there's no point in producing tanks that aren't just stacking soft attack. IRL simply having armour could make a huge difference to the battlefield.

Maybe hard attack could help with entrenchment reduction and then soft attack does the rest in terms of damage?

 

[LordWahu]

Seen an idea by LordWahu (e.g. here or here) for land battles to involve territory within a province being captured over time, with attacker winning at full capture progress. This would remove both reinforce meme and org cycling (since attacker's win condition is no longer 'have zero non-reserve defending divisions at some particular moment in time'), and could also make speed an important stat on the tactical layer.

The second value to this would be making "clicking" less viable, as it would take more than a single tick to capture the entire zone regardless of reinforcements. Make battles both faster and slower, and therefore the whole "specific stats as extreme as possible" issue would be significantly flattened

 

[LordWahu]

I would like to see Supply Use and Reliability make more of a difference. Make the Supply Grace significantly increased, but also decrease significantly faster when in combat to represent supplies like bullets being used up

Of course from there, they would need to fix the supply tooltips so you can easily tell the supply situation of each unit and each tile

 

[Darth Murder]

Make division design logical ww2 was about combined arms.
Divisions without artillery should be borderline useless.
500 tanks per division is just dumb.

 

[Metz]

Make division design logical ww2 was about combined arms.
Divisions without artillery should be borderline useless.
500 tanks per division is just dumb.

Maybe a sort of combined arms bonus because having different tools at your disposal can be more useful than too many of one type.

 

[Darth Murder]

Yeah this, because all the tanks then add inf until the required org is reached is not working as a system.

 

[blahmaster6k]

3. Make all "fantasy content" like war elephants and land cruisers usable, but subpowered compared to more conventional means

The only problem is that in a game where we have limited research efforts, having some things be deliberately suboptimal while also taking significant research effort is basically the same as deleting them from the game.

If you need to put significant investment into something that's worse than something else that requires less investment, why would you ever use it?

"Usable" and "subpowered" are mutually exclusive except in cases where you start with something or get it for free, or as a stepping stone to something better.

 

[Arieswolf]

Differentiate between direct and indirect fire.

HOI3 did this.....

 

[Lamartine]

2. Add a penalty for having multiple turrets on the same tank
3. Make all "fantasy content" like war elephants and land cruisers usable,

I agree with these, but in the meantime my head canon is that the turret HMG is actually just a coaxial HMG while the extra HMG is spindle mounted.

I'd move the fantasy combat to a "Alt History Plus" mode. Many Alt history paths and units should not even be visible in historical.

The only problem is that in a game where we have limited research efforts, having some things be deliberately suboptimal while also taking significant research effort is basically the same as deleting them from the game.

I think it's legit to have suboptimal units and techs. Not everything needs to be meta. But everything should have at least a niche, even if that niche is as minor as "good for one playthrough just to challenge yourself"

 

[blahmaster6k]

But everything should have at least a niche, even if that niche is as minor as "good for one playthrough just to challenge yourself"

A niche means it's good in at least one practical use case, even if it's bad for everything else. Something with the niche of "you can make the game harder for yourself" isn't a niche. It's just bad at everything.

 

[Metz]

Maybe an additional stat called "practicality" which penalizes other stats? Like having too many MGs or bombs on a light plane or too many turrets for a tank of a certain size. This could help reduce "unrealistic" designs or limit them to specific purposes. I guess these sort of experimental vehicles could get a special equipment tag to get placed in a new support company called "Experimental Support Vehicles" where you put all these experiments in.

 

[LordWahu]

Maybe an additional stat called "practicality" which penalizes other stats? Like having too many MGs or bombs on a light plane or too many turrets for a tank of a certain size. This could help reduce "unrealistic" designs or limit them to specific purposes. I guess these sort of experimental vehicles could get a special equipment tag to get placed in a new support company called "Experimental Support Vehicles" where you put all these experiments in.

Making "Reliability" be a multiplier to stats might do the trick. That way it wouldn't make reliability the sole important stat while making it significantly more important