Stacking penalty bug?

[cmstea0]

ok this is starting to piss me off. the stacking penalties are quite frankly idiotic. i have two field marshals [one with HQ] attempting an amphibious assault. a 9-stack unit and a 4-stack [all marine] unit. the 9 has an HQ. the combat log shows i have a -66.67 AND a -99.99 stacking penalty applied. obviously i can never win any fight this way.

i posted in the in the main forum about this issue, and i'm posting again here. i appreciate the work you all have put into this game, but this one single issue is making me want to not play it anymore. if i'm doing something wrong, please let me know. if you can tell me how to edit the stacking penalty mods, that would also be appreciated. is it in the misc.txt ?

-c

 

[Balesir]

you refer to real ww2 battle times in an attempt to rationalize ahistoric combat effects. if i weren't so frustrated i would think that was kind of funny.

The combat effects are historical - read Dupuy and the Operational Research in the area. The 'square root rule' design came from my reading of the research of the historical factors and realities of land combat; I'm not just referring to the historical realities to rationalise it. The fact that the rule actually increases the importance of troop quality and improves the game play experience actually followed on from the original design formulation, it wasn't a case of the reverse being true.

the effect of the sq-rt rule is to reduce combat efficiency of all units taking part in the combat. ie the implementation of the rule reduces the benefits of good tech and org.

Are we talking about the same game? If a quality armoured division has an attack power of 1.5 (say), it, alone, can outgun two vanilla infantry divisions with an attack power of 1.0 (combined value 1.4 with the sq.rt. rule). With the softness factor included it is likely to beat them. This works just as well with 10 ARM versus 20 INF - it just takes around three times as long to play out. Unit quality and brigades are more important that sheer mass with this rule - but that does not mean that mass will achieve nothing at all. Both the Soviet Union and China proved that this was true, after all.

assault timing doesn't work - as you say, try it for yourself. units can't "follow the assault" because move orders to a province currently in battle simply include that unit in battle, thus magnifying the problem. move orders through the newly captured province obviate the whole point of blitzkrieg tactics by making incremental assaults the only viable method. add to this the province destruction that results from a change in ownership, and suddenly an actual blitzkrieg becomes impossible.

Use shift-clicking to set objectives past the initial province for your attacking divisions, and save some armoured divisions (particularly) to throw into the fray after the battle is underway, or even after the (enemy) retreat has begun. Blitzkreig works just fine in AoD until your enemies get the numbers and the doctrines (ORG) to deal with it.

 

[Amallric]

Balesir could you explain how softness works too, please?

 

[Balesir]

Sure - same as it did in HoI2. Each 'attack' against a unit is either soft, hard or both; e.g. if your soft attack is 12 and your hard attack is 4 then the first four attacks will be both soft and hard, and the last 8 will be soft only. Each attack it takes, a unit 'rolls' a percentage equal to its softness; if it 'succeeds' it takes a soft attack, if not it takes a hard attack. So, an ARM with 33% softness taking the above attack will always take the first 4 (because they apply to soft or hard), but the last 8 it will take only 33% of (due to the softness).

 

[unmerged(61296)]

So, the stacking penalty is working as designed? In my Yugoslavian game, a stack of 4 divisions attacks a single Albanian Militia in Tirana, and gets a -40% modifier. It did strike me as a pretty strong penalty, but if this is WAD, is there a way for units to lower that penalty? Is it, for example, based on the quality of provincial infrastructure?

 

[Balesir]

Yes, it's WAD. If four divisions attack one they just won't all fight it all at once - it's not the way military operations work. You'll win, anyway - but expecting the opposition to spread out and make themselves available to be shot is just gratuitous

No, there is no way to reduce it - and you shouldn't really need to. One general tip is that avoiding overkill is generally good practice.

 

[Alex_Gorik]

Hi Guys. idea of implementing square root rule to combat battle effectiveness is deffenitely great. yet I would consider calculating sq.r rule only to divs atacking from 1 province. If we have 4 divs attacking enemy from 4 different provinces attackers shouldn't have any stacking penalties as in fact they approach enemy from different sides and do not interfere really much with each other. Is it possible to mod this somehow in misc file? Overall I think it bring more benefits to USSR than to Germany, thus kinda balancing the game.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Hi Guys. idea of implementing square root rule to combat battle effectiveness is deffenitely great. yet I would consider calculating sq.r rule only to divs atacking from 1 province. If we have 4 divs attacking enemy from 4 different provinces attackers shouldn't have any stacking penalties as in fact they approach enemy from different sides and do not interfere really much with each other. Is it possible to mod this somehow in misc file? Overall I think it bring more benefits to USSR than to Germany, thus kinda balancing the game.

I suggested this earlier in the beta, and my general understanding is that they don't agree due to how the enemy can retreat back into the province if flanked and thus shortens the lines.

They prefer the bonus modifier from multiple direction attacks (and its probably also much easier to code).

I still think It would be an improvement though, as long as the defender also gains the same benefit. 4 divisions defending should also be able to occupy one border each without stacking.

 

[Balesir]

It's not easy to explain on a board like this, but the key issue is that the division of the map into "provinces" and the consequent segmentation of the war into discrete "battles" is an abstraction. In reality, the war is fought over ground that does not have such arbitrary segmentation in operations that often involve fluid and/or porous front lines and 'defence in depth', all making the idea of separate "sections of front" all but meaningless except in the minds of over-fussy staff officers .

Really, the rule should apply to all contiguous defending "provinces" and all attacks upon them; basically, anything, of any size, that could be considered a single "battle". The reasons it applies are many and various, including more-or-less universal doctrines concerning the maintenance of tactical and operational reserves, the bandwidth of command coordination in a single operation and the physical size and space relationships when large formations engage in battle.

In short, the rule is far from perfect in execution, but it is far better than if not executed at all and, if it were to be improved, decreasing the scope over which it is applied would be the very last thing to do.

 

[Bobby53]

Thank you Balesir

I was going crazy trying to figure out what I was doing wrong to have such a large stacking penalty applied to my forces. I don't remember reading anything in the manuel that explained the stacking penalty in depth, but this thread finally did. Thank you.

 

[Balesir]

Thanks for the feedback - we probably ought to really clarify this in the manual at some point...