Starfire Historical Mod Available (Major Mod)

[Mithel]

Version F6 (for v1.3a) of the Starfire Historical Mod is available at:
http://www.mnstarfire.com/ww2/hoi/hoimain.html

There is still a lot we need to do and desire to do to bring back the historical accuracy that the Starfire Historical Mod brought to HoI1.

The entire combat system has been overhauled and should result in a more realistic experience. (ver B8 is a second complete overhaul of combat, ver C5 is a third complete overhaul of combat, ver E2 is a fourth complete overhaul of ground combat)

As always our focus is on historical realism and a concern for multiplayer play (i.e. if you are looking for "fantasy fun" pick a different mod). This version has only a minimally updated province.csv file so far, which was always the key to our previous HoI 1 mods. Ver E1 introduced a new manpower system. Ver E2 is in the middle of a worldwide economic & diplomatic rework.

Versions F1 & F2 introduce significant improvements in resources and management of government sliders.

Version F4 introduces ten models of Infantry, Mountain, Marine, Motorized, Garrison and Militia to lay the groundwork for a dramatically refined new era of HoI2. F5 streamlines the Marine, Motorized, and Mountain division development.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy. Visit our forum at:
Starfire Discussion Forum

 

[Zakouski]

The first release (version A0) of the Starfire Historical Mod is available at:
http://www.mnstarfire.com/ww2/hoi/hoimain.html

This is a hasty major mod to fix up some of the most critical issues (specifically attention to slowing down combat, USA and USSR more reasonable).

As always our focus is on historical realism and a concern for multiplayer play (i.e. if you are looking for "fantasy fun" pick a different mod). This does not have an updated province.csv file yet, which was always the key to our previous HoI 1 mods.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy.

Just downloaded it; the modifications (combat particularly) have sense and seems balanced. I will start a campaign when i finish the actual one, and give you feedback.

I like your change in XP for units, the mods for being encircled, the combined arms bonus.

I wait to test the efficiency of the ground defense efficiency.

From you change log, it seems that you changed the IC of occupied provinces and partisans; could you give some more details ?


Good job, I really hope it will give me more satisfaction than the actual 1.1.

 

[Spricar]

well, some questions/suggestions:

Could you lower the chance of ships retreating (maybe taking in account their speed, transports couldn't escape destroyers)

Longer combat is a great idea but I think you should lower the terrain movement mod. penalties since if battles will be fought for days Germany won't be able to blitzkrieg Poland and France in 3 weeks anymore...Besides, do they apply for aircrafts too? If your planes will bombard one province for days than you won't be able to use them anywhere else e.g. they won't bombard other provinces...

Are you sure it is a good idea to drop paratroopers soft attack values? even if they "came" in smaller size that doesn't mean they were less effective as they were often dropped in key points with surprise effect+they were an elite with best training/equipment.
They already get hefty paradrop combat penalty and with soft attack values lowered they won't be bale to make succesfull para attacks anymore...
I mean when marines were assaulting beacheads they weren't doing it with a whole division at once either...

Change in XP. Are you sure this is a good idea? Units truly gain XP somehow slowly but even if half of division is decimated they still keep their XP (in contrast with real life). So if the same and the same divisions slowly received XP for 2 years without losing it when reinforced you could field a very experienced army in 1942-43...

You changed some tech modifiers for USSR, Could you give some details on changes? Does every nation have a "specific research" efficiency stat or what?

edit: Great idea to up the attack avlues for armour and make it slightly more effective in the desert. Could you lower movement penalties for tanks in desert too? They are awfully slow in the desert now(at least compared to infrantry...I know there are supply problems in the desert but still they should be faster at least in provinces with high infra.). Deserts are virtually tank's playgrounds...

Combined arms bonus increased is a great thing to do, BUT;
1. You have to have armour divisions stacked together with inf. in order to activate it(its not enough to attack say with one armour and one inf. division).
2. This further hinders the strenght and independancy of armour and forces player to attach armour divisions to his inf. forces. That doctrine was used by French while Germans used armour as an independent strike force. Your change of combat arms modifier encourages the usage of outdated doctrines which were IRL beaten down by blitzkrieg. Infranty can have support tank brigades attached as heavy tanks and that gives them extra stenght....
So couuld you maybe extend combined arms modifier to fire at least whenever there are inf. and tanks involved in a battle without the need of being stacked together? Or try an not encouarge the usage of outdated tactis by completely removing combined arms combat bonuses and add some to armour fighting on plains and deserts ("roll over" effect)?

I assume its OK to use only part of your update (I think I'll skip paratroopers and transport planes mods)?
And just another suggestion, could you include urban attack mod (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=183465)? It makes AI more willing to attack urban areas...

 

[unmerged(23993)]

Change in XP. Are you sure this is a good idea? Units truly gain XP somehow slowly but even if half of division is decimated they still keep their XP (in contrast with real life). So if the same and the same divisions slowly received XP for 2 years without losing it when reinforced you could field a very experienced army in 1942-43...

At least in vanilla HOI2 units DO lose experience when reinforced. I've seen 3 exp. 60% strength division reinforce to a 1 exp. division.

 

[boromir]

The first release (version A0) of the Starfire Historical Mod is available at:
http://www.mnstarfire.com/ww2/hoi/hoimain.html

This is a hasty major mod to fix up some of the most critical issues (specifically attention to slowing down combat, USA and USSR more reasonable).

As always our focus is on historical realism and a concern for multiplayer play (i.e. if you are looking for "fantasy fun" pick a different mod). This does not have an updated province.csv file yet, which was always the key to our previous HoI 1 mods.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy.

The combined arms modifier works only when armour is in the same stack AFAIK with other units. As already pointed out, that encourages outdated tactics not Blitzkrieg ... So I wouldn't change those modifiers. We should petition Paradox to change the modifier to work for separate stacks as well (or maybe even only )

province.csv is the key to getting a more balanced game in MP ... it is worth to look at the Japanese situation here as well.

Oh yes, please get rid of the stupid leader deaths.

And lower UK IC a bit

 

[StephenT]

The combined arms modifier works only when armour is in the same stack AFAIK with other units. As already pointed out, that encourages outdated tactics not Blitzkrieg ...

No it doesn't. Some countries, such as the USSR, tried to field huge all-tank armies: they were comprehensively defeated. The Germans, on the other hand, attached motorised infantry or mechanised units directly to their Panzers and were successful. Tanks by themselves are weak and vulnerable... they need infantry support.

The French mistake was simply to reverse the priority (tanks supporting infantry, not infantry supporting tanks) not putting the two together in he first place.

Oh yes, please get rid of the stupid leader deaths.

Randomise them, perhaps, but it would be unrealistic to get rid of them. People do die during wars, you know.

And lower UK IC a bit

Sure, as long as it's still higher than that of Germany, as it was historically.

 

[boromir]

No it doesn't. Some countries, such as the USSR, tried to field huge all-tank armies: they were comprehensively defeated. The Germans, on the other hand, attached motorised infantry or mechanised units directly to their Panzers and were successful. Tanks by themselves are weak and vulnerable... they need infantry support.

The French mistake was simply to reverse the priority (tanks supporting infantry, not infantry supporting tanks) not putting the two together in he first place.

Unfortunately, I don't think this "priority" is modelled in HOI2. So the Soviets can spread their tanks across their masses of infantry ...

Randomise them, perhaps, but it would be unrealistic to get rid of them. People do die during wars, you know.

Again, I don't think that's in the HOI2 model. The way it currently is it should be removed.

Sure, as long as it's still higher than that of Germany, as it was historically.

It's not an issue of history, but of playability. A peacetime modifier is necessary, as the way it is now, the UK can do a (successful) DDay on its own, which is not very realistic and fun in MP. OTOH, it should not be overdone, if the UK is to hold its own against the combined Axis for 1.5 years.
Alternatively, the lend-lease events from the US to the UK should be toned down.

 

[StephenT]

Regarding combined arms, the bonus should only apply to tanks with motorised or mechanised infantry, not 'leg' infantry. (If that's not the case already?) That would simulate the effect of infantry units trained and equipped to keep up with the tanks, rather than expecting the tanks to move at walking pace with the infantry.

As for leaders, the way to randomise it would be to have a random event killing off a randomly-selected leader every so often. Balance the likelihood of the event happening so that the same quantity of leaders will die (or retire) as happened historically - but now you won't know when and who will go...

Without looking into the figures closely, I'd have thought that the limiting factor for Britain should be manpower, not IC - they could match the Germans in planes, ships, even artillery and tanks for most of the war (except when Germany geared up in 1944), but lacked the manpower for a large land army. As for a peace penalty for democracies, I absolutely agree.

 

[Mithel]

Well, first of all this was just a quick release of my mod to fix up some of the things most in need of adjusting so many of these other issues will be addressed in the future. If you remember my mods from HoI 1 you know that I tend to release fairly regular updates as I improve more and more (I released about fifty versions of my mod for HoI 1).

I have not looked into naval combat at all yet and that is going to be far down the line. Don't expect me to tweak it soon (but please do continue to inform me of any issues you feel need adjusting and I'll consider whether I can do something about them or not). I don't think there is anything we can do as for the escape speeds - that would have to be a Paradox fix.

I have not (and will not) slow down air combat.

I don't think my mods so far will significantly slow down Germany's ability to thrash Poland. Remember Germany should not be conducting "even odds" attacks!

Man for man my paratroopers will always be far superior to your average infantry soldier. However, in my opinion it is better to use the paratrooper "divisions" in HoI to represent the smaller airborne units that were actually used in WWII (specifically the early war). In my opinion with stock HoI it's far too easy (although horribly expensive) to build huge forces for airdrops where it's quite possible to mount a major multi division assault via air and that is unrealistic.

Units do lose experience when reinforced and in my opinion a "veteran" division is far more combat worthy than a "green" division. Stock HoI 2 makes this difference "trivial" when it should be very significant. These values will need fine tuning as we see how they work.

I believe all nations start with a 100% tech modifier (i.e. normal). I've tweaked down the USSR so that it's massive economy doesn't allow it to race ahead with pre-war research on par with Germany.

I'll give the desert warfare more consideration. I understand what Paradox did, they fudged it so that the North Africa campaign wouldn't be an "instant blitz" and has more of a chance to be a slower seesaw battle like it historically was. It's a very difficult thing to model given the scale of the game and Paradox's system.

I can't modify Paradox's code and hence can't change the way they have combined arms working. As a reasonable compromise it is not unreasonable to expect the player to combine motorized infantry or mechanized infantry with armor to get the benefit.

I agree with StephenT - the way the system works is good, it does discourage as it properly should, players trying to use huge stacks of armor only. The game system is somewhat crude and generic and hence we must allow for a bit of "imagination".

Yes, feel free to use any portion or eliminate any portion of my mod if you enjoy your changes more. And all other modders are welcome to use my ideas too. I'm just trying to help. I'm not "forcing" my ideas and opinions on anyone.

Yes, I'm aware of the need to tweak the AI files so they aren't as afraid of urban zones. There are a lot of changes still in need of doing.

Province.csv is a major amount of work, but yes, I'll be making massive changes to it in order to get the economy more historically accurate.

IC is a bit tricky because while we may look at the historical GDP to get an idea of the economic power of a nation, we must also factor in the peacetime economies. I will be balancing this as much as is possible to be historically accurate. Paradox gave us a fantastic new tool in giving us the peacetime IC modifier!

Leaders dying is "realistic" but I don't think it adds anything to the game. I can't randomize them so I am leaning toward eliminating them as I think they hurt more than benefit the game and our enjoyment of it.

 

[unmerged(37264)]

Just a little something on the leaders:
In one of my games as russia(vanilla HoI 2) I had over 400 divisions by 1941. However, as my leaders started to die before/during barbarossa, I had to promote a great deal of leaders, some from mj. general to field marshall. Because of that most of them had very low skill. Historical?

 

[Mithel]

I'm ok with a few random leaders dying (and I think Paradox has that in random events "Commander Assassinated by Enemy Commandos" and "Failed Coup"). But to say a major, well known leader like Rommel *must* die on a specific year well... that just is a bit too "scripted" for me.

 

[unmerged(31954)]

Just a little something on the leaders:
In one of my games as russia(vanilla HoI 2) I had over 400 divisions by 1941. However, as my leaders started to die before/during barbarossa, I had to promote a great deal of leaders, some from mj. general to field marshall. Because of that most of them had very low skill. Historical?

Very realistic. As a result of the purge, overexpansion of the Red Army, and poor leader recruitment and training, the Red Army had a critical shortage of officers at all levels at the time the Germans attacked. They had very inexperienced officers commanding units far above the size those officers should have. Apparently, during the Purge, there were in some cases majors in command of divisions, because everybody above had been Purged.

 

[boromir]

BTW, it does appear the arm + inf in the same stack does receive the combined arms bonus, which should probably not be the case

arm + mot does as well, which is ok
I read somewhere that someone tested arms + mech and didn't get the bonus, which may be a bug

 

[Mithel]

Sounds like a bug to me. Paradox probably considers "mech" as armor, but in reality a mechanized division essentially is the combined arms concept. For a simple game the mech divisions probably should be counted both ways (both as armor and as infantry). The combat system of HoI 2 isn't sophisticated enough to properly model this. I think we have to be happy with what Paradox gave us... in this regard I don't think it's too bad to require combining infantry and armor in the same stack to get the combined arms bonus.

I see nothing wrong with leg infantry working as combined arms with armored divisions. It should give the battlefield advantage but of course you then have the problem of your stacks move slower and can't consolidate their victories as quickly.

 

[unmerged(24693)]

quess on real mod

First off, like to say thanks for the mod. Understanding that it is a work in progress, I am going to question one item. Mech is combined arms and as the post stated it does not get the combined arms bonus; my question would there be a fix where 2 of the mech division combined makes combined arms? I realize this maybe non historic in context, but each time I research the mech in battle it seems thaey were 1) always holding key junctions and 2) seldom were they operationing a 1 mech divison, alway mech and elements of another. This seems to be the case more in 1944 where you see almost the complete 1 1/2 mech divisons operating in an area. It is a thought, I don't have any programing experience(yet, although this game is getting me into it), but it would be a operations fix for some of the research I have done.

 

[unmerged(37264)]

Very realistic. As a result of the purge, overexpansion of the Red Army, and poor leader recruitment and training, the Red Army had a critical shortage of officers at all levels at the time the Germans attacked. They had very inexperienced officers commanding units far above the size those officers should have. Apparently, during the Purge, there were in some cases majors in command of divisions, because everybody above had been Purged.

yes, but these were not generals dying as the result of the purge. These were generals dying as result of 'barbarossa', which btw. ended me conquering Germany by 1942, with losses of 400 manpower.

 

[Mithel]

Unfortunately Paradox hasn't shared with us any understanding of how the code checks to see if a force is "combined arms" or not. So I guess more testing of trial and error to see exactly what combinations actually get the bonus is needed. I don't know if attaching a brigade will influence it or not, but I've heard mention that it will depend on the overall ratio... ie. 9 Panzers and 1 Inf will not be combined arms yet 3 Panzers and 1 Infantry would. We need someone to test these things.

 

[Mithel]

Note: it has come to my attention there are some issues with saving games and reloading them via "moddir" mods. Until I release the next version you should manually create a "save games" directory under the Starfire\scenarios directory.

When the game is actually saved the .cfg file will be saved in the normal save game file - that's ok, it's not needed anyway.

 

[boromir]

I did a few tests with the combined arms modifier:

It works for mot + tanks and for inf + tanks, doesn't look like it works for mechs + tanks.

It looks like there is a max 2:1 ratio of one unit type to the other for it to work.

 

[Mithel]

Thanks Boromir.

Unfortunately with "moddir" not working for multiplayer I'm not sure if I should just shelve HoI 2 for a couple months while we wait for Paradox to fix it or if I should abandon moddir and just start modifying the game directly like I did for HoI 1.

I'd like some feedback. Who wants the Starfire Historical Mod to be replacing the game files and who wants to just wait for Paradox to get "moddir" to work?