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The land doctrines

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Say, is there any way to convince the game to print decimal values in the tech descriptions?

Maybe the techs wouldn't feel quite so useless if you could tell the difference between a 0.1% bonus and a 0.5% bonus.

Frankly, I'd be tempted to take a crack at coming up with cooler names myself (being a deeply hubristic person in some ways :rolleyes: ), if I had the tree. But to my knowledge CORE isn't out for Mac yet... or is it?
 
Tegetthoff said:
The land doctrines are "small" and "easy" at the moment, which means also minor nations can make some progress there with low skill TECH teams. If you play GER od USA, you will not notice but its already different with JAP and ITA and I guess different again with CHI or ROM.

The land doctrine tree is not so hugely different from the naval doctrine tree, which to me seems very well done. What the naval doctrine tree offers is "feeling", i.e. well formulated doctrine names and trade-offs, i.e. some doctrines cancel out other doctrines.
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I disagree. Like Shadowarrior mentioned, the land doctrines do require quite a bit of research for a rather small increase in combat effectiveness. Minor nations would probably get more bang for their buck by focusing more on the armor/artillery and infantry techs if they want to improve combat performance.
 
I must agree that the land doctrine tree is not very good, especially compared to naval/air doctrine trees which are excellent. I would like to see of course more innovative naming for the doctrines but above all I would like to see different research paths so that there would be different doctrinal choices.

But if the current doctrine tree will be kept after all, perhaps there should be more concentrated effects to give feeling of doctrine research actually having some meaning? ShadoWarrior makes good point about this in my opinion.
 
Hi,

I've said this before but I'll repeat it again. Going back to the old CORE Land Doctrine tree is not an option. It was a nice tech tree for what it covered. However the techs were essentially only from 1938 to 1944, which is less than half of the required timeline. Attempting to stretch this design to meet the DD timeline removed all of the interesting features from it. I'd add that a careful review of that tree would show that most of the techs did even less than the current techs do. There were 3 "must have" techs in each branch and otherwise the effects were pretty minimal.

As for balance, directly comparing the Land Doctrines to the Naval or Air Doctrines isn't really viable. The game effect of a 2% change in ORG for land units is much more pronounced than a similiar ORG change for either Air or Naval units.

mm
 
You missed the point by focusing on Org. Try looking at a 0.5-1.0% combat effectiveness increase versus a 5-10% increase for a similar air/sea doctrine.
 
Hi,

Well I think you are missing the point. Land ORG/MOR modifiers are extremely powerful in game. OTOH, those 5-10% modifiers for Air/Naval units are generally focused on specific models and have far less total impact, even though they appear to be large. Exactly what country have you been playing where the Land Doctrines didn't seem to matter?

mm
 
Germany, of course. A fully-industrialized high-tech nation with excellent battlefield leaders. Leader effects and combined-arms bonuses easily overshadow the trivial land doctrine bonuses. My Ground Attack mission at the outbreak of the war, with NO land doctrines having been researched, is 105%. Increasing the Ground Attack by 3-5% (to 108-110%) by spending a truly absurd amount of my limited research time on land doctrines is, trust me, unnoticeable in the game. Not when compared to the above-mentioned leader/arms bonuses. And most assuredly not when compared to the impact of a single hour of Interdiction by a handful of Tac bombers.

Those specific-model mods that you seem to be casually dismissing as having minor impact do matter a great deal more than you may realize. If they didn't, then why are you nerfing subs by about the equivalent of 3 doctrines-worth in order to balance convoy attrition rates? I assure you that adding 15-30% to, for example, Tactical Bomber ground attack efficiency has a massive impact on my blowing holes in enemy lines and destroying retreating units. By far more impact than adding 1.5-3% to ground attack via land doctrines. You must play CORE very much differently than the way I do, is the only conclusion I can reasonably draw, based on the difference between what I see happening when I play CORE and the impression you seem to have.
 
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I play as Germany too, only researched one or two doctrines and I still was able to defeat the Soviet Union in 1943 (Invaded 1941) with relatively no problems. Like the above poster, I just concentrated upgrading my units and they prevailed in the end.
 
Hi,

Sucess with GER doesn't exactly indicate that a strategy is a no brainer. GER is the easiest country to play and always wins AI/AI games right now as we have not worked out all of the balance issues yet.

mm
 
Given the effort that went into the other trees, that the land doctrine tree seems an afterthought. I'm not denigrating work here. I'm just trying to help improve an already great mod with a few holes in it.

All trees make players make initial choices based on their national situation (IC, industrial level, natural resources, etc.) then as they progress and provide various benefits, other avenues are opened to the players that initially might have been closed off. e.g. A country can progress to a home-grown aircraft industry in time (with the right industrialization level).

But with the land doctrine tree, no choices have to be made. I can research Mobile Defense and Static Defense. And I should because both give similar benefits to different units without any additional costs other than research time. Mobile Defense should have penalties associated with that particular doctrine because of the very nature of a mobile defense doctrine (e.g. penalties to land fort construction, land fort defense efficiency, infantry dig-in bonus, etc.). Same with Static defense. Not all of the Doctrinal choices are that severe (or mutually exclusive) but that was an example off the top of my head.

Making players make doctrinal choices (or providing more interesting names) would not be that difficult given the current doctrine tree. You can either research Mechanized Offensive or Traditional Offensive. Boom. You make a choice based on a strategy and limited resources. That also has costs associated with the choice. The particulars of each doctrine could be modded a little without great AI modification.

Also, the research cost should probably be cut down. As the USSR, I spend about half my research spots continuously researching land docs to stay current in perhaps half the fields.

I, as a player, hate not researching something that's available for research. Grey outs relieve my conscience. LOL.
 
PanzerWilly said:
Also, the research cost should probably be cut down. As the USSR, I spend about half my research spots continuously researching land docs to stay current in perhaps half the fields.
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That's the trade off.

EDIT: As for the other things - we did have a different land doctrine tree before but there were things in it that didn't work properly in Doomsday so we had to redo it. I do understand that many are confused, if not even frustrated, with the current tree and we are looking at what can be done without redoing it completely. I agree with you in part and will take it up for discussion, but do not expect anything major anytime soon (ie. the bugfix).
 
Can we at least have some more interesting names?
 
Thistletooth said:
Suggest some. I'd be curious to see what ideas y'alls have for new doctrine names.
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The last time I saw the tech-trees was over 3 weeks ago. Or at least make it an either/or kind of thing rather than being able to chose both static and elastic defense and whatnot.
 
Hi,

So what you are telling me is you aren't even playing the mod... Re: naming there are mixed opinions about this. Before they ahd more "interesting" names but people wanted something more descriptive. I 'll be happy to consider any serious proposals.

mm
 
I'm working on a set of doctrine names that's based on the names given as comments in the land_doctrines file and on my own limited understanding of the tactics represented by these doctrines. I'll have it done within a day or two.

I'm not talking about changing any actual techs here, just coming up with some names that sound a little more immersively realistic than "1935 Operation Focus 2" or whatever.

EDIT: It looks like I'll actually get this finished in the next day or so; where am I supposed to send it once I've got it? I'm writing it on Macintosh's TextEdit program because that's the only decent word processor I have handy right now.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I'm working on a set of doctrine names that's based on the names given as comments in the land_doctrines file and on my own limited understanding of the tactics represented by these doctrines. I'll have it done within a day or two.

I'm not talking about changing any actual techs here, just coming up with some names that sound a little more immersively realistic than "1935 Operation Focus 2" or whatever.

EDIT: It looks like I'll actually get this finished in the next day or so; where am I supposed to send it once I've got it? I'm writing it on Macintosh's TextEdit program because that's the only decent word processor I have handy right now.
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Post it in Mantis if you please (see my sig for the link), and assign it to Dec.
 
I like the tech tree just fine. I think it's a really innovative concept to tie Land Doctrines firmly to tech teams, and it adds real historical flavour.

The argument that the increments are too small doesn't hold up. As far as I know there are 54 techs to be researched and that means there are massive gains to be made. Germany benefits considerably from having such excellent tech teams and can keep up reasonably well in other fields.
I haven't played other countries yet, but I can imagine that the SU has serious trouble after purging Tuchachevsky. Early in the war, their leadership was made up mainly of leaders who were stuck firmly in a WW1 frame of mind, and that will cost them dearly in game, just as it did in reality.

So what we got is historical accuracy and good gameplay. Nice job!

Having said all that, the tech tree is a bit bland. I look forward to a change in names, but coming up with 54 odd historically accurate tech descriptions is quite beyond me. Good luck Simon Jester! If anyone would set up a post to discuss possible names, I'd happily join in. Here or on the CORE forum.
 
dec152000 said:
Hi,

So what you are telling me is you aren't even playing the mod... Re: naming there are mixed opinions about this. Before they ahd more "interesting" names but people wanted something more descriptive. I 'll be happy to consider any serious proposals.

mm
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:eek:o

I haven't played the mod since I've been away from my computer for 3 weeks and I got back yesterday. But I downloaded it and had a fun game as China going before that. Almost got crushed since I didn't make peace with Guaxi and then Japan DoWed and then Yunnan DoWed but after I took down the warlords I stabilized the front.
 
Pol said:
The argument that the increments are too small doesn't hold up. As far as I know there are 54 techs to be researched and that means there are massive gains to be made. Germany benefits considerably from having such excellent tech teams and can keep up reasonably well in other fields.
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As Germany, you really only have two tech teams that are viable for land doctrines (albeit they are very good teams): Manstein and Guderian. These are also, not coincidently, the same teams you need for Infantry and Armor research (respectively). Given how long it takes to research each land doctrine, if you try to keep an historical pace with land doctrine research then you'll fall behind in the far more important (and useful) Infantry and Armor/Artillery trees.

As they currently exist, the land doctrines simply take far too long to research for the marginal benefit that they each provide. There are several ways to fix this. The easiest is to make them take less time. The (IMO) better way is to redo the tree so that each tech is more focused on particular aspects of land warfare (such as supply, fortification, et cetera). This would have several excellent benefits. It allows for more inspired naming of each tech. It allows for a better focus so that each nation can tailor itself to a particular style of warfare. And, not least, it allows for a larger bonus to be applied to fewer aspects, so that when you've researched the tech you feel you've accomplished something that you'll notice on the battlefield.

I assure you that the current 0.5-1% boosts in org, or morale, or whatever (and I know that you get such boosts to each of 10-20+ different aspects of land combat) are, with the exception of TC, inconsequential in the game. You won't notice their impact. It doesn't matter that after researching ten or twenty land doctrines (which takes an horrendous amount of valuable tech team time to do) you'll have some appreciable bonuses (and that affect all aspects of land combat). Had you spent that time instead on researching in the Infantry, Armor, Aircraft, Air Doctrine, and Industrial trees you'll be by far more effective in combat. I've tried it both ways (researching or ignoring the land doctrines) in 4 separate games (twice each way, just to be sure). The current land doctrine system needs tweaking. And IMO, it needs it badly.
 
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