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Time and cost of upgrades

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unmerged(24102)

unmerged(24102)

Chief of Stuff
Dec 29, 2003
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If this is already covered, I apologize. Haven't found it yet.

Some units take very long time to upgrade at high cost, others don't.
Is this WAD?

So far I have not more details than below, if you need more I've to do more research.

Germany:
1936 Two JG:s took 2.5 mounths to upgrade (from model I to II) to a cost of about 10 IC per squadron.
- isn't the cost supposed to be a fraction of the cost of a new unit? (I'll go back tonight and try to find out what a new unit would cost)

1937 – 11 airunits (8 TAC, 3 INT) cost about 170-200 IC to upgrade, wich means about 16 IC per geschwader.

On the other hand – when I get a new model of panzerdivisions it just takes a couple of days before the units upgrade.

I like the long time, low cost thingi for infanterie, but it feels a little bit to heavy with the airunits.
And armour upgrade is practically for free, though nice during a desperate game, note that realistic.

Still love your mod,
/Nic
 
I've seen this problem myself. In fact, the upgrade cost and time for aircraft is so high that, when playing Germany, I destroy the entire starting airforce. It's much cheaper to just rebuild them from scratch later on when you factor in the costs of multiple upgrades and supply consumption.
 
Are you aware that multiple levels of upgrades will reduce the cost of the early ones?

Eg. Play a 1936 campaign (CORE or vanilla). Leave the starting airforce. Get the tech to build level 4 tac bombers (1940 in vanilla). Cover all your upgrades. It will take x amount of time to upgrade a level 1 to a level 2, ax time to upgrade from level 2 to level 3, and a^2*x to upgrade from level 3 to level 4.

Straight multiples of upgrade cost/time only reflect the cost if you upgrade to the latest model every time its researched.
 
Air units do essentially cost a lot to upgrade - some research I did suggests that upgrading an air unit costs maybe 1/4-1/2 what it does to build it from scratch, all in all. That factor of 1/4-1/2 is partly on the cost of the new planes (sometimes it is just new engines and so on, othertimes, complete new planes, but then you get the old ones for training, scrap, etc) and partly because upgrading only takes maybe 1/2 the time of training from scratch. Of course, in reality, you generally had to take the unit out of the front line, stick it somewhere quiet for 3 mths, then you can send it back into battle. In game, it just "upgrades" overnight at the end of the time period, so it isn't all bad.

Tim
 
If you check out the "division" files in your CORE HOI2 directory, you'll see that air units in general have an "upgrade time factor" of 0.5 and an "upgrade cost factor" of 1.0. I interpret this to mean that it costs as much to upgrade them as to build them, but the upgrade occurs twice as fast as new construction, for a net cost of 50%. However, if you do two or more upgrades, it's more expensive than building new air units from scratch (especially when support costs are factored in).

Most other unit types (infantry, armor, brigades, etc) have an "upgrade cost factor" of 0.05, which is twenty times less than that for air units. This imbalance seems too large to me. I'll probably customize my version of CORE so that air units have the same time and cost factors as armor (2 and 0.05, respectively; this will make air upgrades take four times as long as they do now, but their overall cost will drop by a factor of five). An armored division and a fighter squadron both fielded roughly equivalent numbers of expensive combat vehicles; there's no reason armor should be so cheap by comparison.
 
Great to hear, Baylox. Just in case you've overlooked it, don't forget CAG's. They currently have the same 0.5/1.0 cost as TAC, CAS, FTR, etc. Whatever new values you give the independent squadrons should probably apply to CAG's as well.
 
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