Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

Development Diary #3 - 29nd of October 2008

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Show only dev responses
Darth Tracid said:
well....strong armour + huge gun = very heavy = most certainly undermotorized = not high speed

(this is in reality, no in-game reference)
Click to expand...

Darth is close but wrong. You are forgetting the 5th variable, IC cost.

You can design a heavy armored, heavy weapon, fast and reliable tank but it won't be cheap. At constant IC cost, you will have to trade off some stats for others, or choose how to allocate your limited researc.
 
dpdlc said:
Darth is close but wrong. You are forgetting the 5th variable, IC cost.

You can design a heavy armored, heavy weapon, fast and reliable tank but it won't be cheap. At constant IC cost, you will have to trade off some stats for others, or choose how to allocate your limited researc.
Click to expand...

well that´s also true.
but historically speaking, all heavy tanks in the game period were underpowered, and SERIOUSLY so. I don´t think it´s very realistic to overcome that. (although that doesn´t have to mean it won´t be possible at outrageous IC cost).
 
TheLand said:
This is true: ideally a unit's combat strength would be reduced while it was being upgraded.

However that's another level of micromanagement ...
Click to expand...

You could have it that units lose some XP points when they are given new equipment.

Infantry Equipment like Rifles and AT might be -5%
But new tanks might be -15% for the affected subunit.

If it's a percentage thing, and you have new units starting at -5 or -10 XP, then giving new equipment won't make them less Veteran.

*thinking* Now if you can have different types of tanks. Then one would assume you'd be able to have different types of infantry platoons as well. Light and manouverable, Heavy (semi-motorized) or small (less manpower usage)

As for:
Johan said:
A German Infantry Brigade with
- Mauser Karabiner Model 1898 (upgrading to 'Mauser Karabiner Kar 98k' (23%))
- Panzerfaust 30
- Maschinengewehr Modell 34 (upgrading to 'Maschinengewehr Modell 42' (2%))
Click to expand...

As long as it's not just weapons being upgraded.

A German Support Brigade with
- Horses (upgrading to '3t Opel Blitz' (12%))
- Early Field Hospital (upgrading to 'Basic Field Hospital' (68%))
- Early Repair Shop (upgrading to 'Basic Repair Shop' (98%))

And then you have doctrines that adjust the whole brigade, just as in HOI2.
 
Darth Tracid said:
well....strong armour + huge gun = very heavy = most certainly undermotorized = not high speed

(this is in reality, no in-game reference)
Click to expand...

Hm the Panther was almost invincible it had sufficient speed excellant armor and gun and was more reliable than any other german tank design so far.It would be quite a waste if paradox makes characteristics slider like(one istead of the other).There are military designs in which there were made no compromise this resulted of course in high cost but the fact that you would have a clearly invinsible division of something is tempting. :)
 
patriot1 said:
Hm the Panther was almost invincible it had sufficient speed excellant armor and gun and was more reliable than any other german tank design so far.It would be quite a waste if paradox makes characteristics slider like(one istead of the other).There are military designs in which there were made no compromise this resulted of course in high cost but the fact that you would have a clearly invinsible division of something is tempting. :)
Click to expand...


well it all has to balanced, otherwise players will only build the best all the time making the system useless.
 
patriot1 said:
Hm the Panther was almost invincible it had sufficient speed excellant armor and gun and was more reliable than any other german tank design so far.It would be quite a waste if paradox makes characteristics slider like(one istead of the other).There are military designs in which there were made no compromise this resulted of course in high cost but the fact that you would have a clearly invinsible division of something is tempting. :)
Click to expand...

But it was also staggeringly expensive and hard to crew and repair :)
 
Indeed. Do you want 1 Division with state of the art, well engineered and well trained Panthers. Or do you take 4-5 Divisions of T-34's with reasonably okey engineering, crewed by conscripted farmers?

I'd go with a 4-5 Divisions of Volksturm Panzers to be honest (As long as they can punch through the skin of a T-34)... well, no probably the elite Panther division if Manpower is a problem.
 
Earl Uhtred said:
But it was also staggeringly expensive and hard to crew and repair :)
Click to expand...

Indeed. It's possible to get out of most design problems by accepting a higher overall size and cost.

Of course there is a limit to how far this is plausible. Tanks, for instance, have to be small enough to fit onto a train flat-loader, drive under a road-bridge. So indefinite size increases are not viable without affecting manouverability.

For ships, the limit is the width and depth of various straits and canals (though this limit was not reached in practice in WWII).
 
Why limit oneself to just one tank type in an armoured division? I'd go with a core of Panthers, supported by about twice to thrice as many T-34s and a regiment of motorised infantry... plus some auxiliaries like artillery, tank destroyers and AA.

I really hope just stacking tanks without proper support/auxiliaries in a division will come with a realistic efficiency loss in HoI3.
 
Hansag said:
I'd go with a 4-5 Divisions of Volksturm Panzers to be honest (As long as they can punch through the skin of a T-34)... well, no probably the elite Panther division if Manpower is a problem.
Click to expand...

Panzerfausts and bicycles for everybody :) If it comes to using Volkssturm tank crews, you are probably going to be having oil shortages anyway.
 
TheLand said:
You could always take the view that this was a cunning move to represent the additional difficulty of moving spare aircraft parts long distances.

Or, you could say it's a bug. I know whihc side I'm on. ;)
Click to expand...
Not a bug exactly, but an intentional design element that wasn't thought through very well and doesn't work.
 
I like the flexibility of the new system but I'm not sure why you can't have most of its advantages and tech teams.

Why not have tech teams that gain experience and the occasional new speciality as they research things, especially things that push the limits of what they could previously? You could have nationwide modifiers based on production and such, while still being able to assign specific teams (themselves evolving, rather than static, entities) to specific aspects like the much-discussed tank reliability. This keeps and even enhances the flavour and the appealing RPG-like aspects of the existing system while still allowing all, or nearly all, the benefits of the new one, if I've understood the latter correctly.

What, if anything, am I missing here?
 
Jeffh, how would you like to handle multiple techteams working on different aspects/components of a new technology?
I think the new, more abstract, system will actually yield a better historical flavour than, say, having a nuclear physicist researching carrier doctrines because he's one's country's only high-skill tech team.

TheLand, I read somewhere that the US designed carriers to be the maximum size able to pass through the Panama Canal, but I don't remember where.
 
Wobbler said:
TheLand, I read somewhere that the US designed carriers to be the maximum size able to pass through the Panama Canal, but I don't remember where.
Click to expand...

Can't remember whether that is true of their WWII designs. If so, there was evidently plenty of room to expand post-war.

The binding constraint on the USA, if I remember rightly, was the size of the flaoting dry-docks they could deploy. Similarly for Britain, the constraint was the docks and drydocks in their key bases.

The Yamato-class battleships (again IIRC) were designed based on the largest battleship the USA could plausibly build to go through Panama, and then adding a bit...
 
Wobbler said:
Jeffh, how would you like to handle multiple techteams working on different aspects/components of a new technology?
Click to expand...
Combine all their specialities, effective skill level slightly higher than the best skill level of any individual team involved, experience split between them, and of course, you have to pay all their salaries.

That's just me, an amateur game designer and full-time grad student, musing about this one afternoon; I'm not paid to do this stuff. That does mean there could be further issues I'm overlooking, but it also means if I could come up with that answer more or less on the spur of the moment, Paradox, which from what I've seen so far has some crack designers, should be able to think up the same or better stuff with relative ease.
I think the new, more abstract, system will actually yield a better historical flavour than, say, having a nuclear physicist researching carrier doctrines because he's one's country's only high-skill tech team.
Click to expand...
Okay, to some extent I agree. There are lots of ways to make that a bad idea, though. For one thing, you could make it extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that a team would ever pick up new specialities that didn't bear some obvious relationship to their starting ones, or make some teams (mostly those that represent one really smart guy and his grad students and hirelings rather than a corporate entity or university) "specialists" with a much lower effective skill level outside some fairly narrow field, if you don't think the existing speciality system already captures this well (and it seems to me that specialities are far more relevant than skill levels in the existing system).

EDIT: Or you could just make sure there's always something attractive within his speciality for that physicist to do, of course.
 
Last edited:
patriot1 said:
Hm the Panther was almost invincible it had sufficient speed excellant armor and gun and was more reliable than any other german tank design so far.It would be quite a waste if paradox makes characteristics slider like(one istead of the other).There are military designs in which there were made no compromise this resulted of course in high cost but the fact that you would have a clearly invinsible division of something is tempting. :)
Click to expand...

the Panthers started to die after Pershings and IS2s appeared. Of course Pershings come very late to the war though.


not to say T34-85 had fairly good chance of killing any axis tanks.
 
henryjai said:
the Panthers started to die after Pershings and IS2s appeared. Of course Pershings come very late to the war though.


not to say T34-85 had fairly good chance of killing any axis tanks.
Click to expand...

The Pershings and IS2s were only equal i would say, and only because the lack of proper materials in the last days was so great.

The T34-85 on the other was a superb tank indeed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back