- Dec 14, 1999
- 19.094
- 74.470
Hello, and welcome to the fifth chapter of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary. We’ve had yet another busy week, developing lots of interesting things for the game. Today we’ll talk about basics of the land combat system in HoI3.
Land combat, in our opinion, forms the centrepiece of Hearts of Iron 3; the whole game revolves around your ability to take provinces from other countries. Thus combat was an area we put a lot of thought into and the basic system was one of the first game features we coded in. Our overall goal was to take what was an already good combat system and make it better.
First up, move is still attack. It worked in Hearts of Iron 2 and we felt no reason to change to this basic system. However what we have done is that if you are fighting you suffer a movement penalty. Which can be increased or decreased according to combat events. Now using small units to try and delay an enemy is an option. However due to the unpredictability of combat you don’t know in advance how successful they will be.
The next thing we looked at was the legendary super stack, and we made sure that now it is no longer any guarantee to success, not to say it might not have its place. What we have added is a maximum attack frontage, per attacking province, you can imagine it feeling a bit like the EU3 or EU:Rome battle screen. There is now only a finite number of units that can attack or defend on a single province border. First, as you no doubt remember, we actually have several sizes of provinces. We have assumed that all provinces are the same for attack frontage purposes. We justify this assumption on the grounds that these large provinces are usually in the places in the world that are remote and have hostile terrain so even though the borders are technically larger the terrain is such that you cannot use this extra space to bring more units into combat.
So what does this mean, first off if you cannot fill your whole frontage you suffer a force to space ratio penalty. From the point of view of an attacker the more provinces you attack from the more likely you are to stretch the defenders and force them to thin out their lines. This means that multiple attacks are good, but you can’t just throw in a single division and pick up a nice bonus, you really need to attack with numbers on each axis.
The next question is how much space does a unit take up? Well this depends on the unit composition of the division, the more brigades a division has the more frontage it will take up. It also depends on doctrines. For example the Blitzkrieg path gives you the ability to narrow the frontage of armoured units, making them more effective. Finally terrain also affects the frontage, when crossing a river or making a seaborne landing it is much harder to bring your massed troops to bear as compared to nice open terrain.
Onto the next question, what happens to the extra units? They sit in reserve, should a unit drop out of the front lines there is a chance, modified by things like doctrines, that it will join the combat. Should you run out of troops on the front line then regardless of the number of reserves you may have your troops still has to retreat.
To sum up a large stack is no guarantee of victory, not all these units will be able to fight and there is a chance that not all of them will even get a chance to fight. Combat should become much more unpredictable, and quality should be as important as quantity. You might blitz your enemy or you might end up in a grinding attritional fight that drags on, the goal is to remove the I win option out of combat and make your strategy much more important than the size of the stacks, because the people on the home front want victory not super stacks.
Here is a screenshot of the mighty Swedish army, all ready to invade the Norwegian forces, to reunite them, in the utterly historical war of 1936.
Land combat, in our opinion, forms the centrepiece of Hearts of Iron 3; the whole game revolves around your ability to take provinces from other countries. Thus combat was an area we put a lot of thought into and the basic system was one of the first game features we coded in. Our overall goal was to take what was an already good combat system and make it better.
First up, move is still attack. It worked in Hearts of Iron 2 and we felt no reason to change to this basic system. However what we have done is that if you are fighting you suffer a movement penalty. Which can be increased or decreased according to combat events. Now using small units to try and delay an enemy is an option. However due to the unpredictability of combat you don’t know in advance how successful they will be.
The next thing we looked at was the legendary super stack, and we made sure that now it is no longer any guarantee to success, not to say it might not have its place. What we have added is a maximum attack frontage, per attacking province, you can imagine it feeling a bit like the EU3 or EU:Rome battle screen. There is now only a finite number of units that can attack or defend on a single province border. First, as you no doubt remember, we actually have several sizes of provinces. We have assumed that all provinces are the same for attack frontage purposes. We justify this assumption on the grounds that these large provinces are usually in the places in the world that are remote and have hostile terrain so even though the borders are technically larger the terrain is such that you cannot use this extra space to bring more units into combat.
So what does this mean, first off if you cannot fill your whole frontage you suffer a force to space ratio penalty. From the point of view of an attacker the more provinces you attack from the more likely you are to stretch the defenders and force them to thin out their lines. This means that multiple attacks are good, but you can’t just throw in a single division and pick up a nice bonus, you really need to attack with numbers on each axis.
The next question is how much space does a unit take up? Well this depends on the unit composition of the division, the more brigades a division has the more frontage it will take up. It also depends on doctrines. For example the Blitzkrieg path gives you the ability to narrow the frontage of armoured units, making them more effective. Finally terrain also affects the frontage, when crossing a river or making a seaborne landing it is much harder to bring your massed troops to bear as compared to nice open terrain.
Onto the next question, what happens to the extra units? They sit in reserve, should a unit drop out of the front lines there is a chance, modified by things like doctrines, that it will join the combat. Should you run out of troops on the front line then regardless of the number of reserves you may have your troops still has to retreat.
To sum up a large stack is no guarantee of victory, not all these units will be able to fight and there is a chance that not all of them will even get a chance to fight. Combat should become much more unpredictable, and quality should be as important as quantity. You might blitz your enemy or you might end up in a grinding attritional fight that drags on, the goal is to remove the I win option out of combat and make your strategy much more important than the size of the stacks, because the people on the home front want victory not super stacks.
Here is a screenshot of the mighty Swedish army, all ready to invade the Norwegian forces, to reunite them, in the utterly historical war of 1936.
Nice to see it progressing along and the land combat modifications look cool enough.
