HOI4 Dev Diary - Combat and Stats changes

[Shaka of Carthage]

Or would changing how organization is calculated within units salvage the mechanic? (and fix a lot of other problems in the process

Yes. To me that means giving ORG to Artillery and increasing Armor ORG.

 

[debozewolf]

I love the fact they are shacking up combat widths. Many are going to have to kill their darlings. Darling division set ups, that is. Back to the drawing board and contemplate new division designs and how and where to use them.
Unrelated, I also hope developers would spend some time and love on artillery. At the moment I do not see the benefit to invest in rocket artillery. Lost time on research and production do not weigh up against any possible gains. I hope this will change in the future.

 

[safe-keeper]

I'm seeing a fair bit of Italian and Russian officers in these screenshots. I smell new focus trees.

Sorry, but the devs have confirmed Italy is not getting a new focus...

Then again, what do I know. They might've changed their mind for all I know, or maybe decided to throw Italy a bone and give them some content in some form or another.

 

[RedTemplar]

Sorry, but the devs have confirmed Italy is not getting a new focus...

Then again, what do I know. They might've changed their mind for all I know, or maybe decided to throw Italy a bone and give them some content in some form or another.

They did? Where was that? I must have missed it.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD Podcat, and the extra info Bobby and Jamor All sorts of exciting stuff, and the changes sound like they'll move the land game (as unimportant as it is, but I guess it's important for the troops to have something to do after the ships have moved them there ) forward in a very positive way Best of luck with tweaking and testing.

But at the same time, smaller countries should now be able to specialize their division width to suit their home terrain more appropriately.

I know it's difficult and possibly impossible, but if it were feasible to make it so that it didn't matter what the combat width was relative to terrain, that'd be the gold standard to aim to. Small countries specialising their units by focussing on battalions that have better terrain bonuses in their home terrain makes a lot of sense, but combat-width division design optimisation feels like an artifact of gameplay mechanics, rather than something that makes one feel like they're playing a GSG set in the WW2 period.

I'm no expert on the land mechanics as they stand (and with the standard "please ignore any silliness" - which in this case it could well be!), but as a (somewhat radical) alternative to mild overstacking penalties (and with changes to the way defense works - which as well noted in the DD is a bit wonky relative to the way attack works), what about something like:

• No overstacking or overstacking penalties, but rather pro-rataing down the attack stats of divisions that are only partially in the battle - basically, the combat width can only ever be the max for that terrain.
• Doing away with the attack > defense mechanic at the whole of the division level, and replacing it with maybe having defence have a proportional impact in reducing the amount of damage done that's done in a diminishing marginal returns-style calculation. The binary nature of the defense stat in battles is one of the oddest elements of land combat - it's very unintuitive (relative to actual land combat during the period, as best I understand it), and any impact it has on division design is very 'meta' and not immersive. Even if it's not changed in this way, I'd argue strongly for changing it to make it more meaningful (ie, the defense stat should matter for every battle).
• So, for example, if defense is half of attack, then the amount of damage done is reduced by 25 per cent. If defense is a quarter of attack, it's reduced by 20 per cent, if it's ten per cent of attack then a 15 per cent reduction, five percent then ten per cent reduction (however the curve would work out). In the other direction, if attack = defense, then maybe a 40 per cent reduction, and if attack is twice defense, then maybe a 60 per cent reduction (with an upper limit of say 75 per cent - so there's always some damage done).

It's not perfect (brain's a bit woolly now) - but I'd hope to see the defense stat made more broadly relevant and immersive in any shake-up of the combat mechanics. At the moment, I ignore it, and the things that boost defence are usually last options I'll take, as attack is far better and more reliable.

First of all we are weighting the targeting towards wider divisions being more likely targets and also when picking targets to try and match it to have wider divisions spread damage over smaller rather than always concentrating it. They will probably still hit harder, but combined with width changes and other downsides of larger divisions it should make it less clear cut.

Another angle could be to take the defence of each side, and then average it over the width of that side, so the defence values that are used as the "average defence/width" - that way, if one side has more width than the other, then they can overwhelm the defence, but if the difference is just division structure, then it will make no difference at all (and that larger divisions hit harder than multiple small divisions of the same total width, due to the defence mechanic, doesn't really make a lot of sense, as best I can tell).

With the tank designer coming we wanted to make it feel like your investments in upgrades were always worth it, so we are changing armor and piercing to have more gradual effects.

Gradual is good, really like this improvement Very plausible too, particularly when looking at these things at the strategic (or even tactical) level - the war wasn't a set of contests of people setting up careful ballistics tests at set angles, velocities and ranges

At the end of combat units with better reliability will be able to get back a certain amount of tanks etc to simulate that simple more reliable constructions would work better for battlefield repair and be less fragile when taking damage.

This is super-cool, super-historically plausible and very immersive - love it

It's a very tough DD for a ship pic (I fear it will be a tough expansion!) - but here's a tank and a truck leaving a landing craft, on their way to ground combat - that's still on-topic, just

 

[safe-keeper]

They did? Where was that? I must have missed it.

Somewhere in the DD on their plans for the patch and Barbarossa, IIRC. Look through the thread with "show only dev replies" turned on and you should find it.

 

[Sourlol]

tanks weren't perfectly armoured boxes on all sides btw

Obviously.
But a 7.62mm round isn’t piercing the front, back, top or side armor. It simply can’t pierce the tank.

there’s a caliber that can begin to pierce the thinnest armors of the tank, and there is a caliber that can’t even do that. There are ways to kill a tank without piercing it, so you do get some ability to kill them in game even without piercing. But again, if you can’t even pierce the rear armor—you can’t pierce.

 

[minimouse007]

• Doing away with the attack > defense mechanic at the whole of the division level, and replacing it with maybe having defence have a proportional impact in reducing the amount of damage done that's done in a diminishing marginal returns-style calculation. The binary nature of the defense stat in battles is one of the oddest elements of land combat - it's very unintuitive (relative to actual land combat during the period, as best I understand it), and any impact it has on division design is very 'meta' and not immersive. Even if it's not changed in this way, I'd argue strongly for changing it to make it more meaningful (ie, the defense stat should matter for every battle).

tbh yes, currently the stats don't really make much sense, if you consider it 1vs1 division fights, due to fights at such scale including a lot of counterattacks and stuff. hoi4 stats come from a vision of a 100 guys fighting another 100 in a 10 min assault. But then you have the 20k mass assault divisions............. so yeah. I also think people understand the armour/piercing mechanics a lot sooner due to them making a lot more sense, not like the gamey defense, despite defense being quite simple.

 

[X-town Shocker]

Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary! Today is about various changes that affect combat and units. With the Barbarossa update we want to shake up the meta a bit and also change a few stats and other aspects to make using the tank designer more interesting and rewarding.

High Command bonus changes
For a long time now unit bonuses from high command have confused people. Most expect that they apply to battalions, when in fact they apply only if their target unit type was “the majority type”, which was basically a weighted type count. They also could overlap, so infantry, mountaineers and artillery would apply to the same units letting you stack stuff in ways that was never intended and quite unintuitive.

View attachment 714880

This system has now changed, and divisions get bonuses based on their composition, this is a straight up ratio based on the number of non-support battalions of each type, so a 2x artillery 3x infantry division will be 40% artillery 60% infantry.
Battalions are always classified as a single type for this (even though some are scripted with multiple types) based on this priority:
cavalry > armor > artillery > motorized > mechanized > infantry

The exceptions being rocket & special forces, which both act as an addition, so if the 3 infantry divisions in the example above were mountain units, then the division would also be 60% special forces and if the 2 artillery are nebelwerfers it'd also be 40% rocket

When counting the battalions of armies (ie when we have an actual unit and not only a division template), battalions that lack equipment will count as less, so a Light Tank battalion with only half it's tanks will count as 0.5 battalions (and not count at all if without tanks). The total sum of the compositions will still end up 100% (unless every battalion is without equipment).

View attachment 714881

To make it easier to see this we now have an indicator in the division windows showing the breakdown.

Combat Width
As a part of our efforts to shake up the 40/20 width meta, we have made changes to the combat width of province terrain. Province widths now range from 75 to 96. Plains have a new base combat width of 90, while Mountains have a new combat width of 75. Most of these widths will not divide into each other easily, hopefully moving the ideal width away from multiples of 10.

Urban provinces are now the “widest” with a width of 96. But this does not mean they will be the easiest provinces to overwhelm. Mountains, marshes, and urban provinces now have reinforcement widths of ⅓ of province width instead of ½. This should hopefully give these provinces a slight defensive buff, while allowing us to open up pushing power in the more open tiles.


View attachment 714882

In conjunction with these changes, we have also been looking at reducing the overstacking penalty. We hope that this will alleviate some of the need to have divisions that are the perfect width for a given province. But at the same time, smaller countries should now be able to specialize their division width to suit their home terrain more appropriately.

Breakdown (numbers not final etc etc)

• Plains
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Desert
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Forest
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Jungle
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Hills
  • Standard 80
  • Reinforce 40
• Marsh
  • Standard 78
  • Reinforce 26
• Urban
  • Standard 96
  • Reinforce.32
• Mountain
  • Standard 75
  • Reinforce 25

One of the major things that make larger divisions like 40 width armor hit disproportionally harder than smaller ones is also how targeting and damage works inside combat in relation to the enemies defense. Essentially the larger divisions make more efficient use of concentrated damage as it punches through defense. To solve this we are doing a few things. First of all we are weighting the targeting towards wider divisions being more likely targets and also when picking targets to try and match it to have wider divisions spread damage over smaller rather than always concentrating it. They will probably still hit harder, but combined with width changes and other downsides of larger divisions it should make it less clear cut.
However, this part isn’t quite done yet though so I’ll cover it again in more detail in one of the “bag of tricks” diaries in the future when i see how it pans out, but I figured it needed to be mentioned now That said though, to wet your appetites here is a little tease from a debug mapmode in development...
View attachment 714920

Armor and Piercing
Currently the effects of having stronger armor than the enemy can pierce, or being able to pierce an enemies armor are binary and give fixed bonuses. This meant that there wasn't really any benefit to have more armor than you needed to stop the enemies piercing, and also that being a single point of piercing under enemy armor was just as bad as having no piercing. So things were quite binary. With the tank designer coming we wanted to make it feel like your investments in upgrades were always worth it, so we are changing armor and piercing to have more gradual effects.

Armor > Piercing

• Unit takes half damage (as it currently works)

Armor < Piercing and Amor > 0.75 * Piercing

• Take damage between half damage to normal damage by difference in value

Armor < 0.75 * Piercing

• The unit takes normal damage

Lets break this down with an example:

• A panzer division has an armor value of 52
• Its being attacked by an infantry division with some anti-tank guns. Their piercing is 60
• If this was the old system this armor would be worthless and not reduce damage at all
• Now because its close enough (between 60 and 45), so you get roughly half of the normal effect around 25% reduction of damage.

Reliability
For the tank designer it was important that reliability was more impactful if it was to be a good tradeoff with other aspects of design, so we needed to change it up (lest @CraniumMuppets 0% reliability tank monsters would take over the world). Now it will not just affect rate of loss in attrition but various other aspects:

• Reliability affects losses from attrition like before
• Reliability now affects org regain when moving, and also makes any weather related org effects more impactful when low
• Lower reliability scales up all impacts from weather so if facing extreme weather a unit with low reliability equipment will suffer more of those weather effects
• At the end of combat units with better reliability will be able to get back a certain amount of tanks etc to simulate that simple more reliable constructions would work better for battlefield repair and be less fragile when taking damage. So it's a bit like capturing enemy equipment in combat - but in reverse

View attachment 714885

Our goal is that this creates interesting tradeoffs when designing equipment and will make you have to consider if its worth switching a strategy focused on speed and firepower towards reliability when operating in bad weather and tough areas like the Russian winter or in northern africa or jungles.

Oh, and I figured now might be a good time to point out that there will be a future diary on weather changes and other cool related stuff, so these changes aren't completely in isolation. But one step at a time

But before we go, a few words about the studio...

Studio Gold
Hello everyone, my name is Thomas, but perhaps better known as @Besuchov here

As you saw here we have recently reorganized ourselves a little, moving from a big centralized Stockholm studio to splitting ourselves into Red, Green and Gold. This is mainly an internal org shift to make sure we keep our growing organization firmly focused around making good games. You shouldn't notice too many differences in the short term, we are still PDS making GSG on the Clausewitz engine, but it does mean that we can align each studio to the particular games. Since you will hear the studio names every once in a while, I just wanted to say who I am and what the studio is responsible for.

My role is Studio Manager, which means I'm accountable for the long term success of Studio Gold and working with things like management, staffing, and long term plans. Studio Gold has as its main focus Hearts of Iron (but we may or may not have some secret other stuff as well). Directly making the games though, that's still the job of Podcat and the team, but I intend to do my best to create an environment where we have the best chances to make great games together.

For me this is coming full circle at Paradox. I started as a programmer in 2004 and one of my first tasks was to work on Hearts of Iron 2. Since then I've done various things including being lead programmer for Hearts of Iron 3 (and Victoria 2), Project Lead for EU4 and more recently Studio Manager for PDS. Next to EU, HOI is my favorite game and I'm delighted to be back in a place where I can focus on fewer games and where that game is Hearts of Iron. You will see more of me in the future even though I will mostly take a backseat to the team working on the game.

That’s all, see you all again next week for more dev diary goodness!

I've always wondered what a Podcat was so I googled it and this was the first image.

Is this what you had in mind when you created your name?

 

[minimouse007]

Obviously.
But a 7.62mm round isn’t piercing the front, back, top or side armor. It simply can’t pierce the tank.

there’s a caliber that can begin to pierce the thinnest armors of the tank, and there is a caliber that can’t even do that. There are ways to kill a tank without piercing it, so you do get some ability to kill them in game even without piercing. But again, if you can’t even pierce the rear armor—you can’t pierce.

yeah, but some tanks have as little as 12-15-20 mm of butt armour, while having 80-100 on the front, such as the sherman
this means, that an old at rifle can penetrate 'dat ass' , a very simple, yet common weapon, while the front needs at least a 45-50mm at gun, and even then sometimes apcr shells. the difference in cost and technology for said weapons is too large to ignore. yet, without the at rifle, the infantry can't deal with a sherman, only with explosives. so your argument is true only for a very-very few occasions

 

[Hoi Neuling]

Thanks for the cool Infos about that. Hope the refit works correctly in the Public Version.

 

[Balesir]

yeah, but some tanks have as little as 12-15-20 mm of butt armour, while having 80-100 on the front, such as the sherman
this means, that an old at rifle can penetrate 'dat ass' , a very simple, yet common weapon, while the front needs at least a 45-50mm at gun, and even then sometimes apcr shells. the difference in cost and technology for said weapons is too large to ignore. yet, without the at rifle, the infantry can't deal with a sherman, only with explosives. so your argument is true only for a very-very few occasions

In addition to which, that AT rifle can generally break a track or possibly even jam a turret without ever penetrating any of the armour at all...

 

[safe-keeper]

I've always wondered what a Podcat was so I googled it and this was the first image.View attachment 715321
Is this what you had in mind when you created your name?

 

[ThaHoward]

Militia just use underequipped and poorly trained inf. Assault guns, you can design now. Jägers are just 6 inf battalions (oh my, reduced width. Almost as if it can be specialized). Gebirgsjäger same, only with mountaineers. Skitroopers, mountain battalions or just your average Norwegian, Finnish or Siberian conscript that do not warrant special battalion.

@Znail and @goodcigar what do you disagree with here? I can't see the error in the statement, and if it is one please elaborate. Ironically, Shaka of Carthage the user that was tagged as the expert on historical division design agreed to the post, it really can't be that far off - and goodcigar I suppose shaka then did give you an answer to your post by agreeing with me.

 

[Shaka of Carthage]

Podcat

Podcat after using the Tank Designer.

 

[Shaka of Carthage]

@Znail and @goodcigar what do you disagree with here? I can't see the error in the statement, and if it is one please elaborate. Ironically, Shaka of Carthage the user that was tagged as the expert on historical division design agreed to the post, it really can't be that far off - and goodcigar I suppose shaka then did give you an answer to your post by agreeing with me.

Jeez guys. If we want to split hairs, lets make another thread for that.

I'd rather make fun of Podcat.

 

[X-town Shocker]

Podcat
View attachment 715344

Podcat after using the Tan Designer.
View attachment 715346

More podcats

 

[ThaHoward]

Jeez guys. If we want to split hairs, lets make another thread for that.

I'd rather make fun of Podcat.

Good point, was merely interested in what they disagreed with, if there was something I had misunderstood or did not know.

 

[safe-keeper]

Militia just use underequipped and poorly trained inf. Assault guns, you can design now. Jägers are just 6 inf battalions (oh my, reduced width. Almost as if it can be specialized). Gebirgsjäger same, only with mountaineers. Skitroopers, mountain battalions or just your average Norwegian, Finnish or Siberian conscript that do not warrant special battalion.

Ski troops are an interesting one, and for gameplay's sake, I suppose that since the Dutch got bicycle infantry and some countries get Coastal Defense Ships, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nordics (and perhaps Russians) got specialized ski infantry battalions, but generally, I assume that any infantry deployed in snowy regions would be issued skis or snow shoes. So realistically, I suppose a national spirit or some sort of acclimatisation stat would be more appropriate.

 

[ThaHoward]

Ski troops are an interesting one, and for gameplay's sake, I suppose that since the Dutch got bicycle infantry and some countries get Coastal Defense Ships, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nordics (and perhaps Russians) got specialized ski infantry battalions, but generally, I assume that any infantry deployed in snowy regions would be issued skis or snow shoes. So realistically, I suppose a national spirit or some sort of acclimatisation stat would be more appropriate.

Agreed. National spirits or bonuses to acclimation would be a better way to portray some nations' ski proficiency rather than special units. I.e Norwegians are better at skiing and use it in the military due to "being born with skis" and the lack of infrastructure, long winters, and landscape make it necessary as a way to move around. They simply have skis since they have used it since they are children and it is a good way to move around the winter landscape with. German and American ski units on the other hand (Gerbirgsjäger, Skijäger, and Mountaineers) are specialized in skiing, among other things, but they are already represented as the mountaineers.