Things are looking good for the upcoming beta release of our 1.2 patch, and I have nothing to important on my todolist, so it is the perfect opportunity for another Dev Diary.
This time I want to tell you a bit more about our ideas behind one of the more important features of Darkest Hour.
Buildtimes and directly related to it the upgrade and reinforcement time/cost.
BUILDING DIVISIONS
First, what you must understand is that production times do not represent just the build time for most units.
Ships are handled the way most of you would expect, historically it took X days to build this and that ship class, so we used those times as the production time in the game. Simple and straight forward.
But other unit types in the game are another story.
Most people assume that the creation of an Infantry Division involves mostly:
- Train 16000 soldiers
- Build 16000 sets of equipment
- Mix both together and be done
So all in all that can't really take that long, perhaps 3-4 months, right?
Wrong, it isn't simply a question of providing the basic building blocks, but also putting everything together properly and getting it to work as intended. An untrained mob without the proper organization may work on paper, but in reality you only end up feeding men to the meat grinder.
Most of the following numbers are based on the WW2 US Handbook "The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops" and similiar documents of the Wehrmacht. The US Handbook is avaiable online for those of you who are interested in the topic.
Looking at US Division in 1942 shows us the following reality (which is also pretty close to german numbers)
A Division is more then just the sum of its parts, officer selection and preparation of the internal organisation started roughly 3 1/2 months before the first enlisted man even arrived for training.
Afterwards rigorous training followed to get the the whole unit combat ready.
17 weeks of basic training
13 weeks of unit training
14 weeks of combined arms training
8 weeks of final review and finishing up of specialized elements
That's almost 16 months to create a Division from the ground up. Even considering shortcuts during the height of war you can't cut too many corners if you want to keep an efficient fighting force.
Even reducing the basic training to 15 weeks proved to be very problematic later in the war and was quickly reverted.
As a curious little sidefact, suprisingly for most people, it actually took longer to train an infantry soldier in comparison to a pilot or other specialist.
Due to the generalized aproach of the GI Training it took about 18 weeks, where the GI would learn everything from rifle training, heavy weapons to simple artillery- and comwork.
While a pilot would finish his training after only 10 weeks.
We reduced the times a bit for gameplay reasons, but the essence you should remember from this paragraph is the following:
This is where we stand with the version of DH you already have.
While we were happy with the buildtimes it caused problems with extreme reinforce and upgrade times.
The simple solution here is of course to reduce the the time/cost of it, which we did in the initial release... but we don't usually go for the easy workaround.
So for this patch we we went a step further.
REINFORCING DIVISIONS
Reinforcing an Infantry Division during WW2 was for the most part a pretty simple and straight foward process.
GIs would go through their basic training (17-19 weeks), get some basic equipment and be shipped to the current theatre of operation, where they received more "on-the-job" training with their units.
It was also pretty cheap compared to the Division creation. After all only 15% original cost of an Infantry Division are equipment costs.
So nothing really suprising to tell you.
Full reinforcement of an Infantry Division takes from now on roughly 1/3 of the time and costs 1/2 of a new Division.
You might have noticed that I talk about Infantry Divisions here, things look different for other unit types.
There were huge logistical/production differences when it comes to different kinds of units, you can push a soldier through general training and he is ready to go.
You can even build planes in a few days, but tanks and ships took time, lots and lots of time, germany did build 10-15 airwings in the same time it took them to equip one tank division.
Simply put we can group units in three classes.
For the first two classes we have manpower replacement as bottleneck:
Generalistic man depended Units:
- most infantry variations
- gets reinforced in ~18 weeks, as soon as the recruits come out of training.
~15% cost of a new unit
Specialized man dependend Units:
- Airplanes wings
- Naval infantry
- gets reinforced in ~10 weeks worstcase, as soon as the recruits come out of training.
~20% cost of a new unit
For the third class we have equipment replacement as bottleneck:
Equipment dependend Units:
- Tanks
- Ships
- Modern planes
- reinforce times of 40-50 weeks almost 3/4 time of new creation
~30% cost of a new unit
So all this boils down to:
UPGRADING DIVISIONS
The upgrade process follows the same pattern as reinforcement.
It is fast and easy to upgrade Infantry and massproduced equipment, even a bit faster then reinforcing them.
But:
Also with the increased cost and time involved in keeping you armored Divisions in the fight, a fundamental flaw of the original upgrade system became obvious.
While a certain portion of reinforcement troops would be equipped with salvaged equipment, it doesn't make sense that the replacements fresh from the factory were still outdated.
So from now on half of your reinforcement troops come with fresh shiny new equipment..
Which means ingame, that when you reinforce an outdated unit by 10% you also upgrade it by 5% without additional costs.
You can now also define upgrade and reinforce behaviour for each model indivdually in the unit files.
I hope you will enjoy the results.
This time I want to tell you a bit more about our ideas behind one of the more important features of Darkest Hour.
Buildtimes and directly related to it the upgrade and reinforcement time/cost.
BUILDING DIVISIONS
First, what you must understand is that production times do not represent just the build time for most units.
Ships are handled the way most of you would expect, historically it took X days to build this and that ship class, so we used those times as the production time in the game. Simple and straight forward.
But other unit types in the game are another story.
Most people assume that the creation of an Infantry Division involves mostly:
- Train 16000 soldiers
- Build 16000 sets of equipment
- Mix both together and be done
So all in all that can't really take that long, perhaps 3-4 months, right?
Wrong, it isn't simply a question of providing the basic building blocks, but also putting everything together properly and getting it to work as intended. An untrained mob without the proper organization may work on paper, but in reality you only end up feeding men to the meat grinder.
Most of the following numbers are based on the WW2 US Handbook "The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops" and similiar documents of the Wehrmacht. The US Handbook is avaiable online for those of you who are interested in the topic.
Looking at US Division in 1942 shows us the following reality (which is also pretty close to german numbers)
A Division is more then just the sum of its parts, officer selection and preparation of the internal organisation started roughly 3 1/2 months before the first enlisted man even arrived for training.
Afterwards rigorous training followed to get the the whole unit combat ready.
17 weeks of basic training
13 weeks of unit training
14 weeks of combined arms training
8 weeks of final review and finishing up of specialized elements
That's almost 16 months to create a Division from the ground up. Even considering shortcuts during the height of war you can't cut too many corners if you want to keep an efficient fighting force.
Even reducing the basic training to 15 weeks proved to be very problematic later in the war and was quickly reverted.
As a curious little sidefact, suprisingly for most people, it actually took longer to train an infantry soldier in comparison to a pilot or other specialist.
Due to the generalized aproach of the GI Training it took about 18 weeks, where the GI would learn everything from rifle training, heavy weapons to simple artillery- and comwork.
While a pilot would finish his training after only 10 weeks.
We reduced the times a bit for gameplay reasons, but the essence you should remember from this paragraph is the following:
Creating a new Division from scratch was and still is an enormous task that costs alot of time and money.
This is where we stand with the version of DH you already have.
While we were happy with the buildtimes it caused problems with extreme reinforce and upgrade times.
The simple solution here is of course to reduce the the time/cost of it, which we did in the initial release... but we don't usually go for the easy workaround.
So for this patch we we went a step further.
REINFORCING DIVISIONS
Reinforcing an Infantry Division during WW2 was for the most part a pretty simple and straight foward process.
GIs would go through their basic training (17-19 weeks), get some basic equipment and be shipped to the current theatre of operation, where they received more "on-the-job" training with their units.
It was also pretty cheap compared to the Division creation. After all only 15% original cost of an Infantry Division are equipment costs.
So nothing really suprising to tell you.
Full reinforcement of an Infantry Division takes from now on roughly 1/3 of the time and costs 1/2 of a new Division.
You might have noticed that I talk about Infantry Divisions here, things look different for other unit types.
There were huge logistical/production differences when it comes to different kinds of units, you can push a soldier through general training and he is ready to go.
You can even build planes in a few days, but tanks and ships took time, lots and lots of time, germany did build 10-15 airwings in the same time it took them to equip one tank division.
Just to demonstrate the difference between two later models:
Panther ~150,000 man hours
Bf-109F ~6.000 man hours
Simply put we can group units in three classes.
For the first two classes we have manpower replacement as bottleneck:
Generalistic man depended Units:
- most infantry variations
- gets reinforced in ~18 weeks, as soon as the recruits come out of training.
~15% cost of a new unit
Specialized man dependend Units:
- Airplanes wings
- Naval infantry
- gets reinforced in ~10 weeks worstcase, as soon as the recruits come out of training.
~20% cost of a new unit
For the third class we have equipment replacement as bottleneck:
Equipment dependend Units:
- Tanks
- Ships
- Modern planes
- reinforce times of 40-50 weeks almost 3/4 time of new creation
~30% cost of a new unit
So all this boils down to:
Don't waste your Tanks, it will take quite a while to get new one to the front.
UPGRADING DIVISIONS
The upgrade process follows the same pattern as reinforcement.
It is fast and easy to upgrade Infantry and massproduced equipment, even a bit faster then reinforcing them.
But:
Keeping your armored force uptodate requires time and ressources.
Also with the increased cost and time involved in keeping you armored Divisions in the fight, a fundamental flaw of the original upgrade system became obvious.
While a certain portion of reinforcement troops would be equipped with salvaged equipment, it doesn't make sense that the replacements fresh from the factory were still outdated.
So from now on half of your reinforcement troops come with fresh shiny new equipment..
Which means ingame, that when you reinforce an outdated unit by 10% you also upgrade it by 5% without additional costs.
Code:
misc.txt
# Reinforce to upgrade modifier. Values from 0.0 (divisions do not get extra upgrade progress on reinforcement) to 1.0 (1:1 ratio, 1% reinforce adds 1% to upgrade progress)
0.5 # 0.0
You can now also define upgrade and reinforce behaviour for each model indivdually in the unit files.
Code:
Unitfile
upgrade_time_factor = 0.25
upgrade_cost_factor = 1.25
reinforce_time = 1.1
reinforce_cost = 0.56
I hope you will enjoy the results.