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HOI4 Dev Diary - Combat and Stats changes

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.

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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).

Screenshot_3.png


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.


Screenshot_2.png


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...
1620214309589.png


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 :cool:

Screenshot_4.png


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!
 
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Unless they've already planned for this and intend to discuss it at a later date, wouldn't changing the multi-directional combat penalty to reduce armor by -X% help reduce the binary nature of < piercing than enemy armor?

As tanks were historically quite vulnerable to being hit in the flank with most armor concentrated in the front and armor overall being abstracted into a singular value in the game that seems like solution to increase overall value of piercing as well as the new armor mechanic. Afterall even an autocannon with armor piercing rounds can rip through the sides of a tank like swiss cheese in reality.

Or at least some similar mechanic to simulate this effect in combat.
That happened on a lower level than what is represented in game.
 
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I think it actually oddly does a bit of the opposite. If it's successful it'll mean there's no longer a meta to really learn. Meaning players can focus more on experimenting/testing/seeing what they like. It's kinda freeing in a way, to know that there is no one catch-all solution/meta. I also think most new players when first learning the game are not concerning themselves with how to be the absolute best at everything.
I see your point, but I would not agree with the most part. New players are the ones who need meta to help them to overcome the early learning stage of the game. I think it would make the new players more confused about which kind of divisions they need to make since there will be far more guides for them to follow instead of the previous 10/20/40 meta.
This change would certainly spike more interesting experiments for the players, but mostly the experienced players who already know the meanings of the stats when they look at a division template.
But I agree that it would be an improvement in the sense that the older players are freed from the fixed combat width meta, the current MP community really lacks variity in terms of different divisions.
 
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Well, the Combat width part would drastically change the game. I am not sure about the Armor part that it simply making armor more valuable. Heavy tanks still remain unstoppable and mediums will be buffed.
 
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the current MP community really lacks variity in terms of different divisions.
(i comment this a lot but) i really don't buy this. this guide for MP divisions has around 25 unique templates, not including variants (i.e. med/mech vs med/mot or 13/7 vs 12/8 vs 11/8/2 - that feels pretty varied to me! it's just that players get very used to them.
 
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However, I am stauchly against "spreading" attacks.

Now, since smaller widths means more overall organization - the main reason why 20s and 10s are generally preferred on defense - than there is 0 incentive NOT to make my divisions as small as the overstacking penalty allows.
Spreading attacks will lead to a 10 width (and only 10 width) meta.
Well a question to ask: is the problem with the PDX's planned damage spreading system by itself and doing nothing else?

Or would changing how organization is calculated within units salvage the mechanic? (and fix a lot of other problems in the process, i.e. China 2-width spam in conjunction with regular units to avoid stacking penalties)?
 
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Honestly, I just think the new armor vs piercing is backwards. IMO it should be full protection if armor > 1.25*piercing, scaling partial protection when 1.25*piercing > armor > piercing, and no protection when armor < piercing. It would be a buff to AT guns (since they're currently pretty bad), which will probably be necessary since I imagine the designer will allow you to make some pretty heavily-armored monsters. It also makes more sense to me that piercing being a little too low means that you can penetrate, just not at certain angles/in certain places, which would be partial rather than full protection.

In either case, I hope the system is opened up to modding to allow the community to play around with it and see if there's maybe anything better.

Maybe they will decrease armor values so the end result is the same?
 
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That happened on a lower level than what is represented in game.
And? Would it not add more value to for example AT infantry in that case? Again gameplay is more Important and more than a few people have already complained about this in the thread?

Also how do you think Shermans defeated Panthers and Tigers when they struggled to do so frontally.
 
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Or would changing how organization is calculated within units salvage the mechanic? (and fix a lot of other problems in the process, i.e. China 2-width spam)?
If you mean having organization be summed, then you end up with a single-width meta where said width is rather large. 2 width spam is not a problem for player templates, you can easily strength-kill everything thanks to the overstacking penalty.
And? Would it not add more value to for example AT infantry in that case? Again gameplay is more Important and more than a few people have already complained about this in the thread?
Adding more value to something != better gameplay. Though on second thought, I do actually like your idea. On the one hand, just having a large front didn't make tanks more prone to being pierced, but having a small one (like El-Alamein) sort of did make them less prone to being pierced. I just think it should be supplemented by armor having reduced power when it's nearly, but not wholly pierced.
 
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If you mean having organization be summed, then you end up with a single-width meta where said width is rather large. 2 width spam is not a problem for player templates, you can easily strength-kill everything thanks to the overstacking penalty.

Adding more value to something != better gameplay. Though on second thought, I do actually like your idea. On the one hand, just having a large front didn't make tanks more prone to being pierced, but having a small one (like El-Alamein) sort of did make them less prone to being pierced. I just think it should be supplemented by armor having reduced power when it's nearly, but not wholly pierced.
Absolutely, I'm not sure how well the game can represent it but the other thought I had was having the armor penalty apply if significantly outnumbered in the combat and focus less on multi-directional combat, to force players be more careful not to overextend and move in more reinforcements since you'd be very vulnerable to a counter-attack by any kind of piercing otherwise.

There's only a limited number of targets you can hope to engage and suppress under such circumstances afterall.
 
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You're right. I just tried it myself - the disagres are simply hidden.

Come on PDX, that ist not your standart!
they are? i was under the impression that it only showed the top 3 emotes. when i "angry face" or "informative" it nothing happens either.
@bitmode is that what you meant?
 
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Putting a Facebook style Dislike button on the forum was a mistake imo. It adds nothing positive or constructive to the forum.

Ok so by that logic we shouldn't have likes either, have both otherwise there's no point in having it in the first place. It's meant to show general feedback, it's not meant to be an essay explaining why the DD has a silly idea. You can disagree with the post then explain why you disagreed, or you don't have to if you want. Constructive feedback will come in the posts beneath or in other parts of the forums.
 
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Putting a Facebook style Dislike button on the forum was a mistake imo. It adds nothing positive or constructive to the forum.
But facebook famously does *not* have a dislike button?
I think it's very helpful to be able to disagree with something without having to give it additional attention by replying.
 
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I think the easiest solution to this case would be to borrow a page from Hoi3's amphibious naval landing system in some form and apply it to all types of land-based combat. At some point, naval landings in HOI3 were changed such that combat wasn't an immediate clash, but a growing escalation. In the process of landing, a division would gradually fill up a progress bar from 10% to 100%. This value represented the percentage of soft attack, defensiveness, and offensiveness stats that could be applied. If a 1000 soft attack division was landed in naval combat, it could only apply 10 damage dice rolls initially, but this would gradually grow overtime and it could apply the full 100 damage dice rolls.

I really like the idea of Escalation made by @Bane5 .
I can already see things like planning or speed helping a unit get to 100% faster.

Also terrain could slow down the escalation. Not easy to make a full frontal attack on a City, Marsh, etc.

The game does need mechanics that slow down the game a little bit, but without making the combat more deadly.
This is a good route to think about it.
 
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