Just some examples of why bad suggestions are bad:
- Penalizing equipment capture makes an already questionable option worse. It also introduces significant micromanagement as you now have to untick equipment in divisions over trivial stuff. All of that for...how many meaningful gameplay choices being made? Oops, that duplicated template is out of "infantry equipment 1 from Iran", get rekt until you update it to "infantry equipment 1 from Netherlands". No thanks.
Given that these differences had real-world implications, making them more realistic makes it less easy for players to capture their way to victory. It's incredibly abstracted already, and so adding in some incentives to not mix equipment will furthermore encourage the AI to stop spamming divisions.
- In practice, logarithmic vs exponential penalties in supply will change gameplay decisions...how exactly? You are already more penalized (by a lot) for being low supply with motorized/tanks, being out of supply is already bad/crippling if it's low for meaningful periods of time. The system mostly works, in a game with multiple systems which do not work, objectively.
and yet dismounted infantry can march 500 miles through trackless desert no problem, while motorized infantry get more debuffs. If dismounted infantry have fewer logistical penalties than motorized, then it makes division spam more viable, not less. Especially when you consider that cramming more bodies can allow a dismounted defender to outlast a smaller, more nimble motorized force from ORG alone.
- Resistance is an abstraction, and functions in that capacity. If you have sufficiently good anti-resistance investment (through collab + garrison troop type + policy), you can trivialize damage. You can also take tradeoffs to get more production + more resistance. Crushing resistance a few times making it stop would damage the abstracted tradeoffs, with no proposed model for why players would still pick different options then.
Any viable attempts to grow collaboration allow resistance to grow and become a problem. And given how even a small amount of resistance can slaughter hundreds of garrison troops per month like clockwork (before we multiply by several regions), then this is a one-dimensional drain of manpower and equipment.
- "Escort" air mission does not change the approach to air combat in any meaningful way. You already get this by putting superiority in the same air zone as your bombers.
And if you don't have total air superiority but want to drop a nuke? One-off attacks are not the same as a sustained bombing campaign. Limiting players to only one of the two methods cramps gameplay.
- "Artillery is powerless" strikes me as a false assertion. Maybe you prefer its nerfs reversed, but there's no argumentation along those lines here.
Artillery gameplay-wise functions like 18th-century artillery, in a purely direct-fire role. The massive advantages in indirect fire, interdiction, etc. are not abstracted and so players can't choose quality over quantity. They just get a bigger boom from their direct-fire weapons.
It's a difference in kind, not degree.
- What is the gameplay benefit to adding more tank support companies, rather than just putting them in a line battalion? You don't got into detail here, so it's not surprising people rejecting the OP don't go into detail either.
I mentioned it in the link to the full description, and have answered other replies. It's cost-effective for low-IC/low-fuel nations that can't mass huge numbers.
- The game already abstracts degrading entrenchment and fort damage (sustained attacks force org rotating, and damage forts).
yes, and they're exactly the same. Masses of peasant militia with SMGs can breach the Maginot Line. Having them be damaged by different kinds of attacks (not degrees) then this will discourage human wave assaults against land forts, while still allowing infantry to overcome entrenchment.
- 2.6 is literally in the game already.
No, they change other stats. Bullets don't hit as hard and breakthrough is gutted, but this does not change combat width.
- Similarly, units in low supply already have junk stats.
and unless their opponents have better supply (which in Russia, North Africa, and the Pacific is rare), then the defender can't fight either and so the attacker isn't held up at the gates of Moscow or El Alamein. They just waltz right in.
In a thread about "fixing" things, one normally expects this to concentrate on aspects of the game that do not work at present, not suggestions that add more complexity (in many cases without changing actual tradeoffs/player decisions in practice) into a game that objectively can't handle its present level of complexity (given the vast quantity of confirmed issues).
You are literally proposing to penalize equipment capture in a game which gives false information about equipment capture ratio (per 71cloak's tests, 10% is more like 5-6%). If we're talking "fixing" something, the things in the game that lie or don't work would be the place to start. Amusingly, you only mention the UI in passing, despite that it is one of HOI 4's most glaring flaws...a setup that requires tons of extra unnecessary inputs, arbitrarily penalizes micromanagement while forcing micromanagement to play well, lies about what it will do, and has multiple trap options + bugged displays.
This isn't a forum for bug reports; they have one dedicated to fixing things that don't work. This is about fixing design flaws that are technically functional but require elaborate statistical math to balance. Making these fixes would reduce the amount of statistical math necessary, give players more options, and make the AI smarter. Oh, and less division spam.
If you want to talk about the UI, then go right ahead and discuss it. This is the place where I want to talk about such matters. If there's something you want to add, and I haven't thought of it, then start with that. Half of my ideas came from commentators who offered counter-proposals.