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Soapy Frog

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Copper Nicus said:
It perfectly possible to do this. It's used in CORE to rise sub night defense, lower general effectiveness of air fight during the nightime, rise river attack penalty...
I dont dispute that you can raise or lower efficiency using *_attack and *_defense, I am just saying that each affect BOTH attack and defence efficiency of one SIDE (*_attack affects the "attacker", *_defense affects the "defender").

The commands you are using in CORE are identical to the ones I am using... I checked ;)

So you cannot, for example, have a defending division at 1% attack efficiency and 200% defence efficiency. Attack and defence efficiency will always be the same for the same side.
 

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Mithel said:
Of course we can't really debate what the GD figure should be if we don't also agree on the attack figures. With my armored divisions having SA values of roughly 100 a single panzer division would be far above the "dogpile" threshold for a division with only 20 to 40 GD.
What is the justification for setting armor SA values so high? Armored units already inflict considerably higher org loss than "soft" units, and when you factor in the hard defence, the relative combat power of armor would seem to be a bit obscene. Was an armoured division REALLY 4-5 times more powerful as a regular infantry division, as WELL as being more mobile?
 

unmerged(14603)

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Welcome back Math Guy. Less than a week and you've already provoked the best discussion in months!

Mithel
Mathguy, as far as I know the "ground_def_eff" is not rounded at all. I believe that is an accurate combat calculation for whether or not an individual GD point blocks an attack or not. If anyone has evidence otherwise that is critically important to me (and the entire GD = 999 concept)!

IIRC our tests of last summer showed that g_d_e was not rounded except that it can not make hits go to 0%. 1% (spread over a large number of battles) always got thru even when g_d_e was 100%.


Soapy Frog
I think I have hit upon a partial solution to the problem. Instead of mostly applying penalties to the attacker efficiency, the modifiers should instead primarily increase the defender's efficiency. This is much more controllable method of applying the modifiers and ensures they dont spiral out of control.

This is critical to managing loss rates and unusual results. Keeping the base of the equation (the lower attack/defense efficiency in the fight) relatively stable while manipulating the higher value makes for much more predictable results. When the lower % falls below 30-40% then the results start getting "out of control" from a modder's point of view. The fluctuations are far too great in vanilla HOI.


Math Guy
So I think what you're doing may well produce a better game experience than standard HOI, and for 90+ percent of players that's justification enough. For my own purposes, though, the 999+ GD idea is just premature. I think Soapy Frog got the essence of my concern -- I just don't want to get rid of a useful variable until I'm really sure of all the effects it is having.

This has been my position since Mithel first introduced the idea. I do not believe that eliminating the effect of any variable is the way to go. There are so many different situations which need to be modeled so we need every variable possible (I wish we had more - such as morale and experience).
 
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unmerged(14603)

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For some reason the bottom of my post was being cut off so I've moved it here.

Math Guy
And the problem in each case isn't necessarily the game mechanics, e.g. movement and combat, but lame strategic planning by the AI.

This is a critical issue. Unfortunately not enough effort has been put here. The big project started last summer seems to have faded away. However, some modders are doing excellent work in this area (PB-DK and Lothos come to mind). I've worked with PB-DK on major country AI's and a lot of progress is being made in areas such as controlling invasions and front management. Much more progress is necessary in this area (it's where I'm putting all my HOI time) because the AI is still as dumb as a stick.

IMHO we need to "maximize" the AI before we can come to definitive conclusions about "actual game" battle lengths and loss rates. At the same time we need to recognize that the human player will always be much smarter on the strategic level and that even a "smart" AI will not be so under all conditions. For my modding I am leaning towards a solution which seperates SP from MP entirely. At the moment I have chosen to concentrate on SP only to simplify the situation.


Math Guy
I'm less comfortable with conclusions about fine-tuning loss rates in particular because I have found that the only way to get good data is by slow and laborious observation, hour by hour, writing the loss figures down on paper and then transferring them to a spreadsheet.

I did some of that last year. The results are all over the map because of modifiers and the AI. My conclusion was that we needed to work on the ridiculous accumulation of modifier effects (as Soapy Frog mentioned above) and we needed to work on the AI before we could even start to come to preliminary conclusions in this area.

It does not help that some modifiers are broken - even worse they may or may not be fixed. Fort_attack and Winter_Specialist are badly broken (I have removed Winter_Specialist from my modding and have greatly limited fort_attack). G_D_E is not WAD but IMHO works better the way it is now so I hope that they don't "fix" it.

We have too many leaders in the game (and with every patch more are being added). The AI randomly selects its leaders so having more leaders simply gives the human player the advantage especially when there is a significant spread of skills and traits to choose from. I "sleep" a large number of the worst leaders for the major countries controlled by the AI to help this situation a bit.
 

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Soapy, Yes, all the material I've read indicates a panzer division is four times the power of an infantry division. Ok, now that's a very wild statement. Is it true for all countries? What about depleted divisions? At what tech level? It's not anywhere near precise but I've adopted it as a guideline. Hence you'll see my panzer divisions tend to cost four times as much as infantry divisions and they pack four times the firepower. (See T.N Dupuy's calculations for some hard statistics - but as Mathguy has mentioned virtually all conclusions and calculations are and should be open for debate)

It's an interesting thought to tone down HoI panzer divisions to perhaps three times the firepower of an infantry division. I do find that when playing a major power there is a big temptation to build far too many panzer divisions (and I've tried to counter that with fuel and supply costs issues).

I might try and tone down the relative power a little, but also keep in mind that techs impact this too. Anyone else have any opinions on the relative firepower of a panzer division vs an infantry division? Keep in mind that four infantry divisions can absorb four times the amount of damage that a single panzer division can!

Mikel, I'm very pleased to hear confirmation that the earlier tests do indeed indicate that g_d_e is not rounded at all.

It sounds like several of us are in agreement that a very big improvement will come from eliminating the massive reductions in efficiency from combinations of terrain and weather modifiers. So we all agree that we should increase defensive benefits and reduce attacking penalties?

GD = 999 actually doesn't completely eliminate the threshold / dogpile effect it just raises it so that it only kicks in during extreme situations and with a more moderate kick in. I'm still inclined to suggest that raising GD to infinity might still be the best course of action. I think we can trick ourselves and burn a LOT of time testing and playing with various GD values (only to later realize that some particular case we hadn't thought of causes some disasterous problem).

Certainly we can agree that raising GD significantly, does narrow the gap between AI and human ability and that it improves some dogpile/threshold issues.

There is no arguement from me that the AI files need a lot of attention. In the Starfire Historical Mod I've tweaked every single country and these adjustments continue to get a lot of my attention and time. I feel I've greatly improved the AI research and I've recently improved the AI R&D vs building in the early pre-war years and these both help narrow the gap between AI and human significantly.

Could we perhaps somewhere document exactly which modifiers are "broken" and in what manner?

- Mithel
 

Mithel

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Oh, one more comment.

I very much agree that HoI has too many leaders. I've eliminated huge amounts of them and I think it improves playability and it sure can't hurt the AI to not have those crappy leaders available. My leader editor does have features to automatically trim out "useless" leaders. At some point I'll probably trim even more.

Maybe we should start our own "trimmed" leader project?

- Mithel
 

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Math Guy said:
Right. This is part of why I hesitated to go with really high GD, because of the wild swings in overall effectiveness. I think what you may find next is that really high GD makes defense of good terrain in bad weather phenomenally strong, because the defender usually has a higher net effectiveness. One division on a snowy mountain at night with effectiveness of 60 % and GD = 999 can resist being "dogpiled" by as many as 600 enemy divisions who have been reduced to a minimum of 1 SA. Under your system of 98 % GD, it would suffer 12 x 0.15 = 1.8 % losses per hour, right? Being outnumbered 600 to 1 and still only losing twice the historical average seems a little odd to me. EDIT: oops, 1.8 % per HOUR, 1 % per day. Right. Still, outnumbered 600 to 1 and only losing 43 % per day seems doubtful to me.
Defenders of bad terrain in poor weather ought to be able to hold out almost indefinitely - the classic example is Thermopylae. If it's a snowy mountain then you're crazy to attack with one division, let alone six hundred - the logistics alone will cripple you. See Kashmir where Indian and Pakistan have been fighting a border war over the same mountainous terrain forever.

Generally, the game seems to make it too easy to conduct offensives in seasons other than the summer. The German don't pause for a long period of rest and reorg after Poland, as in history - they just turn around and blitz into the Low Countries and France without a break.

Right now in the real world, it's snowing all over, even here in the green and pleasant land of England. Government advice is to stay indoors and avoid non-essential journeys because there's a serious risk that you'll slip on some ice and kill yourself, especially in a motor vehicle. Trying to fight a war in such conditions is not smart. And this is even more true of an army like the German army of 1939 - most of who's logistics depended upon horses that would soon sicken and die if they weren't cosseted.

So, if the outcome is that attacking in poor terrain and/or bad weather is a losing proposition then that's fine. That's the way it should be to simulate the Italian campaign, the Battle of the Bulge, etc ...

Andrew
 

Mithel

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And the combat engine and AI's reaction to bad modifiers is very poor. In real life a commander can make a decision "Bah, the weather is terrible and the terrain unfavorable, I'll hold off the attack until better conditions can be obtained". This doesn't happen in the game.

Also HoI is on a strategic scale there aren't really any options for bypassing very defendable strategic positions. We need the terrain in HoI to represent a "general" situation - i.e. "this region is mountainous and thus favors the defender" not "this area only consists of unassailable defensive positions".

As I see it the mountains of Italy and the Balkans (the Alps) should negate the advantage of having armored and motorized divisions, but it shouldn't render them completely impotent. It should just make them more nearly equivalent to an infantry division (and mountain divisions that are trained and equipped for such locations should have an advantage).

- Mithel
 

Soapy Frog

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Ok here is my preliminary assessment of the weather/terrain modifiers.

There is no such thing as fort_defense, river_defense or shore_defense (or paratroop_defense), so these will have to remain as penalties to the attacker.

-40-50% seems reasonable for river and shore attack, with say 25-30% bonuses eventually applicable from tech.

-50% should be as low as it goes (except for night)... the only other penalty that will be applied is the leader penalty, which is out of our hands.

Fort attack I am a little unsure of... is it a hard-coded penalty based on the level of the fort? Anybody know? Does it need to be lessened?

Alright next all terrain and weather ATTACK penalties need to be eliminated, or greatly minimized. For example, I would retain small attack penalties (-10%) for winter (snow, blizzard, frozen) and for jungle and desert, which can be mitigated by acheiving the appropriate techs.

Once that is done, positive modifiers for the defender need to be applied. In this case we should avoid going over +200% combined modifiers (for example, you might get +80% for mountain and +80% for blizzard, for a total of +160%, and with level 6 leader that'd take you to +190%, or 290% defence efficiency, while the attacker attacker labours at 120%.)

Now I don't really LIKE giving a positive modifier to the defender for weather (since combat intensifies instead of dropping off), however hopefully it will encourage the attacker to cancel or break off attacks, and thus result in less overall combat that way. The higher losses in actual combat can be explained by weather-related attrition.

Some testing needs to be done to determine what the base modifiers are. I might have time to do some of that tonight. The weather modifiers are going to be a hell of a job... I'm kinda hoping the spreadsheet snippet I displayed in anothe thread is accurate ;)
 

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Fort attack I am a little unsure of... is it a hard-coded penalty based on the level of the fort? Anybody know? Does it need to be lessened?

Edit:
Forts give an efficiency penalty of 9 * fort_level to the attacker.

The fort_attack modifier currently works like this:

Any penalty/bonus between -99 and +99 has no impact. A bonus of +100 to +199 negates the entire effect of the fort. A bonus of +200 to +299 actualy gives the fort advantage to the attacker! A penalty of -100 to -199 doubles the value of the fort to the defender. A penalty of -200 to -299 triples it, etc.
 
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Soapy Frog

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Ah ok. So this is a strong argument for reducing the strength of the Maginot line!

And fort_attack penalties/bonuses applied by tech are basically broken as you say. Fair enough! I guess the level of forts worldwide should be examined to make sure there are no completely unassailable forts!
 

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Soapy, I think the "documented" modifiers are fairly accurate, my guess (without testing and checking everything) is that only a few have changed and not by too much. For instance my testing showed night attack was -50% rather than the documented -40% was my test wrong/flawed? I've got these values documented on my site at:
http://www.mnstarfire.com/ww2/hoi/documentation/supplementalDocs.html
however I've not tested them and I don't know if they are accurate (I'm very much looking forward to hearing any test results you obtain Soapy).

I was wondering if fort_defense, river_defense or shore_defense actually did anything. So I take it you tested these and found they had no impact?

I'd like to see the worst combination be no worse than -75%. What is the worst situation? Armor attacking across a river against a mountain in a blizzard at night? Hmmm... what's that -50 plus -80% plus -90% plus -50% for a total of -270%!!! Ok.. perhaps the worst case needs to be worst than -75%. I'd like to see river penalties remain at -50% (improved by techs), mountains for armor perhaps -20%, blizzard perhaps -20% and night perhaps -30% - that would make a worst case of -120% definitely bad enough to trigger some horrible results but how often is that situation ever going to happen?

I think it might have been Mikel that pointed out to me that fort attack modification is in lumps and thus he starts with -100% (forts are twice as bad as normal), then flamethrowers add 100% to bring it to 0% (normal) then another tech could add another 100% to make forts ineffective (not sure if that really should ever be allowed).

I think we are best off having weather modifiers stay within -15% to +15% overall lessenning the impact of weather. Not that this is accurate or desired but the alternative is worse.

Rather than give the defender a bonus in bad weather wouldn't it be better to give them a small penalty (as well as a small but larger penalty to the attacker)? Thus attacks are "discouraged" during bad weather but they aren't a disaster. And with the defender's efficiency reduced too the battles will take longer (longer battles are a disadvantage to the attacker generally and especially if they have worse effectiveness than the defender).

- Mithel
 

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The GD 999 might be a good idea, but it will require a lot of tuning.

Especially when dealing with timing the battle, it might not be easy...

I bet you think about letting the attacking value between 1 and 999

Just as a clue for now, when the defense is higher than the hit points targeted the real hit points formula is:

hit points targeted * (1- cancellation rate)power(defense/targeted hit points).

So now let's take 2 soft units of the same kind (inf). The attacker and defender fight over let's say 2 weeks, the attacker gets 20% casualties, while defender takes 10% casualties. You have only the SA that you modify... You'll be lucky if you can solve that only with one variable.

Make a similar computation with mot inf with duration and rates of casualties.

You'll find the SA of your mot.

Make the computation for a fight between the mot and an inf... You'll be really really lucky if you get something realistic.

You can use the org to have another parameter, hoping it falls low at the right moment.... But that's really a lot of work, and I would expect patch 1.07 with maybe new rules to be out before....
 

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Rather than give the defender a bonus in bad weather wouldn't it be better to give them a small penalty (as well as a small but larger penalty to the attacker)? Thus attacks are "discouraged" during bad weather but they aren't a disaster. And with the defender's efficiency reduced too the battles will take longer (longer battles are a disadvantage to the attacker generally and especially if they have worse effectiveness than the defender).

I agree with you on this point Mithel. However, in trying to implement this I've had a hard time keeping total minuses within reason after everything is considered. I keep running into the problem that -5 on top of a running total of 50 has considerabley more effect than +5 on top of 150.

It is easier (but not realistic) to keep the attacker base as close to 100 as possible so that the impact of each modifier is more predictable. I still think what you propose is a better solution and we should continue to pursue it in spite of the complications.
 

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Mithel said:
I was wondering if fort_defense, river_defense or shore_defense actually did anything. So I take it you tested these and found they had no impact?
I did not test, however it makes sense... if I am attacking across a river with 4 divisions and from a different direction NOT across a river with another 4 divisions, it would not make sense to be giving the defender an efficiency bonus (although it would make sense to penalize those divisions crossing the river). These ariable also dont show up in the save game files, so its a good bet they dont exist.
Mithel said:
Rather than give the defender a bonus in bad weather wouldn't it be better to give them a small penalty (as well as a small but larger penalty to the attacker)? Thus attacks are "discouraged" during bad weather but they aren't a disaster. And with the defender's efficiency reduced too the battles will take longer (longer battles are a disadvantage to the attacker generally and especially if they have worse effectiveness than the defender).
Possibly. I want to avoid any chance of the odds due to modifiers escalating to ridiculous levels, and when you are applying negative modifiers its very easy for that to happen... how much of an advantage should weather/terrain net for the defender? 2:1? 3:1? 4:1? it's much easier to control if you keep efficiencies high.

It's kind of a pity that there are no "clear_attack", "fair_attack" efficiency variables to boost the baseline to something higher.

Hmm, what if we raised the skill level of all leaders by 20? that would be a de-facto 100% increase in efficiency right across the board, right? Are leader skill levels allowed to get that high?

If we could do that, then you would have a lot more leeway in applying efficiency penalties.
 

Mithel

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Hmmm... yes... if the Maginot line is -99% efficiency to attack it then it would be virtual suicide to assault it at all and the french could essentially put only a single division there and beat off dozens of divisions attacking. It doesn't seem quite that bad to me as I recall in a previous game assaulting it and actually doing ok but losing the battle). Of course we do want such a major fortification to be a major deterrent to assault.

If we reduced the Maginot line to about level 5 then we'd have a situation where the attacker should only do pulses of attack during the day (and retreat each night).

Soapy, Mikel, any opinions on what the highest fort level should be? Of course the terrain the fort is built in would be a factor too (imagine a level 10 fort in a mountain! Hmmm... Switzerland?). I'd say we probably want to set forts to about 5 or 6 at max. Then with a couple years of work a player might raise them to 7 or 8 at most. That would be enough to discourage all but the most intense attack. I'm almost thinking level 4 might be a good max starting value.

- Mithel
 

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Soapy Frog said:
It's kind of a pity that there are no "clear_attack", "fair_attack" efficiency variables to boost the baseline to something higher.

Hmm, what if we raised the skill level of all leaders by 20? that would be a de-facto 100% increase in efficiency right across the board, right? Are leader skill levels allowed to get that high?

If we could do that, then you would have a lot more leeway in applying efficiency penalties.

Edit:Wrong. See Mithel's post below. (AFAIK 5 is the max skill level allowed.)

I've toyed with the idea of converting the swamp terrain into jungle (forcing them to have the same modifiers). This would allow clear terrain to be converted to swamp thus allowing us to use the swamp modifiers for clear terrain. This would require extensive graphical, text and other modifications but would give us a modifier for clear terain.
 
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