Anti-Tank brigade always has higher piercing than Heavy Tanks

[Denkt]

You have to invest a little into armor to be safe against the best anti tanks guns which is hardly much to ask for.

 

[oerbaa]

You have to invest a little into armor to be safe against the best anti tanks guns which is hardly much to ask for.

If the stats are as the wiki states, then indeed you will need to upgrade the heavy tank model to have a higher armor value than the similar tech level AT.

Btw, off topic, I never "agree" "disagree" anyone's post ever, so thats someone else.

 

[tom_jones]

The bonus a division gets from having a higher armor value than the opponent's piercing value is tremendous. I'm not understanding you entirely, but the point here is that you should attach an AT brigade to your infantry divisions so as to nullify your opponents armor advantage.

That in itself is fair enough, having anti-tank equipment in your divisions is basically common sense, and the decisions revolve mostly around whether it's more valuable than recon attachment, or supply attachment etc (or maybe whether your economy is good enough to afford all)

But I don't see how you arrive from this to the conclusion that "it gives very little reason to make heavy armor", or to that thing you mentioned, about single division with anti-tank attachment becoming so superior to anything without that attachment, that it'd defeat multiple divisions on its own. These part just look like min-maxing tendency gone off rails.

 

[vector1]

For the sake of game balance we have to pretend these dual purpose stuff doesn't exist or there would be no point in producing 37/50mm versions of AT (1936/1939 versions I guess).

Isn't it true that the Tiger, when first introduced, could not be pierced by any AT the enemy had in use? I'm not completely sure but if so, then Heavy Armor should be the exception. Like I said before, Light and Medium armor should always be pierced by current AT tech, but not for HA. What do you think?

Overall I'd say that the Tiger when first introduced in 1942 was fighting against 1940 level AT guns, take Zis-3 with 75mm calibre for example. This necessitated the upgrade to the 1942/44 designs of the 85mm, 122mm and 152mm calibre guns on various platforms that proved able to deal with the Tigers. I feel that up to date AT should almost always pierce unupgraded heavy armor given equal tech levels since it's always been the case. Guns are far easier to upgrade and deploy than tanks.

 

[Denkt]

Support anti tank have less piercing then line anti tank.

 

[oerbaa]

That in itself is fair enough, having anti-tank equipment in your divisions is basically common sense, and the decisions revolve mostly around whether it's more valuable than recon attachment, or supply attachment etc (or maybe whether your economy is good enough to afford all)

But I don't see how you arrive from this to the conclusion that "it gives very little reason to make heavy armor", or to that thing you mentioned, about single division having anti-tank attachment becoming so superior to anything without that attachment, that it'd defeat multiple divisions on its own. These part just look like min-maxing tendency gone off rails.

The reason it gives less incentive to make Heavy Armor is that the armor advantage is easily nullified. An opponent can simply produce cheap AT brigades and counter your Heavy Armor's supposed advantage.

The part about a single division beating multiple divisions is when you have an armor value advantage over your opponent. Your divisions are not invincible when you add an AT brigade. What I said is that they can become very poweful if they have an Armor brigade that has a superior armor value compared to the opponent's piercing value.

 

[oerbaa]

For the sake of game balance we have to pretend these dual purpose stuff doesn't exist or there would be no point in producing 37/50mm versions of AT (1936/1939 versions I guess).



Overall I'd say that the Tiger when first introduced in 1942 was fighting against 1940 level AT guns, take Zis-3 with 75mm calibre for example. This necessitated the upgrade to the 1942/44 designs of the 85mm, 122mm and 152mm calibre guns on various platforms that proved able to deal with the Tigers. I feel that up to date AT should almost always pierce unupgraded heavy armor given equal tech levels since it's always been the case. Guns are far easier to upgrade and deploy than tanks.

I do agree with the last point. That guns are easier to upgrade and produce than entire tanks. Hmm, perhaps you are right.

But game balance is different than historical balance yes? Should we give HA an advantage compared to same year AT levels? They cost so much and take so long to produce that by the time you can field them, the opponent can already field current level AT brigades in many divisions.

Should we not reward the player's production efforts in making HA by giving them an armor advantage for at least 1 year before the opponent can research higher level AT tech?

 

[vector1]

Given the poor state of espionage in the game (non-existent), you can expect that it'll take quite a lot of time to actively deploy large amounts of AT to nullify the advantage your heavy armor will have when they are first deployed. No weapons system is going to remain invulnerable for long in a war with rapid technologically advances, but for those critical few months or half a year your tanks will have the shock value before the first AT gun even arrives.

It's going to be tested thoroughly when the game releases, but my gut feel is that tanks will work far better as an offensive tool because it'll cost a lot less to build up a few select divisions for breakthroughs than to inoculate the entire front against heavy tanks. This isn't even considering the variant advantage that heavy armor will have with a +3* to armor. 1941 heavy armor will have base 110 armor + 30% = 143 whereas AT needs to hit 1941 for 114, 1942 for 123 and 1943 for 151 piercing. This seems fairly balanced to me.

Personally I won't even bother with AT. I'd go straight to medium tank destroyers and upgun them to deal with heavy armor because you use a specialised tool to deal with a specialised enemy than waste money/org/stats on inoculating the whole front against a few divisions.

 

[tom_jones]

The reason it gives less incentive to make Heavy Armor is that the armor advantage is easily nullified. An opponent can simply produce cheap AT brigades and counter your Heavy Armor's supposed advantage.

However it should be kept in mind that it's "only" the penalty of not being able to penetrate the armour, that is getting nullified. It doesn't remove the base disadvantage infantry has vs armour, which is very poor hard attack value. The anti-tank brigade adds some of that hard attack sure, but not all that much.

So at best, the anti-tank attachment can turn "double disadvantage" units into "single disadvantage" units. (leaving aside other areas of comparison for the sake of simplicity). This is far cry from situation where there's very little reason to make heavy armour, imo.

The part about a single division beating multiple divisions is when you have an armor value advantage over your opponent.

Right, and I pointed out such situation (having armour value advantage) isn't likely to happen if you put in practice your conclusion that there's little incentive to produce heavy armour, and don't produce it. You will have infantry divisions with anti-tank attachment, and these units won't have any real armour to speak of. As such, they're unlikely to ever gain armour advantage over any opponents they'll face.

Even in other scenarios the situation where your unit has armour advantage (as in, it can pierce the enemy while enemy cannot pierce your armour) is generally only happening when 'harder' class units face the 'softer' class units. the anti-tank attachment can help the 'softer' units to hurt the 'harder' units, but it merely levels the field (somewhat) -- the 'harder' units are still going to be able to hurt the 'softer' units fine.

 

[Bridger15]

Unless attacks are done by each of the sub-units of a division and allocated randomly among the possible targets, or adjustments are made for quantity of AT or Armor, it basically means that you can add one company of AT guns and nullify the effects of a full Battalion of Heavy Armor, or add one company of Heavy Armor to make a Motorized division almost impervious to infantry weapons unless it includes dedicated AT support.

Hopefully this is something that the devs already know about and account for. It makes sense to me that beating the piercing value shouldn't instantly grant you some buff but bing "just under it" does nothing. It's probably something like piercing/armor = damage bonus/malus. It's also highly unlikely that the devs would have made a whole division designer but then built a combat system which resulted in the div designer being useless except for adding 1 battallion to otherwise mono-type divisions.

 

[oerbaa]

However it should be kept in mind that it's "only" the penalty of not being able to penetrate the armour, that is getting nullified. It doesn't remove the base disadvantage infantry has vs armour, which is very poor hard attack value. The anti-tank brigade adds some of that hard attack sure, but not all that much.

So at best, the anti-tank attachment can turn "double disadvantage" units into "single disadvantage" units. (leaving aside other areas of comparison for the sake of simplicity). This is far cry from situation where there's very little reason to make heavy armour, imo.

Right, and I pointed out such situation (having armour value advantage) isn't likely to happen if you put in practice your conclusion that there's little incentive to produce heavy armour, and don't produce it. You will have infantry divisions with anti-tank attachment, and these units won't have any real armour to speak of. As such, they're unlikely to ever gain armour advantage over any opponents they'll face.

Even in other scenarios the situation where your unit has armour advantage (as in, it can pierce the enemy while enemy cannot pierce your armour) is generally only happening when 'harder' class units face the 'softer' class units. the anti-tank attachment can help the 'softer' units to hurt the 'harder' units, but it merely levels the field -- the 'harder' units are still going to be able to hurt the 'softer' units fine.

This is all true. I'm just saying that there is less incentive but it is not removed entirely. But if you consider the costs, if you remove the armor advantage, you could produce twice as many divisions that are just as powerful (or some greater amount).

Lets say you could make 4 infantry divisions in exchange for a heavy armor division. If armor is being easily penetrated by the opponent, then it might be more useful to have more infantry divisions that have higher overall attack values, but no armor value (but this doesn't matter since its being easily pierced).

This is a bunch of what-if scenarios. Everyone here has some good points. I'm just arguing for increased Heavy Armor - Armor Values.

 

[Ctanr]

whats interesting is that a tank destroyer with a level 5 gun has twice the penetration of an nonupgraded one which means that in 41 a light tank destroyer with a level 5 gun penetrates a heavy tank with a level 5 armor

 

[paranoidsteve]

This thread is full of speculation...you all assume that the combat system maths are identical to HOI3 (expect for some name changes to stats). The Devs have given no clear indication that this is the case. For all we actually know they might have totally changed the combat system.

 

[vector1]

The interesting idea I had long ago, was immediately producing sub-models (TD/SPART) of tanks from 1936 to leverage on the production efficiency and it seems as it it would work fairly well as a defensive tool. Level 1 Heavy TD has 70 armor and 96 piercing. With some upgunning this will remain relevant up to 1943 medium tanks with base 90 armor. This will also force the opposite side to spam AT into every single division if you spread these out into infantry divisions on a wider front.

It's basically production with hindsight and building up PZ3 as TDs and SPART right from the start instead of producing them as tanks, and only producing PZ4, Panthers and Tigers as tanks.

 

[oerbaa]

Given the poor state of espionage in the game (non-existent), you can expect that it'll take quite a lot of time to actively deploy large amounts of AT to nullify the advantage your heavy armor will have when they are first deployed. No weapons system is going to remain invulnerable for long in a war with rapid technologically advances, but for those critical few months or half a year your tanks will have the shock value before the first AT gun even arrives.

It's going to be tested thoroughly when the game releases, but my gut feel is that tanks will work far better as an offensive tool because it'll cost a lot less to build up a few select divisions for breakthroughs than to inoculate the entire front against heavy tanks. This isn't even considering the variant advantage that heavy armor will have with a +3* to armor. 1941 heavy armor will have base 110 armor + 30% = 143 whereas AT needs to hit 1941 for 114, 1942 for 123 and 1943 for 151 piercing. This seems fairly balanced to me.

Personally I won't even bother with AT. I'd go straight to medium tank destroyers and upgun them to deal with heavy armor because you use a specialised tool to deal with a specialised enemy than waste money/org/stats on inoculating the whole front against a few divisions.

If a person actually spends the immense production cost to make HA with the +30% armor boost, then I agree that no current AT brigades should pierce it.

All I'm arguing, is that the base variant of Heavy Armor should have higher armor values than similar AT brigade piercing values.
The only thing that should pierce it, is equally expensive Medium Tank Destroyers with upgrades, or a Heavy Tank Destroyer.

Maybe my hundreds of hours playing HOI3 has influenced me too much.

 

[tom_jones]

Lets say you could make 4 infantry divisions in exchange for a heavy armor division. If armor is being easily penetrated by the opponent, then it might be more useful to have more infantry divisions that have higher overall attack values, but no armor value (but this doesn't matter since its being easily pierced).

Yup, but again -- the attack value of infantry divisions when specifically fighting tanks and such is very low. The anti-tank attachment will prevent that "very low" value from becoming "half of very low", but I think it's not really that much of benefit, and the tank division is still very likely to come out on top. So on paper at least, the tanks still look like quite worth their higher production cost (as do other units for that matter, am certainly not trying to say here that infantry or anti-tank attachments are going to be useless)

 

[oerbaa]

This thread is full of speculation...you all assume that the combat system maths are identical to HOI3 (expect for some name changes to stats). The Devs have given no clear indication that this is the case. For all we actually know they might have totally changed the combat system.

From all the WWW and dev dairies, all points indicate the same system. One of the strongest aspects of HOI3 was its combat mechanics, if it isn't broken I don't see why they would change it so dramatically.

 

[oerbaa]

whats interesting is that a tank destroyer with a level 5 gun has twice the penetration of an nonupgraded one which means that in 41 a light tank destroyer with a level 5 gun penetrates a heavy tank with a level 5 armor

Well this just makes things worse.

 

[Ctanr]

Well this just makes things worse.

but you have to spend 75 experience and the upgraded tank destroyer has -50% speed and -25% reliabilty

EDIT: in 41 the destroyer would have speed 7 which is quite low compared to the medium tank with speed 9

 

[Denkt]

If a person actually spends the immense production cost to make HA with the +30% armor boost, then I agree that no current AT brigades should pierce it.

Stuff don't get more expensive because of the variant system, but less reliability can make the equipment more expensive to use.