Artillery should reduce ORG like air superiority

[Michael Gladius]

Right now, artillery is not the king of battle. An all-infantry division with support artillery will beat an artillery-heavy template. IRL, the reverse would be true: massed artillery would devastate dismounted infantry attacking in the open.

So how to fix this? Have non-support artillery act like air superiority and reduce division ORG.

This will accurately replicate indirect fire's ability to disrupt attacks' cohesion, forcing them to come in piecemeal. There could even be an icon for "Artillery Superiority," just like "Air Superiority."

 

[brainiac1530]

Already sufficiently represented by the artillery's high soft attack value, leading to organization damage. Infantry on the offensive has very poor breakthrough, so infantry units on the defensive with added artillery battalions will usually exceed their breakthrough value, causing much greater organization damage than usual. But put those artillery on the offensive, where the infantry applies its defense instead, and this effect is greatly reduced. Thus, the game already represents the effectiveness of artillery against infantry in the open just fine. It's the reason why certain infantry templates (7/2 and 14/4) are considered to be so strong, having sufficient soft attack to punish infantry attacks without lowering the unit's own organization and HP too much.

 

[Michael Gladius]

7/2 and 14/4 templates should produce and suffer much heavier casualties than they currently do. In 1914, armies of dismounted rifle infantry with less artillery support suffered 300,000-350,000 casualties in one month (Battle of the Frontiers). That's why the first world war bogged down into trench warfare in the west- fighting in the open with dismounted units resulted in colossal losses. For a WWII equivalent, how about the Battle of the Bulge, where each side lost 90,000-100,000 men in one month and one week?

Yet, in-game, if two of these divisions clash, the losses are in the thousands per month. The higher soft attack value makes artillery the big brother, but not the king. Artillery causes roughly 85% of all losses in modern warfare, both world wars included. Infantry in the open should get massacred, not bruised.

 

[Iskulya]

You should put these in the suggestion forum. Seems like we get enough of these threads already on the main forum.

 

[FStefanak]

I do think that artillery should provide some qualitative benefit (such as % bonus applied to whole division) in addition to flat base soft attack. Here's why:

It's true that soft attack represents artillery contribution well, BUT that also means that artillery is way too OP compared to infantry. They needed to make it 3-width for balance, so you don't put too much of it.

When you put too much artillery in, your width becomes too high. The only way how to interpret it is that division spreads out in the field so that their artillery is not too concentrated in one spot. That is equivalent to a hard game rule "you are not allowed to concentrate your artillery". Instead of making it suboptimal to concentrate, the simulation does not put that option on the table. Each division HAS TO spread out to optimally use artillery. You are not allowed to make this particular overconcentration "mistake" in template creation (simply because it would be OP under current rules).

You could argue that the end result ends up being correct (even if for wrong reasons), but there is one more factor: it loses flexibility. The real world benefit of more artillery is that if you had many divisions with lots of artillery you could choose to spread them out or have them compress to hold a narrow front when you need to put more men in (to create an equivalent of an org wall). It is this kind of operational flexibility that makes combined arms more powerful and this aspect is not modeled at all now.

In other words in real world a 7/2 could fight as "more mushy" 7/2 or a "more solid" 7/0 depending on how their general chooses to deploy them. In HoI4 we have to make that decision way ahead of time by choosing the appropriate division template.

 

[Secret Master]

The problem is that unless you balance other stats, ART would be too effective as a battalion if you made it "king of the battlefield."

HOI4 has gone through iterations where ART is so ridiculously powerful that you wonder why anyone used other weapons in WW2. As it stands now, I still think they are a bit OP in terms of supply draw in versus firepower, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

We also want to avoid some of the weirdness we saw in some iterations of HOI3 where there were divisions with 3 ART brigades supporting a single INF brigade for maximum trolling.

 

[Harin]

It is most likely intuitive to those who have read up on WW2 that divisions without artillery are not divisions at all. They are just emergency speed bumps to an attack they have no hope of stopping.

It makes sense to me that the game should reflect this. It is what a new player without a manual is going to assume. How is he supposed to know that 10-0 infantry divisions can hold that line just fine without any artillery? It is not normal. Not at all.

Surely the developers can fix artillery where it is so necessary that it is standard in every division. That is real life. Maybe the developers are already working on the solution for Barbarossa. I do hope land combat rises above making the tank/fighter doom stack, produced by most of the factories, because nothing else is worth the investment.

 

[Shaka of Carthage]

Surely the developers can fix artillery where it is so necessary that it is standard in every division. ... Maybe the developers are already working on the solution for Barbarossa.

One can only hope. We've seen from the past, the changes they have attempted, which haven't quite worked out so well. There have been some current game mechanic changes which could be helpful in a new attempt.

 

[Michael Gladius]

The problem is that unless you balance other stats, ART would be too effective as a battalion if you made it "king of the battlefield."

HOI4 has gone through iterations where ART is so ridiculously powerful that you wonder why anyone used other weapons in WW2. As it stands now, I still think they are a bit OP in terms of supply draw in versus firepower, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

We also want to avoid some of the weirdness we saw in some iterations of HOI3 where there were divisions with 3 ART brigades supporting a single INF brigade for maximum trolling.

My other post on introducing ammo consumption would fix that- artillery would eat up ammo supplies so fast, it's OP nature would be only possible in a narrow window of opportunity. If artillery battalions carry less ammo per capita compared to infantry, then they'll start out with less and consume it faster, making it difficult to sustain.

 

[Bergermeister]

Would using two combat phases like EU4’s shock & fire phases help to solve this? Infantry alone would be terrible at distant attack, but do well in close quarters, but artillery would do well at range and do minimal damage close. The same could apply to early AT guns, needing to be closer in to penetrate tanks, and later versions improve the range. Tanks could do both well, some more than others. I wonder if that has gone around the table at PDX.