Balancing mod day 0

[lekim]

I watched most of the streams and followed the game closely for the last months.
Right now I decided to do a balancing mod and it is surprisingly simple one (hopefully it will not make AI even more fragile as it is now).
Inf should get a nerf on any attack and defense should be increased (this way bhutan style of fun will be practically impossible).

What do u think guys?

 

[VampiRos]

I think you are overreacting, planing/starting a day0 "balance mod" not even played the Game is kinda strange.

 

[Snow Wolf]

i sincerely hope everyone who complains about having watched a too easy AI on some stream gets crushed really hard.

 

[lekim]

I think you are overreacting, planing/starting a day0 "balance mod" not even played the Game is kinda strange.

I saw enough on twitch, search for ddrjake.

 

[lekim]

i sincerely hope everyone who complains about having watched a too easy AI on some stream gets crushed really hard.

I wish you are right!

 

[Sun_Killer]

the problem with this "balance" mod is that you more or less make the backbone of middle powers or majors with limited production useless. If you have to build tanks for offensive you more or less will have big problem as countries like turkey, romenia and the like. Also for Italy and France which haven´t the best production without expanding will have problems.

 

[lekim]

Anyway I dont wanna bitch here or discuss the discussion about AI, we all have our opinions and I hope mine is incorrect.
What I want to discuss is whether people who were watching the game closely or played it already think it might be a good blancing mod (it is fairly easy one since I just need to modify a couple of text files, if I am lucky only one)!

 

[lekim]

the problem with this "balance" mod is that you more or less make the backbone of middle powers or majors with limited production useless. If you have to build tanks for offensive you more or less will have big problem as countries like turkey, romenia and the like. Also for Italy and France which haven´t the best production without expanding will have problems.

France had a lot of tanks, but yes this is the exact intention. You cannot make an offense with infantry. USSR tried it in 41-42 and they lost 10m people. Cause Inf is som much more powerful at defense against inf.
IT is not only tanks:
mot. inf, mech, artillery and bombers are the real offensive tools and inf is just grabbing the land behind running enemy I would say.

 

[Ricox]

I don't think many sane people will download a "balancing" modification made by a person who hasn't even played the game yet.

The infantry spam tactics do have plenty of drawbacks. Initially I was also massively concerned about it, and it might need some balancing, but certainly not one done in such a fashion. The manpower losses and poor breakthrough (which drags the fighting on even more and incurs additional losses) are some of these drawbacks, although they might need to be slightly extended to make the strategy more noticeably worse than making a combined arms/varied army.

 

[77Hawk77]

I know that that game isn't out yet, but saying you can't know something about the balance of a game before it's out is simply not correct.

There are many experienced modders who design balance and have experience testing it, if we can't theorise correctly about balance without actually playing something, it would be hard to design it in the first place now wouldn't it?

Wether @lekim is right or wrong is fine to debate, but can we stop trying to quash this debate but just saying you haven't played it yet, and then when it comes out we'll say you haven't played it enough, and then we'll say you just aren't good enough.

Anyway I dont wanna bitch here or discuss the discussion about AI, we all have our opinions and I hope mine is incorrect.
What I want to discuss is whether people who were watching the game closely or played it already think it might be a good blancing mod (it is fairly easy one since I just need to modify a couple of text files, if I am lucky only one)!

I don't know why exactly that countries seem so easy to destroy in the streams, but if it's simply because the AI doesn't produce enough stuff then hopefully that is an easy AI fix, i don't think you should change how the combat modifiers work just yet, it seems to me more of a problem that small countries can have small arms weapons level 3 quite early and then trash people with their superior weapons.

Maybe the difference in weapon tech levels is a real problem considering how easy it is to upgrade.

 

[Sun_Killer]

i think the biggest problem why minor ai powers don´t build huge army to counter the player is: they try to do everything, lets say this minor has 6MF. He uses 2 on inf equip, 1supp equip, 1 on arty, 1 on trucks and 1 on fighter. So it is easy to see why he would get defeated when they player only concentrates on inf equip and can just steamroll him.

 

[Axe99]

It's very, very tricky to balance a game when we're not full bottle on the balance as it stands (there's no way known the streamers have had enough time with the game - including their non-streamed time - to be on top of it, let alone the watchers). We need quality time with the game to determine what (if anything) needs tweaking when it comes to balance things - very easy to create more problems than are solved if we don't know what we're working with. Doesn't mean we can't have ideas or discussions (and by all means have a play in the defines later today ), but it's like changing a cake recipe before we've actually baked and tasted a cake built on the original recipe. It may work out, but it equally could not.

Also - it's likely there'll be some fairly hefty patches in the first month or so (at least until the July holidays in Sweden), so putting a lot of work into a balance mod (not so much in the coding, but in the testing - a good mod that affects balance needs a lot of testing - multiple hands-off and hands-on playthroughs to work out what all those balance changes do) only to have it all changed in patches could be pretty frustrating.

Not saying you shouldn't do it - just highlighting some dangers in jumping too early. Either way, hope you enjoy the game today, and any modding efforts are fruitful .

 

[Daddl]

i sincerely hope everyone who complains about having watched a too easy AI on some stream gets crushed really hard.

I will start with Communist China on Veteran, so your dreams may come true. I should probably record that to show you something funny if I fail horribly.

 

[lekim]

I know that that game isn't out yet, but saying you can't know something about the balance of a game before it's out is simply not correct.

There are many experienced modders who design balance and have experience testing it, if we can't theorise correctly about balance without actually playing something, it would be hard to design it in the first place now wouldn't it?

Wether @lekim is right or wrong is fine to debate, but can we stop trying to quash this debate but just saying you haven't played it yet, and then when it comes out we'll say you haven't played it enough, and then we'll say you just aren't good enough.



I don't know why exactly that countries seem so easy to destroy in the streams, but if it's simply because the AI doesn't produce enough stuff then hopefully that is an easy AI fix, i don't think you should change how the combat modifiers work just yet, it seems to me more of a problem that small countries can have small arms weapons level 3 quite early and then trash people with their superior weapons.

Maybe the difference in weapon tech levels is a real problem considering how easy it is to upgrade.

Thanks!
I was just looking at the fight on twitch (you can take any of them ddrjake, Daniel). Inf even with a better equipment should not be able to destroy another inf at full org, cause it is not how it works in the real life, for offensive operation you need big guns and only majors can afford them, that is why china lost japan and that is also why japan could only get so much of china. Same with ussr and germany.
Anyway I will play one game as germany tonight on normal difficulty and then modify inf stats and play one more game and make two report, maybe even make a streaming session with a mod, lets see.

 

[lekim]

It's very, very tricky to balance a game when we're not full bottle on the balance as it stands (there's no way known the streamers have had enough time with the game - including their non-streamed time - to be on top of it, let alone the watchers). We need quality time with the game to determine what (if anything) needs tweaking when it comes to balance things - very easy to create more problems than are solved if we don't know what we're working with. Doesn't mean we can't have ideas or discussions (and by all means have a play in the defines later today ), but it's like changing a cake recipe before we've actually baked and tasted a cake built on the original recipe. It may work out, but it equally could not.

Also - it's likely there'll be some fairly hefty patches in the first month or so (at least until the July holidays in Sweden), so putting a lot of work into a balance mod (not so much in the coding, but in the testing - a good mod that affects balance needs a lot of testing - multiple hands-off and hands-on playthroughs to work out what all those balance changes do) only to have it all changed in patches could be pretty frustrating.

Not saying you shouldn't do it - just highlighting some dangers in jumping too early. Either way, hope you enjoy the game today, and any modding efforts are fruitful .

My biggest worry is that change like this will screw up with AI - since we dont really know how it works. I would presume it estimates the power of the opposite side somehow but does it use unit stats for that - maybe there is an easy way to check it, i've seen that once battle plan is drawn it can show you a probability of success. I will just make a save before changes and load the game after changes and see if the plan success chance has dropped significantly on inf against inf situation.

 

[Sun_Killer]

it is probably a god mod to get more historical. But I have a felling that you make minors unplayable and that you will screw up the overall combat do, if you increase the defense as much as your indicating, you will even have problem to get through with mech inf+tanks.

 

[Kallocain]

I think making a mod is one of the most constructive ways to react to something you feel is not to your liking or would improve the game.
Balancing this stuff is really, really hard, and everyone has difference preferences as well, so we can't get it exactly right for everyone anyway.

 

[77Hawk77]

Thanks!
I was just looking at the fight on twitch (you can take any of them ddrjake, Daniel). Inf even with a better equipment should not be able to destroy another inf at full org, cause it is not how it works in the real life, for offensive operation you need big guns and only majors can afford them, that is why china lost japan and that is also why japan could only get so much of china. Same with ussr and germany.
Anyway I will play one game as germany tonight on normal difficulty and then modify inf stats and play one more game and make two report, maybe even make a streaming session with a mod, lets see.

You may be right, i just think the solution is to nerf how much infantry equipment matters, rather than nerfing the actual infantry base stats though.

It should be possible to have an effective army with infantry equipment one like britain who never made any small arms weapon progress in ww2.

 

[Walltar]

Just one question OP... Are you going to play Bhutan? Because if not, then there is practically no possibility of something like that happening in your game.
There is not really need to balance minors that are played by AI, other than giving them some way to protect themselves better against minors played by player. Minors played by AI will most likely get low processing priority, so they will be sitting around waiting to get taken.

Only place where it would make any difference would be MP, but I do not think that player Bhutan will ever be able to stand against player Japan.

 

[77Hawk77]

I think making a mod is one of the most constructive ways to react to something you feel is not to your liking or would improve the game.
Balancing this stuff is really, really hard, and everyone has difference preferences as well, so we can't get it exactly right for everyone anyway.

Sorry for giving you guys a hard time, i think we're all just really stoked about the balance, because we know we're going to spend so much time in this even though we know it can't be perfect we want it to be