Originally posted by SilentLawyer
Hey Bolt, great work you are doing. Just reportage on my side, not criticism. I assume all events must have their effects on the trigger date and you can't build in a lag, in which case a delay on the "impress" event makes sense.
One question/comment: I installed 1.02a but went back to a game I started under 1.02 (upon downloading) and after some seemingly strange results noticed that the new Inf+Art Divs I had built were inching along at a speed of 2. The older ones were as before. Not sure if the Bolted change was supposed to carry into the old game. I've renamed them fortress divisions and am looking to rely more on ship or strategic redeployment for them as they are too slow in the field.
Getting speeds of 4-5 miles per day or even less does seem rather slow to me, and looking at the time ratios compared with other troops the infrastructure seems to matter a lot more for these than for motorized (which is odd) or tracked. I would have thought bad terrain is a great equalizer in favor of horse-drawn equipment.
My thought would be that base inf speed of 4 would havd been preferable to 3, but I'm curious how you see these unit speeds working out in practice.
Merry Christmas,
SilentLawyer
Silent : you did a great deal of work and have contributed immensely to the progress of Bolted HoI. You, nor anyone else, do not have to preface any criticism with an apology. As it is, I can't detect any criticism from you anyway.
Loading a save game started before you applied any mod will have anomalous results. The game generates the unit speed based on what the include files said at the time the game was started up or restarted. When you first started the game, you were using unmodded include files, and the speed of units created then is stored in the savegame file. When you fired up the game after applying the mod, the savegame file loads up the speeds defined in the savegame file, and that's the speed those units have. However, new units constructed in that session have speed values based on the include files used during that session. Hence, new unit construction will be based on modded speeds, hence you will have two units of the same type with two different speeds if you've done this.
Many people labor under the wrong impression that the speed with which units move is approximately equal to the speed a man can walk, a horse can trot, or a truck can go. In fact, to maintain military unit organization as a fighting force, military units tend to move at about 1/10th of the average speed of all things in the unit, per day.
I'll give you an example, the fastest advance by any military unit all through WW2 was the advance of 56 Panzer Corps from the Nazi-Soviet Demarcation Line to the city of Dvinsk from June 22 to June 26, 1941. In these four days, the Corps covered some 250 miles. No unit ever beat that record in the war, not Patton, not Rokosovvskii, not Rommel, nobody. When you consider that 4 days is 96 hours, that averages out to 2.6 miles per HOUR. Thats actually slower than a man walks, and this is supposed to be a PANZER CORPS. Now, granted, the Corps was probably marching 10-12 hours per day, so you could probably double that to 5 miles per hour while the unit was active.
Still, that seems awful slow to non-military people or non-historians.
However, that happens to be the WW2 record for an opposed advance speed. The average is much lower.
My rule of thumb of 1/10th the average speed of ground movement happens to hold true. For this reason, a Motorized American Infantry Division would consider itself fortunate and competent if it could make 20 miles in one day, which is less than 1/24th of the average speed of a truck driving down the road (even a bad road)
In my opinion, all of the game speeds are WAY WAY WAY overrated. My experiments with altering the unit speeds in the include files led to my determination that it would be probably a really bad idea to do serious changes to these ratings. The reason is that the AI changes its mind too often about where to send units, and in some cases can have units permanently STUCK in provinces because they lose all march progress every time the AI changes its mind. In other parts of the world, with low infra, the units can get permanently stuck and start to lose manpower for the same reason.
Until the balance between org and str losses in low infra zones is worked on, I don't see many more changes to unit speeds in the pike. But I thought that infantry travelling 100 miles in a week was just too much to take, so I lowered it as much as I could without messing up other game aspects.
