mlipo said:
Oh-it's coming down to numbers again. I'm probably going to get laughed at, but when I ferry troops across an ocean, I usually don't have an unlimited capacity to do that ferrying. I want the best divisions possible to land and do the fighting. If you have five corps, that is great...but sometimes I will only have 4, and I want those 4 to be fast and tough as possible.
This is a perfectly correct point, but also a strictly limited one.
As a general rule, brigades are useful when they improve the bangs-per-buck ratio of the Division they attach to. In game terms, this means that expensive Divisions (eg: Armor and Mech) benefit from brigades, while cheap Divisions like Infantry are actually
less effective when brigaded...
if you measure in terms of constant-Manpower, or constant-ICs, or constant-TC... not in terms of constant numbers of units.
In other words... you have only so much Manpower, IC-days and TC-limit to spend; and spending it on un-brigaded Infantry allows you to purchase
more fighting power (more battle-winning ability) with those resources than spending it on brigaded Infantry. For expensive units like Armor, the opposite is true... you get more battle-winning ability by spending your resources on fewer, brigaded Armor than by spending it on a somewhat larger number of un-brigaded Armor.
The main exception is the one that you pointed out... in specific situations where your stacking is sharply limited (eg: Amphibious Assault, Sea Transport, Paradrop, or very
VERY narrow fronts), brigades are an advantage simply because you cannot fit the extra un-brigaded units into the fighting line.
It should be borne in mind, however, that these situations are very much the exception... it would be extremely inefficient (and ill-advised) to deliberately configure your army so that it will do well in rare, exceptional cases but will do poorly in typical cases.
Just as a random example... when starting a new 1936 campaign as the Germans, I will detach all my original starting brigades and give them
all to the forces holding the French border facing the Maginot Line... it's a narrow front, with limited stacking, so every Division gets a brigade. I do not, however, build any
more brigades until I have Armor or Marines to attach them to.
Well, there are rather more limited front situations than is often accepted. Secondly the right choice of brigades also affects / corrects significant other imbalances - early if you are not German (or Russian??) do not under rate Armoured Car Brigades. Later Light Armoured are also worth a look. For some one like the UK brigades are needed to make progress - like actually winning fights. The issue with A/C & L/A is the multiple gain - stats rise and so does org so you get more of both the increase and what you had to start. For early ish (36 & 39) divs and doctrines in the early 40's you can more by brigading than not. Earlier than that and its even bigger gain - can't find my sheets but depending on the exact mix 25% to 50% (mix = doctrines, div tech & brigade). With the Doomsday change to TC then vanilla brigades can be more TC efficient than more Divs. Next is cracking Hard targets - here the limitation is span of control - so increasing the no of divisions is almost entirely a waste past control / command limits - often worse as your casualties climb hurting the limits of MP, wasting IC etc.
