Cheesy / Gamey play with upgrades / variants?

[LordOfWar16]

You lose 25% of your factory efficiency by updating the model on the production line. That may not sound like much but its probably something like 5-6 months worth of gearing lost. It would be far more efficient to simply throw all of the points into the latest model of tanks researched and instead just taking the 75% loss for switching model within a class. Also maxing out all four stats will impact heavily on the reliability of the vehicle. Reliability only goes to 5, and each of the other three stats reduce reliability an equal amount. Basically you can only have one stat (gun, engine, armour), maxed as well as reliability in order to have the same reliability of the default model. Otherwise you will incur more vehicle losses through attrition. Its basically simulating over engineering in the vehicle.

In short you want the xp for major milestones in your research that you are intending to stick with for a while, or perhaps in more dire straits upgrading a vehicle which is obsolete but you cannot sacrifice the full 75% of its production gearing to switch the model of. For instance if you were russia and needed every tank available but your gun or armor aren't quite cutting it. An interim measure.

You arent really meant to simply swap production anyway. It is much better (even tho more industry and resource intensive) to produce the new and old stuff in paralell and slowly gearing up production of the new stuff, while slowly gearing down production of the old stuff. You might even want to produce some stuff for the entirety of the war. You can always tailor the older versions to different specializations. For example making the PzIII a great, fast breakthrough tank while focusing on tank-on-tank combat with the PzIV for example. Especially since you can filter what equipment divisions use, you could quiet easiely do that.

 

[Denkt]

The quicker you swap to better equipment the better off you will be in the long term (but don't forget you need to survive the short term to reach the long term).

It you have a good variant of an old tank you may be better of producing it while you build up a good variant of the new tank.

 

[nastydisease]

You arent really meant to simply swap production anyway. It is much better (even tho more industry and resource intensive) to produce the new and old stuff in paralell and slowly gearing up production of the new stuff, while slowly gearing down production of the old stuff. You might even want to produce some stuff for the entirety of the war. You can always tailor the older versions to different specializations. For example making the PzIII a great, fast breakthrough tank while focusing on tank-on-tank combat with the PzIV for example. Especially since you can filter what equipment divisions use, you could quiet easiely do that.

I guess that depends on whether the efficiency is flat over a production line regardless of factories, or affected on a factory by factory basis. I know each line of 15 factories has a separate efficiency so I thought adding more factories to a line would reduce that efficiency. I could be wrong, interesting question.

If you can slowly ramp up production as efficiency improves and keep that efficiency then you are right. However a lot of equipment such as infantry weapons require many lines for a major. Each line would be starting at the bottom efficiency. If your plan was to replace the weapons of most front line units (i would imagine most majors would) then you might as well get it over with and get a fair few lines going immediately, leaving only enough older weapons for replacements and attrition.

If its on a line by line basis its much more exploitable. You could simply start off multiple lines with a single factory each and then wait a year for efficiency to go up before going absolutely crazy with the new equipment.

 

[sidders]

I was thinking about exactly this recently. I suppose it mainly comes down to how many upgrades can you can afford with 500 xp, and how quickly you can equip your divisions with this new gear. It will be very IC intensive to overcome the lack of gearing bonus.

Interestingly, I remember one of the German national foci in the Molotov-Ribbentrop line removes the ahead of time research penalty for the panzer 4! Unless that's been changed by release, it opens up the possibility to go immediately for the pz3, timing it so as to unlock pz4 research just as the focus finishes, and research the 1941 model pz4 far ahead of time. Immediately using whatever land xp you have to make a powered-up version of the pz4, and then mass-producing it till it becomes totally obsolete.

I wouldn't be surprised if that focus does get changed before release, because I could see it giving Germany an overwhelming early game advantage.

 

[GsusNSV]

Interestingly, I remember one of the German national foci in the Molotov-Ribbentrop line removes the ahead of time research penalty for the panzer 4!

I found this one. Even reduces the ahead of time for the Panther.

 

[RupertTheBear]

Maybe I should clarify: I know that switching production from an un-upgraded version to an upgraded one will give a hit to efficiency.

But what's keeping me from building upgraded variants for a newly researched tank right away, if I have the XP? Nothing. So it would be possible to research a new model, give it like 4,4,4,4 upgrades, and only then go to production. Right? Right. Is there any reason not to do this?

 

[Denkt]

The tradeoff is that you need to save the experience instead of using it straight away, so you trade some type of advantage for an advantage later in the game.

That is what strategy is about.

 

[nastydisease]

Maybe I should clarify: I know that switching production from an un-upgraded version to an upgraded one will give a hit to efficiency.

But what's keeping me from building upgraded variants for a newly researched tank right away, if I have the XP? Nothing. So it would be possible to research a new model, give it like 4,4,4,4 upgrades, and only then go to production. Right? Right. Is there any reason not to do this?

Like I said earlier you reduce reliability by over engineering your variants (which leads to higher losses through attrition, breakdown etc). You can only go as high as 5 in reliability, then 2 - 2 - 1 perhaps or 5 in one category, weapon say, without the variant having much lower reliability than the original version.

That said, I think using your xp right off the bat on a new variant is the most efficient use, like you say. Either that or as a ditch response to suddenly finding yourself unable to penetrate the T34's armor in the opening weeks of Barbarossa as happened historically. Instead of waiting for a new variant you could take a small hit to production to do something immediately. Or if perhaps you are in such dire straits you cannot afford the lapse in production but need better vehicles sooner. Perhaps something the USSR encountered with shifting back to the Mosin.

Its kind of historical coming straight off the bat with a more mature design if you have plenty of experience with that type of vehicle before. Would be nice if there were more individual types of experience, similar to HOI3's practical's, so it would seem more thematic to only be able to come out with a superior tank if you're actually using tanks. Might be a bit difficult to manage against the need to use some kind of experience to evolve your divisions however.

 

[RupertTheBear]

1..

2..

3..

1) Do we know if it works like that? Can you only offset 1 armor / engine / weapon upgrade with 1 reliability upgrade? Or is it some other value?

2) Since the whole game is build around small number changes, I think it's highly improbable that you'll 'encounter a new tank that you cannot kill'. But I get what you mean

3) Yeah, i was wondering about the same thing. I think it would kinda feel weird - say you're playing with infantry divisions only, then develop your first tank, bam, there you go, full upgrades because you didn't spend the XP on new division templates. Still, I am aware that there's a balance to be struck between playability and 'every model has it's own xp'.

 

[nastydisease]

1) Do we know if it works like that? Can you only offset 1 armor / engine / weapon upgrade with 1 reliability upgrade? Or is it some other value?

2) Since the whole game is build around small number changes, I think it's highly improbable that you'll 'encounter a new tank that you cannot kill'. But I get what you mean

3) Yeah, i was wondering about the same thing. I think it would kinda feel weird - say you're playing with infantry divisions only, then develop your first tank, bam, there you go, full upgrades because you didn't spend the XP on new division templates. Still, I am aware that there's a balance to be struck between playability and 'every model has it's own xp'.

You can watch Daniel do it in the WWW videos. He messes around with it a bit, you see that 1 reliability only counteracts one upgrade of something else. Possibly I've seen it elsewhere too but particularly the first DD where Daniel takes over he (number 5?) messes with the variants a bit and creates The Riga panzer variant.

Armor and Weapon penetration values are super important. If the penetration doesn't beat the armor value the division does half damage. Personally I'm more of a weapon guy because I believe death is the best damage mitigation, but having tanks that are super tough because the enemy doesn't have the weapons for them is certainly an appealing strategy!

EDIT: Here you go
30:30ish in the video

Obviously it is still in development. I think I've seen this elsewhere too.

 

[GermanPower]

To me I see some very clear cut issues already. It's making it seem like the upgrading system is a wash because of how harsh the cut down is. To me they now needed to tie in the extent of the upgrade to the amount of changes as I stated early. Instead of automatically leaving it at 25% that's easily abused by the player to make things silly and wonky. Such as a Panzer IV coming out fully upgraded or close to it on the first line. That makes no sense. Practically every tank when it first came out and the last model are totally different. There was no hyper advanced tank coming out right off the bat. That seems gamey and unrealistic. Game mechanics should be encouraged to be used correctly and realistically. Not to be used all wonky tonky like.

If the purpose of the upgrade system was to let the nations tanks be colored by that instead of premade stats for each it should be widely used when possible by the player. I understand the need for a high penalty to keep a advantage to staying with the same model. But I think minor changes have to be encouraged and the major changes should have the heftier penalty. Again I do think the efficiency regain rate should be higher for production of the new upgraded version to a milestone or something. Simply so it translates that the production line is more adapting to the new model versus starting over from scratch.

Maybe a tank needs a certain number of tanks produced before it can even be upgraded..that'd be a good tag in to stop players for instantly having the best the tank can offer. You have to build 1,000 or 500 of a model before you can upgrade it. That way the player is faced with a choice. Makes no sense to come out with a T-34/85 right off the bat.

Can you max out all the stats? I saw someone explaining how it works and is the there no hardcap simply if you max it out you'll get a hard reliability penalty.

 

[panzerzombie]

The exact formula is as follows ( the basic model has a 80% reliability ) :

1 point reliability equals +16% reliability
1 point of others equals -8% reliability

thus a 5R-5-5-5 tank would have 40% reliability
a 5R - 3 - 3 - 4 has unchanged 80%

I don´t know if there is a upper or lower hardcap...

edit: It seems I have old data, nastydisease is right, 1 point Reliability is now +8% ( my info was from older W.W.W. and 1 point did cost 25 Exp, now it costs 5 Exp.

 

[3ishop]

I'd say if you are able to do it then yeah it would be cheesy gameplay. Xp shouldn't be that easy to get early on and you shouldn't be able to avoid spending it while gearing up for the war.

From what I remember it's not going to be easy to get a lot of xp before the war begins and the amount you gain depends on the size of your forces and enemy forces and those that get used.

 

[vector1]

From WWW, it seems that +10 points (maxing 2 areas) = 500 land experience. That argues that most people might choose to go with 5 points in reliability and 5 points in everything else, or maybe even spread out 10 points and take the reliability hit if you are confident of outproducing the enemy's more reliable tanks. It's also not possible to max out all 4 areas unless this changes later.

 

[adam_grif]

There are two historical things represented by the variant system.

1) What we've mostly been talking about mostly, designs getting upgraded over time
2) The innate differences between vehicles designed by different countries at different times

It's definitely ridiculous to get a 1944 Panzer IV cranked out in 1940 by XP cheesing. But it's not ridiculous for "1941 tank" to produce both the the T-34 and the Panzer IV despite the differences between those vehicles. You could imagine that the differences are accounted for by the "base characteristics" of those vehicles, i.e. variants of the standard 1941 template. A wave of initial investments in the tank chassis in terms of XP would be what accounts for the fact that not everyone's tanks are the same.

Some future DLC might decouple these two things both being accounted for by the XP system, but in the mean time, perhaps there could be various limitations like making it cost more than the max XP to upgrade far down a tree, or making it so that the XP cost of a variant upgrade is innately tied to the production line efficiency of that model being produced. So if you've got full efficiency on a tank, it's cheap to upgrade, but a new line with only 25% efficiency will cost 4x more XP to upgrade. That might be "too local", i.e. if you switch lines and switch back it would be a bit awful if you had to pay tons of XP for a temporary production disruption. But Idk what systems are in place. Paradox might be in a better position to comment on this.

 

[favonius]

Maybe just a +100% experience cost penalty for creating new models (investing points) in equipment you've just researched which slowly scales down until reaching 0% after a year has elapsed.

So for example immediately after researching the Panzer III every point in a new model of the Panzer III would cost 100 experience rather than the default 50 experience. After 6 months have past since finishing the research though that would have scaled down to 75 experience for a point.

 

[nastydisease]

The exact formula is as follows ( the basic model has a 80% reliability ) :

1 point reliability equals +16% reliability
1 point of others equals -8% reliability

thus a 5R-5-5-5 tank would have 40% reliability
a 5R - 3 - 3 - 4 has unchanged 80%

I don´t know if there is a upper or lower hardcap...

If you look at 30:30 in the video I posted above you can see about a month ago it was reliability +8% not +16%.
So you're only looking at fully upgrading one aspect of the tank along with reliability if you dont want to adversely affect its reliability compared to the stock version.

From WWW, it seems that +10 points (maxing 2 areas) = 500 land experience. That argues that most people might choose to go with 5 points in reliability and 5 points in everything else, or maybe even spread out 10 points and take the reliability hit if you are confident of outproducing the enemy's more reliable tanks. It's also not possible to max out all 4 areas unless this changes later.

Also in the same video its 5xp per point. So 50xp for 10 points or only 10% of the max accrual of xp which seems very low and probably not given a proper balance pass yet.

For better or worse this system makes it so that the tech upgrades (which are limited by year) are the main source of creating more power than your opponents (at least majors) and using xp to make variants is simply to provide flavor and a bit more depth to a nations overall strategy. I'm not opposed to this idea at all seeing as it allows a player to colour in an otherwise generic tank to their tastes.

The exact rates of gaining xp pre war and during the war, as a minor and a major probably need a lot of tweaking tho.

 

[vector1]

I see, I mistook the 500 star on top as the total experience needed. What does that mean then?

 

[Quendallon]

I would think total XP available for upgrading.

The cost is shown in the save button.

 

[GermanPower]

I would think total XP available for upgrading.

The cost is shown in the save button.

So it'd be possible to fully upgrade with 100 army xp?