I will note that the points in made in this video have not been addressed
Command hierarchy
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I will note that the points in made in this video have not been addressed
I think there is no point in discussing 40w any further. Some people want them banned and anyone else behaves like a three-year-old
But I checked the ratings, and it looks that the small sample has a popular vote in favour of 40w not being ahistorical or gamey.
Conclusion: this thread is a Kindergarten.
While not ahistorical or gamey per se, 40 width are definitely more common in the game than they were historically.
But banning them outright would simply replace this problem with another one. It would make those historical divisions impossible to recreate and remove variety and strategy from the game truning it into a battle of raw numbers between 20 width divisions on both sides.
We think anyone who wants to contribute meaningfully to this thread should make proposals how to rebalance the divisions. The goal should be that 40 width divisions becomes what they were historically, a powerful but rare tool to be used in truly decisive battles.
Based on the video @Gefallener_Held provided
we've come up with two more Ideas:
I. reverse the support exploit. Make every support company less efficient with every additional main battalion. This would be both logical and give small divisions an advantage.
II. Rebalance Generals so that the command limit is based on battalions (perhaps 300 battalions per general) but experience gain is increased with the number of divisions. That way a general commanding many small divisions would gain XP much faster than one commanding 40width divisions. A player would therefore have to choose betwen having many strong 40width divisions led by unexpereinced generals or many smaller divisions in order to train good generals.
This seems reasonable. I still dismiss out of hand the assertion that 40 width divisions were common, etc. Fixing the dynamic so that one 40 width division will attack one divisions where two 20 width division each attack a separate division, which in effects gives a compound attack bonus to 40 width divisions for no possible rationale.
Support divisions should also be capped, OR have a higher equipment cost prorated according to width.
Please note I did later suggest a cap on 40 width divisions. If allowed, they should be incredibly rare.
I think we are--or rather were--talking past each other. The spirit of my assertion is to ban the ubiquity of 40 width (entire armies) OR address the gamey exploits I have noted, or rather was explained in this excellent video.
I like the first Idea but I don't know about making them less efficient, just keeping them the same. It doesn't make sense that the same amount of men/guns spread out between more battalions would be more or less effective, the support battalions should just give flat buffs to the division they're in.
The second idea would be a non-factor. Commander experience is already based on number of divisions fighting. Meta players already grind their top generals (Italy in Ethiopia, USSR in Finland/Iran, Germany in Spain, Japan in China for example) with armies of the maximum number of bad divisions until they gain skill points and traits. People would just keep doing this until their generals have all the traits they want, before their major war or major enemy. After the generals have all the desired skills (usually adaptable, engineer, fortress buster, trickster/improvisation expert, infantry or panzer expert), they just swap that general over to the army that contains their important armored or special forces divisions.
The Allies can't really do this, but this is a game balance thing.
Non-Democratic nations that can fight early wars will have much better generals at the start of World War Two, and better generals than the allies will get fighting a normal war without purposeful grinding for traits in specific provinces, but the Democratic nations have better generals at base (USA, UK have generals that start at level 5, Patton has 7 points in attack), and stronger economies to make up for the initial land military disadvantage.
The main topic of this thread was a question on Command Hierarchy, I do not believe the OP intended to turn into an argument on whether 40 width divisions are gamey and a-historical or not, just a simple question about different division sizes representing different levels of army units.
What seems to have recently dominated this thread, the 40 width issue, really belongs in its own thread, which exists and was quite active and now seems to be bleeding into the rest of the forum.
This discussion presents two questions: 1) are 40 width divisions gamey/exploitative, and 2) Are they historical?
For the first:
Personally I feel like 40 wide divisions are not an exploit so much as the AI should be taught to play optimally and use them itself, as long as the player is allowed to make them. The AI should be given the tools it needs to compete with good players. Someone else brought up submarines and strategic bombers being unable to be countered by the AI, are using those exploits too?
Someone also said that only majors can make 40-widths. This is patently incorrect, and can be proved by counterexample. The meta in competitive multiplayer games for years has involved South Africa exclusively producing 40-width heavy tank divisions. Canada also occasionally builds 40-width mechanized divisions. Romania builds 40 width Marines and Mountaineers. The existence of just one counterexample would prove that minors can indeed produce 40-width divisions, and I have now listed three off the top of my head.
For the second:
The examples of a few German divisions have been discussed at length in this thread already, there's not really anything for me to add here. It's been explained to my satisfaction that these divisions did exist in history even if someone only recognizes the existence of a singular division he thinks meets this criteria. Again, even if only one example existed, it is proof that they did exist. If something existed in history, the player should be able to reproduce it as best as he can in the game.
The abstraction of Corps/Army level assets into divisions in-game might also be a fair point to make, but one that I am not sure of without doing my own research on the subject.
Lastly on this question, does it matter? Half of the game is based on doing things differently than the historical nations and leaders and seeing a different outcome of the war. If I wanted to tank my entire economy and make 50 divisions of Maus tanks to attack Russia with, I could do that. Even though only two prototypes were built in real life and they were expensive and unreliable machines, the player is free to make those decisions no matter how impractical they would be historically. This particular argument about the Maus tanks is using the exact same reasoning as the person saying that "The GD was the only historical 40-width division and was an exception, so 40-width divisions should be banned." Would this person also claim that super-heavy tanks should be removed from the tech tree because they were a-historical?
Final thoughts:
The whole discussion about this seems to be one side making points drawing from research and giving examples of divisions that historically might have been translated as 40-width, and someone on the other side putting his fingers in his ears going "I can't heeeear youuuu." We need to be more civilized on this forum, nonconstructive discussion has no place. If you disagree with someone, state your point and, importantly, back up your own claims and refute others' with sources and evidence instead of replying with insults, fallacies, and non-arguments. Repeating "NO" over and over without offering a counterargument sounds immature and does nothing to serve you.
I submitted MHV as a source. Others have explained ad nauseum why the argument that as a rule divisions were 40 width is erroneous. And yet it persists.
As for allowing the AI, NO, because that oblige the player to. Unless the stat exploit in the video I submitted is remedied..... 40 width should be banned or capped severely.
I agree with you on this part. The very first part of my post said that it doesn't make sense for support company bonuses to be multiplicative.
However, would it be possible to ask you to respond to each of my specific arguments instead of a general reply that doesn't acknowledge ninety percent of what I said? I'm curious to your thoughts on the Maus tank point in particular.
Because I and others have repeated our objections and they just get strawmanned. And I am tired of arguing about it. I speaking in generalities, and someone comes with the exception, eg someone playing as South Africa using all 40 width divisions. One, this is an exception. It is like pointing to a woman who is 6'1 and using it as a vehicle to submit that it is not true that men are (generally) taller than women. And if South Africa or Romania can field 40 width division by min maxing, they should not be, because Germany only had a handful--one that I am convinced of, namely GD.
And again, programming the AI to filed these things just means that I and others who rightly decry them would be forced to go along. I think its crap, especially without, if not a ban, a severe cap, and I do not want to have to do it because of some gamey exploit bonus that make one 40 width division kill 2 x20 width seemingly every time for no good, justifiable reason.
Look, they effectively banned space marines for good reason. They did other things to account for this. This needs to happen with 40 width divisions. Whether it is a ban, a severe cap, or the least likely but best solution of fixing the compounding combat bonuses is less important to me.
I would agree to a severe cap combined with some sort of tinkering to stop the unfair bonuses, but I do not think that is likely to happen. That is why I advocate just banning them. Above all, I do not make me and others field armies of them by programming the AI to do this.
Well, the game already arbitrarily forces the AI to use 20-width divisions, which are often, though not always, too small to be historical in size. The problem, ultimately, is the combat width value; there's no way to set a battle width value without one size of division being optimal. You'd have to use a completely different combat system to get rid of this problem and allow for differing division sizes. I mean, you could change the combat width to be 81 to make optimal the use of the standard triangular divisions most countries used at the time, at least on paper - 9x INF, 3X ART - but that would still advantage one width over any other width, which would become especially apparent when you consider most armoured divisions weren't triangular in the second half of the war, yet this arrangement would make keeping them triangular optimal.
I think the overarching problem is simply the fact that HoI4 is a game. Combat calculations have to be done somehow, it can't be fluid real time combat at the tactical level like in real life, with unique equipment behavior, leadership, and training for every country.
As long as players know how the combat system works in the game skilled ones will be able to determine the optimal, most effective template for every situation. And the AI developers at Paradox are more focused on making a system that works so that the game is playable for the average player than spending many hours figuring out how to min-max their own game. As long as high level players continue to spend hours learning how to min-max effectively while AI devs do not attempt to, the AI will always be unable to compete.
The only reason 40-width divisions are meta currently is because of 1) the 80-width +40 per additional province combat width, 2) combined with the way attacks are rolled against the defense stat and 3) how divisions target enemies in combat making larger divisions better than smaller ones, even when total combat width on both sides is the same.
If Paradox were to change the system, people would just complain about whatever is meta under the new system and how gamey it is.
As long as players know how the combat system works in the game skilled ones will be able to determine the optimal, most effective template for every situation. And the AI developers at Paradox are more focused on making a system that works so that the game is playable for the average player than spending many hours figuring out how to min-max their own game. As long as high level players continue to spend hours learning how to min-max effectively while AI devs do not attempt to, the AI will always be unable to compete.
The only reason 40-width divisions are meta currently is because of 1) the 80-width +40 per additional province combat width, 2) combined with the way attacks are rolled against the defense stat and 3) how divisions target enemies in combat making larger divisions better than smaller ones, even when total combat width on both sides is the same.
If Paradox were to change the system, people would just complain about whatever is meta under the new system and how gamey it is.
Except that It's not an exception. Every single country that makes divisions in multiplayer, no matter how small the country, makes 40-width divisions. Those were just three examples. Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Australia, New Zealand, British Raj, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, pretty much every single country builds 40-widths. The actual exceptions are countries like China, which benefits more from hordes of smaller divisions of pure infantry.
You can argue that they should not be able to because of the rarity of historical examples of large divisions, but my and others' opinions is that the player should be free to make a-historical decisions, since this is after all a game, not a simulation. If you have so many complaints about hoi4, might I recommend HoI3 or HoI2 instead? You don't seem to enjoy the newest game very much, and from what I hear the older games didn't place so much emphasis on alternate history.
By that logic, bring out the space marines. No, sorry, not interested.
Not really. The special forces cap makes sense because only a limited amount of people have the incredible conditioning, talent, and physical characteristics to be effective special forces. Much like the often proposed pilot manpower pool, it is incredibly difficult and expensive to give huge amounts of people specialist training and equipment.
Whether a country builds lots of small divisions or fewer large ones has nothing to do with any amount of training, available manpower, equipment or anything else. It's purely based on how the country's leadership decides to divide up and organize the same amount of troops, and the player should not be limited to what countries did historically in that respect.
I do not see why a system cannot be developed where a 40 width (or whatever it is) is not better than two divisions half its size. I would agree width cap per province should be revised. Perhaps the basic unit should be 30 width rather than 20, with a severe cap on number of 40-45 width divisions. So that width on first province is 90 rather than 80, and 30 or 60 for each additonal province.
Again, I object to situations where majors let alone minors field whole armies of 40 width, and I object to the unintended benefi bestowed on 40 width when that is not congruent with most divsiion configurations.
Except there are also factors on why no one fielded 40 width divisions as a rule.
Space Marines are still a thing, you just can't make very many of them due to the SF battalion limit. You can still pair your Marines with Heavy Tanks to steamroll anything that gets in their way.
Space Marines!
As if the US Marines would actually mix tanks with infantry to steam roll across Okina...
...wa...
Le Sigh
As if the US Marines would actually mix tanks with infantry to steam roll across Okina...
...wa...
Le Sigh
They are banned in multiple player, whether paradox's efforts to limit them are effective is another thing. You get the point....
Or perhaps just reduce the speed, breakthrough and attack values of the divisions stacked in the same or involved in the same combat.
Space Marines!
As if the US Marines would actually mix tanks with infantry to steam roll across Okina...
...wa...
Le Sigh
Off topic, but is that tank about to throw a track?
I personally like to cap the number of units a general can handle based on number of batallions (or even better total combat width) instead of number of divisions.
When playing Soviet union I always build 40 width divisions no matter for which purpose, because with 20 width I would quickly run out of generals.