Development Diary #16 - 11th of February 2009

[Ostheim]

Let's say that the German player is trying a Sealion and reconaissance says Britain's defenses are minimal. One week before the invasion is about to start, the Italian player launches a massive offensive in North Africa, shattering a lot of the Britsh divisions there. When the German player lands, he finds that there are 10 extra divisions in London that weren't there before. Yeah they'll be at 30% strength with only 75% of the org, but "It is better to be present to command ten men than to be absent in command of a thousand." Defeating the forces of the island nations shouldn't send them back to the capital.

While I agree there should be some solution to the issue of capitals and islands, I don't think the shattered divisions at 30% strength are active and usable until the units themselves (the vehicles and equipment) are fully built again. I believe it's just like building new units, and that German player may already have to face new divisions being built aside from the shattered ones. In addition, I think early critics of the system are overestimating just how many and how often divisions will be shattered...it's not like every offensive is going to result in a handful of shattered divisions, especially not an Italian offensive in North Africa. I don't think the UK will have enough units being shattered on a consistent basis to make Sea Lion any more difficult than it already is--and should be.

 

[Radu]

Shattered units reappearing at 30% and 75% would be too much.

I would lean more on what Johan said,which did not give numbers,but emphasized that shattered units are remnants. 30% isn't quite remnant. 10% or 5% is. I mean,it seems closer to the spirit of the dev diary.

Even King's statements can be interpreted. He might mean 50% of the manpower is gone for good but that doesn't mean the division reappears with the rest of the 50%,especially since it appears manpower and equipment are not separate,but unified into strength.

So merely retaining 50% of the men but 10% of the material really means a div at 10%, the rest being poured into the manpower pool. You can't send men unequipped.

 

[von Tairach]

I do think it's funny that Johan stopped commenting once people started saying we like it, but divisions in India, Burma, the Middle East etc. should not pop up in London.

Maybe he just has more important things to do than repeat the same sentences over and over again to whining readers...

Nevertheless I too find the "shatter - capital" concept a bit weird... Don’t get me wrong, the basic "shatter %" idea is very nice, but the thing that bothers me is the sudden miraculous appearance of a new (although severely damaged) division in the capital city. I would much rather just see the manpower value increased and from that the "surviving or people in hospitals/vacation/etc." could get back on the battlefield with some other division...

I mean, it makes decent sense when the battles are taking place around the capital city, but a trip from Singapore to London? Or from Midway to Washington? I don’t think so... Although it’s not that much of a pressing issue. If it stays like this, I can live with it (stargate strategic redeployment is much worse...) :rofl:

 

[kstanb]

Shattered units reappearing at 30% and 75% would be too much.

I would lean more on what Johan said,which did not give numbers,but emphasized that shattered units are remnants. 30% isn't quite remnant. 10% or 5% is. I mean,it seems closer to the spirit of the dev diary.

Even King's statements can be interpreted. He might mean 50% of the manpower is gone for good but that doesn't mean the division reappears with the rest of the 50%,especially since it appears manpower and equipment are not separate,but unified into strength.

So merely retaining 50% of the men but 10% of the material really means a div at 10%, the rest being poured into the manpower pool. You can't send men unequipped.

No, no, they will probably start at 0%, but as long as you have manpower, they will keep increasing strength, if you are in a desperate situation, you will be more than willing to sacrifice lets say ten 30% strength divisions to save Moscow.

a completely new division, if using the same mechanics of HOI2, will not be ready until it is at 100%, so using the same example, it won't be possible to throw them to save the day

 

[Alex_brunius]

Do I want to shatter a division? As far as I can tell I don't. Having a division retreat with 30% causalities and a loss of organization seems to be more advantageous.

So you preffer for the enemy division to fight you in the defense of each and all the provinces on the road to the enemy capital instead? Each time with new organization and the advantage of your units moving over damaged infrastructure with lagging supplylines.

If this feature works out as Its supposed to do then the difference between a few shattered enemy divisions and a few retreating ones WILL be the difference between a clean breakthrough (that might net you a very nice pocket of enemy troops) and a stubborn defense slowing your advance down enough for the almost encircled divisions to slip away.

I think Its going to be very interresting to try this out and se the effects of shatter and combat slowing down movement live.

 

[hito1]

I'll say it again. I'm ready to pre-order!

Wonderful dev-diary!

 

[Modestus]

I don't think you quite understand what happens when you shatter the unit, you are destroying the actual 'unit' for all intensive purposes, it is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. The only difference between destroying that BEF division in a pocket and shattering it is that some of the manpower escapes with some experience to fight another day.



What is better to destroy all of the unit but 30% of the manpower and send it all the way home where the unit armaments have to be totally rebuilt or only inflicting 30% casualties and ~80% org loss?

I understand that the unit is gone but thats the reason why I suggested your causing a Dunkirk before you have actually put your units in a position to actually have a Dunkirk.

If I shatter 3 British divisions on the first day of my attack at the German Belgium Border they will end up in London. They may have no manpower or organization but they are out of my reach. If however I force those Divisions to retreat and subsequently trap them within Belgium without supply they will be destroyed and no divisions will appear in London.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I shattered 3 divisions makes it easier for me to encircle the remaining Divisions but thats the problem does it? 3 divisions forced to the point of shattering are probably ineffective anyhow.

On a grander scale you have Barbarossa, do you want to weaken divisions allowing you the opportunity to encircle them or do you want to send them all the way back to Moscow. I appreciate that this will be a drain on Russian Manpower and resupply but that particular manpower ( and by this I mean the new manpower) is now beyond my reach. I will now have to direct my attentions towards the remaining forces.

If I continue to shatter divisions I will continue to put them beyond my reach. I have to weigh up the cost for me in manpower to actually shatter a division compared to the time it takes for me to regain contact with those divisions that are being re-equipped in Moscow. Regardless of how much this costs the soviets if they can resupply those units before I make contact I will have to fight them again.

I think it will only make sense if you can reach a stage where the drain on manpower and supplies is so great that the country cannot afford to re-equip its units and that reminds me of EU3.

Edit: By the way I am not arguing against a new idea really, just thinking out loud. There are so many other concepts like frontage and logistics that must be taken into account, I do think its all very interesting.

 

[Gormadoc]

Since it requires strengt losses for a unit to shatter, i cant see the problem really. I assume the percentage strenght the unit reappear with, are the percentage of the strengt at the time when the unit was shattered.

So if it takes 50% strengt loss before a unit can be shattered and the unit then looses 70% of remaining(reappers with 30%) when shattered it will end up reappearing with 15% of total strenght.(only manpower, all equipment lost) This sounds very reasanoble to me.

Or i might have misunderstood the intire thing.

 

[Chief Savage Ma]

Each and every diary I read makes me willing to spend five more dollars on this game.

Now we're up to 80 bucks. :wacko:

 

[Alex_brunius]

On a grander scale you have Barbarossa, do you want to weaken divisions allowing you the opportunity to encircle them or do you want to send them all the way back to Moscow.

Unless you actually is able to take all those soviet divisions down to very low manpower levels they are not guaranteed to shatter anyway.

Also remember that divisions will retreat individually, so we won't se a single tank keeping all the AIs Infantry in battle until they are so low on manpower anymore.

I think its going to be very hard to make an enemy division shatter. How often do you see enemy divisions below 50% strenght in HoI2? For me its only when I apply excessive numbers of ground attack aircraft and they get in the way of the full army group spearhead (3:1+ numerical advantage + tech advantage favor me).

This is assuming the AI is smart enough to give its divisions enough manpower, reinforcements and leadership.

 

[potski]

Having thought about this a while I do not like this shattering division concept one bit.

If I shatter some of the BEF in Belgium I must have inflicted serious losses on those divisions why should they be able to leg it back to England. I understand that you will need to reconstitute those divisions partly or from scratch is not quite clear but either way it seems to me your causing a Dunkirk to happen before it has actually happened.

Do I want to shatter a division? As far as I can tell I don't. Having a division retreat with 30% causalities and a loss of organization seems to be more advantageous.

Shatter implies a devastating victory with a very good chance that a division will be destroyed in the follow up.

If I shatter 20% of Soviet divisions during the opening phase of Barbarossa I will only be guaranteeing that when I get to Moscow 20% of the Soviet army will be waiting for me, that does not include the divisions that are coming on line.

It may cost the Soviets a lot of manpower but if I was the Germans I would prefer that manpower be sent out to the front line where I can get at it.

Shattering divisions seems to me to create reserves which my be its intention but besides that it does not make much sense to me at the moment.

Ostheim and Alex_brunius has covered much of this. But I would add, surely it was exactly German doctrine deliberately to shatter enemy Divs. They weren't particularly interested in fixing them in place and destroying them. The essence of Blitzkrieg is to get the Panzers through the frontline as quickly as possible and cause chaos in the rear areas, affecting command and control and supply services, so that a unit just breaks up into smaller parts which are not able to fight as a cohesive whole. Follow-up infantry might mop these up, but they might not, instead they are quite willing just to push on often allowing many men who had fought in the shattered units to find their way back to their own frontlines (and therefore in HOI terms join the MP pool). The shattered units might go far to the rear to be rebuilt, but the intention of Blitzkrieg is that the war would be over very quickly, before they will ever be ready to fight again.

A new Inf.Div takes 95 days to build, and we can assume a shattered unit takes the same to rebuild, as it loses all of its equipment. So, Poland, France and Yugoslavia - Blitzkreig successful, capital overrun and country surrenders before any shattered Divs are rebuilt. Soviet Union - Blitzkrieg fails as Panzer Armies do not capture Moscow and Leningrad quickly enough to force complete collapse of Soviets.

This was partly because of the distances involved and low infrastructure, which had been underestimated by the High Command, partly because of Hitler diverting Guderian's Panzer Army away from Moscow towards Kiev for a couple of weeks, and partly because of the resilience of many Soviet units, which did not shatter as easily as the Germans expected. They were then forced to surround them, and try to destroy them in place. Massive numbers of Soviet units were completely destroyed in this way, but it ultimately helped win the war by delaying the Panzers from reaching Moscow before winter.

IMHO the Blitzkrieg doctrine should increase the chances of an enemy unit shattering.

 

[Radu]

I understand that the unit is gone but thats the reason why I suggested your causing a Dunkirk before you have actually put your units in a position to actually have a Dunkirk.

If I shatter 3 British divisions on the first day of my attack at the German Belgium Border they will end up in London. They may have no manpower or organization but they are out of my reach. If however I force those Divisions to retreat and subsequently trap them within Belgium without supply they will be destroyed and no divisions will appear in London.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I shattered 3 divisions makes it easier for me to encircle the remaining Divisions but thats the problem does it? 3 divisions forced to the point of shattering are probably ineffective anyhow.

On a grander scale you have Barbarossa, do you want to weaken divisions allowing you the opportunity to encircle them or do you want to send them all the way back to Moscow. I appreciate that this will be a drain on Russian Manpower and resupply but that particular manpower ( and by this I mean the new manpower) is now beyond my reach. I will now have to direct my attentions towards the remaining forces.

If I continue to shatter divisions I will continue to put them beyond my reach. I have to weigh up the cost for me in manpower to actually shatter a division compared to the time it takes for me to regain contact with those divisions that are being re-equipped in Moscow. Regardless of how much this costs the soviets if they can resupply those units before I make contact I will have to fight them again.

I think it will only make sense if you can reach a stage where the drain on manpower and supplies is so great that the country cannot afford to re-equip its units and that reminds me of EU3.

Edit: By the way I am not arguing against a new idea really, just thinking out loud. There are so many other concepts like frontage and logistics that must be taken into account, I do think its all very interesting.

Strength = Manpower + Equipment

The USSR might have manpower reserves but it does not have infinite industrial capacity, it doesn't even dwarf Germany's in the way the US's does.

The equipment destroyed during shattering is equipment destroyed without actually fighting and taking losses for it. So it's your gain.

Second,as it has been emphasized, shattered units reappear as "shadows". As long as the numbers are crunched right and reinforcing a unit is not too quick and too cheap,it's not an issue.

Shattered units reconstituting at 30% is far too high for what shattering tries to model and while hard numbers haven't been thrown yet,it's reasonable to assume shattered divisions reappear at 10% strength at most.

So basically shattered divisions are divisions that broke apart due to the stress of combat without the need to encircle them.

What you've missed is that these divisions,due to leadership/doctrinal/technological insufficiencies break without you needing to expend the time and losses that you normally would.

If Paradox gets things right (and if not CORE will ) you won't see shattered units back on the frontline within a month. More like three months, and we're talking a div that shattered in a not-so-catastrophic manner.

Looking at historical cases of reconstituting shattered units, wether Soviet ones during Barbarossa or Romanian ones during Stalingrad or in Normandy, you'll see that three months is the absolute minimum, with six months being closer to the norm.

I know you're not arguing, but I get the feeling you discount the fact that shattering happened historically,and was not disereable. Why do you assume Paradox will seek to muffle and arcadize the effects of shattering?

Again, Johan and King stated clearly that this is not the case of resupplying,but reconstituting units. They made no effort in underlining that shattering is a very bad thing to happen to a div.

Why do you believe they will backtrack on their statements and make shattering almost a Strategic Redeployment?

I think quite the contrary, shattered units are near-destroyed units and again,unless Paradox really f-es things up in making reinforcement too speedy and too cheap,you have nothing to worry about.

P.S. : A quick question for Paradox. Will reinforcement use a logarithmic function? (i.e. harder and longer to reinforce at 10% and easier at 90%) Non-linearity works wonders for real-life simulations

 

[Lazy_Boy]

I really like this shattered division thing. Will make the eastern front much more realistic I think. Completely break the Soviet army without ridiculous encirclements. And if supply lines are stretched and winter hits the Germans, the Soviets have an opportunity to reinforce well without building everything from scratch. Makes speed and timing a big factor.

Only problem I see is that everything is sent to capital. Why not designate various major cities and the broken division redeploys to the nearest one it has a supply route to?

 

[unmerged(91061)]

Great DD. The balance between wide & small fronts and many vs few support brigades is also good, simulating the difference between US & Soviet armies rather well beyond just doctrine. The adjusting of combat events is also good, encircling the attacker was always a bit odd. The retreat mechanic also looks to be getting some nice love, but things like where they retreat to are still unknown.

Shattering also sounds very good, a great way to make Blitzkrieg more viable and players more careful when sending troops into battle. I would only suggest making a shattered division not neccesarily reform in a naton's capital because the capital does not always represent a training & recruitment centre. As an Aussie, I can say that Canberra was never a major recruitment and training centre, even though it is the national capital. Sydney or Melbourne would be much more realistic. Furthermore, historically when an Australian division was shattered in the North Africa campaign, for example, they would "reform" in Syria where recruits shipped from Australia would be constantly arriving to join up with "shattered" units.
Interesting fact. One of the reasons Operation Market Garden met such stiff resistance is because the II SS Panzer Corps had recently been "shattered" (reduced to about 20-30% strength) due to continuous acion since June and arrived Arhnem in early September. The II SS Panzer Corps was ordered to refit and reform behind German lines in Antwerp and ended up playing a decisive part in the German Defence in Operation Market Garden.

 

[unmerged(25355)]

First, due to a lack of time, I have not read anywhere near all of the posts, so if I repeat, I am sorry.

I think one major change must be made to the shatter mechanics. A unit that is attacking should never shatter. There is no logical reason for it to. They have not been taken prisoners, etc. as described by the development team, because the opponent has not over run their position, which is the basic concept behind shattering. I think a similar event should be added for attackers where the attacking division is forced to abandon the attack. Of course, this division would 1) not be usable in attacks for a while, and 2) would likely shatter if attacked, forcing the player to pull it from the front lines to recover. This would match historical events. Example, Hurtgen Forest and the subsequent Battle of the Bulge, and to a degree Stalingrad.

And as far as the India example that people keep talking about, the solution is to make India a puppet, like in CORE and some of the other mods.

 

[Radu]

The concept of shattering is not a tactical one,but an operational one.

It's not about being overrun or not,it's about a breakdown of command and control.

And yes,attacking units did shatter. During Barbarossa, the Mechanized Corps met their fate attempting to fullfill Stalin's order to counter-attack all along the line.

During the Sino-Japanese war, entire KMT divisions shattered while attempting to counterattack during the fighting around Shanghai.

German units came dangerously close during Operation Typhoon.

The North African theater saw its share.

But yes,shattering in attack is a sign of a much graver miscalculation than shattering in defence.

 

[unmerged(44926)]

What would happen if an American or Canadian division, or even a British one is "shattered" on continental Europe? Are they going to reappear in Washington, Ottawa or London? That seems a little... odd. London maybe, but I can't imagine the reminants of a badly damaged American or Canadian division being hauled back across the Atlantic to be reconstituted in North America, and then shipped back again. Good idea overall, but units should retreat to the nearest major city or army staging point (something with VP maybe? Supply depot?) not necessarily the nation's capitol.

 

[Ostheim]

Radu is right, if you attack a well entrenched position, overwhelming superior forces, or without proper rest/reinforcement it is definitely possible to shatter yourself in combat while on the attack. It can turn from an attack to a desperate defense quickly if things are handled poorly.

@The RC: I would propose--if shattered units are intangible until complete--that shattered units be able to deploy again on the continent where they were shattered. So long as brand new units are not restricted (like forming in the capital or specific province, god forbid) I don't see the problem in this.

 

[unmerged(127071)]

Sorry if this has been answered, but don't feel like reading 7 pages of posts.

So after a division is shattered it reappears in the capital where you can rebuild it again with fresh recruits. Now, Does this newly reinforced division has all the experience it had before it shattered? Or does it loss some or all of its experience?

 

[sbr]

Sorry if this has been answered, but don't feel like reading 7 pages of posts.

So after a division is shattered it reappears in the capital where you can rebuild it again with fresh recruits. Now, Does this newly reinforced division has all the experience it had before it shattered? Or does it loss some or all of its experience?

It retains some experience.


This is from the DD itself.

Just a final note about the shatter effect, since the unit is not eliminated, it will retain some of its accumulated experience. Thus once it is rebuilt from the survivors that did manage to hold cohesion, then it will be a bit more resistant to shattering next time around.