Seems to work fine for me....
I should have said "as intended".
This does work. Try changing default templates to add stuff like self-propelled guns and self-propelled anti-tank brigades and then report back, but before you do make sure the game proceeds at least until 1941-1942. Problems start to show or accumulate as time progresses.
If you still manage to have AI divisions looking like this and with more advanced stuff, tell us how you did it.
Actually, now it takes care of missing equipment. It changes priorities for missing stuff, adds new equipment (like SPART for example) etc. That is actually a positive thing and the light in the tunnel. Other part of the problem is actually poor management of training queue.
The hard part is balancing.
The first thing I did was to make it hard for the AI to do division deployment. That worked beautifully. The AI was able to keep its armies equipped and the game became more challenging and a lot more fun. Obviously now there were a lot less divisions around, which may or may not be what you are looking for.
However, this approach became a problem when I realised China -consistently- could not stand against Japan. When I'm modding the game, I'm trying to do two things:
1) Make it perform better and more realistically.
2) Make it perform historically accurate.
Hence, having China getting knocked out by Japan by 1940-41 each time (something I'm noticing happens a lot with the new patch) was not acceptable for me. So I started tweaking to allow the AI to build enough divisions for Germany to quickly despatch Poland, France and the Low Countries (one thing I did notice making this hard was that the German AI was declaring war against the Low Countries by 22 September and the war was turning into a two front war, making it a lot harder for Germany. So I changed national focus priorities to give it enough time to take care of Poland first) and for China to hold against Japan. This is the hardest part of modding the AI and division deployment defines, at least for me. Because I want the game to progress historically. If I tweaked something a bit too much for example, China would then overwhelm Japanese forces. If I did it a bit too little then Japan would overtake China by ~1941.
Unfortunately before long, I realised the game is just not designed to run historically, nor, it seems, logically. It was just too unpredictable. Also, one thing you change usually has a domino effect that needs further refinements on other fronts. That's why thorough testing is important.
When testing your mods, make sure the game plays until at least 1942, at least. Stuff that seems to be working early game can fuck shit up once the map starts shifting.
With that said; you guys might want to tweak AI naval invasion numbers as well. In cases where Japan is driven out of mainland China, it will keep mounting small scale naval invasions on China and Korea with 1-2 divisions. Sometimes it will succeed at gaining a beachhead and start unloading more and more divisions there. In the meantime, the Chinese army will reorganise and create a front around where Japan landed and will attack, eventually regaining all the naval bases and cutting the Japanese army off. This in turn will result in the loss of all divisions there. This will keep happening and soon enough, Japan will have no divisions left. I mean nothing, zero, nil, naught. At this point, as soon as it deploys a new division, it will mount an invasion and the same thing will keep happening over and over again, like a very shitty groundhog day.
This happens with Britain too. They will keep invading Italy and sometimes they will succeed, but then they will be overwhelmed and will lose all divisions there.
I tried making it harder for the AI to invade overseas, but that doesn't work well in the Pacific, where you want there to be invasions taking place. So I found a compromise by making the AI mount larger invasions to increase their rate of success. This works to an extent. It makes it quite harder for Japan to lose all its divisions, but it also makes Italy easier to be invaded by Britain.
So to conclude; if you're not as compulsive as I am when it comes to historical gameplay, then you may be satisfied with the results. I, unfortunately, cannot be.
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