interesting mechanic which gives you an edge

[Alexander Suvorov]

Let us say, I want to deploy a new division type, using Light Tank destroyers. I have not yet built any of them. I would like to deploy 12 divisions under a nice general with good bonuses for armor just as soon as I can, but I want them trained, not green, because WOW green troops get a big penalty (as they should in my opinion.)

So, you might fire up a production line, and head to your division designer and set up, oh let's say 3x3=9 units of my new light tank variant plus some engineers and recon. assume we have sufficient XP. I could make the division and then wait till I have 9 units worth of those tanks produced, and then begin training that first, as we have seen folks do in the streams. Or you can just Queue them all up but they won't have equipment yet.

but I think there may be a better way . say in the division designer I add only 1 unit of the tanks even though I want 9 when I deploy the divisions. with this "partial" division template I intend to add to later before I deploy them, I have an advantage. As soon as I have 12 units worth of tanks I can start training 12 "divisions", and as I add additional tanks in my division designer, it will add to the amount of training time required for the divisions I have started already. This "moves the finish line" so to speak for the training progress bar. but it does not change the value of days spent training so far it just changes the amount needed, which creates the illusion that you have lost progress. but you don't lose progress I don't think. it just looks like you have less training completion because you need more to finish. But the important part is that they start training sooner, and the total amount of total training required will not change. That means I can deploy them sooner.

you can see how much extra training time is needed per unit you're adding in the division designer, on the tooltip! they show SO MUCH on the tooltip. I love tooltips...


So, the question becomes, if I just Queue 12 divisions of my finished template for training even though I do not have the equipment yet, then they'll train as the equipment becomes available. is this better or worse than the method I outlined above? If there is a penalty to training speed based on lack of equipment, then the method of adding the units one at a time in the division designer after I have enough equipment produce will allow me to start training sooner and avoid that lack of equipment penalty on training. if there is no such penalty, it may be just as good to train them up the "simple" way of queue them all up even though I don't have any light tank destroyers yet.

What do you guys think?

 

[Nicolas I]

The game is not out, yet some are already trying to game the system...Though we are all free to play as we like to play.

 

[Sun_Killer]

as far as i know there is no time penalty. But you can only train your units to the lvl of their equipment. so lets say i double the amount of battalions and they where full trained before, they will fall back to 50% training.

 

[Bridger15]

Danial mentioned in one of the recent streams that exact exploit that you describe in the OP. They changed it so that when you change a division to include MORE troops, the newly added troops are green and bring the EXP of the entire division down (apparently experience is calculated on a per battalion level for this reason).

So yeah, go ahead and train up a bunch of 1 brigade divisions, but as soon as you change the template and add 8 more brigades, they are going to be flooded with green troops which brings their training level way down.

 

[Alexander Suvorov]

You would add the divisions incrementally as soon as the equipment became available, not create 1 and then add 8 later, because that wouldn't work at all. as you add the units to the division template, the new units will start to train. As the your division grows, the amount of training "lost" in terms of progress towards the division achieving the next xp rank is just an illusion caused by "moving the finish line" changing your % completion. An example off what i mean. say you have 5 bucks and you need 100. then suddenly you need 200 instead of 100. your % of what you need just went from 5% to 2.5%, but you still have five bucks. you didn't lose half your money. it's an illusion caused by a % indicator.

this is not the same exploit da9l describes, it is nuanced by the adding of battalions to the division as equipment becomes available. What Da9l said was that you can't train one battalion and then wind up with a trained division of multiple battalions. this is not what i am describing. when you finally get the last few tanks you need and your template goes from 8 to 9, it will adjust the amount of "progress" you see in the bar, but not in the drastic way it would if you added 8 new battalions to a template with 1 battalion in it, and again I do not think you lose troop xp, it is just "split up" among the troops in the division so to speak.

this is not really an exploit in my opinion, but a game feature. a division of troops could be trained as battalions and combined later and then trained as a division, which is essentially what I am doing here. they would require training as a division once combined, but not as much as if they would require had they had no training as battalions. this is represented well I think. it's less "gamey" than it seems.

 

[Alexander Suvorov]

as far as i know there is no time penalty. But you can only train your units to the lvl of their equipment. so lets say i double the amount of battalions and they where full trained before, they will fall back to 50% training.

if there's not a penalty, then there's probably no difference between the complicated method I describe and just dumping full divisions into the Queue even though you do not have the equipment for them. I hope that is how it works, because it eliminates micromanagement of queuing up new divisions as you reach the needed amount of equipment which is good.

 

[vector1]

This seems to depend on how the final shipping version of HOI4 treats experience. As I recall in HOI3, experience for units in training is stored as a local, regiment based variable.

As you said, if just 1 brigade is trained, whether the remaining 8 are in the template or not shouldn't impact the final, overall training. The apparent % trained speed is slower simply because the other brigades aren't training. As such, if you actually intend to wait till all brigades in the division reaches the 100% trained mark, whether you add in 1 by 1 brigade or 9 brigades at once doesn't matter, only the total equipment you have ready to put into the division since you have to wait till 1) you get all the equipment and 2) training completes once all equipment is received. This is what I think on the subject, but needs some diving into the save games to confirm how variables are stored (brigade level most likely).