It seems strange that artillery takes up combat width.

[Frosted Vert]

It's worth noting that claims of artillery being 'OP' are misinformed by pop-culture. In movies and video games, small arms are the main killers, that's where the action is. In 20th century conflict, indirect fires are responsible for ~90% of casualties.

 

[Denkt]

And that is why artillery have a soft attack of 37.5 and a firepower/width of 12.5 compared to infantry who have F/W of 3.

 

[208]

What you are asking for is basically the EUIV system and to that I say no thanks.

No, the EU4 system puts a hard cap on the amount of artillery you can stick in the back row. "Exceed the support battalion capacity afforded by your frint line troops and suffer a combat malus" is not a hard cap.

The crazy divisions should not be effective because they will either lack firepower or staying power.

I don't have detailed knowledge of the combat model, so I'm not sure exactly how damage is distributed in combat, but if a unit heavily overburdened with artillery is attacked and NOT suffering massive casualties to its artillery brigades (because the enemy infantry is 50 yards away shooting their gunners due to a lack of friendly infantry in their way), then there's a problem in the model that's not being addressed by simply adding up the brigade stats and letting the "best" numbers win.

 

[Secret Master]

Yes. You will die if you are hit by 1 shell, if you would be hit by 2 shells there would be no benefit at all, just waste of ammo.

There is no kill like overkill.

It's not a wast of ammo if I feel better after firing the barrage. Sure, we might still lose the war, but aren't feelings important too?

It's worth noting that claims of artillery being 'OP' are misinformed by pop-culture. In movies and video games, small arms are the main killers, that's where the action is. In 20th century conflict, indirect fires are responsible for ~90% of casualties.

Not OP in the historical sense, but OP in a game sense.

If you never played HOI3, you haven't see just how ridiculous ART could get. There were versions of the game where ART were so powerful that it started rendering other mechanics pointless. I'm talking about "Well, there's no point in having tanks or planes, because we can just build more ART." or "Well, I suppose we could focus on using AT guns to stop German armor, but why bother? The AT brigades just take up a slot we could use for ART." Or, my personal favorite, "I'm feeling cheap today. We'll just use MIL instead of INF and attach hordes of ART to it. Sure, the low toughness values will cause us to take more casualties, but who cares? With the low width of MIL, we can squeeze in even more ART while using a brilliant theater commander to lower the stacking penalty. I figure we can dedicate one howitzer to every 50 square meters."

Increasing their cost didn't solve these problems by themselves, but it required multiple rule tweaks to get it right.

 

[Frosted Vert]

I agree, it's certainly off by an order of magnitude! It would just be nice to have a roughly accurate frontage in kms per battalion, tubes per km of frontage, and interplay between the two. The current system breaks this relationship by diluting the frontage of battalions whenever there is an increase in artillery.

With the 1944 Soviet numbers I posted earlier,

Average number of battalions per km of front was 6-8, so let's simplify and say 7 battalions per km.
There were at times up to 240 tubes per km of front.
240 / 7 = 34.

We can say that during major operations like Bagration, the Soviets could have up to 34 tubes supporting each battalion.

Of course, massed fires were not always available or organic to a unit. The Organic firepower for a division was 69 pieces, coming from both the Artillery Regiment and the Rifle Regiments. I will assume that 120mm mortars are abstracted like the 50mm and 82mm mortars and are counted as Infantry Equipment. That leaves 36 76mm guns and howitzers and 12 122mm howitzers, for a total of 48. 48/7 = 6.8. I'm not really sure what to do with decimals since you can't have 80% of a cannon, so I'll round up to 7.

This is very, very abstracted but I don't think it would be too far out there to say that a ratio of artillery in a division that allows for 7 guns for each infantry battalion would be relatively historical and balanced.

If someone can do a better job with the math/abstraction/turning into game terms, I'd appreciate it was just roughly outlining that I think there is a historical ratio to follow, generally*.

* The numbers here are for a 1944-45 Soviet Rifle Division, at full strength, with no corps or army artillery, and 120mm mortars removed etc. etc.

** and my math is not great.

 

[Cardus]

In real life you can assign as many batteries as you like to a unit or even have batteries without any infantry unit. Why this is not done? Because a battery without infantry cover it is very vulnerable. So to prevent crazy things it is not necessary to think about absurdities such as caps, stacking penalties, etc. It would be sufficient just to mimic reality without much fantasy...

 

[EntropyAvatar]

Perhaps one reason why it's hard to balance artillery is that the player doesn't have to pay for ammunition. Artillery can burn through a lot of expensive shells very quickly. In HoI4, units pay for ammo through attrition, but I doubt players would be happy with artillery having giant attrition just from firing. Guderian mentions that one of the advantages of using a tank is that direct fire is economical use of explosives, since maneuvering for direct aimed fire can kill a target with much less expense that saturating the area with an indirect bombardment.

 

[Gort11]

I assume it's like other forms of supply where the cost of ammunition is built into the cost of the artillery battalion when it's built. If it turns out this makes artillery too cost-efficient, it'd be simple to raise the initial cost to rebalance them.

I suppose the generally low organisation score of artillery battalions goes some way towards representing their ability to exhaust their available ammunition quickly.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I assume it's like other forms of supply where the cost of ammunition is built into the cost of the artillery battalion when it's built. If it turns out this makes artillery too cost-efficient, it'd be simple to raise the initial cost to rebalance them.

First, stacking all cost in the initial production is not a great model, it would be better to have attrition just from firing them, since ammo is a larger portion of the cost. However, even assuming a "cost upfront" model, there is a lot of resistance to doing that. People intuitively want the upfront cost to be the sticker price, not the total cost of ownership. Artillery has a larger divergence between those than a tank.

I suppose the generally low organisation score of artillery battalions goes some way towards representing their ability to exhaust their available ammunition quickly.

I don't think org is a good way to model ammo shortages. As far as I know, you don't lose org for shooting, but for getting hit (and moving). An artillery-heavy unit that wipes out a weaker opponent will have expended a lot of ammo but not taken many hits. So it's combat ability is a lot less impaired than it would be in reality.

 

[Secret Master]

If I remember Tooze correctly, a continuous problem the Germans faced was trying to allocate metals to both equipment and ammunition. It was very difficult at times to stockpile ammo for artillery, because Germany simply didn't have the metals needed to make huge stockpiles of ammunition AND panzers AND planes AND rolling stock to move those shells to the front.

I have no idea how to simulate this with current mechanics, beyond very high attrition values for ART battalions shooting.

 

[fabius]

If I remember Tooze correctly, a continuous problem the Germans faced was trying to allocate metals to both equipment and ammunition. It was very difficult at times to stockpile ammo for artillery, because Germany simply didn't have the metals needed to make huge stockpiles of ammunition AND panzers AND planes AND rolling stock to move those shells to the front.

I have no idea how to simulate this with current mechanics, beyond very high attrition values for ART battalions shooting.

Exactly. And the effect of a chronic shortage of ammunition for artillery can be seen time and time again. The first battle of Sevastopol; Stalingrad etc
Unfortunately they don't really include ammunition in the game.

 

[rutger9]

I wonder how artillery would work using the black ice approach.
That being:
Artillery has an extremely low actual attack value, instead it gives the division as a whole a very large bonus to attack and defense in all terrains (varying depending on terrain ofcourse) meaning that artillery on its own is literally useless but it buffs the division so much that it becomes a giant boon to any division that contains said artillery.

 

[panzerzombie]

Unrealistic, but from a game POV very interesting, didn´t remember that from BICE.

 

[rutger9]

Well IMO it would be realistic in the perspective that the artillery allows the fighting unit to achieve significantly larger kill rates then the division would have without it, it just uses an approach where technically the artillery itself doesnt do the killing.

 

[Denkt]

Artillery battalion is 3-4 times as expensive as an infantry battalion and we do not know how well artillery battalion absorb casulties.

 

[Otto of england]

No, the EU4 system puts a hard cap on the amount of artillery you can stick in the back row. "Exceed the support battalion capacity afforded by your frint line troops and suffer a combat malus" is not a hard cap.



I don't have detailed knowledge of the combat model, so I'm not sure exactly how damage is distributed in combat, but if a unit heavily overburdened with artillery is attacked and NOT suffering massive casualties to its artillery brigades (because the enemy infantry is 50 yards away shooting their gunners due to a lack of friendly infantry in their way), then there's a problem in the model that's not being addressed by simply adding up the brigade stats and letting the "best" numbers win.

For combat purposes a division is considered a single monolithic unit, with no distinction of its parts, just its whole combat value. At least that is how it worked in previous Hoi games. Also the way the stats are being set up sounds like it should do what your suggesting here, since artillery has low org and low defence/break through it should cause units with artillery die more per width than solid infantry, that being said they should also kill more per width. Somewhere in there is the magic number where the increased killing power is maximized and compared to the decreased survive-ability.

If I knew the stats it wouldn't be that hard to calculate an approximation actually, though it would require math that is likely above the average form goer so you would have to take my word for it.

 

[Frosted Vert]

I agree that ammunition should not be considered part of the building cost of the guns.

When I was in Artillery School I learned my trade on a C3 Howitzer that's design (if not manufacture) dates from 1941 (M2A1). The last Yankee built ones were in 1953, IIRC. These guns had thousands of rounds put through them over their service life. Barrels were replaced after however many rounds, and other parts as they broke or were made redundant (the gunshield flaps and some changes to carriage). In 1997, the Dutch upgraded them with a 33 caliber barrel.

There is no way it cost as much to build one of these guns in 1941 as it cost to use these guns even just at the schools until the LG1 arrived in 1998 or the M777 in 2005.

 

[jackalope81]

I think if you substitute size for width it makes sense. In a given area at any given point of the war an all infantry division would take less logistics to maintain in combat than one that is half infantry and half artillery. "width" is a bad word choice but is used mainly because of previous games using it. In EU4 width mainly addresses the ability to field an army in the battlefield terrain, which is a portion of the province. In HOI width concerns more the number of units that can effectively engage in combat anywhere in entire the province.

 

[Gort11]

There is no way it cost as much to build one of these guns in 1941 as it cost to use these guns even just at the schools until the LG1 arrived in 1998 or the M777 in 2005.

Nobody's saying it does. All the game designers have done is say, "This is the average cost of an artillery piece plus all the ammunition it will fire over the course of the game", then made that the cost to produce the gun. On average it works out because some guns will be destroyed before they fire the average amount, some will fire the average amount, and some will fire more. It's an abstraction, but abstraction is the price of accessibility.

 

[Cardus]

If I remember Tooze correctly, a continuous problem the Germans faced was trying to allocate metals to both equipment and ammunition. It was very difficult at times to stockpile ammo for artillery, because Germany simply didn't have the metals needed to make huge stockpiles of ammunition AND panzers AND planes AND rolling stock to move those shells to the front.

I have no idea how to simulate this with current mechanics, beyond very high attrition values for ART battalions shooting.

I remember the same issue for all countries (for some more, for some less). The current mechanic is completely unrealistic* and this is a major concern with the game. This is not to say that the developers are bad or to be disrespectful with them (in truth I think that they are the best) but it is just a matter of fact. As I mentioned elsewhere I suspect that the issue is with the engine developed for EU/CK which is not able to cope with a WWII game. Anyway I hope to be wrong...


* Apart from zero logistics, see for example the need to "abstract" air units which do not exist in EU/CK that brought the problem of teleporting planes and paradrops.