Right.
Good observation.
Just wondering: would a thread totally dedicated to "Balance in HoI4" be helpful?
I suppose I could slap up a thread entitled "Balance in HoI4: What are you thoughts?"
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Motorized is super good now
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Right.
Good observation.
Just wondering: would a thread totally dedicated to "Balance in HoI4" be helpful?
I suppose I could slap up a thread entitled "Balance in HoI4: What are you thoughts?"
Yes, but it still shows that the same amount of performance has a much higher cost than before. You just have the option to drop certain aspects you don't need to lower the cost, but then your tanks are specialized and have disadvantages in other situations.
Well yes, you can, but...
I doubt this tank will get anywhere in combat, even if you have twice as many tank divisions. It's almost as slow as infantry and gets pierced by anything that has anti-tank capability.
This is the only 1936 light tank design that gets more than 24 soft attack while being as cheap as possible. In reality, it isn't even half as cheap because light tanks need 60 tanks per battalion while medium tanks only need 50, meaning our light tank would need to have at least 8.0 production cost in order to be truly "less than half the cost". I'm pretty sure you were just giving an example to prove your point and not an actual design, but it shows that the gap isn't *that* big.
I'd argue that speed is important for a classic tank division unless you just use it to break a heavily defended tile in multiplayer. In which case you should build heavy tanks instead. Or CAS - but that's a different topic.
The only way to give up piercing would be to use a howitzer, which is more expensive than a medium cannon both in production and resource cost, and the soft attack boost from the improved medium cannon to the improved medium howitzer is small, going from 32 to 35. Using it is only worth it if you designate it as an SPG, which buffs its soft attack further due to artillery techs now affecting your design and you need about 1/3 less vehicles - but you lose hardness and a ton of breakthrough (and require more combat width). Similar for TDs, where you keep hardness and combat width but lose the breakthrough.
Feel free to show me a division that works, but I've tried several templates with either tanks, SPG, TDs or a mix of them, and haven't found something that is clearly superior to a tank division. Divisions with SPGs/TDs always were roughly 75% the production cost, but in my opinion lose too much breakthrough to make up for the extra soft/hard attack or piercing. Good for filling the lines with "budget tanks" I guess, but at this point you might as well build motorized artillery divisions which cost just about 40% of an SPG division, use far less supply, have almost as much soft attack, more speed, more breakthrough, more defense and the only thing you really give up is the armor bonus and a bit of hardness. Which brings us back to this thread's topic.
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I'm curious about how the nerf to TD breakthrough affected it. In 1.11.3 I had good experience with designing a max soft attack and highly armored SPG and a max piercing TD and sticking them in tank divisions alongside tanks. Basically, the idea is to use the fact that divisions get 40% of their piercing and 30% of their armor from the max piercing/armor bat. But of course you still need regular tanks for breakthrough. Are the nerfs to breakthrough of SPG/TD so bad that they're now worthless?
Id suggest that if youre pairing them with motorized, breakthrough on tanks is no longer important because motor already provides more than enough in most cases. So if anything Id say SPG and TD are more useful than regular tanks because of the lower cost.
If youre combining them with infantry that might be another matter, but thats pretty niche.
Being a TD adds a -95% modifier to the base breakthrough now, which is quite rough. Afaik, previously it was +95% because someone messed up the numbers. But if you stack up positive modifiers against it, it becomes less noticeable (first level of Mobile Warfare already grants +20%, making it only -75%). You could probably make an SPG-TD-tank-motorized hybrid division to get the most out of them, but I imagine it would still have less combat power, although being more cost-efficient.
I've never been much of a user of SPGs or TDs before NSB, so I can't tell if they are worthless now. I had always seen them as cheaper alternatives for when high breakthrough isn't as important, e.g. when you're trying to grind down the enemy with high soft attack or when being on the defensive against tanks.
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Last I checked, this only applies to tanks and not tank destroyers. Those techs in the MW doctrine apply to tanks, and TD are only all_armour and not specifically tanks.
Edit. I should have checked, because the first of the 3 +breakthrough is all armour, not just tanks.
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SPG have had a place in tank divisions, once the division in question has "enough" breakthrough you can add additional attacks for less cost by using SPG. In the past, refetting them up one tank tier didn't hurt either.
Does this place currently still exist? I'm not sure if there is a magical difference at the chassis/equipment level. But as for the battalion level, SPG battalions seem to just be straight up worse than tank destroyer battalions. They consume more width and require more vehicles per battalion, and more supply per width, vehicle, and battalion. TD has more recovery and is classed as front line, so it can benefit from some of the SF techs.
The difference in width isn't really much to talk about either. Sure, you only need 2x rather than 3x to have an equivalence of 6w to compare them. For light chassis, its 72 SPG v 90 TD, which okay sure, +25% vehicles for +50% stats. For mediums though, its 72 vehicles either way, using TD you get +50% stats for 'free'. Heavies are 48 v 60, which is +25% again. An alternative though is that instead of 3x TD, we could use 2x TD and slap another mot-inf in there. Now its trying to balance the costs of 12/48/8 extra vehicles against 35 mot and 100 IE. Since mot is 2.5 IC and we can assume the IE is worth 58, that is 183 IC. So, for the 12/48/8, the vehicles would have to be cheaper than 15.25/3.8125/22.875 for the SPG route to be beneficial in terms of cost.
The only real advantage that SPG might have is the vehicles per width is lower, if you were aiming for a formation of a particular size and you had dead space you just wanted to fill up that offered a particular blend of stats (attacks with hardness?). The SPG will technically make more cost-efficient use of that filler space, but this of course begs the question of why you have 'filler space' in your formations. We aren't nearly as hardlocked into 10/20/40 as we used to be, we don't have to go out of our way to hit those particular points anymore. We also don't particularly want large formations either.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel like SPG and SPAA have been BALEETED.
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When your division reliably has breakthrough > opposing attacks that combine onto it, it has enough breakthrough.
I'm not sure.
Depends how much damage theyre doing, how much air support you have, etc.
I find that for punching through infantry with a concentrated attack of multiple divisions, 200-250ish works just fine. You break them fast enough that their SA never eclipses your breakthrough per battle, so any extra is essentially wasted
First off, I agree with you whole heartedly, the stats are less.. This was the closest that I could get using 1941 tech but it would have been much better without the armor was a little bit much. However, I could have gotten closer I think using sloped armor, which I neglected that gives you an additional 20% armor. I don't know. It's not that far off though, it could be much worse. I think that the modules are too expensive imho.
Doesn't the medium one man turret reduce soft/hard attack by -25%? That's why I've used the two man turret (and the basic medium cannon because the improved one is 1942 tech) and added 2 machine guns to get the 24 soft attack. Also it was a more realistic design to include a few machine guns lol.
That 66.7% reliability might hurt in the long run though. I used welded armor instead of riveted, so I only needed armor level 4 which gave me higher reliability and saved some resources. Rivited armor is usually not worth its cheaper cost if you want to design something that can withstand piercing attacks. How many resources per mil does your tank need? For whatever reason Pdx decided that this isn't visible in the tank/ship designer and you have to calculate it yourself. It should be 6 in total if I remember everything correctly, which would be quite a lot for a budget medium tank.
CAS did not stop the Chinese Army in the winter of 1950.
And yes, the motorized infantry did retreat faster than the Chinese- that's why they weren't encircled like the Chinese had hoped to accomplish. After failing to encircle numerically inferior NATO forces in 1950, the Chinese began paying higher and higher losses for smaller and smaller gains. Eventually, the Chinese reached their high tide at Chipyong-Ni and began a disastrous retreat from February-May 1951 which saw entire Chinese divisions surrender or disintegrate courtesy of the motorized infantry hitting them faster than the former could recover and the latter enjoying regular resupply. Eventually the Chinese lost Seoul themselves and the only reason their armies weren't completely destroyed was because of American politics which sought a stalemate rather than total victory.
So yes, motorization saved NATO from encirclement and then brought Mao's Red Army to the brink of collapse. CAS could blunt the Chinese attacks, but it could not reverse them.
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I can’t remember exactly. I didn’t notice the reliability, it was just for turret though 2 Tung 1 Chromium. I think that I had a better design with about 16-17 IC, in reality that is a 10-15% increase over the old base. Even if you are talking 18 that is a 23% increase.
I really need to look into the exact numbers a little more. I can say that they are consistent with what you get though alittle but more. Meaning… Mediums seem truly in between lights and heavy. And only slightly more expensive than lights again in reality maybe 20%.
I don’t know if they had plans about all this due to the changes to piercing etc… before NSB everyone was complaining about AT weapons not being powerful enough.
My own thought on how to fix some of the stuff is give tanks initiative and coordination. (Something to that effect). I think AT are profiting from the fact that their stats are better but in reality, you couldn’t have them run all over the battle field, they weren’t quite as useful as a tank.
Just look at the enemy infantry soft attack or look at your own infantry template. Let say they are 120 for each 10w, so 240 for 20w as your tank. Now your tank is 50% hardness, so it would receive about 120 per 20w. Now you will want a tank division total breakthrough as min 120 and preferable as double that, 240 per 20w, to defend vs 2x20w infantry.
If you have a lot of small tank divisions, the breakthrough can be lower. If you want to attack enemy tank in forest, the breakthrough will needed much higher.
But the quick and cheap rule is breakthough the same as the soft attack of same width regular enemy infantry, for tank with 50% hardness, for 33% hardness or vs infantry with AT, breakthrough need about +50% more.
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While I read about all this trying to match pre-NSB tanks and what not everyone here seems to only be looking at the hard base numbers but not the general picture or the scaling factors.
First, SPG's have scaling now based off of arty tech up to 40%, this is massive because each SPG battalion all uses the same exact gun, so if using howitizer 1's which is like 28 SA you can get almost + 14 attack at max tech. This scaling gets stronger as the game goes on till 1942ish where you can hit over 100 SA per SPG battalion with the heavy howitzer. No Tank will ever hit that kind of damage output because of the low SA nature of tank guns and that tank SA scaling is dependent on Doctrine.
So steping further back, if tanks want to match SA power punches it needs doctrine unlocks to scale up. Tanks themselves need Army experience to be formed and to be upgraded, Doctrines also need army experience to advance. To cherry top all of this off some army spirits can also help scale up tanks which needs even more army experience. What makes it worse is the more types of tanks you have the more expensive it will be to upgrade as you have more tank classes to improve.
So after all of this, you have the moto divisions, the core of this whole thread. They dont need army experience to be created or improved, they benefit greatly from doctrinal choices and spirits. Moto divisions do not need anything from the artillery tree to become stronger. And after all of that, they still cost a fractional of a tank.
If tanks want to compete with motorized divisions, no, compete with ANY other division type they need to justify its army experience cost. If it doesnt why should I waste precious army experience when I can just get earlier doctrine advances to improve the rest of my army through doctrinal scaling? I note any other division type because if they nerf moto divisions, whats stoping me from just spaming foot infantry with support instead?
First, SPG's have scaling now based off of arty tech up to 40%, this is massive because each SPG battalion all uses the same exact gun, so if using howitizer 1's which is like 28 SA you can get almost + 14 attack at max tech. This scaling gets stronger as the game goes on till 1942ish where you can hit over 100 SA per SPG battalion with the heavy howitzer. No Tank will ever hit that kind of damage output because of the low SA nature of tank guns and that tank SA scaling is dependent on Doctrine.
So steping further back, if tanks want to match SA power punches it needs doctrine unlocks to scale up. Tanks themselves need Army experience to be formed and to be upgraded, Doctrines also need army experience to advance. To cherry top all of this off some army spirits can also help scale up tanks which needs even more army experience. What makes it worse is the more types of tanks you have the more expensive it will be to upgrade as you have more tank classes to improve.
So after all of this, you have the moto divisions, the core of this whole thread. They dont need army experience to be created or improved, they benefit greatly from doctrinal choices and spirits. Moto divisions do not need anything from the artillery tree to become stronger. And after all of that, they still cost a fractional of a tank.
If tanks want to compete with motorized divisions, no, compete with ANY other division type they need to justify its army experience cost. If it doesnt why should I waste precious army experience when I can just get earlier doctrine advances to improve the rest of my army through doctrinal scaling? I note any other division type because if they nerf moto divisions, whats stoping me from just spaming foot infantry with support instead?
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You need to use a heavy or super heavy chassis to get the 4 slots for secondary cannons at 5 each, and 50 from the heavy howitzer, as well as the full +40% from arty tech to only get 98 soft attack. You'd have to use a soft attack designer or SF doctrine attacks boost to get it over 100. But even if you are over 100 soft attack per battalion, those battalions are 3w. Thats only 33 SA/W. A TD with the same setup of 70 soft attack, has 35 SA/W.
The guns and secondaries also cost a minimum of 30 IC, before the chassis and everything else. That level of attacks is going to be extremely expensive.
A somewhat ironic part of this is that the old heavy SPG3 at 80 base attacks, 5 gun adding +15%, designer adding 5%, and SF doctrine for +10% at battalion level could also clear 100+ soft attack. And no one cared.
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SPG's dont get any scaling from SF I believe. I remember the other day I went through it to see if they got anything extra and its mostly support companies or line towed artillery not SPG.
Also derp yea your right, Heavy howi was higher before I guess it got scaled down this last patch.