Night combat

[kviiri]

Daniel expressed his liking for the Night Assault Tactics doctrine in yesterday's stream, because it effectively halves the night attack penalty (if the percentages work as usual for Paradox games).

The question is, do the defenders suffer any penalty for defending at night? I don't really see the point of initiating night combat otherwise, even with the doctrine, unless one is really desperate to win a war quickly.

 

[MonkeyFuzz]

How much does day/night combat actually effect game play? From how the WWW/WWT streams have shown at a reasonable Speed 3, the in-game hours blow by and the day and night times blur together. Unless you're really down to a snail's pace, will players really start launching or stopping attacks based on the time?

 

[vector1]

If it works like previous paradox games, both sides get a penalty to attack so it inherently favors the defenders by slowing down the attack. By attack I mean soft attack/hard attack values, and not breakthrough/defensiveness.

Also, combats are unlikely to conclude within a day given the scale of HOI4 combat. If the stream is any indication, combats are going to be multi-week long slugfests against prepared opponents to force a breakthrough.

Why it's so powerful is if you consider a full day as the lowest unit of combat rather than hours. 12 of those hours you spend at 100%, and 12 of those at 50%. Total full day % attack delivered would be 75%. Getting +25% night attack means you spend 12 hours at 100% and 12 hours at 75%. This boosts your full day % attack to 87.5% or a full 12.5/75 = 16.7% more attack over someone without the tech. This could easily be a game-changer in terms of combat strength.

 

[MonkeyFuzz]

If I recall correctly from the streams, as the year progresses, the length of the days towards the poles should change through the year. This could be especially important in that setting.

Do day/night only affect for land forces or does it apply to naval forces, too?

 

[kviiri]

If it works like previous paradox games, both sides get a penalty to attack so it inherently favors the defenders by slowing down the attack. By attack I mean soft attack/hard attack values, and not breakthrough/defensiveness.

This clears it! I thought for a moment the penalty only when attacking strategically, so it would only affect one side of the combat. Cheers.

 

[vector1]

I don't recall any change in day/night cycle based on time of year. They do have certain weather conditions set to trigger over areas so I guess a "long night" or "unending day" modifier could be put in over the higher/lower latitudes. The HOI4 base map isn't even very well setup in terms of projection to take advantage of latitudes because of gameplay reasons. The entire American continent is shuffled to line up with Europe/Africa for example, but it's very far offset in other map projections.

 

[kviiri]

Do day/night only affect for land forces or does it apply to naval forces, too?

Yeah, pretty immensely too. If Wiki is correct (it's been updated with beta player information) night makes it easier to evade hits and grounds carrier aircraft completely. The latter part alone is pretty massive.

Air combat is affected too. Planes are harder to detect when flying at night, but conversely bombers have a harder time hitting their targets as well. So night flights are a safer but less effective alternative to daytime bombing raids. (EDIT: Come to think of it, this makes night combat better when one's losing the air war - you're not downing the enemy CAS planes, but at least they'll do less damage)