One feature of BICE that I would like to see in vanilla

[Dalwin]

An item in vanilla that has always been a little disappointing mainly because it is more or less inaccessible is unit experience. In many games your forces will get to regular status via exercises and once the war starts will steadily decline toward trained.

What BICE does to actually bring this feature into the game from the sidelines is to break each rank into 5 sub-ranks each of which gives 5% instead of the one big bonus for 25%. This plays very nicely and would not distort the overall balance of the game in any big way.

 

[Axe99]

Aye, this is a great example of a bit of added detail that requires no extra player intervention* (and I'd expect limited UI/settings tinkering) to work - depth without micro, so to speak, and I can't imagine it'd tax resources or the like (although that's a wild guess). Nice thinking (to you and of course Panzeroo, Maverick and the BICE crew) .

* And from BICE too!

 

[Alex_brunius]

I remember in previous HoI games it used to be a gradual sliding scale from +0% to +100% bonus instead of specific level, which worked better mechanically even if it didn't look quite as fancy.

 

[pvt.conners]

This is available as a standalone mod here

 

[Zwirbaum]

I remember in previous HoI games it used to be a gradual sliding scale from +0% to +100% bonus instead of specific level, which worked better mechanically even if it didn't look quite as fancy.

It can be done now as well if I recall correctly (With little bit of scripting).

 

[Dman1791]

To be honest I think the reason units rarely go anywhere but trained or crawl past regular is that battles are too one-sided: You're either being slaughtered or slaughtering the enemy. If you're being slaughtered, you lose lots of unit XP. If you're slaughtering, your units barely gain any XP. Even max-tier field hospitals don't help enough in 99% of cases for my units, only armored bits help.

 

[Deinhardt]

To be honest I think the reason units rarely go anywhere but trained or crawl past regular is that battles are too one-sided: You're either being slaughtered or slaughtering the enemy. If you're being slaughtered, you lose lots of unit XP. If you're slaughtering, your units barely gain any XP. Even max-tier field hospitals don't help enough in 99% of cases for my units, only armored bits help.

The Experience System in General Needs a look at. In all forms. Land/Naval/air XP, General/FieldMarshal XP and Division/Ship XP.

In it's current state it rewards grinding to much for the Land warfare. Just take Italy for example. You can sit half a year in Ethopia, cicling your Generals through and come out off that war with an army of Elite demigods, lead by Generals and Field Marshals with Level 7 or such. Not to mention all the army XP, turning your veterans even more lethal.

And then on the other Hand you have the Ships, which, after one big and fortunate Engagement, get to max rank and just double their firepower, making it even harder to come back against a Loss on the Sea.

Not to mention XP Retention of Units as you describe. The german army especially made a Habit of mixing rookies with veterans so that the old geezers can pass on their experience, resulting in a better learning curve at the frontline.

The BICE way of doing Veterancy could fix some issues, but not the Overall Problem of Experience in General.

Stop the Grind!

 

[Secret Master]

To be honest I think the reason units rarely go anywhere but trained or crawl past regular is that battles are too one-sided: You're either being slaughtered or slaughtering the enemy. If you're being slaughtered, you lose lots of unit XP. If you're slaughtering, your units barely gain any XP. Even max-tier field hospitals don't help enough in 99% of cases for my units, only armored bits help.

Only against the AI or weak human opponents that fold quickly.

Against enemies with a bit more intestinal fortitude, battles can get drawn out and the fighting gets intense for all combatants.

I don't normally use hospitals, but it's not because of lopsided combats. It's because of the lack of granularity in unit XP that Dalwin points out. (Well, and for a few other reasons.)

 

[Alex_brunius]

Only against the AI or weak human opponents that fold quickly.

Against enemies with a bit more intestinal fortitude, battles can get drawn out and the fighting gets intense for all combatants.

Sure, but even in MP it's either one side getting slaughtered, or both sides taking heavy casualties... You really never get a situation where neither side inflicts much casualties ( after 1938 /SCW anyways ) so the same units stay engaged for weeks. Either you rotate in fresh stuff or you die.

To be honest I think the reason units rarely go anywhere but trained or crawl past regular is that battles are too one-sided: You're either being slaughtered or slaughtering the enemy. If you're being slaughtered, you lose lots of unit XP. If you're slaughtering, your units barely gain any XP. Even max-tier field hospitals don't help enough in 99% of cases for my units, only armored bits help.

The next logical step of finding the root cause of the problem is to understand why you either get slaughtered or are slaughtering too fast to gain XP.

IMO it's because silly soft attack scaling. ( Soft attack being the main stat which determines how much damage is dealt to all units except very heavily armored ones ).

Soft attack in game skyrockets in such a way that units early on has maybe 50 base or so, while later in the game units get 500+ base soft attack. Naturally with 10 times as much damage output, and no stat ( besides hardness/armor ) to reduce that damage sustained our battles will tend to be resolved 10 times quicker and lead to 10 times less experience gained for the same damage taken.

And no Breakthrough/Defense stat don't reduce damage in a relative way here since they progress in a fairly similar way to soft attack. If early units got 50 soft attack and 10 breakthrough later units got 500 soft attack and 100 breakthrough instead, so their relative damage reduction stays the same.

IMO some radical changes are needed either to the combat model, unit stat progression or XP gain mechanics to fix the issue here.

 

[ScientX]

Sure, but even in MP it's either one side getting slaughtered, or both sides taking heavy casualties... You really never get a situation where neither side inflicts much casualties ( after 1938 /SCW anyways ) so the same units stay engaged for weeks. Either you rotate in fresh stuff or you die.




The next logical step of finding the root cause of the problem is to understand why you either get slaughtered or are slaughtering too fast to gain XP.

IMO it's because silly soft attack scaling. ( Soft attack being the main stat which determines how much damage is dealt to all units except very heavily armored ones ).

Base soft attack in game skyrockets in such a way that units early on has maybe 50 base or so, while later in the game units get 500+ base soft attack. Naturally with 10 times as much damage output, and no stat ( besides hardness/armor ) to reduce that damage sustained our battles will tend to be resolved 10 times quicker and lead to 10 times less experience gained for the same damage taken.

And no Breakthrough/Defense stat don't reduce damage in a relative way here since they progress in a fairly similar way to soft attack. If early units got 50 soft attack and 10 breakthrough later units got 500 soft attack and 100 breakthrough instead, so their relative damage reduction stays the same.

IMO some radical changes are needed either to the combat model, unit stat progression or XP gain mechanics to fix the issue here.

Base soft attack isn't the issue in my opinion, its the added modifiers that are too strong, breaking the combat formula, take for example general skill, offensive high command, infantry and special forces high command plus planning bonus, plus special forces bonus, if fighting on appropriate terrain, and if you go over the enemies defense, this all added together makes units ignore terrain entirely and obliterate enemy units in seconds.

I played for a few months with a german community mod that removes planning bonus from the game, nefs CAS even more, and defence suddenly becomes completely overpowered, you basicly can only attack with tanks since they are the only kind of unit with enough breaktrough/hardness to keep on attacking for more than a few days.

And since you can never really have high enough soft attack to go over the enemies defense battles last forever, like literally forever.

After paradox nerfed soft attack, the base soft attack is fine, it might actually be too low in fact, its the modifiers that make the difference.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Base soft attack isn't the issue in my opinion, its the added modifiers that are too strong, breaking the combat formula, take for example general skill, offensive high command, infantry and special forces high command plus planning bonus, plus special forces bonus, if fighting on appropriate terrain, and if you go over the enemies defense, this all added together makes units ignore terrain entirely and obliterate enemy units in seconds.

I played for a few months with a german community mod that removes planning bonus from the game, nefs CAS even more, and defence suddenly becomes completely overpowered, you basicly can only attack with tanks since they are the only kind of unit with enough breaktrough/hardness to keep on attacking for more than a few days.

And since you can never really have high enough soft attack to go over the enemies defense battles last forever, like literally forever.

After paradox nerfed soft attack, the base soft attack is fine, it might actually be too low in fact, its the modifiers that make the difference.

I never seen modifiers add up to more then ~+400% at most together, around 200% to 300% is still really high...

That is an x3-5 increase in damage output compared to x10 increase in damage output from later tech Soft attack equipment/variants.


Even if defense is much higher the 500 base soft attack WILL do 10 times as much damage as 50 base soft attack does, and without the higher base modifiers won't be able to take it over the defense values.

I'm not saying the modifiers are not also an important part of the equation, just that soft attack stat progression has a bigger impact.

 

[Zwirbaum]

Maybe extra points of defensive stats could lower enemy attack values (with some X ratio). So if enemy attacks you with 100 effective attacks and you have 150 defensive stat it would lower his attacks by 50*X ?

 

[Alex_brunius]

Maybe extra points of defensive stats could lower enemy attack values (with some X ratio). So if enemy attacks you with 100 effective attacks and you have 150 defensive stat it would lower his attacks by 50*X ?

I don't think this is such a good idea since it would make the problem of large 40W divisions being superior (much) worse.

 

[Zwirbaum]

I don't think this is such a good idea since it would make the problem of large 40W divisions being superior (much) worse.

If all attacks would be grouped together (so in theory 2*20 W attacking enemy division should have similiar results in terms of dealing damage as 1*40W division + get slight bonus from having two times support aspect) then it shouldn't matter all that much. + there could be a scaleable ratio for that bigger divisions would need to have more extra defensive stat to reduce enemy attack.

UPDATE: It's just random thought thrown out.

 

[SpeedKatMcNasty]

In my MP mod I've changed a couple things that make the veteran system a bit better. For instance, I've changed the manpower laws to increase veteran gain at lower levels. Once you hit service by requirement though, you actually lose veterans faster.

This seems to make the system make a little more sense