PDS This is PATHETIC

[jju_57]

I want to make a public apology for my poor choice in the title of this thread. I have no excuse for being so childish.



I conducted a number of tests and after 4 expansions I've found that air defense for ground units and surface defense for air units do nothing!!

The only stats that have any bearing on bomb attacks and damage to planes are the AA stat for ground units and the SA or HA stat for bombers.

What this also means is that there are only 2 variables in the defines LUA that have any impact since defense is completely ignored. The first one CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT_AT_NO_DEF is used for ground combat also and this does modify the damage to STR and ORG that planes and land units take. The other one is BOMB_REGIMENT_DAMAGE_MODIFIER and only impacts the damage done to ground units.

 

[Pro_Consul]

Didn't you actually discover this like 2 years ago or something? Or was that someone else?

Also, just my opinion, but I think the devs at PI are more likely to really hear you if you omit the invective, especially from the subject line of the thread. Vinegar-honey... that kinda thing. Just a thought.

 

[jju_57]

I was lead to believe it was fixed in TFH. They won't do anything for HOI3 so my stance won't have any impact. I'm just extremely disappointed that this bug was never fixed.

 

[Pro_Consul]

I don't disagree with you about the bug not being fixed. That is indeed very disappointing. Makes me wonder if they never coded it at all and left it out of TFH deliberately. So that it wasn't really a "fix" at all, but rather a whole section of engine code that was just omitted. Otherwise I guess I find it hard to believe that with all the other bugs they squished that they would have failed to get this one, or attempting and failing would not have introduced a new bug or two.

 

[jju_57]

I have not done the tests but this makes me seriously question if sea defense works or not. I would not be a bit surprised now to find out it doesn't work.

 

[Less]

Any knowledge on Air Defense for Air-to-Air combat? In particular MRs always seem to fare worse vs. INTs than their stats dictate (trading a point of air attack for an extra point of air defense).

If AD is useless as well then that will make a lot of air techs flat out useless or even counter-productive.

 

[Pro_Consul]

If I remember correctly, and assuming it is the same bug jju originally discovered, then AD had appeared to be working as normal. It was only SD which showed no change in combat results no matter what values he set and tested. Hopefully he will correct me if I am remembering wrong.

 

[Less]

So it sounds like the overall suspicion is that Land vs. Land, Sea vs. Sea and Air vs. Air battles take into account the defense, while one type vs. the other doesn't?

Has anyone tested whether the (wrong) defense types affect defense? From a coding standpoint it would be an easy to make mistake to accidentally flip a conditional and write something like "check air defense if the unit being shot is a plane" rather than "check air defense if the unit doing the shooting is a plane". Which of course won't show up as a bug if you are testing planes vs. planes, etc.

It's hard to imagine that they simply left the code out entirely.

 

[jju_57]

It's hard to imagine that they simply left the code out entirely.

Well this is exactly what happened with defensiveness and toughness. Not 100% sure if there was no code at all, but if there was it was never being called.

 

[Pro_Consul]

Well this is exactly what happened with defensiveness and toughness.

Oh man, I had been hoping to forget that. One more hope shot down in flames.

 

[Chromos]

Did anyone made a test if AD for ships work?
Or if Sea Defence work for ships? Afaik for ships was a test done lately?

If thats bugged, it should be easily to be patched, just would need testing.
But for clearance we would need best an explained test run.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Well I conducted a number of tests and after 4 expansions I've found that air defense for ground units and surface defense for air units do NOTHING!!

What is the 4:th expansion called?

Well this is exactly what happened with defensiveness and toughness. Not 100% sure if there was no code at all, but if there was it was never being called.

IIRC the correct code in the defines.lua which is moddable was even being called, it was just a percentage error. We though the input meant 80% chance to avoid hits when defensive stats remain but when they analized the engine it was found to actually be 0.8% ( negligible impact ).

 

[jju_57]

OK here are the details of the test using HOI3 TFH expansion.

I tested with AD for land units ranging from 0, 1, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1000. I then ran 3 bombing runs using 5 TAC's with a SA of 10 against 1 division of 4 INF brigades. The modifiers were constant and the bombing units had total modifiers of 99% (leader, weather etc.). The land units had total modifiers of 106.4%.

I then changed in the defines LUA the parameters BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT and CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT_AT_NO_DEF. What I found is that the results were identical for all levels of air defense and at all changes to BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT. It was ONLY when I made changes to the CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT_AT_NO_DEF variable did I see different results.

I then did this for surface defense for air units and found the exact same thing.

So this means that only the attack values (SA, HA and AA), BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT variable and the BOMB_REGIMENT_DAMAGE_MODIFIER variable have any impact.

You guys are free to retest but after running close to 100 tests I'm confident that my findings are accurate. BTW this makes me very suspect about air to surface combat. My guess (no tests yets) is that the defense values are ignored for these combats also.

 

[jju_57]

APOLOGY to PDS For Stupid Title

I want to aplogize to PDS for my childish choice in picking this title. While I was angry as this cost me about 40 hours of work on redoing unit stats that is no reason or excuse for my choice in words for the title.

Paradox I'm sorry for picking this title.

 

[bloki]

Did anyone made a test if AD for ships work?
Or if Sea Defence work for ships? Afaik for ships was a test done lately?

If thats bugged, it should be easily to be patched, just would need testing.
But for clearance we would need best an explained test run.

I did.

English lvl 1 DD versus german lvl 1 DD
Both have sea_attack = 3 and sea_defense = 15
combat modifiers were always the same, 132% attack bonus and 132% defense bonus.
So defense is always better than attack, unless i miss something.

In a 10 hours combat :

with BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT = 100.0 -> english DD 71% STR, german one 88%
with BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT = 200.0 -> english DD 81% STR, german one 74%
with BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT = 10000.0 -> english one 80 % STR, german one 63% STR

interesting one :
with CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT_AT_NO_DEF = 100.0 -> english one 100% STR, german one 100% STR.

Sea_defense seems bugged to me.

 

[Charles Reeps]

I tested ground AD through thousands of bomb runs and found it doesn't work. This was NLT last year and I posted a bug report (I was hoping someone would make a test for ships as I was tired from all the damned bombing runs). You can change the BASE_CHANCE_TO_AVOID_HIT modifiers all you want and wind up with statistically insignificant differences. The only problem with testing this is that the program doesn't send 100% of the airwing: it sends a variable percentage for each bomb run. This is the reason for the extremely large number of test runs.

@bloki: you only need to change the modifier to two possible numbers - 0.00 or 100.00. You don't want to risk the program being thrown off by higher numbers.

 

[Kagernaut]

I want to aplogize to PDS for my childish choice in picking this title. While I was angry as this cost me about 40 hours of work on redoing unit stats that is no reason or excuse for my choice in words for the title.

Paradox I'm sorry for picking this title.

PM a mod to change it if you want.

 

[szmik]

Features and modifiers that don't work after 3 expansions are enough to guarantee the title thread IMHO.

 

[jju_57]

Further tests show that the surface defense of planes when attacking ships is also ignored. I'm still looking at the air defense of ships against bombers.

BTW there is a good chance that CAG's are not treated the same as other bombers when attacking ships. At least the results so far are not clear. More testing is needed to determine air defense of ships vs standard bombers and against CAG's.

 

[Pro_Consul]

BTW there is a good chance that CAG's are not treated the same as other bombers when attacking ships.

My prediction is that you will find CAGs also not use their SD stat when on bombing missions, e.g. port strike or naval strike. When they are on CAG-duty in a naval combat, however, that is not really treated like an air mission but more like very long range surface fire.