Quantitative Division Design

[blue emu]

Does this actually work?

Not sure... I may have misinterpreted it:

L4.4 Pushback Phase
In each Combat Round, there is a chance that a Pushback effect
may occur. This is more likely to happen when the Defender
has suffered serious Combat losses and has been forced to
Withdraw. If it is determined a Pushback has occurred, some
collateral damage is inflicted upon the Infrastructure and any
Installations that exist within that province.

L6.1 Retreat
Instead of simply having the losing side’s units Retreat into
the next province, HOI 3 tracks Retreat more carefully.
Individual Divisions will Retreat, and not the whole army.
Each unit Retreats a certain distance through the province,
per Round, at the rate at which the Attacker Advances. If the
Attacker Advances 50% of the way through the province,
the Defender Retreats through 50% of the province. In order
to fully push the Defender out of the province, the Attacker
must push it 100% of the way. In game terms, the percentage
of the battle won is considered equivalent to the amount
of the province’s territory left to capture.
A unit that loses all of its Organisation is forced to begin
Retreating. Some Units (such as those with a deficiency of
Officers (see L6.4) may be forced to Withdraw before their
Organisation reaches zero.
For obvious reasons, a Retreating unit may never be
ordered to Attack. Retreating Brigades also may not participate
in a second Defensive battle.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

About 4.4: I have yet to see a single pushback event. I have fought quite some battles with GER, but never seen any damaged province after combat...

About 6.1: Imo this is just the regular "fight till out of org" description. Combat progress is directly tied to ORG, so neither do I see any difference to the HoI2 mechanic, nor have I noticed any different behavior ingame. So it sounds like "kick out" is simply "total ORG defeat"... Only difference: Reserves might not actually be able to join combat. Maybe thats what "kick out" relates to...

PS: Another difference I can think of is that units with low officer % break once their relative ORG % is smaller than 100-Officer % ratio. Though I have yet to confirm that officer % has any effect at all - as germany, I was fine at ~60%...

 

[dhelmet99]

As promised I have integrated the full effect of technology into my division designing spreadsheet. It was a bit of a bear, and I'm only 95% certain on some things, but it's a big step in the right direction (also I didn't put in HQ stats, as it would have been a lot of work to dig through the doctrines just for that). I have again uploaded the file and am making it available to everyone via the link below. If you have Excel it should work fine, and I tried to make it as easy to use as possible.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/z5iermrgnro/Division_designer3__8-24.xls

I'll be posting some analyses tomorrow, but in first playing around it doesn't seemt to change the earlier data as much as I thought it might.

In the meantime I have one question: on the wiki it lists all the stats for units in 1947 and it shows the infantry and special forces gaining 10 morale relative to their base stats, what technology affects the morale of these units and what year is it? I couldn't find it anywhere in the technologies folder, but I could have missed it. I was able to match every other stat in the wiki except these (hence the 95%).

EDIT: (found, as noted below)

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I haven't been able to find any kind of infantry morale booster.

 

[Evil4Zerggin]

It's the helicopter evacuation tech, in the Secret folder. Don't remember the year though.

 

[dhelmet99]

It's the helicopter evacuation tech, in the Secret folder. Don't remember the year though.

Yep, there it is. It's a 1946 tech, so it is pretty late. Thanks.

The updated link is below and I'll edit the earlier post to reflect this too.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/z5iermrgnro/Division_designer3__8-24.xls

 

[dhelmet99]

I forgot a couple things in the introduction to the new spreadsheet. I only set it up to work for years from 1918-1947, although it would be possible to extend it since techs can be rushed. I have also updated some of the earlier calculations to reflect my better understanding. The division org and morale for instance is averaged instead of summed, and the softness calculation is more robust.

As my first exploration on how technology changes things I thought I would like at some of what I think will be the most common division designs.

First is the 3 Inf compared to the 3 Inf + Art combination. The effect of changing technology is to make the Artillery brigade slightly less cost-effective (expressed as a percent, this is kind of a mathematical artifact as the denominator in the calculation increases over time). In the larger sense there does not seem to be a big difference due to tech here. That is probably because the artillery brigade benefits from several techs. Some of the brigades only have one or two stats that increase over time and it is my belief (as yet unsubstantiated) that this will make those brigades less cost effective over the course of a longer game. I'm thinking in particular of the TD brigade that doesn't upgrade soft attack (maybe it should).

For armored divisions I looked at how an Arm + 2 Mot division compares to an Arm + 2 Mot + SPArt division over time. I think these are pretty common combinations. The result is that the cost effectiveness just slightly decreases over time, without having a big effect. It is interesting to note some of the other changes, as the speed increases significantly over time and the softness decreases slightly as well.

 

[Peekee]

@1: Except for the SU, I doubt that any country can man their border with three divisions in each province.
If not, then we assume we have to disperse our troops evenly. If that is the case, I have the choice between fewer troops with artillery and more troops w/o artillery.
Adding artillery increases attack rating by 40%/60%, defensiveness by 20% and manpower only by 13%. An additional infantry regiment would obviously boost it by 33% each.

Play as Poland 36 and only build artillery brigades until you run out of manpower... You should be able to average ~ 0.5->1 Corps per province on the German borders. (about 3 divisions) That's around 15 brigades per province, but with very low width allowing them all to attack.

If you only built infantry instead you would run out of manpower much quicker.

 

[dhelmet99]

It turns out that my estimation of the stacking penalty is wrong, and so is the manual. As I proved in http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=425509 the stacking penalty depends on the number of divisions engaged in combat, and not the number of brigades contained in a province. This will force me to completely re-evaluate the efficacy of militia and of unbalanced divisions with huge numbers of artillery. Damn.

 

[pnt]

dhelmet99:

I hope you will soon continue your analysis. I think the question of the superstack needs to be addressed, and cannot see a better way than having you complete what you started!

 

[dhelmet99]

In light of the changes made in the spreadsheet due to my vastly increased understanding of the stacking penalty I have seen the need to re-analyze the super-stacks of doom problem. I chose to fix the technology year to 1940, which is roughly the early war period and includes the militia width reducing tech.

The pic below shows all of the mega-stack combinations I analyzed. The first is the comparison of the Swiss Army knife-like stack of 4 different 3 Inf divisions to the super-stack of militia doom (1 Mil + 3 Art times 20 divisions). The stacking penalty is ~55% on the militia stack. Even so the militia stack of doom has much greater combat stats, excepting toughness. It is not cost effective in anything but manpower. In fact it requires massive IC, officers and supply to get that firepower. The supply in particular could cause some serious issues with actually using such a formation (it's a whole frickin' army in one province). Things look better when the number of divisions is reduced to 10 (not shown), but at that point you might as well go to infantry over militia for the better toughness.

Next is the 10 division stack of 1 Inf + 3 Art divisions. This looks like a stack that might actually be usable. The third item in the table shows that this has almost the same combat stats as the giant militia stack of doom at much lower cost.

The last two show how the two main armored division designs stack up (get it?) against the mega infantry-artillery stack. Not that well. The armored division combos cost more IC for inferior combat stats except softness. At some point I may try to convert a softness level into an effective increase in defensiveness and toughness to make the comparison a little more concrete. I still think armored divisions make sense to use due to their high speed and the resulting encirclement tactics, but it looks like super-stacks of infantry and artillery are better for pure firepower.

Note that I could also look at stacks of armor and SP artillery for the most expensive and firepower laden mega-stacks, but I have not yet done so.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

Good work. A few points:

- Does the armor analyis take into account combined arms bonus? If I'm playing as Germany I will probably also have panzer leaders and the combined-arms boosting tech pretty early.

- As mentioned in the strat guide supplement, armor has additional 'baked in' advantages over infantry that don't show up in the numbers (not something I support, btw).

- The stacked Inf+Art uses more than twice the manpower and more than three times the number of officers. That's pretty significant, IMO.

 

[mikey1871]

A very cool and useful post, thanks.

It's nice to see what makes intuitive sense to me, like 3 infantry plus one arty brigade, stacks up so well. Playing as the Americans with the 5th brigade option I wanted to add an AA brigade for both AA and some hard attack, but I am not getting the combined arms bonus so I may need to put in TDs.

That the classic combo of one armored and two motorized brigades does not get the combined arms bonus is surprising. I've been trying to adjust the 5th brigade in my Ami divisions to get this bonus but a normal arty plus TD was still out of the sweet spot.

Off topic: May I ask if the combined arms bonus is calculated for each division, or for the total units in each attack?

I've found that either TD's or S-P arts work very well in the "5th brigade" spot every well.

until they get the AA bug fixed I wont attach any AA to my divisions.

YES, most excellent post and well done for all the hard work u put into the statistics u have here.

 

[mikey1871]

It turns out that my estimation of the stacking penalty is wrong, and so is the manual. As I proved in http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=425509 the stacking penalty depends on the number of divisions engaged in combat, and not the number of brigades contained in a province. This will force me to completely re-evaluate the efficacy of militia and of unbalanced divisions with huge numbers of artillery. Damn.

dhelmet99... YOU are a statistical Krazy man, but that is a very very good thing... Major congratulations to ur perseverance in all things statistical in HOI3.

Yes, stacking penalties are and should only apply to units attacking or supporting an attack and NO other units in a particular province.

Of course if one reads very well thought out spread-sheet, then should realize that the best setup for a division is 3 units and 1-2 support... period.

Then u just put those divisions into Corps and then into an Army consisting of NOT more than 12 units and u go play war with a least amount of stacking penalty u will be able to garner in HOI3. I think that the 12 limit is for the real units in ur divisions and that it doesn't or it shouldn't apply to ur support units. But I could be wrong hahaha

in any event.. congrats for all your very nice spread-sheet work :!!!!!!!!

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have drawn the same conclusions, though... when you compare stats like this you also need to be reminded of the cost in resource/manpower and officers to build these mega stacks of Doom as you call it. Is it really worth the effort to have that kind of effort put in to a mega-stack when combat fronts are so large as they can get in the game.

These mega-stacks are only useful as long as you can keep them together and find viable targets for them. Having only one combat brigade will be a real disadvantage if the stack is broken up. Brigade for brigade artillery are much weaker than even a simple infantry brigade. So you put a lot of effort in time, resources and officers into something that might just weaken you in another area of a front, considering that two opponents have roughly the same industrial output.

I still view specialized assault corps (backed up with lots of strong divisions with short width and lots of support brigades) to be useful. Though, I don't think that going the extreme way are very smart resource wise, unless you outproduce our enemy and have a fair amount of officers to to use.

Tough, my investigations shows me that concentrating support brigades in specialized corps or armies are the way to go and to keep regular divisions as they are with just two-four combat brigades.

 

[pnt]

Is it really worth the effort to have that kind of effort put in to a mega-stack when combat fronts are so large as they can get in the game.

There is always the special case of defending your capital. If, say, Poland parks one of dhelmet99's 20 Mil/Art divisions in Warsaw, where they have (almost) unlimited resources, city terrain bonus, a lot of time to dig in, and a nice airfield to provide air cover, Germany will be in dire straits. This possibility along makes it imperative to explore, and hopefully optimize, the stacking penalty.

 

[R57-Daishi]

There is always the special case of defending your capital. If, say, Poland parks one of dhelmet99's 20 Mil/Art divisions in Warsaw, where they have (almost) unlimited resources, city terrain bonus, a lot of time to dig in, and a nice airfield to provide air cover, Germany will be in dire straits. This possibility along makes it imperative to explore, and hopefully optimize, the stacking penalty.

Given a historical scope - Leningrad + Stalingrad, any takers for the 20 mil/art stack ?

 

[dhelmet99]

Things I did not account for in the last post:
1. Combined arms bonus (I've done this before just forgot this time)
2. Practical effects on IC-day cost
3. Extra research required to keep militia branch up to date
4. Terrain maluses (not sure how the brigade ones translate to the full division stats)
5. Evolution of technology over time (as mentioned earlier in the thread the combat brigades benefit from more techs than support ones)
6. Logistical system (I don't know enough to quantify potential difficulties in supplying mega-stacks)
7. Other things that I don't even know that I don't know

So this is by no means a complete analysis and it has been evolving throughout the life of the thread. When I commented on the cost effectiveness of the inf-art stack compared to the armored ones I was only referring to IC-days, for many countries (like Germany) the manpower and officers will be the constraining factor; it is only minors with highly limited resources that it would dominate the other factors.

In defending the capital it might actually be beneficial to use a stack greater than the mega militia stack of doom. I assumed a simple 10 wide combat front, whereas you can assume your capital will be surrounded and therefore the front much higher. Anyone now if there's a limit to how many divs you can stack in your capital? Potentially mitigating against this tactic is that it might be possible to force a surrender without capturing the capital by nabbing every other VP province, possibly combined with spies to reduce national unity.

 

[pnt]

Of course if one reads very well thought out spread-sheet, then should realize that the best setup for a division is 3 units and 1-2 support... period.

This is an entirely different discussion, and your conclusion does not follow from the spreadsheet. At the moment, however, the main question is how to identify and prevent unintended consequences stemming from details (not principles) of the current system, such as the stack of doom.

As for what is the best choice for most effective division composition, it very much depends on the goals. For defensive coverage a large front, you want to fill the frontage as much as you can with combat brigades, since support brigades are less cost effective, and in defense of a line, concentration of firepower is not terribly useful.

Thus, if you think that you can fill your front line with combat brigades (say, 12 per province), then you see how many support units you can afford on top of that. I suspect that in general the answer will be none, but if you can afford a few, probably 4 combat + 1 support is a good mix. If you can afford many, 3 combat + 2 support is better.

In general, having 4 combat brigades per division have two advantages compared with 3 per division, in particular for a human player.

1. It can be split up into two size 2 divisions as needed (tactical flexibility)
2. It makes more efficient use of available leaders

It also has the (small) disadvantage that it takes a little longer to get off all its shots in each round (but the number of shots is the same).

The main advantage of the size 4 division is that it allows for some very effective mixes of hardness and speed.

3 Arm + 1 Mot has the best hardness allowed by combined arms, and a final speed of 8.7 (a TD has 7.5). And 1 L.Arm + 3 Mech or 2 L.Arm + 2 Mec provide very powerful and fast combined arms units (final speed 10.4), with which only SP R Art can keep up.

Given their breakthrough and encirclement role, the fast, hard units would benefit most from having lots of good support, but not that many suitable units are available, and most of them are slow (at least in comparison).

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

This is an entirely different discussion, and your conclusion does not follow from the spreadsheet. At the moment, however, the main question is how to identify and prevent unintended consequences stemming from details (not principles) of the current system, such as the stack of doom.

As for what is the best choice for most effective division composition, it very much depends on the goals. For defensive coverage a large front, you want to fill the frontage as much as you can with combat brigades, since support brigades are less cost effective, and in defense of a line, concentration of firepower is not terribly useful.

Thus, if you think that you can fill your front line with combat brigades (say, 12 per province), then you see how many support units you can afford on top of that. I suspect that in general the answer will be none, but if you can afford a few, probably 4 combat + 1 support is a good mix. If you can afford many, 3 combat + 2 support is better.

In general, having 4 combat brigades per division have two advantages compared with 3 per division, in particular for a human player.

1. It can be split up into two size 2 divisions as needed (tactical flexibility)
2. It makes more efficient use of available leaders

It also has the (small) disadvantage that it takes a little longer to get off all its shots in each round (but the number of shots is the same).

The main advantage of the size 4 division is that it allows for some very effective mixes of hardness and speed.

3 Arm + 1 Mot has the best hardness allowed by combined arms, and a final speed of 8.7 (a TD has 7.5). And 1 L.Arm + 3 Mech or 2 L.Arm + 2 Mec provide very powerful and fast combined arms units (final speed 10.4), with which only SP R Art can keep up.

Given their breakthrough and encirclement role, the fast, hard units would benefit most from having lots of good support, but not that many suitable units are available, and most of them are slow (at least in comparison).

I completely agree. Combat support brigades are only ever useful for special purposes and these are for breakthrough formations. In general, I would say in infantry assault corps. Armored units are best to use as exploitative divisions and they quite often will only fight solitary or maybe two, tops three divisions per province.
When you need to heavy assault, you bring in your artillery and engineer divisions to dispose of the enemy.

As Germany I lately have created special assault corps and usually attach one or sometimes two per army group. They consist of three Artillery-Divisions (2xInf, 2-3xArt) and two Assault-Divisions (3xInf, 1-2xArt). The HQ get 1xAA, 2-3xEng). The Engineers are placed in my assault divisions instead of artillery when I need to assault over a river or into forest terrain.
These divisions hit harder than my Panzer-Divisions when concentrated in one province.
When I want to preform a breach I begin the assault with this corp, if possible supported by the Panzer-Divisions form adjacent provinces. Once the breach is done Panzer and Motorized divisions will exploit and press on the attack.
The biggest benefit with this construct are that they will win combat fast, they have a tremendous firepower per width. This translate into a quick win. This is what you can use to surprise and chock the enemy front line.