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Great stuff dhelmet, its fascinating stuff just to read about : )

Thanks. I want to present the data and let people make their own conclusions as much as possible. I do put in some of my own conclusions, but because everything depends on everything else there really is no "one ring to rule them all" that I've found so far. That's encouraging; I want there to be multiple good strategies.
 
So I went through and looked at a number of combinations for armor divisions. I did NOT correct the attack and defense values to account for the combined arms bonus, as the technologies affect the softness of motorized and maybe others and I did not want my assumption of only using base stats to bias the results. I also did not use mechanized brigades because they are higher in the tech tree and I'm not accounting for technology effects. That could change the results, so they are most valid for the early game.

First we'll look at different armor-motorized combinations, along with some SP artillery and AC support versions. It appears that one armored and two motorized is more cost effective, so that is used as the baseline.

armor1dre.jpg


Next we'll look at different combinations of support brigades. I went through a little more extensively here since it looks like there are several support types that make sense. I'm particularly intrigued by combinations of armor and TD. This combination might make a lot of sense to get the most power into a given frontage.

armor2.jpg


Next, combinations using light armor brigades. One light armor, one motorized and one TD look like a pretty good poor man's armored division. Two light armored with motorized and SP artillery looks like a very fast, hard hitting division that could be good for making encirclements.

armor3.jpg


Lastly, we'll explore combinations with heavy armored brigades. There aren't as many here since it seemed more difficult to find combinations that made sense. I thought that maybe heavy armor could be useful in maximizing firepower for a given frontage, but I think armor + TD looks more cost effective in this role.

armor4.jpg
 
One thing I noticed is that you didn't account for width.

For Example 3 INF & Art vs 2 INF & Art

Looks like the later is the best but............... You only have 2 brgades at the front hence you will break and shatter fast. The Inf will be hit more often.

The other statistic that is miss leading is the ORG.

The Org doesn't change in this example. The infantry are still at the same organizational level. The ART may have a higher Org but that doesn;t come into play.

Art is behind the lines, there fore the only time it's Org is used is when it fires a shot and defends. The Art never defends as it is not a front line unit. The only time it will defend is after the attached division have been broken to zero strength (perhaps zero Org).
 
The width is one of the columns in virtually all my tables. I am looking at the unit statistics and the stacking penalty only right now. I find it difficult to believe that units shatter when the support brigades still have org. If you have some source for this I would love to see it.

Also, note that my analysis of stacks assumes that the full width is being utilized, and therefore even if your theory is correct I have accounted for width in those tables.
 
Very informative and helpful. Seems now that at least TD have a role to play, as long as your opponent is fielding some form of armor/SPARTY.

I'm also glad to see that GAR rank pretty well when it comes to cost effectiveness. Japan, in both HOI2 and HOI3 starts with large numbers of them and until HOI3 I never really had much use for all of them. Now, perhaps combined with AT, they can at least serve as a first line of defense against a Soviet armored thrust into Manchuria.

While I applaud your thoroughness in comparing so many different types of units, it seems kind of silly to see the combination of MIL and so many higher level support brigades, such as TD.

Then again, during the Soviet offensives into Poland, Germany, and the Balkans, the Germans did field large numbers of TD, mostly converted from older tank models (like all the Czech tanks they appropriated) along with conscript militia. Might be something to think about when playing the 1944 scenario as Germany.
 
I personally use ARM+ARM+AC+SP ART as my armor units, how does that compare?

Also; do you take into account the modifiers to other units that come with the tech needed to unlock things like SP ART and MEC?
 
There used to be a table on the wiki showing the change in unit statistics for each tech level, but it disappeared in the last couple of days. Does anyone know if that was because it was wrong?
I wrote the original, but I replaced it with a table of 1947 stats because it was a bit misleading--not all techs start at the same year, have the same offsets, etc. I could generate stats for some intermediate years if that would help.
 
I personally use ARM+ARM+AC+SP ART as my armor units, how does that compare?

Also; do you take into account the modifiers to other units that come with the tech needed to unlock things like SP ART and MEC?

Kinda expensive, but powerful.

newerg.jpg


I did not take into account any tech modifiers. That would be better, but painful to dig through and automate. I would like to in the future.

I wrote the original, but I replaced it with a table of 1947 stats because it was a bit misleading--not all techs start at the same year, have the same offsets, etc. I could generate stats for some intermediate years if that would help.

It was kind of misleading without context, but still useful. What I would really love is to have the availability year for each brigade type and then modifiers for each tech year. I could then modify my spreadsheet to accept tech year for each brigade type and modify stats accordingly. That would be pretty sweet, but a lot more work.

I think that people are most interested in ~1940 tech year, a much simpler solution would be to post a table of brigade stats with everything at that tech level. It would be really easy for me to modify my spreadsheet with that data, and update some of the tables. Maybe an additional tech year of interest could be 1943 or 44, so that we could also examine how the best division types change over time.


Any chances of doing similar for aircraft and ships? :)

Probably not. The options in ship design are in determining which components to upgrade when. The permanent parts of the ship should obviously be researched ahead, since things like AA can be upgraded later. I suppose something similar could be done to look at ideal fleet composition, but I have no plans to do that.

With airplanes I thought there have been discussions about the stacking penalty, and the best stack sizes as a result. I think it's counterproductive to have more than four. It's also my understanding that aircraft damage is pretty small and they're not really cost-effective. I'm certainly open to being corrected on that.
 
I think that people are most interested in ~1940 tech year, a much simpler solution would be to post a table of brigade stats with everything at that tech level. It would be really easy for me to modify my spreadsheet with that data, and update some of the tables. Maybe an additional tech year of interest could be 1943 or 44, so that we could also examine how the best division types change over time.

Probably the best thing to do is to work out a few key characteristics for each division model and graph them against tech-year.
 
I'm just speculating here - I don't know if its true or not or, if in some ways, it already plays out like I describe below ..

But shouldn't combat statistics be spread out amongst the width that your up against ..

For instance - Lets say we are sending a 2 Width 2 Inf 1 Art up against a 3 Inf division.

Shouldn't the 2 Inf 1 Art combat values be shared out amongst the 3 division witdth of the enemy whereas the 3 division width of the 3 Inf is coalesced into a 2 width attack (concentration of firepower).

On the defensive .. a 2 width, 2 Inf 1 Art division has to spread its defensive stat out against the 3 width attack of the 3 Inf division ... (the 2 inf 1 art is being "stretched")?

As I said, dunno if this is how it works - but it kind of makes sense to me.

To give a totally extreme example .. Lets say you had a <made up division of 1 brigade> of 1 width but with a SA of 30 .. Does it seem right that that division can bring all of its 30 SA to bear equally against a 3 width, 3 brigade division .. It makes sense it would spread that 30 SA out against the 3 brigades .. so 10 SA vs Each. On the defensive .. if it had a DEF of 30 .. to spread that defensive stat against the 3 width attack of the enemy .. ie, again, 10 DEF vs each brigade ..

If that makes sense to anyone .. :rofl:
 
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As I said, dunno if this is how it works - but it kind of makes sense to me.

All divisions in the front line have a chance to fire and are eligible to be damaged. Divisions keep being added to the frontline until the frontage limit is exceeded.

So if you have 4 divisions of 3 width 1 bdes each then they will fit onto a width 10 front. If you had 3 divisions of 5 width 1 bdes only 2 will fit. If you have three 3bde divisions and one 5bde one then they will still all fit.

So there is a bit of gaming you can do there, maybe, if you can micromanage which units engage enough.

But then there's support brigades to consider. E.g. 6 divisions of 3inf brigades, versus 6 divisions of 2inf+1 Art.

You will find that 4 divisions of 3inf engage 5 divisions of 2Inf + 1Art. 12 brigades effective versus 15 brigades effective, and 6 vs 3 in reserve. This is advantageous for the 2Inf+1Art because of concentration of force - they can put more shots onto the target.

However, the Inf+Art force will lose a higher proportion of its effective power per hit it takes, and its smaller divisions are at greater risk of shattering.
 
From my understanding, based on a close reading of the manual, land combat works thusly:

Each division is considered to be one self-contained unit for each calculation. The strength losses are spread out among its constituent brigades, but everything else is considered to be as one. Only the divisions that fit in the front are part of the combat calculations. Reserve units will have a chance to join the battle each hour if there is an opening, but their only other effect is in changing the stacking penalty. Each of the units on the front will get a chance to fire each hour, with the target being randomly selected from the enemies divisions at the front.

So basically combat width matters in that it determines how many divisions you can stuff into the front, but width has no independent effect on the divisions ability to inflict damage. This is all highly abstracted, but I think we can agree that trying to manually manage battles ala Total War series would not be worth the huge pain in the ass involved.
 
Here I will look at a few stacks of armor units, making the same stacking penalty assumptions I did for the infantry and militia stacks from before. I focused on combinations of armor-TD-SP art. I can easily check out other combos, but I thought these looked promising.

First I went through even numbers of each brigade type from 5 to 10, and then I looked at doubling either the TD or SP art component. Note that going up to 10 armored brigades would require the tech to reduce armored's width.

armstack1.jpg


Next I did some pairwise comparisons of the different armored stacks, and also to the infantry-artillery stacks from before. The armored stacks are much more powerful per brigade, but also more expensive. Also, piling on the brigades isn't very cost effective; it costs twice as much to put 10 brigades of each type in the same province for only 41% more firepower.

armstack2.jpg


I was really surprised that dumping 12 Inf + 4 Art cost 1/4 the IC of the armored stack, but was pretty competitive in the attack stats. Of course the lack of hardness makes this combination much more vulnerable even with roughly equivalent defensive stats, and the manpower difference is huge.

The real value of armored divisions lines in the not-easy-to-quantify effect of speed on their operational utilization. Cutting off supply lines, encircling units, quickly reaching VP provinces to force a surrender, the above analysis doesn't really account for this.
 
You may be correct with all that - not going to disagree .. as I say, just specualting ..

What I'm trying to work out - is justification / reason for using a plain old 3 Inf vs 3 Inf 1 Art division

The "Disadvantages" of bunging a Art brigade onto every 3 Inf division (if you wanted to) is just so small to justify not doing it (for majors at least .. ). I detailed whys and wherefores here (sorry for the long read!!) : http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?t=421543

I'm trying to work out why in my head, nigh on every starting division in each scenario is filled with combat brigades and very few support brigades .. I keep telling myself that their must be a reason for it .. The saving of IC and Supplies doesn't addup in the pre-war years when you as Germany, for instance, can just pump reserve divisions out in droves (and the suppliy costs don't cost much in IC terms). Added to that that the AI doesn't seem to build Support Brigades for the nations your up against - it all smells of cake walk to me!
 
So basically combat width matters in that it determines how many divisions you can stuff into the front, but width has no independent effect on the divisions ability to inflict damage.

That is correct. The key aspect is using support brigades to achieve concentration of force. 0 width brigades -> more brigades on the front line -> more casualties inflicted early in the battle and enemy attack capability diminishing more rapidly.

Exactly how it works out is pretty complicated but it will be vital for breakthrough formations.
 
The scenario OOBs are based on historical ones. It was primarily the Soviets who attached massive numbers of artillery to divisions, so the divisions of most countries will be the plain old vanilla infantry. This has nothing to do with that build being superior.

It is a massive advantage to a human player to optimize their division layouts relative to the standard ones used by the AI. I just hate to play inefficiently unless I'm consciously RP'ing. Perhaps we could get modders (or a future patch) to adjust the build strategy of the AI to whatever looks "best".

I think the biggest thing restricting the use of massive numbers of support brigades is their inordinately high officer costs. It costs just as many officers to add a support brigade as a combat brigade, and having sufficient officers is huge bottleneck in the game.
 
dhemet99 said:
It was primarily the Soviets who attached massive numbers of artillery to divisions, so the divisions of most countries will be the plain old vanilla infantry. This has nothing to do with that build being superior.

I'm not claiming the build is superior - I'm looking for reason to justify building or having just Combat Brigades in a division like with the starting OOBs.

For some reason - as you say - most countries didn't attach massive numbers of artillery to divisions .. so there must have been a historical reason for that - whether cost effectiveness, logisitcs or doctrine .. yet in Hoi - it seems that the support brigade is a simple accessory to take, rather than - for want of a better word - a luxury.

Someone previously said above, words to the effect "Glad 3 Inf 1 Art fairs well - that was my preferred set up" .. to me, if your building a bog-standard infantry division its a no brainer to add a support brigade to it of whatever type you choose (from a HOI 3 gaming perspective, that is) .. but obviously "something" historically made our real-life counterparts decide to just go with combat brigades as the OOBs show .. and it appears that that "something" isn't modelled in HOI 3 if there is no combat benefit to be had with the set-up of just 3 Inf ..
 
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