SP Artillery

[tommylotto]

I have checked out the new HoiIV wiki chart on land units. SP Artillery comes in 3 varieties -- light, medium and heavy. However, the light, medium, and heavy distinctions refers to the type of tank chassis that the artillery piece is mounted on -- not necessarily the size of the artillery piece mounted on the chassis. However, there does seem to be a difference (sometimes significant) in soft attack between the 3 different varieties. For example at 1941 tech levels soft attack is as follows: Heavy (97), Medium (92), and Light (63). A German Wespe would be a Light SP Artillery piece (built on a Pz.II chassis), whereas an American M7 Priest would be a Medium SP Artillery piece (built on the M3 or M4 chassis). The Priest might have some advantages with slightly better armor, but they are both a track mounted 105mm howitzer. They should be both be pretty much the same as far as soft attack is concerned.

Soft attack for SP Artillery should depend on the size of the gun, not the side of the chassis that it rides on.

Make artillery great again!

 

[Marfach]

Paradox, in their many 'abstractions' and streamlining of tech trees etc, have likely decided that because a heavy tank chassis would have had the engine, suspension and transmission system to carry a larger gun, it did.
It makes sense in a way, Artillery are not a front line unit so from a gameplay point of view if their Soft attack values were equal there might be no meaningful differences between them other than the cost and so bigger guns go on bigger chassis avoids making a redundant unit type.

 

[jamesd]

Amongst the many historical problems that appear to be in HOI4, this has to be one of the more minor ones. A way to rationalise it could be that the larger chassis of the Priest allows for more shells to be carried (69 vs the 40 of the Wespe) and thus the Priest can deliver more firepower to the battlefield per resupply, but should also have a higher rate of supply consumption.

 

[LordOfWar16]

I disagree that the soft attack should be the same. If it was like that there would be no point in getting medium sp-a at all, since then it only would be more expensive for no real benefit (that you expect from an artillery) at all. Hearts of Iron IV isnt an realism simulator, it is a game after all. Nobody prevents modders from making it hyper realistic of course. The bigger the chassis, the bigger the engine, the more room there is for a bigger gun. Thats basicly the thinking behind this.

In the end all equipment names are just flavors and the stats arent really related to the real counterparts. At its baseline a Tiger II, M26 Pershing (or whatever the american equivalent is in the game) and a IS-2 are the same tank with the same stats. Those get altered by design companies and doctrines etc of course, so you wont end up with the same tanks as everyone else, but they still wont reflect reallife specifications.

 

[Dr Hiram Temple]

Amongst the many historical problems that appear to be in HOI4, this has to be one of the more minor ones. A way to rationalise it could be that the larger chassis of the Priest allows for more shells to be carried (69 vs the 40 of the Wespe) and thus the Priest can deliver more firepower to the battlefield per resupply, but should also have a higher rate of supply consumption.

I like this theory. Another potential idea could be that the Wespe represents a higher rank of weapon variant, relative to the variant employed on the Priest. In real-life terms, it would reflect that the Priest's m3/m4 chassis could likely hold a substantially larger gun if redesigned to, while the Wespe was probably approaching the pzII chassis's limits with the 105mm gun.

 

[tommylotto]

I guess I can live with those rationales for the base game, particularly the variant idea... Still, in a more detailed mod, cough, I'd like to see a system where the firepower, as far as SP Artillery is concerned, comes from the type of gun, not the chassis. The choice of which chassis to use should be whatever you are building most efficiently at the time. Germany had bunches of factories building Pz.II's that were no longer effective so it made sense to switch those factories to Wespes to preserve efficiency. Whereas the US was cranking out Shermans like crazy so it made sense to put them on the M4 chassis. What was most important was that they both carried 105's with the armored divisions.

Maybe a light chassis can carry LART and MART but cannot carry HART, whereas a medium chassis could carry LART, MART or even HART (Hummel on a Pz.IV chassis or an M40 on a M4A3 chassis) -- and if you are putting your artillery on a heavy chassis, well, your kinda nutz. So, you could have just a few extra battalion types, instead of just LSP-ART, MSP-ART and HSP-ART, you could have LSP-LART, LSP-MART, MSP-LART, MSP-MART and MSP-HART. Just brainstorming here...

 

[vector1]

I had a similar idea for ships where the discrepancy between tech years are pretty large. UK had 18 inch gun technology since WW1, and it's strange that you can't choose to design a larger battleship with increased firepower by disregarding the Washington Naval Treaty. Instead, you have to tech to 1941 battleships to get increased firepower. Maybe going back to a more distributed research system would make more sense. Like what you said, decoupling firepower from chassis may be the key to a more realistic representation at the cost of increasing model numbers tremendously since every combination needs a specific model.