Suggestion/Mod: Artillery Provides Org Damage and Soft Attack

[Commissar Yossarian]

I posited this at Podcat in another thread specifically about the mechanics, but as I think about it more it seems worth including if not already in.

While Art currently boosts soft/hard attack stats in a division, it doesn't seem to affect the oppositions org while aerial bombing does.
I'd like to see enemy units under fire from Art suffer a direct org loss of some amount in a similar manner as interdiction bombing. This would obviously be limited to engaged units and not those in reserve, but would help to improve the game play by allowing finer control over the Rock Paper Scissors trade-offs in designing and equipping your divisions.

In the WWW when Daniel stripped his Inf to bare bones to max their org and keep their tempo up, right now there is no risk as long as he can bring enough soft attack to bear (overloading a salient, better inf weapons, etc) to effects 'hits' on the enemy divisions then both combatants loose org at roughly the same rate. So while he may take disproportionately higher casualties given sufficient manpower reserves there's no adverse affect on his combat tempo and the result is a zerg rush working to overwhelm an enemy front.

I'd much rather see artillery have the effect of breaking up an attack, or suppressing the defenders ability to properly organize their defense as is/was the case IRL such that proper fire support can be used to break up an attack or pin a defender to allow your infantry to close without being mowed down.

Maybe implement it as a scaled penalty that varies the org loss with the success of the soft attack:
if 'soft attack'=success
org loss = X
else
org loss = 0.1X
end

This would have the benifit of allowing combined arms and mechanized infantry to play the role they typically did in supporting an attack by making it less susceptible to small arms and shrapnel.

Cheers

 

[Midden]

In other Paradox games Artillery seems to be able to add to combat without adding to combat width, a concept which seems reasonable. So if you are a production rich country you can benefit by slapping as much Artillery in as you can, adding more firepower. At the cost of production.

Hoi IV seems to have changed this, Art seems to be like any other fighting Brigade and adds width to the division and seems to have mostly similar stats to adding any of the other combat brigades. So adding an extra artillery to a slot is basically similar to adding another inf, sure soft attack is slightly lower but shrug it's doesn't seem that noticeable a difference.

Given this, a player will do better on the game management side if the division is very simple and has only a few things to produce like I only have to produce vast quantities of small arms. Then you don't have to balance, manage various production lines of trucks, AT, Art, AAA to keep your Divs operating. The game shows that this strategy is further reinforced in that your simple Division seems to combat as well / better than a mixed one.

However, it does seem to make the division builder components rather irrelevant and flavorless if Inf spam = win. There doesn't seem to be a combined arms mechanic either further leading to blandness.

Another thought is that the game starts you off with Inf only armed forces, in the early part of the war. However the combat is so fast and conquering quickly means that WW2 is basically over in a year, so that maybe we have had no time to see nations earn experience and add more complexity to the combat slots, which maybe much more effective than just INF?

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I thought hits from soft and hard attack damage ORG. Is there actually another mechanism for damaging another unit's ORG?

 

[Vidkjaer]

Soft attack damages organisation.

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

Yes, but I thought under air attack in hoi3 you could org reduce a unit to 0 without doing any damage to their strength.

I would think that allowing artillery to directly affect org in addition to its current mechanics would help it's battle field role under the current game mechanics.
Right now since it just boosts the odds a unit will cause damage to another you can still end up with a zerg rush of higher level infantry with a planning bonus out competing lower level infantry with artillery which makes no sense.

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

In other Paradox games Artillery seems to be able to add to combat without adding to combat width, a concept which seems reasonable. So if you are a production rich country you can benefit by slapping as much Artillery in as you can, adding more firepower. At the cost of production.

Hoi IV seems to have changed this, Art seems to be like any other fighting Brigade and adds width to the division and seems to have mostly similar stats to adding any of the other combat brigades. So adding an extra artillery to a slot is basically similar to adding another inf, sure soft attack is slightly lower but shrug it's doesn't seem that noticeable a difference.

Given this, a player will do better on the game management side if the division is very simple and has only a few things to produce like I only have to produce vast quantities of small arms. Then you don't have to balance, manage various production lines of trucks, AT, Art, AAA to keep your Divs operating. The game shows that this strategy is further reinforced in that your simple Division seems to combat as well / better than a mixed one.

However, it does seem to make the division builder components rather irrelevant and flavorless if Inf spam = win. There doesn't seem to be a combined arms mechanic either further leading to blandness.

Another thought is that the game starts you off with Inf only armed forces, in the early part of the war. However the combat is so fast and conquering quickly means that WW2 is basically over in a year, so that maybe we have had no time to see nations earn experience and add more complexity to the combat slots, which maybe much more effective than just INF?

The other thing is the massive supply penalty artillery will impose. So when you stack production penalty, resource needs, research, supply and organisation penalties against just more infantry with better gear there is no case where artillery makes sense right now.

At least for Germany anti tank and maxed infantry seem much better.

 

[Secret Master]

While Art currently boosts soft/hard attack stats in a division, it doesn't seem to affect the oppositions org while aerial bombing does.

Huh?

In HOI3, units lose ORG when shot by either hard or soft attack. (You lose some strength, too.)

If you have no ORG, you just lose strength until your unit shatters/dies/is erased.

This is why TAC stacks, when abused, can annihilate entire divisions with bombing. It doesn't work with ART, because the enemy retreats from combat when it hits zero ORG and the ART cannot force it to stay in place and die.

Unless the enemy is surrounded, in which case the unit is eliminated.

Also, you can't stack ART like you can TACs, so you simply cannot erase divisions with artillery. (Believe me, if you could, I would have done it by now.)

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

So I appreciate that a successful attack costs org, I was under the impression an unsuccessful one didn't.

From the air I know of the tac stack abuse strategy and its effects, but I was thinking of a specific scenario where I had a few planes harassing a few divisions and they rapidly eroded their Org but never reduced their strength.

At the time I didn't think too much about it, so I didn't look into the mechanics if they were just reinforcing fast enough or it was a mechanic where they couldn't damage the ground unit so were only inflicting org loss.

Thus this spawned the idea of artillery having a bonus damage to an opposing units org regardless of damaging it to help balance it under the game mechanics.

 

[alp177]

Actually arty gives you 1.1 org and also soft attack bonus and big def bonus.It is not like Daniel mentioned about if you look at thee WWW when they show the support compines it gives you org bonus actually

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

Also, you can't stack ART like you can TACs, so you simply cannot erase divisions with artillery. (Believe me, if you could, I would have done it by now.)

I'm not looking to make artillery look like air power specifically.

Instead I see it as currently:
-an attacking force has: Infantry, Armour, Artillery, Air Power
-a defending force has: Infantry, Artillery, Anti-Tank, Ainti-Air, and Terrain.

How the defender implements their anti-X is more flexible since they get to chose the terrain and thus can afford to be static and employ static or dynamic elements. Hence the generic terms encompassing tanks, planes and specialist infantry.

Looking at the interactions between these elements determines the force composition necessary to be successful.
As it stands per the WWW videos due to the game mechanics there is very little to recommend artillery or armour frankly. Since Org dictates the tempo of your operations then the goal is always to max out your Org with a minimum number of supporting elements that are lower on the IC/power curve.
Artillery has huge disadvantages in terms of production cost and supply consumption even if we discount the potential Org hit. There's an edge case where it may be the tipping point between success and failure of an attack/defense but generally speaking with proper manoeuvres and force concentration decent infantry will bring enough soft attack that artillery isn't necessary.

And that's my current concern. The way the game mechanics work artillery just isn't necessary. I think the mechanics are fine (soft, hard, piercing, toughness/breakthrough), but unfortunately the artillery is so far under the cost/power curve on infantry it's not worth it. While people argue that it trades IC for manpower successfully (and it's true) the manpower argument is completely irrelevant for the majors. If you're going to win as the axis you will have done so by 43 and have gobs of men left because you cannot mobilise divisions fast enough to use them based on your industry. If you're allies or Russia, Russia just doesn't have a manpower problem.

So I'd like to see a change to artillery such that the balance of damage output doesn't change (which is probably well balanced) but it's effect of breaking up enemy formations is implemented in the form of additional Org damage output.

Then I think it would be an interesting choice again instead of the current binary build of inf+anti-tank guns and mot+arm that's likely going to dominate the battle field.

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

View attachment 157611 Actually arty gives you 1.1 org and also soft attack bonus and big def bonus.It is not like Daniel mentioned about if you look at thee WWW when they show the support compines it gives you org bonus actually

That's super interesting, since I'd be surprised if Daniel was wrong. Do you know of an infantry screen cap showing support companies? It would be interesting to see if they had different stats for different types of divisions.

 

[alp177]

That's super interesting, since I'd be surprised if Daniel was wrong. Do you know of an infantry screen cap showing support companies? It would be interesting to see if they had different stats for different types of divisions.

Support companies gives you same bonuses whatever division they are in i think real difference is tech and doctrines as i understand from WWWs DDs

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

As in superior fire power may give a bonus to Org for having support companies while blitz will have a penalty?

 

[alp177]

As in superior fire power may give a bonus to Org for having support companies while blitz will have a penalty?

I dont know it is not mentioned anywhere or i dont see it but i think shouuld not change becuse this image shows Germen Panzer division template