The next expansion and maybe hopefully dealing with unit spam

[SophieX]

Many of the suggestions stated above are very good and reasonable.
But do not forget, that
- these "new" aspects have to be managed by the AI too, and
- these "new" aspects might have a great affect on the players computer-performance.

So it might be wise, to handle the problem of "division-spam" with existing "game-mechanics"

 

[ladner]

I have been giving this some thought, probably in some respects too much thought. I think economies and production in general are broken across the board, this leads to host of problems/issues in the game which break away from the developers stated intent.

Their own intent, to have an authentic real-time war simulation is compromised by this, at least if that intent is to have a game that simulates World War 2. I realize this could be construed as a stinging criticism, it is not intended to be. This game has incredible potential, and in my opinion with some tweaks in the right direction could be a truly epic game.

If we use historical figures as a baseline, for lack of a better term, the following production values are from "The Air War 1939 -1945" by Richard J. Overy

	1932	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938	1939
France	-	-	-	785	890	743	1,382	3,163
Germany	36	368	1968	3183	5112	5606	5235	8295
Italy	-	386	328	895	1,768	1,749	1,610	1,750
Japan	691	766	688	952	1,181	1,511	3,201	4,467
United Kingdom	445	633	740	1,140	1,877	2,153	2,827	7,940
United States	593	466	437	459	1,141	949	1,800	2,195
USSR	2,595	2,595	2,595	3,578	3,578	3,578	7,500	10,382

These are total aircraft numbers which include transports, trainers, and other miscellaneous aircraft. Something interesting to mull, French doctrine at the time allocated 37% of aircraft production to reconnaissance aircraft according to the author.

From Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze (equipment strength/deployed)

	October 1939	May 1940	June 1941	January 1942
PzKampfW I	1.3505	1,266	966	817
PzKampfW II	991	1,110	1,159	996
PzKampfW III	151	785	1,440	1,866
PzKampfW IV	143	290	572	511
PzKampfW 38 t	122	238	754	434
Total Light	2,296	2,376	2,125	2,811
Total Medium	416	1,313	2,766	2,811
Half-tracks	5,200	7,997	15,642	19,129

From Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

	October 1939	May 1940	June 1941	January 1942
2 cm Flak 30	895	1,487	2,153	2,690
3.7 cm Pak	10,560	14,257	15,522	13,348
Light Mortar	5,062	9,957	16,129	15,579
Heavy Mortar	3,959	7,091	11,767	11,719
10 cm Nebelwerfer	179	288	1,112	953
Light Infantry Gun 18	2,931	3,365	4,176	4,022
Heavy Infantry Gun 33	367	491	867	866
L. Howitzer 16 u. 18	4,919	5,538	7,076	6,772
H. Howitzer	2,434	2,383	2,867	2,746
Heavy Artillery 21-42 cm	47	163	442	548

From Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

	October 1939	May 1940	June 1941	January 1942
Rifles K 98	2,569,300	3,228,500	4,372,800	4,717,500
MP 38 and 40	5,711	27,800	166,700	205,450
MGs	103,300	150,400	203,250	206,500

In game production doesn't reflect any of this, understand one could argue a variety of reasons why. I think the primary issue is a flaw in economic constraints, which allows corresponding exponential growth in CIVs and MILs. Consequently we see Barbarossa with 15,000 medium tanks, which is almost the entirety of what was produced in the war by Germany, with corresponding outcomes. I personally think equipment casualties are not high enough, so pools continue to grow at absurd levels. But currently despite the claim about historically accurate aircraft and tanks equipment is very similar among the combatants, when it really shouldn't be. Further with game mechanics a British fighter I, by virtue of being able to research with a design team, will always have an inherent advantage, so although the Hawker Hurricane and ME-109 were close adversaries, game mechanics make it so that one will always have an advantage.

In the process of posting this, realized aircraft numbers weren't really supporting my argument, I suspect, but cannot from my books find the percentage of true front line aircraft in the numbers. From the same "The Air War 1939 - 1945" before the Invasion of the Low Countries front line aircraft strength given as follows:

10 May 1940 RAF 416 aircraft in France, French air-force on the eastern border 1,200 aircraft. Luftwaffe 2,750 aircraft. In the author's words, the British were reluctant to commit their main forces to the land battle and the French had too few modern aircraft to carry out an effective defense. In game, I rarely have any type of numerical, or technical superiority when the war in the West starts. Of course in game, my medium tank production is massive in comparison to any any sort of historical numbers, and in my opinion this is due to a lack of constraints, with exception of resources availability within the current economic engine. So many of the discussions about width, unit spam, and whole host of other problems are due to the current economic model.

I'm not even going to address ship building, which with Man the Guns, should be one of the more interesting aspects of the game, but with the AI not building capital ships, and in many respects an inability to mimic historic production has its own issues.

TLDR

Lack constraints on the economy mainly CIVs results in exponential growth, with corresponding unrealistic results such as 15,000 medium tanks for Barbarossa. Combat across the board for land and air doesn't produce high enough equipment losses, which continues the pool snow ball. Not having a constraint on table of organization and equipment, such as not producing any 3.7cm Pak or 2cm Flak frees otherwise constrained resources (MIL) for more tanks.

 

[SchwarzKatze]

HoI2 and 3 require IC for troop maintenance so that's a way that we know will work

 

[bubbas]

HoI2 and 3 require IC for troop maintenance so that's a way that we know will work

Yepp, agree here.

Re-introduce the production of supplies and that gives you a soft cap to the number of divisons a nation can field.

Then add some kind of mechanism for pilot training and you'll limit the aircraft spam.

Just my two cents on the matter

 

[ctl3]

The concept of officer in HOI3 can be a candidate: you need to invest leadership point for military officers or the organization of the entire army will be reduced. In HOI4, leadership point could be replaced by army exp or political power.

 

[Xerberous]

I would prefer this approach:

Introduce "Supplies" which are produced in CIVs; They represent all the civilian stuff a unit needs; food, clothing, tools, medical equipment, administrative equipment, entertainment items etc. The consumption rate depends slightly on what the unit is doing (idle, moving, fighting) but not really much – lets say a factor of 2 or even less between idle and combat.

In addition, introduce “Ammunition” which is produced in MILs; There is only one type of “Ammunition” which represents all types of non-reusable military action items and that is consumed by infantry, tanks, planes, ships etc. The required amount depends largely on what the unit is doing and can even be adjusted by some sort of “firing policy” which gives you the option to introduce a tradeoff between combat strength and ammunition demand.

 

[permanently_afk]

I would prefer this approach:

Introduce "Supplies" which are produced in CIVs; They represent all the civilian stuff a unit needs; food, clothing, tools, medical equipment, administrative equipment, entertainment items etc. The consumption rate depends slightly on what the unit is doing (idle, moving, fighting) but not really much – lets say a factor of 2 or even less between idle and combat.

In addition, introduce “Ammunition” which is produced in MILs; There is only one type of “Ammunition” which represents all types of non-reusable military action items and that is consumed by infantry, tanks, planes, ships etc. The required amount depends largely on what the unit is doing and can even be adjusted by some sort of “firing policy” which gives you the option to introduce a tradeoff between combat strength and ammunition demand.

And what of all that could not be modeled by a base attrition? Is there any benefit to do it this way round? Or are you just adding "more" in an attempt to seem complex while being complicated?

 

[BeauNiddle]

And what of all that could not be modeled by a base attrition? Is there any benefit to do it this way round? Or are you just adding "more" in an attempt to seem complex while being complicated?

Exactly. Equipment already is ammunition and whilst it's possible to build a massive army it's much MUCH harder to keep it stocked with equipment once the fighting starts.

The problem is that the AI is really bad at judging what future needs are going to be so over produces units and then runs out of equipment from fighting really quickly.

As mentioned above this is compounded by the ease of factory production. The problem is HOI4 still doesn't allow USA to produce the same amount of kit it did in real life and for everybody except the USA it allows too much production (especially if no strategic bombing takes place)

I think adding a 1% permanent attrition to all units would illustrate to players the cost of their armies and should also allow the AI to guess future requirements better (since multiplying 1% to a chosen number, say 70%, is a lot easier than lots of units having 0% and then suddenly spiking as they get involved in combat)

 

[Harin]

This is just a friendly recap of all the ideas above. It is rare for one thread to produce so many different ideas for a solution.

If I have read the posts correctly, it seems that ideas to reduce unit spam include:

• Introduction of reserve manpower system
• Reduce conscription percentages so less manpower is available
• Adjust supply rules
• Adjust attrition rules
• Introduce logistic manpower to reflect the people getting supplies to the front
• Introduce pilots
• Adjust production to simulate historical equipment production
• Total divisions allowed becomes a function of how much industry and/or infrastructure there is
• Introduce money to pay for unit upkeep
• Other methods to introduce upkeep of existing units, such as IC for troop maintenance
• Increase debuffs in conscription laws
• Introduce officers, limiting number of divisions that can be built
• Manpower effected by war support

Forgive me, if I overlooked any ideas.

One warning that came up a few times was that the AI has a tough time dealing with the current situation and there is a reasonable concern that some of the ideas could produce more problems for the AI.

 

[blue_yonder]

Sorry to be the elephant in the room, but while many of these ideas are fine and dandy, podcat actively likes spam because he believes the AI can't cope without it.

 

[Secret Master]

The recruitment laws currently give way to much manpower.

We ended up nerfing manpower in our MP mod, but we also added some extra conscription levels between Service by Requirement and Scraping the Barrel. This makes higher conscription a bit more granular than it is in vanilla.

Can somebody explain why "unit spam" is considered an issue when supply limits already exist in the game?

I don't mind division spam too much in principle. Given that human divisions in HOI4 do not match historical counterparts very much, the absolute number of divisions is largely irrelevant to me. I'm generally more concerned with number of planes and tanks and troops in the field than the number of "containers" in which these things are placed.

What kind of bothers me is that there is no logistical drain on manpower. HOI4, with some tweaks, could accurately represent historical manpower in the field, but even with tweaks to do that, you'd still lack the manpower drain of rear echelon stuff supporting the actual divisions in the field. For some countries, that was a substantial drain on manpower (US, I'm looking at you and the manpower required to support a world spanning conflict on every continent). But since that manpower isn't in the game, we end up with gigantic armies in the field. Which increases divisions count. Which bothers a lot of players who are interested in history or in balance.

Players who go past 1945 find themselves with odd situations where division spam makes certain kinds of amphibious invasions more difficult due to there literally being enough divisions to fill width on every single tile from Labrador to Veracruz. That's kind of a problem, but I attribute that to going past the parameters of a sane HOI4 game.

 

[porta80]

I created my own mod, i decreased Manpower gain from laws significantly Maximum is 17,5% from scrapping the barrel, malus start with extensive consciptions, increased Production Cost for Mils + Civs +synth +docks, rebalanced increased ammount of starting factorys for Majors, some small focus tree changes on shortening focuses, rebalancing starting techs for Majors, changed bonus/malus on economy laws, sligthly increased overall research time, changing total mob to only 12% cconsumer goods and -4% manpower, and some more.
feel free to try:

Steam Community :: Error

steamcommunity.com

 

[Volodio]

The concept of officer in HOI3 can be a candidate: you need to invest leadership point for military officers or the organization of the entire army will be reduced. In HOI4, leadership point could be replaced by army exp or political power.

I disagree. The officer system in HoI3 was pretty garbage in representing the historical situations with officers. It's simply a slider of the percentage of officers per division according to the number needed. Except that the number of officers was never the problem in any army. At worst they would just promote some soldiers. The issue was the lack of skills in the officers, such as the Soviet Union promoting completely inexperienced officers or Germany which had too much old officers using WW1 tactics. It's not something any country could easily deal with by simply putting more resources into officer training or something.

It also doesn't make any sense to use these particular resources considering both touch very different subjects and it wouldn't make sense for them to be limited by the officer policy. Having better officers preventing the creation of variants for a plane or tank, or preventing to put one minister into office, doesn't have any good justification.
Army xp is also something you lack of until the war starts, then that you have in abundance. It would probably make balance worse if it was used.

I agree that nerfing the conscription laws would be a good idea, or even completely reworking them. The number of casualties in the game are already pretty crazy, with for instance the Soviet Union suffering 50m casualties when in reality the Soviets were lacking manpower with "only" 20m casualties.

Also simply improving the AI. Considering how the AI never manages to deal correctly with equipment, I'm pretty sure if the AI priority to new divisions became automatically low, the AI would not have the equipment to field new divisions.

 

[dratheos]

Most of these ideas have the problem of introducing way too much micro. Simple idea: every 4 divisions requires a mil factory (TBD) as "upkeep", and should work similar to trade, the used mil factories just don't appear on the production screen. Can be changed by national ideas and doctrines, like superior firepower requires a mil per 3 divisions, and mass assault per 6 (or something).

Zero micro, just keep that number in the back of your head when you train new divisions.

 

[Atomichazza]

It's very depressing that this game is 4 years old and division spam is still is the biggest issue, for me anyway. It's the one thing that puts me off playing. You'd like to think that in the early stages of development it would have been one of if not the most important issues to get right; for both historical and performance reasons. Whatever they try to implement to fix it (if they even do) will no doubt just cause issues elsewhere as most new features tend to do.

I don't have an obvious answer. Maybe just reducing manpower as a whole and making it much harder to obtain. Upping the amount of equipment required per battalion/unit. Maybe making set brigade and division sizes so the AI can't pump out templates that have only have a couple thousand men in them. Anything that makes divisions more valuable and costly. Perhaps not on the Eastern Front but to the Western Democratic nations they couldn't just throw divisions of 10-20k men into a meat grinder. Manpower was incredibly valuable and precious. It couldn't be further from that on HOI4.

 

[Harin]

It's very depressing that this game is 4 years old and division spam is still is the biggest issue, for me anyway. It's the one thing that puts me off playing. You'd like to think that in the early stages of development it would have been one of if not the most important issues to get right; for both historical and performance reasons. Whatever they try to implement to fix it (if they even do) will no doubt just cause issues elsewhere as most new features tend to do.

I don't have an obvious answer. Maybe just reducing manpower as a whole and making it much harder to obtain. Upping the amount of equipment required per battalion/unit. Maybe making set brigade and division sizes so the AI can't pump out templates that have only have a couple thousand men in them. Anything that makes divisions more valuable and costly. Perhaps not on the Eastern Front but to the Western Democratic nations they couldn't just throw divisions of 10-20k men into a meat grinder. Manpower was incredibly valuable and precious. It couldn't be further from that on HOI4.

Everything you wrote is true, imho. On the surface, the easiest and obvious answer to reducing division spam is to simply reduce the amount of manpower each conscription law provides. This would eliminate the number of divisions created by players and AI. This is such an easy solution some wonder why it has not be implemented already. Maybe, such a solution causes another problem? A poster above mentioned that Podcat was in favor of division spam, possibly because in the current state the AI is in, it needs division spam to function.

It is possible (and most likely probable) that the AI is weak at computing risk. Without such an ability, the AI may see every uncontrolled province on its borders as containing the same amount of risk. That may be why we see the AI deploy a large portion of its forces guarding fronts so far away from the main risk facing it. I can imagine writing formulas for a system determining risk for the AI would be daunting. I would pull my hair out trying to roughly scale the risk the UK has at its borders across the entire world. Ouch!

Thankfully, there are people in the financial and insurance markets who compute risk for a living. They are very good at it. If they have not already, maybe the developers could bring some of these people in to temporarily help them see risk in a different light. It might help them break out of the rut they are in.

 

[Simon_9732495]

Can somebody explain why "unit spam" is considered an issue when supply limits already exist in the game? It's not like anyone can put an infinite number of divisions on the frontline, since they'd lose all their equipment to attrition. I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't even ever use supply companies or the -20% supply FM promotion, so it's very easy to get a huge leg up on the late-game AI even if they have twice as many troops as you. This is to say nothing of how easily modern tanks + 1944 CAS can melt through practically any defensive position later on, even if they have to chew through 30+ infantry divisions per tile.

I agree with Reman here.
I don't see unit spam as a big problem.
Your own faction members screwing up your supply situation is a problem, but this can also happen without unit spam and it can be fixed without changing unit spam.

Maybe I need some more explanation why it is a problem...

 

[Vlad123]

I agree with Reman here.
I don't see unit spam as a big problem.
Your own faction members screwing up your supply situation is a problem, but this can also happen without unit spam and it can be fixed without changing unit spam.

Maybe I need some more explanation why it is a problem...

I think that a simple sentence can explain everything: Lag in late game.

 

[Phleem]

Maybe factories should take manpower?

It could be balanced to give interesting choice trade offs while playing. It is historical too: That was why the USA didn’t deploy 200 divisions - they made a conscious choice that they couldn’t do that and build everything they wanted to build at the same time, and realized with the Soviets holding on, they didn’t need to.

It’s not very realistic to expect any of the changes on the scale discussed in this thread in HOI4, but maybe in 5?

 

[porta80]

I'll try and add it to my mod. Let's start with 500 manpower/factory.
Edit:
Doesn't work.