Two games and the things that spoiled them

[KiwiNoob]

Always nice to fire up the game after a patch and see that not much in the way of game spoiling issues have been addressed. Played a couple of games and wrote down all the things that detracted from the game - a couple touch on the AI but I'll try and avoid too much about it since we all know it's horribly broken.

1. Armour and Piercing mechanics dont work. Give 25,000 troops a couple dozen Heavy TD's and all of a sudden they have almost impenetrable armor. Likewise - give 25,000 troops 24 marginal anti-tank guns and they can deal with full armored divisions. I destroyed the SU with about 1000 T2 AT guns and never once had a problem.
   • The larger a division gets the more armor battalions it should need to raise armor. Likewise - larger division should require more AT to raise it's piercing.
   • Armor, MOT, MEC should raise the hardness of a division more
   • Piercing should not be a boolean, it should have several stages. Easily pierces (P > (A * 1.25), no malus), Pierces Ok (P > A, small malus), Trouble piercing (P > (A * 0.75), decent malus), Cannot pierce (P < (A * 0.5), full malus)
2. The planning bonus should not be tied to battle plans. For starters the battle plan system is horribly broken and if you draw a plan you then have to actively fight against the AI doing stupid things - not fun. It would be much better if planning was a toggle on the army leader the same as training. Toggling 'prepare offensive' or whatever would cause a fixed amount of attrition but start building up the planning bonus. This way it doesn't force people to use a broken system and uses equipment to prepare for an offensive which is realistic.
3. All division training should require equipment - even the training done in the recruit menu. Training from the recruit menu should be allowed to train all the way to regular and provide army experience. Divisions should only provide army experience if they are trained or higher.
4. The production menu needs to be improved for late game where volumes are a lot higher. It gets very slow and unwieldy late game at the moment. The distribution of resources is also problematic after the last patch as later lines will produce nothing when missing a resource where it would be preferred for all lines to share the available resources and each suffer a small malus. I suggest giving production lines a priority like other places in the game "High", "Normal", "Low". When the resources are short - all lines in the matching priority share whats left based on the number of working factories.
5. Combat experience MUST be shared between all commanders in a battle. The main commander can get the lions share but the others should get some. Perhaps 33% for main commander then split the remaining 67% between all commanders in the battle (including the main one). The reason this is an absolute must is that I'm sick to death of the AI sending their shitty divisions all over the place and soaking up 100% of the experience of my units for their generals while my newbies are stuck on lvl 1 forever.
6. Counter icons are too small. Most of the icons look pretty crap when scaled down to that size. Counters could stand to be bigger (configurable size?) and more of the counter area should be the icon.
7. Nowhere in the game should equipment be displayed using only the flavor text. It always needs to come with it's generic name as well.
8. When zooming out counters merge and obscure important information. Would be nice to be able to configure at what zoom level this happens and/or turn it off (except for perhaps the max zoom-out level)
9. When constructing buildings the VP's, airfields and ports are all hidden in the UI. This is a major pain as often you want to construct defenses on VP's, airfields and ports...
10. Change the division designer to show hardness and terrain bonuses/malices as text so that they are easily readable (hovering over the train ones especially is a pain) and more importantly you can display the +/- when editing a division. Hardness can go in the combat stats. The terrain adjusters can be in a table format:
    • ~~~~~~~~~~ Move ~~~~~~ Attack ~~~~~~~ Defence
    • Plains~~~~~~ +10% ~~~~~ --- ~~~~~~~~~~~ ---
      
    • Forest ~~~~~ +5% ~~~~~~~ +10% etc...
11. Divisions not in combat but in the province should regain org but at a reduced rate. This saves having to micro the divisions out and back in again which can get tedious in long combats. This should only happen if the unit is not surrounded.
12. Extensive conscription should become an option for democracies if another country is justifying.
13. The delete BP command wont work unless the army has a BP. This is a pain because often you want to delete BP from several armies and if you delete the selected army first you then need to switch to another army to continue deleting. It would be nice to have the BP tool open at all times (even when no army is selected - just grey out relevant options) but barring that just allow the delete command to work even if the army has no BP.
14. Research speed enhancements (designers/theorists) should be applied to current projects it would affect. Doesn't need to be retro-active but just trim the remaining time by the right amount. The effects of designers are applied but the active research projects dont seem to have their remaining time adjusted.
15. If divisions are in your own territory the supply system should prioritize them. PITA when AI sends a butt load of divisions into your lands and starts killing your units with attrition.
16. Multiple missions for navies (same as air groups) and dont put any limit on the number of sea areas that can be selected. Most nations (except majors) are only ever going to have one significant fleet. Splitting it up to perform different jobs is a pain and 3 areas is never enough.
17. Adviser bonuses to troops should to be specific about what units they affect (extended tooltip after a long hover?).
18. The current trade lanes are messed up. In the trade menu allow players to choose the default trade port where all convoys will work out of. Would also be good to allow an override for each individual resource I.e. by default convoys will be from port A but use port B for Steel because I get it all from SU and port B is much safer
19. AI should not move troops via transport through areas where the other side has significant naval superiority.
20. Conquered territory should have a (sorry for the EU4 ref) 'separatism' mechanic. When first conquered you get 0% manpower & 100% of resistance. If you choose harsh or harshest treatment it stays there/increases. If you choose gentle it begins to decay, gentlist decays faster and perhaps add another level called 'integrate' that becomes available once 'sepratism' is at a low level. The idea being that if you forgo the resources and factories up front you can get long term manpower bonuses. Integrated should still never be as good as core but I had provinces with 3 million people that I'd owned for 10 years and was still getting like 8 people per month in manpower. Better mechanic for longer games and more realistic. [Edit: Resistance should not magically disappear when peace is signed]
21. Current war mechanics are terrible. Attack a nation - they join a faction - you're now at war forever and cant actually conquer them. This makes a small amount of sense when germany invades people but it happens regardless of if the conflict is anywhere near europe or has anything to do with Axis, Allies Comintern.
22. Current peace mechanics don't work. No nation should be able to take territory owned by a country in a seperate war. In one of the games I conquered the SU at the same time as germany was doing it (seperate war) but at the peace conference they just grabbed all the territory I owned and puppeted the rest. Was also broken how they had all the warscore even though I did all the work.
23. The current ideology system doesn't work. Fascism is fun. Communism is ok in a pinch. Neutral/Democracy sux.
24. It costs 20 manpower to field a fighter. Thats cool but then you also lose 20 people each time a fighter is shot down. Thats not cool. Should just be 1 person. This really cripples minor nations.
25. The garrison AI sux. I gave it twice as many units as it needed and told it only to stamp out resistance but it couldn't even do that. Who tested that?
26. Put captured equipment in a table format and display it all instead of showing two things and then 'Other' with a hover over menu.
27. Please fix the AI suicide attacks. They burn their equipment and manpower attacking needlessly over rivers into mountains.

Congratulations to anyone who actually managed to get to the end.

 

[redrum68]

Lots of good points and suggestions there. Some definitely more important than others. Would definitely be useful to organize them into categories to make it more consumable.

 

[KiwiNoob]

Lots of good points and suggestions there. Some definitely more important than others. Would definitely be useful to organize them into categories to make it more consumable.

You're probably right. Was tired after the two games

 

[grandad1982]

Nowhere in the game should equipment be displayed using only the flavor text. It always needs to come with it's generic name as well.

I find this one surprisingly aggravating.

 

[KiwiNoob]

I find this one surprisingly aggravating.

I never had any idea what was being lend leased to me from my puppets/allies unless it was support equipment

 

[Meglok]

I never had any idea what was being lend leased to me from my puppets/allies unless it was support equipment

A lot of very good points, most I even agree with

I will add one that bugs me in SP, we now have a better lend lease system but no way easy to know or ask what our allies need. It is not like it is a state secret when the bad generic template system forces an ally or minor into using more trucks, tanks, or guns than it's industry can support.

And of course, they need to Add Aluminum in Asia.

 

[CharlieFox]

Nice list of suggestions, I agree with most of them.
However, I don't think you actually lose any manpower when a plane is shot down (same with sunken ships)

 

[jamesd]

I'm part way through a Germany game now and I've elected not to take on any allies and have conquered all mainland European nations except Spain/Portugal and Latvia/Estonia (USSR got them) and USSR. Having captured equipment from 19 countries I've found it tedious to try and look at what equipment my troops are using in the field by division or in total. I've even noticed that when looking up the totals, every piece of equipment is listed even if there are currently none in use. So even if I've lost every piece of say Luxembourg Artillery I, for the remainder of the game there will be that extra space taken up for that equipment in the listing. With aircraft I tend to accumulate some experience and then upgrade 1 attribute at a time, so for example I might have a Bf 109 E-2 that has +1 to weapons compared to the Bf 109 E-1 variant. That can lead to very long lists and when trying to see what my air force is using I can get a long list of aircraft types that have been exhausted and are no longer in production. For example when I want to see what types of fighters my air force is using I may see something like:

He 51: 0
Bf 109: 0
Bf 109 A: 0
Bf 109 B: 0
Bf 109 C: 0
Bf 109 D: 0
Bf 109 E-1: 0
Bf 109 E-2: 0
Bf 109 E-3: 0
Bf 109 E-4: 100
Bf 109 E-7: 100
Bf 109 F-1: 100
Bf 109 F-4: 100

and another 12 types of captured equipment that has all been shot down. It makes for a long list and lots of scrolling rather than only displaying the 4 types currently active. When it comes to infantry weapons, with every nation having them, and often multiple types per nation, the list gets very long indeed.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Armour and Piercing mechanics dont work. Give 25,000 troops a couple dozen Heavy TD's and all of a sudden they have almost impenetrable armor. Likewise - give 25,000 troops 24 marginal anti-tank guns and they can deal with full armored divisions. I destroyed the SU with about 1000 T2 AT guns and never once had a problem.

• The larger a division gets the more armor battalions it should need to raise armor. Likewise - larger division should require more AT to raise it's piercing.
• Armor, MOT, MEC should raise the hardness of a division more
• Piercing should not be a boolean, it should have several stages. Easily pierces (P > (A * 1.25), no malus), Pierces Ok (P > A, small malus), Trouble piercing (P > (A * 0.75), decent malus), Cannot pierce (P < (A * 0.5), full malus)

I think that your drawing the wrong conclusions from playing mostly against the AI here IMO.

A single battalion of Heavy TDs will not give a large 40 width division anywhere near "impenetrable armor". It is possible to pierce even by obsolete AT in fact...

The formula for a divisions final Armor value uses a weighted average where 30% of the highest value is used and 70% of the average is used.

This means in a large division with a single battalion of 1941 Heavy TDs ( with 110 armor ), your going to get an armor of something like 33+3=36 armor, which can be easily pierced even by a single support 1940 AT or by 1939 Medium tanks in a concentrated division. Even obsolete 1936 AT won't be far from piercing it.

So in fact it's already the case that you need more battalions to raise armor and piercing of larger divisions then you do for small division, the most important part of both high armor and high piercing is the average value.

In Multiplayer few players still use single HTD battalion divisions since they are so easy to counter even with obsolete AT, and I have seen the AI in singleplayer equip it's divisions with AT as well sometimes, so once it does it more regularly and reliably the single HTD exploit should no longer work.

The same thing can be said about the piercing situation, in MP it's not uncommon to see dedicated tank killer / tank stopper divisions like infantry with 3 line battalions of AT, or MOT+lots of TD, especially if you spot your enemy going for heavy tanks, and thanks to hardness piercing alone isn't enough, you need hard attacks as well.



While it would be interesting to have some additional levels of "piercing", and your suggestion has some merit, I don't think this is an area where the game needs more complexity and details at the moment compared to everything else, and given that the weighted average formula used already is pretty complex, and pretty much does what we want it to do ( require more portion of units to get higher values, but with diminishing returns ).

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

Very good list. In most things I absolutely agree. Some exceptions/additions:
2. Afaik, it isn't tied (unless they fixed it which I'm not aware of): You can make the plan, build up the bonus, cancel the plan and attack manually with the built up bonus. It's a kind of workaround (you still have to draw arrows on the map), but basically as you suggest.
6. I'm normally someone who hates the answer "Use a mod", because most mods suggested break Iron man. The Bigger counter mod doesn't, though. But, personally, I prefer the default counters.
16. I agree in the mission selection part, but a single fleet - regardless of size - is simply not able to effectively cover larger areas.
Plus: Air zones should be dynamic, or "spill over" for one or two provinces. It really bothers me that I have to cover several complete zones if the ground fighting by any chance happens along the border of several air zones (e.g. West German border, three airzones: West Germany, Benelux and Northern France). If I want my Stukas to attack Maginot I don't care if the enemy has some fighters back in Brittany. One could argue the the problem "proceeds" with the front line. As an alternative one could think of a system to assign air wings to specific divisions or armies.
19. Your suggestion is a (bad) workaround, at best. As are those impassable areas they're introducing now... If your suggestion was implemented, the same rule should apply to human players. The player would have an unfair advantage otherwise. And I don't like to become limited in my possibilities because the AI can't handle it (Like those impassable areas they're introducing now...).
20. One addition: The resistance should not magically disappear when the war's over...
21. While being at war with the whole faction is fine (that's what these factions are for) there should be some option for separate peace or something like that.

 

[Misaka_Complex]

Always found it weird how Germany can use an infantry division with 24 pak-36 AT-guns to fully pierce KV-1 divisions with fully mechanized units.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Always found it weird how Germany can use an infantry division with 24 pak-36 AT-guns to fully pierce KV-1 divisions with fully mechanized units.

What kind of strange KV-1 division template are you referring to then?

I never seen a proper Heavy tank + Mechanized division that can get pierced by support AT alone...

Edit:

Here you can see a typical KV-1 division and a typical Infantry division with PAK-36:

Note how the piercing isn't even half way enough to pierce the tanks...



For reference I also made the Infantry + 1941 HTD division ( It can be pierced by a single support AT with 1936 AT equipment and 1939 techs = 37.2 piercing ):

 

[KiwiNoob]

It's true that it might be a bit flavourless but the alternative is not knowing what equipment is in the lend lease you just got, not knowing whats in your warehouse, etc...

Well, for everyone except the ones that really know their WW2 era weapons.

 

[KiwiNoob]

What kind of strange KV-1 division template are you referring to then?

I never seen a proper Heavy tank + Mechanized division that can get pierced by support AT alone...

Edit:

Here you can see a typical KV-1 division and a typical Infantry division with PAK-36:

It's a good thing that KV-1 divisions when invading the SU are no-where to be seen. And even when one does appear it's never up to strength.

But the point is the mechanic is too simple. 24 guns between 18,000 people (regardless of how good they are) should not even be able to negate a LARM division. In reality you'd need a really good chunk of AT guns and preferably some of your own armor to cope with a full armor division. Currently LARM and ARM are useless against anything with an AT support company. HARM might require more than a support company but is so expensive it's not worth it.

On the flip side - Giving 20,000 people 20 TD's also shouldn't give the division any significant armor.

Piercing and armor need to be balanced a lot more by the size of the division, hardness of armor should be increased and piercing in combat needs to be more of a scale than a simple yes/no so that bringing a butt-load of tanks still provides some benefits unless the other side has good AT abilities.

 

[KiwiNoob]

I think that your drawing the wrong conclusions from playing mostly against the AI here IMO.

...

This means in a large division with a single battalion of 1941 Heavy TDs ( with 110 armor ), your going to get an armor of something like 33+3=36 armor, which can be easily pierced even by a single support 1940 AT or by 1939 Medium tanks in a concentrated division. Even obsolete 1936 AT won't be far from piercing it.

HOI4 is predominantly a single player game. I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from playing multi-player.

Currently you don't even need to use a H.TD battalion to enter invulnerable mode against the AI. Slightly out of date M.TD's will do just fine.

Don't use such large divisions. A smaller division (20-25 width) works far better.

 

[Celdur]

Dunno, the AI always has AT in my SP games, and has for months now.

 

[KiwiNoob]

Very good list. In most things I absolutely agree. Some exceptions/additions:
2. Afaik, it isn't tied (unless they fixed it which I'm not aware of): You can make the plan, build up the bonus, cancel the plan and attack manually with the built up bonus. It's a kind of workaround (you still have to draw arrows on the map), but basically as you suggest.

16. I agree in the mission selection part, but a single fleet - regardless of size - is simply not able to effectively cover larger areas.

19. Your suggestion is a (bad) workaround, at best. As are those impassable areas they're introducing now... If your suggestion was implemented, the same rule should apply to human players. The player would have an unfair advantage otherwise. And I don't like to become limited in my possibilities because the AI can't handle it (Like those impassable areas they're introducing now...).

20. One addition: The resistance should not magically disappear when the war's over...

2. The problem is that having the bonus attached to the BP is that it has to be on the front line. It doesn't allow for a counter attack to be prepared.
Unfortunately even attaching units to a BP is hazardous. The moment you do the AI will start mucking up your pristine troop arrangements.

16. Well for staters if you had enough ships you could split them up into smaller fleets and assign them individually but thats time consuming and then requires a lot more effort to keep the production balanced between multiple fleets. Secondly - it's fine if a single DD will not effectively cover a large area. The idea is to set it up then just pump ships into the fleet so it becomes incresingly effective.

19. Tell one of your Axis armies to garrison the ports in europe and then go grab a coffee. They'll all be in watery tomb off the coast when you come back. Though I agree I need to adjust the wording - Don't convoy troops through areas where the other side has naval superiority. It's a bad idea.

20. Good call. That is a bit weird now that you mention it

 

[Alex_brunius]

HOI4 is predominantly a single player game. I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from playing multi-player.

Assuming the AI never will improve and become better your right. If we want to know what the game balance will be when the AI is better we can peak ahead and look at multiplayer already today.

No one in their right mind would add a HTD bat for a cost of 540 industry to armor up all 20 width divisions when your enemy can (and will) add a single support AT for less then 100 industry cost and fully negate it's advantage.

Don't use such large divisions. A smaller division (20-25 width) works far better.

Huh? Your the one who told me to the issue is with such large divisions to begin with!!!

The division in my screenshot has 17600 manpower and you go on about 20000 and 25000 men getting the benefit of armor and piercing from a single battalion?

What divisions are you using that are 20-25 width and have 20000-25000 men???

 

[Misaka_Complex]

What kind of strange KV-1 division template are you referring to then?

I think I might have confused T-34 with KV-1 divisions since their templates icon looks similar, my bad.

 

[KiwiNoob]

Dunno, the AI always has AT in my SP games, and has for months now.

Only support AT which isn't enough to pierce a 25 width division with TD