Eh in peace time yes, in a total war scenario money becomes much less of a real factor. IC is a much better value and makes much more sense as the real value.
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Wage of war: NSB UnBalanced of Production cost of equipments.
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Motorized, tactical bombers(or cas) and fightere seems to be where it is at, maybe mechanized 3 when that comes along. Tanks are expensive, but if you got the research getting a single tank destroyer batallion with high armor in you divisions seems to be worth the cost. Old school tank divisions seem really hard to justify with how good motorized is both in terms of cost and supply use.
The absolutely biggest problem in HOI4 is complete lack of any combined arms bonus. The idea of building each and every independent units to be a mix of various forces was one of the biggest changes in doctrine between ww1 and ww2.
In reality, by mixing infantry, artillery and armour in single unit you are not adding combat value but multiplying it. Infantry without tanks is easy prey for artillery and machine guns, tanks without infantry can be easily defeated by entrenched infantry with artillery. And Infantry and tanks without artillery would have major problem to even engage as they would be constantly disrupted by enemy artillery.
If there was any combined arms bonus in HOI4 (like there was in HOI3 for example) we would see much more realistic division composition. Organisation in theory is doing it, but with tank org boosts from doctrine make it inconsequential especially as tank divs do not need that much org as players do not use them for defence.
Another missing thing is command and control. In reality, oversized divisions should suffer reductions in combat power. That's why in reality division size was standarized around 9 inf battalions with around 50 barrels of artillery, or in case of tanks 150-300 tanks with 4-6 infantry battalions. Massive 800 tank divisions (40W tank) as used by many players should be getting devastating penalties from C&C to the point where they are objectively worse than realistic 4xArm 6xMot 1xArt/SPArt.
Unfortunately, both of those problems are result of design decision that player should be not penalized for creative use of division designer. That's why basic stats are simply additive and this, by simple mathematics, give bonuses to bigger divisions. This clearly was not planned effect, so for NSB they tried to fight this with complicated CW and combat calculations.
Tank designer is victim to similar problems - first Pdox gave players option to produce completely unrealistic stuff - for example heavy tanks with massive guns and light tank one man turret or vehicles with massively OP SA and then try to rein it in by ludicrous cost of tanks. Why, I may ask, there is no code to make some module combos impossible? Why it is not possible force big turret for big guns? Why the cost of chassis is not tied to the amount of stuff you place on tank? The list go on.
This cost inflation would not be necessary if in the first place division designer wasn't promoting vastly ahistorical, corps-sized "divisions"
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Combined arms bonus is not some magic. It is just consequence of combination of different stats. If you build tanks only, you will have no defense against CAS, low HP so very big tank losses, low organization, so you will fight only for small time. So to fix it you need to put infrantry to increase HP and organization, you need to put AA, to defend against CAS, you need to put support artillery, to get cheap soft attack, TD to get high enough piercing, engineers to get bonus over river, etc. Thats organic combined arms bonus, which is in game, so you don't need some artificial magic number.
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Theyre saying that in an abstract sense, in a total war scenario money IS essentially IC…which is an abstract in itself
Germany also had a resource shortage factor that comes into play. They couldn't mass produce tanks because they simply didn't have the steel for that. Sure, reducing labor requirements increases the amount of available men on the frontline. But overengineering the materials you do have into a better tank has a value of its own.
Solving tank production is a symptomatic solution. It was a resource shortage that was the underlying issue. As you said, a smaller but stronger tank force was the solution to a problem that couldn't be solved.
If you are going to argue that you can use air power to overcome most obstacles in HOI4, I won't disagree. That's not new, either. Before NSB we had all-air builds for wiping out the AI. And I won't disagree that the AI struggles with logistics strikes, although I will argue that when you boost major powers to maximum on normal difficulty, their supply draw is so small that the AI doesn't have to worry about logistics much at all. But I will also say that massive ground attack, or massive use of NAVs, or massive strategic bombing was also capable of smacking the AI around like a red-headed step child prior to NSB.
I will say, however, that the value of TACs and other longer ranged aircraft has increased a bit due to how logistics works. I noticed multiple times through some Soviet playthroughs that key airfields on my defensive line suffered some supply shortages due to how the supply depots and airfields were placed alongside a massive Red Army. So, moving them to airfields a bit further away helped in places like Gomel and Kerson. It wasn't massive issue, but while divisions that lack some of their supply quota can fight well, I noticed that air wings that are missing even a small fraction of their supply experience a substantial drop in mission efficiency.
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Combined bonus is already there. If you combine line ART with tank, the line ART attack will have the bonus of armor.
I think these combined bonus looks too good. What if we make each battalion fight instead of each division, with re balance stats and mechanic.
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It's not really an air only build I'm suggesting. Between mountaineers and motorized where exactly am I being stopped? 40% hardness is no joke and you can build a ton of those. The breakthrough is great. As Germany you can get some pretty comical CAS damage. CAS designer, diver bomber theorist, with about 400 xp you can get an entirely maxed out CAS plane and an advanced one with the research bonus. With SPAA being nerfed into oblivion there's not much stopping them from turning you into dust.
In terms of tanks only cheap armored recon is even close to worth it. Now that the width on TD's is back to 2 they are maybe decent but unless I had tons of chromium at hand only mediums are worth it. It seems to me though that part of the problem is that you really aren't supposed to ever switch production lines if you plan on building armored vehicles. The chassis upgrades amount to mostly armor so its not too bad to just keep them going. 10 factories on STUG III's for the whole game with concentrated industry can make quite a few.
The StuG III was produced from January of 1940 until I think the end of the war. Germany made around 10,000 of them. There are a lot of reasons why, but if you told me the game was making you consider producing StuGs for five years straight, then this might be a case of the game getting something right about the history.
I will say that I am not sure I like current hardness on MOT with MECH 1 and MECH in general. I think it's a bit high. I also think the nerf to heavy tanks makes them of questionable value, but I haven't tried all configurations I can think of.
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Yeah, but as an attacker you can afford to get some armor in the spearhead to speed things up, just not too much. The defender can get AT of course, but AT will lower the Org and have big cost.
I think the idea that a soft skinned truck can deflect 40% of HE shells is hilarious.
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Changes to motorized are a mess.
It used to be that advantage of defender was abstracted in the fact that defense was cheap, came in with org and HP, and SA was very cheap and plentiful. Breakthrough in contrast was far more expensive, came with disadvantage of low org and low HP, the only up side being hardness, which forced defenders to invest into expensive AT/TD or tank units, that you could catch out of position.
Typical infantry division could cost 1400-1800 for 40 width, and required 9000-15000 ic worth division to break through economically.
Now, you can build an offensive division that is only 2-3 times more expensive than defending division and on top of that, this division will deflect almost 40% of attacks, meaning, de-dacto offensive and defensive units are close to a match for a cost
/performance, and this offensive division is super fast.
Paradox simply forgot to provide us with better sources of hard attack to match motorized changes.
It used to be that advantage of defender was abstracted in the fact that defense was cheap, came in with org and HP, and SA was very cheap and plentiful. Breakthrough in contrast was far more expensive, came with disadvantage of low org and low HP, the only up side being hardness, which forced defenders to invest into expensive AT/TD or tank units, that you could catch out of position.
Typical infantry division could cost 1400-1800 for 40 width, and required 9000-15000 ic worth division to break through economically.
Now, you can build an offensive division that is only 2-3 times more expensive than defending division and on top of that, this division will deflect almost 40% of attacks, meaning, de-dacto offensive and defensive units are close to a match for a cost
/performance, and this offensive division is super fast.
Paradox simply forgot to provide us with better sources of hard attack to match motorized changes.
Motorized AA does a decent job.
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Motorized AA has similar hardness and probably higher breakthrough than SPAA due to that changes on truck :-D
They did SPAA real dirty in these patches, especially since width is now at more of premium. I do agree that something had to be done, 5gun MSPAA3 giving 75+ AA per width was way over tuned. But now we're only getting what, 21.5 per width at its absolute best? Only getting 1/4th of what we used to be able to get is massive. Especially considering motorized-AA is still 1w, and can reach upwards of 41.6 AA/W.
And it gets worse, motorized and normal infantry also have the same supply cost.
They don't, actually. Infantry are 0.06, mot inf are 0.065.
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Oh ok I thouht the game showed me the whole number. Anyway I do not think that changes much.
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To be fair, MOT bleed trucks like crazy to combat and attrition, so you actually need much more production to keep MOT in fight. Plus, as they loose trucks they loose bonuses
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