Why different techs for INF, MIL and CAV?

[Baltasar]

This is really puzzling me. Why do I have to research basically the same equipment for infantry, militias and cavalry all over again? I just does not make sense to me from a logical perspective.

In reality, I'd imagine that when new stuff is being handed out to the regular troops (Inf and Cav), the old stuff is being handed down to second-rate units such as militas and garrisons. Cavalry would ususally get equivalents to Inf equipment but not something so drastically different that it would require completely different research areas or the same effort.

 

[Sirveri]

balance issues. Basically they want to slow down tech for inf and cav. It also spaces out the advances so you don't have to worry about overflowing the tool tip, and it takes up more space in the tech screen so it looks nicer.

 

[binTravkin]

balance issues. Basically they want to slow down tech for inf and cav.

Oh, come on.
There are myriad other ways if you want to slow something down, which don't include ahistorical setups.
Having more iterations, making techs harder (there is actually a difficulty for each tech), etc.

It's just one of the historical mistakes in the game.
Someone in the design decided it would be fancy to have them separate and skipped the historical aspect on that.

OP:
Check HPP mod - it's fixed there.

 

[nestorius]

Why is it ahistorical? Just research 8 or 12 techs instead of 4? As far as I know countries in WW2 didnt research 4 different techs to upgrade their infantry.

There is some balance issue there, likely they dont want you to be able to upgrade militia, cav, mech, inf etc with the same tech. Not really about the speed but more about the choice. Basically preventing everyone researching everything. I dont think its anything ahistorical, as techs are abstract anyway.

 

[cfp]

I can understand, maybe, seperate techs for militia. This way you could represent under-armed militia fighting alongside stronger, properly equipped infantry divisions. Cav divisions should be using infantry techs, IMO.

It actually bugs me that I can't produce under-equipped infantry divisions (sort of like you can with ships). I should be able to reduce build time and costs by equipping my soldiers with Garands instead of Thompsons, or K98 instead of StG 44s.

 

[binTravkin]

Doh, I already answered on balance issue.

It IS ahistorical.
Cavalry and motorized are basically mounted infantry and horses/trucks where almost exclusively used as means of transport, not in combat.
Militia also fought essentially in the same way as infantry, except that they usually got whatever was left over after supplying infantry (older weapons usually).

Go check some historical force compositions before coming in with those out-of-blue-sky comments.
You can start checking with The Operational Art Of War - it models the actual composition of units to some extent.

 

[cfp]

It really punishes nations like the USSR, too. Too little leadership to properly upgrade all the techs. Of course, now that we know Toughness/Defensiveness isn't working, that halved the number of techs to research.

 

[binTravkin]

Not to mention leadership is too low for 90% countries anyway.
Just to give an example - Poland, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia all had significant research in arms, to represent which in game would be necessary to have at least double leadership that they have.
Finland had very advanced small arms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomi_M-31_SMG), which is simply impossible to achieve ingame.

Furthermore, some nations have quite bad starting levels, e.g. U.S. small arms and support weapons such as Tommy gun and Browning MGs were so advanced they were used well past WW2, yet the game says, the appropriate techs are at level 0.
Rocket-AT was also first demonstrated in US at the end of WW1, yet still - level 0, etc.
Swedish, SU tanks, etc, etc, the list goes on.
Too bad very little of the work in mods checking out the actual historical levels of these get in the game.

 

[Sirveri]

Uhhh... It's a game. It doesn't have to be perfectly historical to produce a balanced result.

In the end, cavalry was moved away from in favor of motorized infantry and armored vehicles. Just because you're not on the bleeding edge of technological innovation does not mean that your forces can't compete. They strived more for balance and game play than perfect historical accuracy in this game.

 

[Baltasar]

It's rather odd, though. Instead of doing it in such an awkward way, they could just have increasd the difficulty of the Inf techs to balance things out, no need to artificially create more fields of research just to fill out the tech tab.

And if it's what the devs think is correct, why no indivisdual tech fields for mountaineers, marines, paras etc? Those would really have much different equipment.

 

[binTravkin]

And you don't have to think up false reasons ("balance") for something that makes no sense from any perspective.

Splitting out techs is as good a "balance" as nerfing (France, anyone?).

It's rather odd, though. Instead of doing it in such an awkward way, they could just have increasd the difficulty of the Inf techs to balance things out, no need to artificially create more fields of research just to fill out the tech tab.

Yup, that's what I said.

And if it's what the devs think is correct, why no indivisdual tech fields for mountaineers, marines, paras etc? Those would really have much different equipment.

Yes and this has been fixed in HPP mod.

 

[Baltasar]

Yes and this has been fixed in HPP mod.

Ido know the HPP mod, I'm just curious why the HoI3 devs decided otherwise.

 

[binTravkin]

I'm just curious why the HoI3 devs decided otherwise.

If you look closely, there are many such things that will make you scratch your head in confusion.

 

[Sirveri]

It's rather odd, though. Instead of doing it in such an awkward way, they could just have increasd the difficulty of the Inf techs to balance things out, no need to artificially create more fields of research just to fill out the tech tab.

And if it's what the devs think is correct, why no indivisdual tech fields for mountaineers, marines, paras etc? Those would really have much different equipment.

For one, if you want to double the time it takes a tech to complete, it's much easier to just make another tech. Basically if you took a level one tech, which normally takes 137.5 days, and made it level 2, it would only take 150 days. In order to double the time required you would actually need to make it a level 12 difficulty tech.

Also the second tier for cav is 1934, while it's 1936 for infantry. Also cavalry pumps motorized theory, while infantry does infantry. There are a bunch of different reasons for the balance they went with. However I'm not a dev so I don't know the exact specifics and can only make educated guesses.

 

[Baltasar]

If you look closely, there are many such things that will make you scratch your head in confusion.

I know, it's just one of the most obvious things. Still wondering about the reasoning behind it, though.

 

[binTravkin]

For one, if you want to double the time it takes a tech to complete, it's much easier to just make another tech.

No, it's much easier to make that tech iterate each year instead of each 2nd year and then maybe upping difficulty by one, if not enough.

I hope I don't have to explain exactly why it's easier than another tech.

You are arguing for a lost cause, if you just wrapped your mind around it more, you'd understand it yourself without extra spam here.


The current tech setup detracts from gameplay and historical accuracy and does it by huge amount since most nations (ALL except GER, SU, US and UK) are only able to afford leadership for one or two types of main land units and thus never build historical or "fun" amounts of different troops.

 

[Sirveri]

No, it's much easier to make that tech iterate each year instead of each 2nd year and then maybe upping difficulty by one, if not enough.

I hope I don't have to explain exactly why it's easier than another tech.

You are arguing for a lost cause, if you just wrapped your mind around it more, you'd understand it yourself without extra spam here.


The current tech setup detracts from gameplay and does it by huge amount since most nations (ALL except GER, SU, US and UK) are only able to afford leadership for one or two types of main land units and thus never build historical or "fun" amounts of different troops.

That's another way to do it (half the benefit, half the iteration), for whatever reason they decided not to pursue that approach.

Also, there isn't anything stopping minors from building other types of troops. Not everything has to be perfect and cutting edge.

The real question here is that since the game is already set up, why should we change it, would we gain anything of actual significance? Is it worth the time and effort for pdox to rebalance and redo it compared to the current model? I just don't see much of a reason to change it away from what it currently is, especially when there are mods in place which already do it.

 

[cfp]

Sirveri: You don't think minors have it hard enough as it is??

 

[Baltasar]

The real question here is that since the game is already set up, why should we change it, would we gain anything of actual significance? Is it worth the time and effort for pdox to rebalance and redo it compared to the current model? I just don't see much of a reason to change it away from what it currently is, especially when there are mods in place which already do it.

First of all, I'm still interested in the original intend of this approach. May be it becomes clear when a dev would respond to the question?

Secondly, it certainly would demand work to recalculate the leadership accordingly, but since that also has been done, eg by the HPP team, I assume it is not that time-comsuming.

Thirdly, I assume smaller countries who start out with militas do have a harder time coping with this.

 

[Sirveri]

Sirveri: You don't think minors have it hard enough as it is??

I don't think merging cav and infantry and militia techs will significantly improve the chances of minors. To do that you would need to rework leadership. Probably increase the base from 2 to around 5. Maybe apply a penalty to places that would still be considered uncivs.

I like Baltasar am curious about why the specifically did it, but like I said, my guess was that it was due to balance reasons and AI programming (Yet another reason I just thought up). Basically if you have a separate tech you can make certain AI minors waste their time on cav techs so they don't do something silly like develop a navy or nukes.

And hey, maybe pdox decided they didn't like the idea of someone doing another AAR entitled battleships for Bhutan, or Nukes for Nepal...