Why use 20 width over 10 width?

[CantGetNoSleep]

I have been very succesfull with 10w for defence (eng, art) and 40w for offence as japan vs china. By just holding the north with 48 div. My kd ratio was 40 to 1.

That's a special case. China and Japan (and everyone in the Spanish civil war) start with huge minuses to attack. And China's attack is particularly poor to start with due to bad infantry template (12 width) and lack of artillery (not even support), so you're never really getting "properly" attacked. Sorry. Try an experiment where you turn the AI off, tag switch and create a 14-4 for China, give it equipment and then use it against your 10w infantry. You will see your losses skyrocket.

 

[Harin]

Yes, this is certainly the case. However as Japan I need alot of divisions to cover a very large, low supply front. Then 10w is usefull. And the chinese are not able to break them regardless. When you get the support company bonuses from Superior Firepower its a slaughter house.

Thanks for sharing. I played China a month or so ago and they start with 12w divisions with no support. Since I had no army experience to change them to 10w, let alone 20w, I kept building them. Even the 12w held, though with some serious moments of rotating troops at first. When I finally was able to add artillery support to some of these divisions, it was just as you said and my loss ratio went very positive, very quickly.

 

[seattle]

40 WIDTH DIVISIONS SHOULD BE BANNED, OR SEVERELY LIMITED!

Unless all WW2 nations were incompetent, a division size of 10,000 to 17,000 soldiers should be the most efficient.
That's what HoI4 should be aiming at.

To be honest though: the whole division designer is an abysmal concept in general.
It shows a serious lack of understanding how a.i. works.
The a.i. would be so much stronger without the gazillion different unit templates. Players will always find templates like Space Marines that the a.i. can't handle.

In chess the a.i. beats the strongest human player in the world 9 out of 10 times.
If chess had a piece designer where you can pimp the knight's armour and speed, the a.i. would screw up all the time.

Why on earth do professional programmers not understand that? HoI5 will hopefully come with uniformed divisions that only have certain national modifiers.

 

[Emren]

In chess the a.i. beats the strongest human player in the world 9 out of 10 times.
If chess had a piece designer where you can pimp the knight's armour and speed, the a.i. would screw up all the time.

Why on earth do professional programmers not understand that? HoI5 will hopefully come with uniformed divisions that only have certain national modifiers.

Then I'd actually rather play chess.

 

[Kryndude]

HoI5 will hopefully come with uniformed divisions that only have certain national modifiers.

If you play EU4, you'll know that's boring af.

 

[Bki]

If you play EU4, you'll know that's boring af.

It's because the EU4 combat system is boring af.

I do understand the idea of templates to represent the evolution of the divisions between the war, and that different countries used different divisions type depending on their needs/circumstances/traditions, but as it is right now it doesn't really work : the goal is to have optimal templates before the war even begin (and the fact that there are clear optimal templates is an issue in itself), and the only changes once you're done are when you get some new option from a tech (like replacing Mot by Mech).

HOI4 combat wouldn't fundamentally change if you simply had an infantry division be an infantry division, and an armor division being an armor division. Considering the game focus is supposed to be on the strategic/operational scale, you could argue that the game would be better for it, though I wouldn't go that far.

I feel the granularity of the division designer should be at the regimental level rather than the battalion, albeit with the possibility of giving each regiment some support units. At the very least it would make it easier for every possible width to be admissible.

 

[seattle]

If you play EU4, you'll know that's boring af.

I didn't find the lack of a division designer boring in HoI 1-3, Strategic Command, Warplan, Gary Grigsby and virtually every wargame besides HoI4.

 

[Kryndude]

It's because the EU4 combat system is boring af.

Maybe. Idk, when I read the description 'uniform divisions with different national modifiers' first thing came to my mind was EU4 and I'd take HOI4 over EU4 any day. But I guess it's possible to create fun and engaging game mechanic with simpler unit design feature. Tbh, I don't expect game AI to become good enough to feel like a real opponent in the near future, so I'm against watering down the game for AI-sake.

 

[Bki]

Maybe. Idk, when I read the description 'uniform divisions with different national modifiers' first thing came to my mind was EU4 and I'd take HOI4 over EU4 any day. But I guess it's possible to create fun and engaging game mechanic with simpler unit design feature. Tbh, I don't expect game AI to become good enough to feel like a real opponent in the near future, so I'm against watering down the game for AI-sake.

It's not so much about AI (though having less way to cheese the system in ways the AI can't respond would certainly help), but that the way it works right now is excessively restrictive in what sort of divisions you can make. That the "optimal" balance of tank to infantry is basically the opposite of what the armies of RL WW2 settled on is also something that annoy me.

Though yes, if there's one thing that has to be fixed it's the AI. I die a little inside whenever the battleplan AI decide to have a unit move across 10 or so provinces while an unit that was closer to its destination then move to take its place.

 

[Gort11]

I didn't find the lack of a division designer boring in HoI 1-3, Strategic Command, Warplan, Gary Grigsby and virtually every wargame besides HoI4.

It'd be a lot for them to throw out, but I honestly wouldn't miss it if they threw out the division designer. The game would be better if you just had standard infantry division templates that everyone built to. Let doctrines allow you to emphasise different things, like the Superior Firepower doctrine might allow you to have an infantry division with unusually large amounts of artillery in it, for example.

The current system just leads to weird situations where the on-paper organisation of units has a drastic effect on their combat performance, as well as being full of traps for the AI and newer players to fall into.

 

[Xuanzue]

I didn't find the lack of a division designer boring in HoI 1-3, Strategic Command, Warplan, Gary Grigsby and virtually every wargame besides HoI4.

In WITE you can tweak your divisions a lot. dunno what are you saying.

Also any AI can design the best template, it just needs to run some montecarlo simulation. In fact running montecarlos can improve the macro of all nations in all the paradox games.

 

[noobermenschen]

In chess the a.i. beats the strongest human player in the world 9 out of 10 times.
If chess had a piece designer where you can pimp the knight's armour and speed, the a.i. would screw up all the time.

LOL! That is a good point.

As for uniform divisions, we had that in HoI2 (1941 Infantry RULES ALL!). It worked well but I suspect players like the more detailed division designing we have now. A simpler game like HoI2 with 2020's AI is an intriguing idea though...

 

[Gefallener_Held]

WOT? I can't hear you over the sound of my enemies being crushed...

View attachment 582019

Ie it is an exploiit. Yeah I know. That is why it should be banned, just like space marines were nipped by limiting special forces and being banned in mp as far as I know.

 

[Gefallener_Held]

Unless all WW2 nations were incompetent, a division size of 10,000 to 17,000 soldiers should be the most efficient.
That's what HoI4 should be aiming at.

To be honest though: the whole division designer is an abysmal concept in general.
It shows a serious lack of understanding how a.i. works.
The a.i. would be so much stronger without the gazillion different unit templates. Players will always find templates like Space Marines that the a.i. can't handle.

In chess the a.i. beats the strongest human player in the world 9 out of 10 times.
If chess had a piece designer where you can pimp the knight's armour and speed, the a.i. would screw up all the time.

Why on earth do professional programmers not understand that? HoI5 will hopefully come with uniformed divisions that only have certain national modifiers.

I like division designer, but I think AI should have prescripted templates. The designer definitely needs to be tweaked in various ways. If the combat mechanic cannot be tweaked to eliminate the qualitative superiority of 40 w over 2 20 width divisions et al, the cap should be reduced, ie 40 width divisions should be banned.

 

[SchwarzKatze]

The issue with 40 width divisions is that it goes against what every country during this time did: maintaining or reducing the size of individual divisions. Countries went from square to triangle divisions, or from triangle to binary divisions, not the other way around.

The game should not encourage behaviors that every contemporary countries went against, or provide a really good reason why they didn't but you should.

 

[Harin]

The combat width is a problem in itself, no matter the size of the division, in my opinion, of course. I would like it much more if all units in combat fought together as a cohesive group, instead of one or two attacking divisions randomly attacking one defending division.

Also, it would be nice if the division designer lead players to build divisions that had the basic equipment they had in the war, such as line artillery, AT, AA, signals, logistics, hospitals, etc... Right now the division designer, for game purposes, makes the 20w and 40w designs without basic equipment a good choice.

 

[Simon_9732495]

I was having France in mind when I wrote my reply, but still an interesting result!
What doctrine did you use?

Mass assault right.

But I think it was a mistake. The 5/0 had 8width now. 10 divisions in a 80w battle give a debuff. So I changed to 6/0 with 9.6width and had some "exceeding combat width" situations where 9 units joined the battle.
And I think I didn't need the buffs from mass assault. Maybe should have taken mobile warfare left right with it's massive org buffs for Infantry, because I was relying on org...

/edit: corrected 10/0 to 5/0 and 12/0 to 6/0

 

[Frozen Yakman]

10/20/40 width is over-valuing a concept. Obviously, if you could manage it, it would be great if you could put a 2 40 width units on every tile and have enough neighboring units to fill combat width with reinforcements. That is simply not possible on all but the smallest fronts. It's useful to know what combat width is but it is not a combat stat worth over optimizing for.

 

[Mentatt76]

I find 10w divisions are just better supply wise. Playing as Italy they make perfect afrika Corps where regions are in low infra and supply is always a problem.