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Enjoy posted:Armoured cars and light tanks are really good in DH for your fast attack divisions (cavalry, motorised, mechanised, armoured). They add a lot of bang for your buck. The costs with armoured cars on motorised divisions especially are negligible, while getting a whole bunch of minor benefits (organisation, defence, hardness and soft attack). Light tanks on your armoured divisions are good for the same reason. The question is not whether the benefits are good (they are), it's whether it's worth having those light tanks versus being 12% of the way to having another armoured division.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 03:15 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:53 |
vyelkin posted:The question is not whether the benefits are good (they are), it's whether it's worth having those light tanks versus being 12% of the way to having another armoured division. Or even more motorized divisions to go superfast.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 03:20 |
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vyelkin posted:The question is not whether the benefits are good (they are), it's whether it's worth having those light tanks versus being 12% of the way to having another armoured division. It is usually worth it, you're limited by frontage when you're punching holes to encircle the enemy. It's better to have 8 Really Tough tank corps than 9 corps that are Pretty Tough, because you can only use 8 (Field Marshal and HQ division) at a time before you get stacking penalties.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 05:33 |
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Motor infantry and air cavalry have high speed and the only brigades that don't slow them down are engineers and armored cars. Lucky then that armored cars are one of the best bang-for-the-buck brigades. I'm not sure about base DH, but infantry in KR can use both normal artillery and self-SP artillery brigades at the same time. Has serious killing power and once you get some of the rocket arty/SP rocket arty techs on top of that they grind up AI stacks real good. If you're using armored divs, brigading them with light armor pre-mid-40s and then tank destroyers (SP AT) post-mid-40s seems more effective than medium or SH brigades.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 05:36 |
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Enjoy posted:It is usually worth it, you're limited by frontage when you're punching holes to encircle the enemy. It's better to have 8 Really Tough tank corps than 9 corps that are Pretty Tough, because you can only use 8 (Field Marshal and HQ division) at a time before you get stacking penalties. Not necessarily. 9 corps can be in more places at once, means you can make a bigger pocket while still leaving forces behind in each province to prevent you from getting cut off, can split up and spread out more when you hit empty space behind enemy lines, can pull damaged units off the line to recover while leaving more in front, can pull some out of combat if it's taking a while to recover while still leaving enough in the fight... There's absolutely tons of advantages to having more units, leaving aside the fact that more units will generally beat better units in a straight-up fight.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 05:38 |
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vyelkin posted:Not necessarily. 9 corps can be in more places at once, means you can make a bigger pocket while still leaving forces behind in each province to prevent you from getting cut off, can split up and spread out more when you hit empty space behind enemy lines, can pull damaged units off the line to recover while leaving more in front, can pull some out of combat if it's taking a while to recover while still leaving enough in the fight... There's absolutely tons of advantages to having more units, leaving aside the fact that more units will generally beat better units in a straight-up fight. You don't want breakthrough units in more places, though. You want them in the one province you're going to punch through. You also want the units you begin the attack with to defeat the enemy (rather than cycling through fresh reinforcements, as during battles of attrition) because you want to arrive in the targeted province before the enemy's own reinforcements arrive and drag the battle out into a battle of attrition (where tank corps are not as efficient as infantry). Hence you want those units that begin the attack to be tough enough to finish the breakthrough themselves. That's the tricky part of an encirclement. Bringing infantry along to hold the provinces you take is simple enough, the extra tank corps won't be super helpful compared to obtaining the breakthrough to begin with.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 05:53 |
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Another massive problem with the "small number of brigaded divisions" is that the cost of reinforcing divisions is not linear. It costs more to reinforce one division from 10% to 100% than it does to reinforce nine divisions from 90% to 100%, so you want to spread the damage your divisions take out as much as possible. Frontage also should not be a meaningful limit for tank armies, since you can get a frontage of 24 simply by having an HQ nearby and a Field Marshal in charge of the attack. If you're someone with a ludicrously large tank force, attacking from two directions will give you 48. Stacking penalties are not prohibitive in DH, numbers of divisions is king. ----- I would say we're straying from the point a bit though - the big trap for new players is thinking that since infantry divisions can have two brigades, they should stick artillery and armoured cars on every one of them, and they then end up with an army half the size of what it should be. Gort fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Feb 6, 2015 |
# ? Feb 6, 2015 08:10 |
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I've fallen into that trap like three different times playing La Plata in KR. Their initial manpower reserves are really deceptive, and I have a really bad memory.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 08:26 |
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Rincewind posted:Are there any screenshots of what this looked like? I found some:
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 12:29 |
ThaumPenguin posted:I found some: If done right that wouldn't necessarily look awful though. I've not done a ton of Victoria II modding, is it similar to EU4/CK2 in that UI mods are generally somewhat easy to make?
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 13:25 |
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They even patched that DLC for A House Divided, but I don't think they ever fixed it for HOD. Shame, I actually quite liked it. It's one of those cosmetic DLCs that I could really see the value of.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 13:32 |
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The thing was it was made by a third party who either couldn't or didn't want to update it for the UI changes in HoD, so we had to disable it and comp people. It was before the Steam DLC manager so you couldn't just turn it off yourself.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 14:58 |
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ThaumPenguin posted:I found some: Good heavens, that's ugly. I guess we're not missing much!
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 15:08 |
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I'm having an issue with KR 1.05. I'm playing as Russia, and as soon as the American Civil War breaks out my game crashes. At first, I thought it happened because I selected "Support the Federal Government" in the American Civil War decision, but on my third attempt I didn't use the decision and it still crashed a day or two later. Any ideas?
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 17:10 |
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Gort posted:Brigades are generally not worth it - don't bother with them unless you have some extremely specialised purpose for them (EG: Building super-heavy artillery so you can attack the Maginot line head on) or if you've got some kind of limit on how many guys you can bring (paratroopers and marines, for example). Otherwise, just build more divisions, it's much more efficient. I will admit that I like maxing out my divisions with brigades, but what you're saying makes a lot of sense. However, won't it make my infantry vulnerable in certain situations if none of them have any brigades? What if there's a massive panzer attack? Would you recommend adding armored cards or light tanks to fast units, as another goon suggested? quote:Air power is very worthwhile (I had 16 INT, 8 TAC and 16 CAS in my last Germany game) but you need to know how to use it, and you also need to make sure you don't neglect building infantry in favour of it. Have a goal for how large you want your air force to be, and stick to it. Always build and deploy aircraft in groups of 8 wings, as fewer will mean individual wings take more damage and are more likely to be wiped out, which gets expensive. (In DH reinforcing units is MUCH cheaper than replacing them) This seems like a better idea than my strategy, which consisted of securing air superiority with my fighters and then swooping in with the tactical/naval/strategic bombers to randomly attack targets. Why did you build interceptors over fighters, do they have some kind of advantage? And what is the difference between tactical bombers and CAS, anyway? I already have the feeling strategic bombers are not really worth it because by the time you can put them to good use, the enemy is usually already on its knees. quote:Regarding leadership, it seems like there isn't a stacking limit when defending, only when attacking, so stack up as much as you want. You can also do a thing on the offensive where you attack with your stacking limit in divisions while some of your other divisions rest, then the moment your first attack fails, you immediately attack with the divisions that were resting, so the enemy gets no time to regain their organisation. That's how to make numbers tell on the offensive. So if possible put two stacks of (almost) 12 divisions in a province, attack with one stack, then immediately switch to the other after organisation starts running low? Again, that makes a lot of sense.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 18:25 |
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Interceptors have a bonus when attacking bombers, but are short-ranged. Fighters are long-ranged. The way it's supposed to work is that Interceptors keep the skies on your side clear from enemy bombers, and then you use Fighters to sweep the enemy skies of enemy Interceptors so your own bombers can bomb enemy units and/or attack enemy airfields so that enemy planes, Interceptors, bombers and all, cannot take off in the first place. You'll rarely see or need to practice this fully integrated air strategy because of IC/production limitations, technological limitations, and whoever it is you're facing down in the first place. quote:So if possible put two stacks of (almost) 12 divisions in a province, attack with one stack, then immediately switch to the other after organisation starts running low? Again, that makes a lot of sense. Yes. To be precise, you may want to attack with stack A, then when stack A is running low on org, attack with stack B, wait at least one hour for stack B to join in the fight (and you will be overstacked for that one hour), then issue the order for stack A to pull out. That'll make sure that the battle never actually ends.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 18:43 |
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Rincewind posted:Good heavens, that's ugly. I guess we're not missing much! Well, the green wallpaper background is pretty nice, and so is... uhh... Yeah it's pretty poo poo.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 19:34 |
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I'm sort of a fan of the lacquered wood look.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 19:36 |
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Funky Valentine posted:I'm sort of a fan of the lacquered wood look. I'm not. the lacquered wood look reminds me of outhouses. I get enough of those while staying in cabins. More than enough.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 19:46 |
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Phlegmish posted:I will admit that I like maxing out my divisions with brigades, but what you're saying makes a lot of sense. However, won't it make my infantry vulnerable in certain situations if none of them have any brigades? What if there's a massive panzer attack? Nah, you'll be fine - keep up to date in the anti-tank technology and your infantry will have more than enough hard attack to be cost-effective against tanks. One of the secrets of Darkest Hour is that tanks aren't actually very good at fighting for their cost. quote:Would you recommend adding armored cards or light tanks to fast units, as another goon suggested? You can take it or leave it. They're probably OK for their cost. Generally speaking I prefer to have more tanks than more powerful tanks, since ideally tanks shouldn't be fighting - their engines are their assets. This is what tanks are for (haha, despite what I just said I've got engineers on my tank divisions in this picture): You make the breakthrough with a massive infantry attack from several sides, then the moment the enemy retreats you ram a big stack of tanks or motorised infantry through the gap and cut off as much as you dare. If all goes well, you neutralise a large enemy force without fighting. quote:This seems like a better idea than my strategy, which consisted of securing air superiority with my fighters and then swooping in with the tactical/naval/strategic bombers to randomly attack targets. Why did you build interceptors over fighters, do they have some kind of advantage? And what is the difference between tactical bombers and CAS, anyway? I already have the feeling strategic bombers are not really worth it because by the time you can put them to good use, the enemy is usually already on its knees. Last time I checked, fighters were good at shooting down enemy interceptors and fighters, while interceptors were good at shooting down bombers. As Germany you want to kill bombers a lot, so I went with INT. Tactical bombers are longer-ranged than CAS, but less damaging. You also have the option to give up the range advantage to make them better in air-to-air combat by giving them escort fighters. I've never had a great deal of time for strategic bombers since I'm usually more interested in invading countries than damaging them. I guess Britain starts with some so you might as well build them up to a full 8 wings? I've heard of people using them as Japan against China, that seems to work OK. quote:So if possible put two stacks of (almost) 12 divisions in a province, attack with one stack, then immediately switch to the other after organisation starts running low? Again, that makes a lot of sense. What I usually do is attack with as many divisions as I can without getting the "over command limit penalty". With an HQ in the same or an adjacent province, that's 24 divisions multiplied by the number of directions I can attack from. So if there are two ways into a province and I have an HQ nearby, I can attack with 48 divisions. Once those guys are exhausted and lose the battle, I can attack with another 48. Generally speaking I'll only use this strategy if I really do have so many divisions they won't all fit in a combat at once. Edit: Gradenko! Gort fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Feb 6, 2015 |
# ? Feb 6, 2015 20:29 |
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What are those weird little pictures all over your map??
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 20:35 |
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One thing I will never understand is grognards love for counters. I mean, Darkest Hour has ugly graphics, no argument there, but counters are really ugly and boring to look at.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 20:41 |
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Gort posted:One thing I will never understand is grognards love for counters. I mean, Darkest Hour has ugly graphics, no argument there, but counters are really ugly and boring to look at.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:12 |
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Gort posted:One thing I will never understand is grognards love for counters. I mean, Darkest Hour has ugly graphics, no argument there, but counters are really ugly and boring to look at. They aren't supposed to be fun to look at, they're supposed to provide the maximum amount of information clearly and cleanly for instant readability. I hate toy soldier mode.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:15 |
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Counters look like rear end and are too small to actually convey information, thanks for listening.Gort posted:One thing I will never understand is grognards love for counters. I mean, Darkest Hour has ugly graphics, no argument there, but counters are really ugly and boring to look at. WELL SEE TO CREATE AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE YOU SHOULD HAVE ACCESS TO NATO COUNTERS IN A GAME THAT OCCURS BEFORE NATO WAS EVEN AN IDEA
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:17 |
Funky Valentine posted:Counters look like rear end and are too small to actually convey information, thanks for listening. To be fair, the basis for a lot of NATO counter symbols came from the Napoleonic Era.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:21 |
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So, if my goal is to win the war while taking as few casualties as possible, are brigades worth it then?
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:32 |
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Autonomous Monster posted:So, if my goal is to win the war while taking as few casualties as possible, are brigades worth it then?
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:35 |
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Especially in these post-CK2 times, when sprites actually mostly look really good.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:35 |
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"What??!?!? Pausing the game for like five seconds and mousing over an army to see it's composition??????"
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:37 |
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Counters are neat and cool and bring satisfaction the part of my brain that likes to look at coloured boxes with a strong symbol defeat differently coloured boxes with a weak symbol and change the colour of the province they move to.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:39 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Interceptors have a bonus when attacking bombers, but are short-ranged. Fighters are long-ranged. Also nine times out of ten your fighters will jump enemy bombers over their airbase
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 22:52 |
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Gort posted:One thing I will never understand is grognards love for counters. I mean, Darkest Hour has ugly graphics, no argument there, but counters are really ugly and boring to look at. Those sprites are ugly as sin.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 23:14 |
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YF-23 posted:Counters are neat and cool and bring satisfaction the part of my brain that likes to look at coloured boxes with a strong symbol defeat differently coloured boxes with a weak symbol and change the colour of the province they move to. But isn't it way cooler to watch your giant dude in a fez and red vest defeat their giant dude in a shako and a blue overcoat?
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 23:23 |
Rincewind posted:But isn't it way cooler to watch your giant dude in a fez and red vest defeat their giant dude in a shako and a blue overcoat? Yeah, for CK2/EU4/V2, I definitely prefer sprites to counters. But in Darkest Hour the sprites look kinda like lumpy turds who wear something sorta like uniforms and carry something sorta like guns.
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# ? Feb 6, 2015 23:44 |
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Who even plays zoomed in enough to see the units as anything other then boxes with a number? You've all been playing with counters all along, and you didn't even know it!
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 00:14 |
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Counters 4 lyfe.
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 00:31 |
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What mod is that anyway?
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 01:26 |
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If you dont like counters your days are numbered because I will murder you. :paradox:
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 03:35 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:53 |
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The only way to settle this is release the game with incorrect modeled sprites so the Germans have spitfires and the Americans zeros, then day one sell sprite packs to correct the original issue while offering a $20 NATO DLC.
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 03:45 |