Rebalance Fortification - Add some sort of counter to it.

[Ektor (OP)]

So I wanted to try out some things today and fired up a test game in order to test different aspects of the ground combat mechanics. The thing I wanted to try out was a theoretical homeworld invasion scenario, where the enemy is heavily dug in and you have to overcome the challenge of attacking their fortified position. I asked around on the Discord about what could be done to counter fortification and was given the options of usng artillery and air bombardment. Let me tell you, that didn't work.

I built two player races with equal formations of 800 PW Infantry and 80 Light Supply Infantry, making a battalion of 160 cost. At first I tested them against each other whilst one was at its self-fortification limit, and it had a pretty severe advantage, managing to kill twice as many enemies than it lost. This is to be expected, and I thought it was fine, basically, you'd need double the amount of troops to take a position. By the way, according to what I checked, units don't actually have ten rounds of innate supply, they fire as if they had zero supplies if they don't have supply elements to provide them supplies immediately.

Then I reset everything and gave the first player race 10 construction vehicles with two construction modules. They took about two years to get the battalion to fortification level 6. By the way, those only work for the formation they are part of, so doing what some Discord people said they did and putting your construction vehicles on your division level formations doesn't work.

Then I tried a bunch of things, resetting time after time. First I tried Infantry vc Infantry, it was a massacre, the attackers in this scenario lost 40-60 units per round while the defenders lost 0-10. So it became pretty obvious that fortification is very strong.

The second time I tried medium bombardment, I took the extra cost the construction units had given to the defenders and added the same cost of light armour medium bombardment static units to the support line of the attackers. It was pretty much useless, I had around 120 bombardment units, but they collectively barely managed to hit a single enemy troop. Their combined casualties were in the same order as the casualties inflicted by the attacking infantry, 0-10 every combat round. Then I tried heavy bombardment, which did even worse. Given the cost constraints of my test, I could only field about 64 heavy bombardment units compared to the medium ones. Their added damage and penetration was useless, and they fared even worse than the medium bombardment.

Then I tried fighters with groud bombardment pods. First I tried to keep true to the cost constraint, and built two, which couldn't hit a single enemy troop. Then I went crazy, doubled the size of the pods, put ten times as many fighters as I had previously, a total of 2912 BP worth of fighters agains 327 BP worth of infantry, and it fared spectacularly poorly. They managed to get 3 kills if I recall correctly.

The last thing I tried was crew-served anti-personnel. I figured the constraining factor in all of this was amount of shots fired, and you can get a hell lot more shots with CSAP than anything else. So I did the same cost constraints, which allowed me to field an additional 500 CSAP Infantry. This was what worked the best by far, and the attackers were consistently managing to inflict half as many casualties as they took. Still, I think, even if medium and heavy vehicles have lower thresholds for fortification, it would be hard to find something that can counter dug in vehicles, maybe autocannons could, given their high rate of fire.

All being said, fortification has shown itself, to me at least, to be entirely impossible to counter. The absurd amounts of missed shots that it causes lead to one, theoretically, having to invade a dug in force with several times as many equivalent troops to be able to fight on equal grounds, even more if they hope to win with high casualties. Now, I don't mind this, I really don't, what I find weird is that the weapons that would intuitively help to counter fortifications, such as artillery and air assault, are completely useless against it, and the only actual way to defeat heavily dug in units would be by human wave tactics.

What do I suggest? Make fortification be a modifier on damage dealt instead of shots that hit or armour value. That way high rates of fire with low damage and penetration would do nothing against fortified troops, but high damage dealers like tanks and super heavies would be able to bypass this modifier, and deal damage, which would force attackers to invest in more expensive armament to deal with fortification, instead of just massing infantry.

You guys are welcome to try and disprove my statements if you can come up with tests with a better methodology - I'd love to be proven wrong. However, it seems to me that the current state of heavy fortification is unbalanced.

[Froggiest1982]

So I wanted to try out some things today and fired up a test game in order to test different aspects of the ground combat mechanics. The thing I wanted to try out was a theoretical homeworld invasion scenario, where the enemy is heavily dug in and you have to overcome the challenge of attacking their fortified position. I asked around on the Discord about what could be done to counter fortification and was given the options of usng artillery and air bombardment. Let me tell you, that didn't work.

I built two player races with equal formations of 800 PW Infantry and 80 Light Supply Infantry, making a battalion of 160 cost. At first I tested them against each other whilst one was at its self-fortification limit, and it had a pretty severe advantage, managing to kill twice as many enemies than it lost. This is to be expected, and I thought it was fine, basically, you'd need double the amount of troops to take a position. By the way, according to what I checked, units don't actually have ten rounds of innate supply, they fire as if they had zero supplies if they don't have supply elements to provide them supplies immediately.

Then I reset everything and gave the first player race 10 construction vehicles with two construction modules. They took about two years to get the battalion to fortification level 6. By the way, those only work for the formation they are part of, so doing what some Discord people said they did and putting your construction vehicles on your division level formations doesn't work.

Then I tried a bunch of things, resetting time after time. First I tried Infantry vc Infantry, it was a massacre, the attackers in this scenario lost 40-60 units per round while the defenders lost 0-10. So it became pretty obvious that fortification is very strong.

The second time I tried medium bombardment, I took the extra cost the construction units had given to the defenders and added the same cost of light armour medium bombardment static units to the support line of the attackers. It was pretty much useless, I had around 120 bombardment units, but they collectively barely managed to hit a single enemy troop. Their combined casualties were in the same order as the casualties inflicted by the attacking infantry, 0-10 every combat round. Then I tried heavy bombardment, which did even worse. Given the cost constraints of my test, I could only field about 64 heavy bombardment units compared to the medium ones. Their added damage and penetration was useless, and they fared even worse than the medium bombardment.

Then I tried fighters with groud bombardment pods. First I tried to keep true to the cost constraint, and built two, which couldn't hit a single enemy troop. Then I went crazy, doubled the size of the pods, put ten times as many fighters as I had previously, a total of 2912 BP worth of fighters agains 327 BP worth of infantry, and it fared spectacularly poorly. They managed to get 3 kills if I recall correctly.

The last thing I tried was crew-served anti-personnel. I figured the constraining factor in all of this was amount of shots fired, and you can get a hell lot more shots with CSAP than anything else. So I did the same cost constraints, which allowed me to field an additional 500 CSAP Infantry. This was what worked the best by far, and the attackers were consistently managing to inflict half as many casualties as they took. Still, I think, even if medium and heavy vehicles have lower thresholds for fortification, it would be hard to find something that can counter dug in vehicles, maybe autocannons could, given their high rate of fire.

All being said, fortification has shown itself, to me at least, to be entirely impossible to counter. The absurd amounts of missed shots that it causes lead to one, theoretically, having to invade a dug in force with several times as many equivalent troops to be able to fight on equal grounds, even more if they hope to win with high casualties. Now, I don't mind this, I really don't, what I find weird is that the weapons that would intuitively help to counter fortifications, such as artillery and air assault, are completely useless against it, and the only actual way to defeat heavily dug in units would be by human wave tactics.

What do I suggest? Make fortification be a modifier on damage dealt instead of shots that hit or armour value. That way high rates of fire with low damage and penetration would do nothing against fortified troops, but high damage dealers like tanks and super heavies would be able to bypass this modifier, and deal damage, which would force attackers to invest in more expensive armament to deal with fortification, instead of just massing infantry.

You guys are welcome to try and disprove my statements if you can come up with tests with a better methodology - I'd love to be proven wrong. However, it seems to me that the current state of heavy fortification is unbalanced.

Lots of the things you tried and explained are interesting and wondering if there are some bugs around. Especially on the construction thing on Division level.

Also the supply would be interesting to know if it's WAI or there is some sort of issues/bugs not noticed yet by tge players.

I have a question though: were the units with the appropriate level of training?

[DFNewb]

You should pretty much never attack with infantry from my understanding of the combat rules.

Try MED Vehicles with Medium armor and Medium Autocannons and Medium anti-tank or Anti-personal depending on enemy. Then support them with a formation with a lot of medium bombardment and maybe some AA if you think enemy will have air (but NPR's don't from what I've seen so you never really need them).

[Froggiest1982]

You should pretty much never attack with infantry from my understanding of the combat rules.

Try MED Vehicles with Medium armor and Medium Autocannons and Medium anti-tank or Anti-personal depending on enemy. Then support them with a formation with a lot of medium bombardment and maybe some AA if you think enemy will have air (but NPR's don't from what I've seen so you never really need them).

So u are saying that infantry is pretty much only for defense? Would be a bit sad as I thought the point of the ground revamp was to avoid the rock scissors paper structure of VB6.

It's also not realistic as if it was like that US would have finished off the kong in 10 days but due to heavy fortifications and jungles you could not simply use vehicles.

EDIT: I still like the new ground units, looks like there is going to be lots of blood spilled for the cause.

[Vasious]

Just throwing ideas out there

Orbital Support?
Nukes?
STOs put on a moon in range providing fire support?
Your own defensive line protecting heavy &Long Range Bombardment?

All of the Above

So your own infantry and CSW in front line defensive, dug in as quickly as possible themselves
with Bombardment supporting, along with Orbital Bombardment and CAS from Fighter Pods. and an armoured element in reserve

The defender can reinforce, or resupply so the aim is to wear them down and once they seem to be out of supply attack with the armour.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The side that doesn't have fortification tends to be the side with orbital support and fighters.  The whole mechanic is designed to favor defenders for cost, because otherwise it is supremely easy to assault a world by concentrating forces.   A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.

CSAP spam working well doesnt indicate its good against fortification so much as it might indicate they are too good for cost/tonnage.   Or maybe WAI from being good against infantry, I suppose.

[MarcAFK]

My take away from this is that Steve has coded the ground mechanics to resemble the battle of the Somme. And I'm alright with that.
Some more tests using the Mark IV and proper combined arms tactics would be appreciated. I'll see if General Monash is available to command the Corps.

[Jorgen_CAB]

It is suppose to be difficult to attack a fortified enemy, otherwise it would be pointless to even try defend any place at all as you just use reactionary invasion forces to take them back.

Infantry is not useless for attack, they actually get the same evasion from attack as vehicles does. Light vehicles have the best evasion during attack.

There also is a mechanical loophole against NPR where you land your troops and set them all in support line. As the AI will likely not put anything in Attacking Line nothing will happen and you can fortify your infantry and static units until you are as fortified as the enemy is and then you put your forces in Defensive Line and were them down. It will take longer but you spare your troops... if you think you will be able to hold space that long you could do that. Personally I don't like that it work like that and would not exploit it like that. Two fortified sides should no fight on equal ground either... if you want to actually attack with a fortified unit you should need to sacrifice your fortified structure.

But anyway... ground combat work really well in general... there are a few tweaks I would like to see implemented. There should be a maximum number of troops that can engage an enemy at the same time... say 4-5 times the size is max... this could make combat a bit slower overall and more realistic. I mean if I have 50.000ton front-line troops the enemy can at most engage them with 250.000 frontline troops at any one time, if they have more the game will simply randomize which 250.000 at the front that engages. This will reduce the unrealistic snowball of higher strength attackers and keep losses more realistic for the attacker in cases of overwhelming odds.
The other change would be that you need to have attacking and defending stances on the armies in the planet, two defending armies don't fight and if you attack then units will have to temporarily give up fortification bonuses on all units in defensive line. Otherwise you end up in balancing problem when you have multiple factions on planets that goes to war at a later date, fortifications should still matter in those situations in terms of defence versus attack.

Other than those two things above I thin that the new combat mechanic is pretty solid in general.

[EvadingHostileFleets]

My take away from this is that Steve has coded the ground mechanics to resemble the battle of the Somme.  And I'm alright with that. 
Some more tests using the Mark IV and proper combined arms tactics would be appreciated.  I'll see if General Monash is available to command the Corps.

Ah, so that's why there is an option to use sone nasty stuff as "terraforming" gas.   

[MarcAFK]

Jorgan is right, Doom stacking may be an issue. With the example I used just throwing 20 times as many troops at the enemy than he had was just 20 times deadlier to your own soldiers.
In Aurora thats probably an acceptable strategy.

[Earthrise]

Two thoughts:

Aren't Combat Engineers the counter to fortifications? I thought they were already in the game.

Modern real world military doctrine calls for a ratio advantage of 3:1 as the minimum effective strength when attacking prepared positions.  In other words, it is risky to attack unless you have a substantial advantage in starting forces.  This already assumes a Combined Arms doctrine where air superiority, if not supremacy,  has already been achieved.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Aren't Combat Engineers the counter to fortifications? I thought they were already in the game.

There are no direct "combat" engineers.... just construction units which help your units to fortify themselves. These troops are none combat troops.

[Marski]

The side that doesn't have fortification tends to be the side with orbital support and fighters.  The whole mechanic is designed to favor defenders for cost, because otherwise it is supremely easy to assault a world by concentrating forces.   A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.

CSAP spam working well doesnt indicate its good against fortification so much as it might indicate they are too good for cost/tonnage.   Or maybe WAI from being good against infantry, I suppose.

Pretty much.

If you can carry out planetary invasion it also means you got orbital superiority, therefore you can rain hell on down below for as long as you want. Sprinkle some nuclear warheads if you're feeling particularly spiteful.

So I completely disagree with Ektor on the subject of fortification and defense performance. However I agree on the supply, construction and support behavior. The fact that battalion-, regimental-, and divisional-level supply or artillery support doesn't work really gets my gears grinding.

[Earthrise]

Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet.  I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet.  I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking 

I have not played the game for real either... I just muck about trying stuff out for fun using Space Master for most testing...