Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: liveware on November 08, 2020, 07:26:33 PM
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Simple question:
When (and why) do you use light vehicles? I find myself always using infantry, static units, and the heaviest armored vehicles available. As one starts with medium vehicles even with a conventional start, I struggle to find the niche for light vehicles. What are other peoples perspectives?
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Light vehicles have a 0.4 to hit chance making them the unit type that has the largest evasion on the attack - even more than that of infantry. As such, if the enemy can reliably penetrate your heavy armor (especially if its happening because of their tech advantage), you might actually find that light vehicles are outright more survivable then the heavies.
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I just fought a long extended war where my main ground force was two armor divisions (heavy tanks with lots of artillery), a power-armored infantry division, a light infantry division, and a Cavalry regiment (light vehicles with autocannons and crew served weapons). My best killers in that force were the light Cavalry regiment and the artillery.
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I'm pretty sure that in a matchup of light vehicles armed with medium AV weapons and medium vehicles with medium AV and CAP weapons (which seems like the standard way to set up a tank on a medium vehicle until you have access to heavier weaponry) the light vehicles have an edge from weapon efficiency.
I'm also pretty sure there's some validity to using light vehicles as HQ units, since it'll be smaller and cheaper than a larger vehicle and doesn't waste space with a mostly useless secondary weapon while still having the vehicle bonus for breakthrough calculation.
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Seems like the unit roles go as following
Light Veh: Main invasion units
Med though Ultra Veh: Heavy anti-veh weapons and break though force
Static Defense: Main defensive units
Armored Inf: Boarding troops (seems not cost effective compared to light veh and static defenses for ground combat)
Non-armroed Inf with a cheap/useless weapons: Cannon fonder (not convinced if they are useful for anything. But being cheap and hard to hit could be useful for buying time until you can bring reinforcements and/or wasting the enemy supplies)
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The non armoured cheap infantry are good for garrisons when you don't expect to ever get into a fight.
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I'm pretty sure light vehicles are for taking the place of weapon teams in your offensive infantry formations. They weigh the same thing as weapon teams but have a bonus to maneuver at the cost of having the lowest entrenchment ability.
It is kinda weird that a weapons team + dune buggy weigh the same as just a weapons team, but I get the logic.
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I'm pretty sure light vehicles are for taking the place of weapon teams in your offensive infantry formations. They weigh the same thing as weapon teams but have a bonus to maneuver at the cost of having the lowest entrenchment ability.
Light vehicles are also for when your armor technology cant keep up with enemy weapons - making them more survivable than the heavy tanks. You can't tech against speed for ground combat.
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Can Light Vehicles replace infantry completely? I forgot if they can 'mount' Personal Weapons which iirc would make them just as heavy as a regular infantryman tho more expensive.
P.S. I'm honestly digging how light vehicles are the meta ATM. In the far future when weapons get even more deadly I'd bet anything that maneuvering out of the way of said guns is always better than trying to tank it.
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Can Light Vehicles replace infantry completely? I forgot if they can 'mount' Personal Weapons which iirc would make them just as heavy as a regular infantryman tho more expensive.
P.S. I'm honestly digging how light vehicles are the meta ATM. In the far future when weapons get even more deadly I'd bet anything that maneuvering out of the way of said guns is always better than trying to tank it.
PW and PWI are infantry only unfortunately. Also your "far future" can even be seen today - especially in naval settings where most defenses on ships focus on actively avoiding damage as opposed to taking it.
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Can Light Vehicles replace infantry completely? I forgot if they can 'mount' Personal Weapons which iirc would make them just as heavy as a regular infantryman tho more expensive.
P.S. I'm honestly digging how light vehicles are the meta ATM. In the far future when weapons get even more deadly I'd bet anything that maneuvering out of the way of said guns is always better than trying to tank it.
The major reason that light vehicles (or Statics on the defensive) do not replace infantry is that the latter give you a meatshield effect. The same tonnage as a LVH+CAP, which is the smallest combat light vehicle you can build, will give you five INF+PW, four INF+PWI, or a Zerg-like eight INF+PWL. Each of those infantry units is capable of absorbing a shot from an enemy weapon that would otherwise have taken out your LVH, which is particularly a daunting capability against MAV/HAV weapons which only get one shot per round, thus reducing the overall rate at which your force is attrited.
Additionally, it is possible on the offensive to give infantry as much armor (but not quite as much HP) as a light vehicle, which admittedly does give them costs comparable to a light vehicle but lets you get very tonnage-efficient with your light weapons, notably 2x INF+CAP has the same size as a single LVH+CAP. This is usually excessive on the defensive but very powerful on the offensive where power-to-tonnage ratio reigns supreme.
The current ground forces system for all its work-in-progress issues really is great at giving almost every unit type and component a viable use at least in the world of theorycrafting.
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Light vehicles are definitely getting some love on this thread - and they deserve it. Another of their uses is bombardment elements within expeditionary forces, especially for those not in rear echelon formations. While light vehicle bombardment loses some firepower-per size compared to infantry, their combination of good dodging and decent HPs makes them vastly more survivable than even armoured infantry.
Infantry, IMHO, are not getting enough love here. On the offense, infantry (especially when armoured) are my go-to elements on jungle, desert, mountain, and rift valley worlds, because they can be trained for these conditions, effectively giving them both superior firepower and supply efficiency, which in turn means transport space efficiency. On the defense, high entrenchment bonuses - especially if you've included construction elements - make foot truly difficult to dislodge.
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Light vehicles are definitely getting some love on this thread - and they deserve it. Another of their uses is bombardment elements within expeditionary forces, especially for those not in rear echelon formations. While light vehicle bombardment loses some firepower-per size compared to infantry, their combination of good dodging and decent HPs makes them vastly more survivable than even armoured infantry.
Infantry, IMHO, are not getting enough love here. On the offense, infantry (especially when armoured) are my go-to elements on jungle, desert, mountain, and rift valley worlds, because they can be trained for these conditions, effectively giving them both superior firepower and supply efficiency, which in turn means transport space efficiency. On the defense, high entrenchment bonuses - especially if you've included construction elements - make foot truly difficult to dislodge.
It should be noted that infantry are as not well suited for defending on desert worlds. Desert is the only terrain that vehicles can be trained for and is also the only terrain that reduces fortification for defending units. Since infantry/statics have the most fortification they are affected the most by this.
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Light vehicles are definitely getting some love on this thread - and they deserve it. Another of their uses is bombardment elements within expeditionary forces, especially for those not in rear echelon formations. While light vehicle bombardment loses some firepower-per size compared to infantry, their combination of good dodging and decent HPs makes them vastly more survivable than even armoured infantry.
Light vehicles are actually not ideal for bombardment units, unless you for some reason (why?!) keep your bombardment units in the front line. While light vehicles have high evasion, this stat only matters when a unit is in front line attack position - for all other positions including front line defense the evasion stat is a nonfactor. Since bombardment in a front-line unit is basically useless (even LB is basically a worse CAP by tonnage though it does have a few specific use cases), you're better off putting your bombardment weapons in the support echelon (or rear for HB/MBL) in which case using medium vehicles or heavier will give you the best protection for offensive forces. For defensive forces of course you almost always want to use statics.
The light vehicle vs power armor infantry comparison is rather nuanced. It is true that LVH are more survivable on the offensive due to higher HP and evasion (this works out even on a per-ton basis for non-PW weapon types). However, armored infantry are more tonnage-efficient in terms of offensive firepower, most extremely you can transport 2x INF+CAP for every LVH+CAP doubling your CAP firepower. Thus the infantry will die somewhat quicker than the vehicles but they will also deal more damage per combat round. Also notably against MAV and heavier with 100% kill rate against light vehicles, the greater numbers of infantry offer more survivability. The point being, neither option is a clear-cut winner and it depends on the specifics of the ground situation. Light vehicles or course are great for their capability to mount medium weapons and thus always have at least some role in a mechanized (as opposed to armored) offensive formation.
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Desert is the only terrain that vehicles can be trained for.
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This just perked my interest a lot - are you saying terrain and other environment training has no impact on vehicles and only troops even though you can select these options for vehicles when you design them?
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If you look in the training table, you'll see the "Inf Only" flag is Yes for every terrain training except desert. If you have them selected, they just won't be applied to vehicles.
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If you look in the training table, you'll see the "Inf Only" flag is Yes for every terrain training except desert. If you have them selected, they just won't be applied to vehicles.
To clarify, the "training table" looks like this (pulled from the DB):
ID Capability Name Tech ID Infantry Only Cost Multiplier HP Multiplier
0 None 65830 0 1.0 0.0
1 Boarding Combat 65822 1 2.5 0.0
2 High Gravity Combat 65823 0 1.5 0.0
3 Low Gravity Combat 65824 0 1.5 0.0
4 Extreme Temperature Combat 65825 0 1.5 0.0
5 Mountain Warfare 65827 1 1.25 0.0
6 Jungle Warfare 65826 1 1.25 0.0
7 Desert Warfare 65828 0 1.25 0.0
8 Extreme Pressure Combat 65829 0 2.0 0.0
9 Rift Valley Warfare 65898 1 1.25 0.0
10 Basic Genetic Enhancement 67771 1 1.5 1.25
11 Improved Genetic Enhancement 67772 1 2.0 1.6
12 Advanced Genetic Enhancement 67773 1 2.5 2.0
As you can see there are a number of capabilities which can be applied to vehicles (and statics) including several environmental capabilities (high/low gravity, extreme temperature, extreme pressure). However, the only terrain-based capability that is not locked to infantry only is the desert warfare capability - Jungle, Mountain, and Rift Valley capabilities are unique to infantry along with the obvious boarding and HP-enhancement stuff.
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Light vehicles are actually not ideal for bombardment units, unless you for some reason (why?!) keep your bombardment units in the front line. While light vehicles have high evasion, this stat only matters when a unit is in front line attack position - for all other positions including front line defense the evasion stat is a nonfactor.
I did indeed expect that artillery would be in support or rear echelon formations, and spoke about support formations specifically. Remember that support formations get 25% the chance per unit size to be targeted by an enemy front-line formation as do front line formations (ignoring exploitations). This means that, although most of the time your bombardment formations avoid getting attacked, when they are attacked they get hit at full strength. The whole of an enemy front-line formation targets the whole of your bombardment formation in such cases, and surviveability suddenly become critical.
I've put armored and unarmored infantry-type bombardment in expeditionary forces several times ... and seen them take quite a lot of casualties. Put the light and medium bombardment in light vehicles, and losses are a LOT lower. Remember that light vehicles have 3x the HPs of regular infantry, which means that at even tech crew-served AP weapons only get a kill one time every nine penetrations.
Consider an enemy armored element, of tech equal to your own, with a gun capable of killing a light vehicle in every hit and also with an AP weapon. Now compare your armored infantry (2x armour) to your light vehicles. The gun takes out one armoured infantry per hit, and the AP weapon takes out one armoured infantry per 4 hits (2x armour versus 1x pen, 1x HPs versus 1x damage). Multiply this by the 0.6 base hit chance against attacking infantry, and you get a expected kill rate of 0.6 * (1 + 6/4 effective) = 1.5. Perform the same analysis for light vehicles, and you get 0.4 hit chance * (1 + 6/(4*9)) = 0.467 expected kills. The light vehicles are, in this case, more than 3x as survivable. Against typical enemy infantry formations, they perform even better. However, against enemy medium and heavy artillery light vehicle artillery would fare less well. If you expected a lot of hostile artillery compared to your own attacking forces (a situation I've never be in yet) then I would not use light vehicles.
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As for the Inf vs Light veh:
The meat shield effect is only worth while if your trying to buy time. If your trying to win the battle then the inf don't seem like an effective choice. This could simply be from my lack of experience but it seems like the ai goes inf heavy armies. If true the survivability of light veh and static should be more cost effective as a front line. If the enemies do have a more heavy weapon focused armies, then i could see a inf heavy front line being useful.
Inf are a bit less tonage but i couldn't really find a down size to being a large tonnage unit in combat. Sure they are targeted easier, but that doesn't matter for your main front line unit which goal is to kinda pull fire from your more expansive units. So its just a matter of needing a bit more transports.
The training points are interesting. Having an extra 2x to hit over everything could be enough to make to make inf useful and its only 1. 25x cost. It also probably a must have for invading mountain/rift and jungle combined worlds
One thing i didn't see mentioned yet is inf have a 50% nerf in their ability to cause breakthroughs compared to vehicles.
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I did indeed expect that artillery would be in support or rear echelon formations, and spoke about support formations specifically. Remember that support formations get 25% the chance per unit size to be targeted by an enemy front-line formation as do front line formations (ignoring exploitations). This means that, although most of the time your bombardment formations avoid getting attacked, when they are attacked they get hit at full strength. The whole of an enemy front-line formation targets the whole of your bombardment formation in such cases, and surviveability suddenly become critical.
I've put armored and unarmored infantry-type bombardment in expeditionary forces several times ... and seen them take quite a lot of casualties. Put the light and medium bombardment in light vehicles, and losses are a LOT lower. Remember that light vehicles have 3x the HPs of regular infantry, which means that at even tech crew-served AP weapons only get a kill one time every nine penetrations.
Consider an enemy armored element, of tech equal to your own, with a gun capable of killing a light vehicle in every hit and also with an AP weapon. Now compare your armored infantry (2x armour) to your light vehicles. The gun takes out one armoured infantry per hit, and the AP weapon takes out one armoured infantry per 4 hits (2x armour versus 1x pen, 1x HPs versus 1x damage). Multiply this by the 0.6 base hit chance against attacking infantry, and you get a expected kill rate of 0.6 * (1 + 6/4 effective) = 1.5. Perform the same analysis for light vehicles, and you get 0.4 hit chance * (1 + 6/(4*9)) = 0.467 expected kills. The light vehicles are, in this case, more than 3x as survivable. Against typical enemy infantry formations, they perform even better. However, against enemy medium and heavy artillery light vehicle artillery would fare less well. If you expected a lot of hostile artillery compared to your own attacking forces (a situation I've never be in yet) then I would not use light vehicles.
For support-echelon bombardment units, my point is that light vehicles are sub-optimal not because they compare poorly against infantry but because a heavier vehicle type is better. Medium and heavy vehicles have more armor, more HP, and more weapon hardpoints (e.g. VEH+MB/MB brings more firepower per ton than LVH+MB). Since evasion is useless in support and rear echelons the armor and HP is much better to have.
As a side note, if you're deploying armored infantry as an attacking formation you really want to give them the HP mod as well as the armor, the highest level of which gives 2x HP for infantry. This bumps up the infantry survivability which is critical for an offensive formation that needs to maximize combat power per ton, rather than per BP as a defensive formation would. Of course that's a later-game research but it does eventually change the balance. Considering the case of equal tech enemy armor, say VEH+MAV/CAP. The MAV will always overmatch both INF and LVH at equal techs, thus dealing 0.12 kills per round to INF and 0.08 kills per round to the LVH (factoring evasion and 0.2 base hit chance) while the CAP will deal damage as:
- INF with 2 armor, 1 HP: 1.5 kill rate * 0.6 evasion * 0.2 base hit chance = 0.18 kills per round
- INF with 2 armor, 2 HP: 0.375 kill rate * 0.6 evasion * 0.2 base hit chance = 0.045 kills per round
[li]LVH with 2 armor, 3 HP: 0.166... kill rate * 0.4 evasion * 0.2 base hit chance = 0.0133... kills per round
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Total kills per round:
- INF with 2 armor, 1 HP: 0.12 + 0.18 = 0.3 kills per round
- INF with 2 armor, 2 HP: 0.12 + 0.045 = 0.165 kills per round
- LVH with 2 armor, 3 HP: 0.08 + 0.0133... = 0.0933... kills per round
In this case, the INF with 2 armor and 2 HP takes about 75% more casualties (in terms of individual elements), but due to tonnage efficiency you can deploy twice as many INF+CAP and come out ahead anyways. for LAV the infantry and vehicle are close to breaking even, for LB or HCAP the vehicle is more tonnage-efficient. Based on this, it makes sense early on to deploy INF+PW (or PWL, PWI) and use LVH for any heavier weapons in an offensive formation, which is a pretty standard kind of Mech Inf formation, but infantry can close the gap once you get sufficient armor and HP mods (even the 1.6x HP mod should make INF+CAP competitive).
Of course, the classic use of infantry remains Zerging a bunch of space marines with some kind of PW to soak up all the AV fire while your tanks kill things. LVH will never be able to replace infantry in this role.
As for the Inf vs Light veh:
The meat shield effect is only worth while if your trying to buy time. If your trying to win the battle then the inf don't seem like an effective choice. This could simply be from my lack of experience but it seems like the ai goes inf heavy armies. If true the survivability of light veh and static should be more cost effective as a front line. If the enemies do have a more heavy weapon focused armies, then i could see a inf heavy front line being useful.
Mechanically, the main way the meatshield effect works is by absorbing AV fire that would otherwise OHKO an armored element. A standard MBT design might be VEH+MAV/CAP and weighs 62 tons. An enemy MAV can knock this out in one shot at equal tech. However, if you deploy half as many MBTs and escort them with an equal tonnage of INF+PW (5 tons), then about half of MAV shots in each round will be wasted on a cheap infantry unit and the overall rate at which you lose tonnage is reduced, keeping your MBTs in the fight and wasting enemy ammo.
Obviously CAP is the counter to this and enemy infantry are pretty efficient in this role as well, however both of these will waste shots against the duranium wall of your tank force which would otherwise kill off an infantry.
Essentially the net effect is that combined arms forces reduce the efficiency of enemy firepower while preserving your own. You lose some raw firepower in the initial stages of battle but your force overall has a lot more stamina to win a large battle.
Inf are a bit less tonage but i couldn't really find a down size to being a large tonnage unit in combat. Sure they are targeted easier, but that doesn't matter for your main front line unit which goal is to kinda pull fire from your more expansive units. So its just a matter of needing a bit more transports.
On the offensive you always want to maximize combat power per ton. It's not a matter of "needing more transports" - if you have more transports, you still want to fill those transports with the best optimized force that you can, per ton.
One thing i didn't see mentioned yet is inf have a 50% nerf in their ability to cause breakthroughs compared to vehicles.
This is a good point.
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your mileage may vary, but my experience is having many more CAP than anti-tank guns pointed in my direction. just pulling down the most recent ground action in steve's campaign, i see CAP outnumbering all other weapons by a factor of seven. under such circumstances light vees will soak far better than infantry. it is absolutely true that the all-CAP infantry has more firepower and no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. but in cases where youre trying to win an advantaged fight efficiently, the ability of vees to make breakthrough attacks and their superior morale accumulation will count in their favor.
transport costs add an overhead of maybe .06 BP per ton- steve posted a design that wasn't *exactly* about cost-containment, with a cost of .1 per ton. That certainly isnt cheap but it doesn't dwarf the cost of producing the units themselves. including transport costs of .08 per ton, your uber-infantry costs 2.16 and the vees you're comparing them to cost 2.88 each. over the course of multiple battles, having to replace troops more often than transports (one hopes!) makes unit cost still more important. GFTF time is a scarce resource as well, emphasizing unit cost efficiency yet again.
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Lots of good discussion points here, thanks for your input everyone!
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Mechanically the game works a bit oddly and you can easily game the system, but I find that to be unsatisfactory.
But...
Step 1.
When you assault bring down as much CAP weapons as you can to eliminate the enemy infantry as quickly as possible. Don't even use anti-vehicle weapons at all... they will initially mostly hit enemy infantry and the supply cost of heavy guns are atrocious.
Infantry are the best at combat enemy infantry in most situations, especially in bad terrain and in defensive line. You can back it up in easier terrain with some armoured formations using all CAP weapons.
Step 2.
Once most of the enemy infantry is gone you bring in the anti-vehicle weapons in whatever form you have it, if needed.
The issue is that all combat is completely random so you can easily know the best most optimal way to beat a specific force. But you always need to eliminate the lighter forces before the heavier the way the mechanic works and cost of supply units to what enemy a certain weapon target. Infantry is always good as they soak enemy fire for a cheap price. If you can't effectively eliminate enemy infantry you are destined to fail no matter what.
For armoured units I find medium units to the most efficient and versatile in the game. They can carry two weapons and are space efficient and can carry heavy guns to combat heavier vehicles and also decently good at light vehicles and infantry as breakthrough units.
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applying the big guns with a little discretion has a bigger benefit than saving supply. HAV (let alone bombardment) are hell on property values.
i gotta say though, that, if you don't "game" ground combat, where exactly does the satisfaction come from? i can understand having an OOB fetish, but my kink is maps not lists. froggiest spends 40 hours lovingly crafting an army, i spend one, but then we both hit "resolve" and move directly on to building garrison and replacements. not exactly "i need a cigarette" material there.
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Arn't those the reasons why games with this type of combat tend to have target weighting so heavy weapons have a higher chance to target armor, and anti-personal have a higher chance to target personal?
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Arn't those the reasons why games with this type of combat tend to have target weighting so heavy weapons have a higher chance to target armor, and anti-personal have a higher chance to target personal?
I honestly think this would be a good idea at least from a realism standpoint. Yes, there are situations where AT weapons will be fired on infantry but generally speaking if you have a tank and infantryman that you can fire your ATGM at you will probably choose to engage the tank with it.
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Arn't those the reasons why games with this type of combat tend to have target weighting so heavy weapons have a higher chance to target armor, and anti-personal have a higher chance to target personal?
I honestly think this would be a good idea at least from a realism standpoint. Yes, there are situations where AT weapons will be fired on infantry but generally speaking if you have a tank and infantryman that you can fire your ATGM at you will probably choose to engage the tank with it.
Couple of thoughts:
First, from a "realism standpoint" it's important to remember that we're talking about formations rather than units. While an individual AT gunner for instance would obviously point the gun at the tank 200 meters away than at the infantryman 20 meters to the left of the tank, at the formation level a commander often does not get to choose the target his battalion or regiment engages - the defender must shoot at the enemy in front of him, while the attacker would like to choose his target but may lack sufficient intel to do so. Considering that one "shot" represents damage dealt in an 8-hour round of combat the latter model is best to consider. Additionally, I would also note that the abstraction of the weapon types might obscure specific cases where firing at the "wrong" target would make sense, e.g. tanks in WW2 would often fire HE rounds at infantry, heavy weapons, or light vehicles out of their "Medium Anti-Vehicle" weapons.
Second, if this were implemented some kind of weighting would need to be considered as units shouldn't always shoot at the best target, otherwise many unit types would be borderline useless in combat. Such a weighting needs to be "continuum" in nature as a simple Infantry/Armor dichotomy does not exist in C# Aurora, which I suspect is a major reason Steve chose not to include it thus far. Obviously this isn't an argument against, but it does need to be a consideration.
Considering both of these, a reasonable idea might be to add a "Battlefield Intel" commander skill level, which should be fairly common and gives that commander's formation an X% chance to target the unit in the opposing formation that would give the greatest expected tonnage kill rate instead of random targeting. This would also add an interesting dimension to commander choice, enough so that this bonus should be relatively common to ensure that intel-skilled commanders are present at all levels of the battlefield (armor, infantry, artillery, etc.).
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Assuming
-aurora ground troops are meant to represent a single entity, and not a squad (which seems to be the case, although conquering planets with a few hundrad thousand tons is kinda comical)
-formations tend to be 5k tons or less to fit in drop pods (never tried loading larger formations in transports so maybe a bad assumption)
Then at a formation vs formation level the entities would all be relativity physically close to each other on the battlefield and thus in range of each other. The local commanders should/would be trying to maneuver their bigger weapons to into positions to open fire at priority targets. I don't think anyone thought it would be perfect targeting. Seeing as weighting and size already exists it would just be applying a multipliers to unit sizes when picking targets for that weapon type. Now granted displaying targeting weighting for weapons in game could be a bit of a UI mess.
The counter argument is the game already encourages mono-type formations, instead of combined arms. This is though better fortification for static/inf, better target training for inf, and better breakthroughs for vehicles. Adding weighted targeting would be the nail in the coffin as it would make combined arm formations take more casualties.
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Arn't those the reasons why games with this type of combat tend to have target weighting so heavy weapons have a higher chance to target armor, and anti-personal have a higher chance to target personal?
I honestly think this would be a good idea at least from a realism standpoint. Yes, there are situations where AT weapons will be fired on infantry but generally speaking if you have a tank and infantryman that you can fire your ATGM at you will probably choose to engage the tank with it.
Couple of thoughts:
First, from a "realism standpoint" it's important to remember that we're talking about formations rather than units. While an individual AT gunner for instance would obviously point the gun at the tank 200 meters away than at the infantryman 20 meters to the left of the tank, at the formation level a commander often does not get to choose the target his battalion or regiment engages - the defender must shoot at the enemy in front of him, while the attacker would like to choose his target but may lack sufficient intel to do so. Considering that one "shot" represents damage dealt in an 8-hour round of combat the latter model is best to consider. Additionally, I would also note that the abstraction of the weapon types might obscure specific cases where firing at the "wrong" target would make sense, e.g. tanks in WW2 would often fire HE rounds at infantry, heavy weapons, or light vehicles out of their "Medium Anti-Vehicle" weapons.
Second, if this were implemented some kind of weighting would need to be considered as units shouldn't always shoot at the best target, otherwise many unit types would be borderline useless in combat. Such a weighting needs to be "continuum" in nature as a simple Infantry/Armor dichotomy does not exist in C# Aurora, which I suspect is a major reason Steve chose not to include it thus far. Obviously this isn't an argument against, but it does need to be a consideration.
Considering both of these, a reasonable idea might be to add a "Battlefield Intel" commander skill level, which should be fairly common and gives that commander's formation an X% chance to target the unit in the opposing formation that would give the greatest expected tonnage kill rate instead of random targeting. This would also add an interesting dimension to commander choice, enough so that this bonus should be relatively common to ensure that intel-skilled commanders are present at all levels of the battlefield (armor, infantry, artillery, etc.).
Well, one would assume that the formation has carried out some recon and tries its best to get its anti-armored units in a position to neutralize armored units. They won't always, obviously, but their target selection should have more than just a random chance to fire at the type of enemy they are meant to face. I assume that anti-tank units would actively seek out appropriate targets and would ignore infantry unless they had no choice.
A recon mechanic that increases the chances that weapons hit their proper targets is an interesting idea. Recon score could be determined by the amount of units in an army that have recon equipment or training. The more recon units, the more accurate your troops, although there are drastically diminishing returns going beyond a 1:4 tonnage of recon to non-recon troops.
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this Should Be (TM) the way the system operates, but how much return is there really for the coding effort? just wait a couple combat rounds to deploy your anti-tank weapons, like Jorgen prescribed.
if you can muscle past the objection of "with thousand ton sensors in orbit, what is a ground-based recon unit going to FIND, anyway?", reconnaissance as a general capability seems to me like an excellent idea for adding dimensionality to the ground combat system. there are so many different mechanics that could be associated with it that there must be one or two that are both aesthetically pleasing and easy to code.
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Always keep in mind that the system has to be flexible enough to cover both boarding combat or a handful of soldiers duking it out on an asteroid, and four-way war between different alien races on a super-terrestrial planet where each has millions of troops.
That's why it's unit, element, formation and not a rifleman, recon squad, armoured battalion.
As nuclearslurpee pointed out, a single medium antivehicle shot is actually 8 hours of combat - possibly across the entire planetary body. It's not a single DM12 MPAT round out of a Rheinmetall Rh-120 L/55 put on a Leopard 2A6 that then takes out one T-72 tank. While I love that level of detail when I'm playing Steel Panthers, it's not necessary for Aurora and thinking of combat in that way can mislead you on what this system is and should/could be. You cannot say that realistically a MAV gunner would pick a heavy vehicle as a target instead of infantry because that's a ridiculous statement to make for the level of detail that Aurora ground combat handles.
As long as targeting is completely random, it's also equal and simple to understand. There already is a weighed system based on the tonnage and that's as complicated as I would like it to be until we get a lot more detail ground combat model that enables multiple terrains, movement, and better direct-indirect fire system.
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There's actually a very important reason why AT weapons don't specifically target tanks: It would make mixed forces (such as tanks + infantry) considerably worse than single chassis forces.
The math is somewhat complicated, but here's a very simplified example (trust me that the math still applies in more complex situations). Let's say you have a force with 50% anti-personnel weapons and 50% anti-tank weapons.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 100% tanks, 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired target.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 100% infantry, 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired target.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 50% tanks and 50% infantry, then currently 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired targets. If weapons went after their best target, then 100% of your weapons would be hitting their desired targets, making this mixed attacker take much more damage.
If the supplies are a consideration, I'd suggest it would be better to just change the rules about supplies. Or simply eliminate them, since I kind of feel like supply units may be a level of detail too high for a game like Aurora.
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If the supplies are a consideration, I'd suggest it would be better to just change the rules about supplies. Or simply eliminate them, since I kind of feel like supply units may be a level of detail too high for a game like Aurora.
I actually like it. Having to prepare also the logistic to keep supplying my invasion forces it's something that I'd expect from a game like Aurora.
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There's actually a very important reason why AT weapons don't specifically target tanks: It would make mixed forces (such as tanks + infantry) considerably worse than single chassis forces.
The math is somewhat complicated, but here's a very simplified example (trust me that the math still applies in more complex situations). Let's say you have a force with 50% anti-personnel weapons and 50% anti-tank weapons.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 100% tanks, 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired target.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 100% infantry, 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired target.
If an enemy attacks with a force of 50% tanks and 50% infantry, then currently 50% of your weapons are hitting their desired targets. If weapons went after their best target, then 100% of your weapons would be hitting their desired targets, making this mixed attacker take much more damage.
If the supplies are a consideration, I'd suggest it would be better to just change the rules about supplies. Or simply eliminate them, since I kind of feel like supply units may be a level of detail too high for a game like Aurora.
The rest of this is a very good point as well.
The last bit: the issue isn't so much that supplies or even the rules of supplies are a problem. The issue is more that as it stands right now, a MAV or HAV "shot" is so much more expensive than a round of six CAP "shots" that it's a huge waste of GSP to let AV weapons shoot at infantry, encouraging the micromanagement-intensive (and not exactly realistic) metagaming approach of sending in the INF and LVH to kill off enemy infantry and then sending in the heavy armor in a second wave to take out the enemy tanks.
Kind of the root of the problem is that CAP supply consumption can't really be balanced against MAV/HAV since it is already balanced against LAV (and LB). Removing supply entirely would be unfortunate since it adds a logistics element that is characteristic of Aurora, and reworking the system is difficult without losing the current simplicity of the mechanics.
I might suggest that the root of the problem is the ground combat AI needs to be upgraded. On one hand, using a better composition of forces that isn't as predictable and can vary more from one race or ground force to the next will help counteract metagaming. On the other hand, an AI that can recognize when it would be good to pull certain kinds of front-line units back (e.g. if the player is attacking with an anti-infantry first wave, pull back the infantry and let the armor or statics defend) would reduce the effectiveness some of these gamier tactics.
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On the other hand, an AI that can recognize when it would be good to pull certain kinds of front-line units back (e.g. if the player is attacking with an anti-infantry first wave, pull back the infantry and let the armor or statics defend) would reduce the effectiveness some of these gamier tactics.
How do you propose to "pull back", that isn't currently an option AFIK?
If the AI can pull back some elements of their army then the player has to respond by moving their own units. Doesn't that add lots of micromanagement?
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On the other hand, an AI that can recognize when it would be good to pull certain kinds of front-line units back (e.g. if the player is attacking with an anti-infantry first wave, pull back the infantry and let the armor or statics defend) would reduce the effectiveness some of these gamier tactics.
How do you propose to "pull back", that isn't currently an option AFIK?
If the AI can pull back some elements of their army then the player has to respond by moving their own units. Doesn't that add lots of micromanagement?
- A good question. probably set them to "Support" or "Rear" formation. There'd be some... issues, but relatively simple overall. You'd just need to adjust the how and how much the AI built of each unit type. The NPRs already are already capable of demonstrating an overarching leitmotif as is, having them generate templates and # of templates to a certain set of parameters wouldn't be too messy compared to other suggestions here. The type of units would need to change to have a greater dichotomy between "armor-centric", "infantry-centric" and "mixed" units, as well as a tweak to generate a larger number of, and variety of, dedicated defensive units so that when they "pull back" by switching the infantry to the "Support" or "Rear" they are not overwhelmed due to lack of defenders.
- Certain NPRs might focus on large mixed unit formations, others might focus on a Zerg-Rush style infantry swarm, some might have a strict separation of armored-units and infantry formations, yet another might focus on defensive tactics centered around static "pillboxes" with Artillery. I like it, and think it would add plenty. :)
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How do you propose to "pull back", that isn't currently an option AFIK?
You can move a front-line unit to the rear echelon, or vice versa. This is how for example one would keep their MAV/HAV out of the fight until the enemy infantry have been killed by CAP and then send them into the battle to kill enemy armor. Less exploit-y would be rotating in reserve formations to replace low-morale formations during a battle, although this is more RP than anything since reserves don't really have a place in Aurora ground combat mechanically as there is no front-level granularity, everything is just one giant battle.
If the AI can pull back some elements of their army then the player has to respond by moving their own units. Doesn't that add lots of micromanagement?
I don't think it would necessarily add more micro than we already have. What I'm proposing is that if the AI can see that the player is for example running only CAP weapons or otherwise disproportionately targeting infantry, they could switch their infantry formations to the rear echelon and leave their armored formation in the front line to absorb all the CAP. This would force the player to bring their MAV/HAV weapons back to the front at which point the AI could send the infantry back in. However, if the player uses a balanced combined-arms strategy this would not be necessary. The idea is to reduce micro by making the strategy of sending CAP in a first wave and MAV/HAV in a second wave less effective.
Basically this is just giving the AI the ability to use a functionality already available to the player to mitigate gamey strategies. If the player is playing things "straight" it should have no effect.
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i believe in such a case moving the infantry into the rear would hurt the defender quite substantially, and not help him in the slightest.
attacker gets those choice targets for his big guns from round 1, meaning the defending armor (which *will* be shooting at infantry targets) just disintegrates. the attacking army will breakthrough with basically its entire front line, basically every combat round, for unreciprocated violence against the defending infantry. unentrenched attacking infantry will receive no damage instead of the customary butchery, and the defender's "natural" rear and support will succumb very much more quickly, due to accelerated attacker tempo *and* the vastly decreased overall defending army effective size.
if you need the defender to be less vulnerable to cap, have the defender substitute statics for infantry (well, for *everything*). but egad, i don't want to play in any universe where that happens routinely.
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i believe in such a case moving the infantry into the rear would hurt the defender quite substantially, and not help him in the slightest.
attacker gets those choice targets for his big guns from round 1, meaning the defending armor (which *will* be shooting at infantry targets) just disintegrates. the attacking army will breakthrough with basically its entire front line, basically every combat round, for unreciprocated violence against the defending infantry. unentrenched attacking infantry will receive no damage instead of the customary butchery, and the defender's "natural" rear and support will succumb very much more quickly, due to accelerated attacker tempo *and* the vastly decreased overall defending army effective size.
if you need the defender to be less vulnerable to cap, have the defender substitute statics for infantry (well, for *everything*). but egad, i don't want to play in any universe where that happens routinely.
I may need to clarify this:
The situation I'm describing is one where the player has elected to deploy their anti-infantry weapons forward while leaving their anti-vehicle weapons in the rear, based on the logic that CAP requires far fewer supplies than MAV/HAV and thus it would be wasteful for MAV/HAV shots to be hitting the enemy infantry. The player then waits until most or all of the enemy infantry are dead before sending their anti-vehicle units forward to clean up the armor with choice-targeted shots.
My suggestion here is to give the AI the capability of pulling their infantry back to the rear area (the same capability a player can use if they want to) to counteract such a tactic, thus the player's anti-infantry weapons will be left to plink ineffectually against the AI's armored vehicles, until the player brings up their own anti-vehicle formations at which point the AI can bring up their infantry again and we're back to normal combined arms tactics where force composition rather than micro decides the battle.
The AI would not retreat their infantry if the enemy force had a concentration of anti-vehicle weapons on the front line, because as you say that would be utter suicide. All this does is gives the AI some ability to respond to the player's tactics to counteract otherwise gamey and unrealistic tactics that are only possible due to the AI's inability to react. Of course such tactics will always exist against an AI in any game, but it would be progress.
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are you proposing that the AI gets to react to my deployment from a position of perfect information, _between_ the time i set my lines up and the time battle resolves? that's some pretty heavy cheating for a relatively small advantage. and if not, you're just walking into the meatgrinder; if the AI responds to lack of AV in round n by pulling back the infantry in round n+1, you are _guaranteeing_ that a delayed commitment of tanks will land that crushing hit.
even if you're willing to just bite the bullet and cheat like crazy, the logic has to be able to handle cases like me leaving _most_ of my big guns at the back, and if it is to produce a benefit for the defender, it has to be able to juggle a lot of different factors, because the benefit (such as it is) is highly situational.
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are you proposing that the AI gets to react to my deployment from a position of perfect information, _between_ the time i set my lines up and the time battle resolves? that's some pretty heavy cheating for a relatively small advantage. and if not, you're just walking into the meatgrinder; if the AI responds to lack of AV in round n by pulling back the infantry in round n+1, you are _guaranteeing_ that a delayed commitment of tanks will land that crushing hit.
even if you're willing to just bite the bullet and cheat like crazy, the logic has to be able to handle cases like me leaving _most_ of my big guns at the back, and if it is to produce a benefit for the defender, it has to be able to juggle a lot of different factors, because the benefit (such as it is) is highly situational.
In theory, no cheating required. The AI can read the same battle logs we do and react accordingly, i.e. based on round N make adjustments prior to round N+1.
I will admit that the implementation is more complicated than I initially thought if you want to avoid the AI getting baited into even more exploitative tactics. Mainly the player needs to not be able to predict what will happen with absolute certainty, else they can anticipate the AI's maneuvers. That shouldn't be impossible though, after all the naval combat AI has similar ability to learn the player's tactics and adapt to some extent, not as much as a human would but still reasonably so. For example, if the AI learns that the player likes to make a delayed commitment of anti-armor forces they can try to anticipate that and retreat their own armor to get the jump on the player rather than being purely reactive.
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Can't we just bias units armed with anti-x weapons to try and target x? It can happen seamlessly in the backround and would result in better battle outcomes with AT actually doing its role even when there are infantry in the field.
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Can we? Yes.
Should we, and if so how much? This has been discussed for half of the thread now...
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Consensus should be reached by competitive aurora tournament. Winner takes all and Steve refs.
You can work out the rules amongst yourselves I'm sure ;D.
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You can work out the rules amongst yourselves I'm sure ;D.
Lock 3 aurora players in a room for an hour and you'll have 4 opinions about the game by the end. Wait longer to acquire additional opinions.
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Can we? Yes.
Should we, and if so how much? This has been discussed for half of the thread now...
I just haven't seen any good arguments not to. The best argument is that it would make mixed formations weak. But I'd argue that mixed formations are justifiably sub-optimal in most cases and the game should encourage you to separate tanks from infantry just like we do IRL.
I admit I don't get what you mean by "weighting needs to be "continuum" in nature as a simple Infantry/Armor dichotomy does not exist in C# Aurora" since units are separated by whether they are infantry or light/medium/heavy vehicles already, making it easy for Steve to bias AT weapons to shoot non-infantry. I think there is more to this statement tho, could you clarify?
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I just haven't seen any good arguments not to. The best argument is that it would make mixed formations weak. But I'd argue that mixed formations are justifiably sub-optimal in most cases and the game should encourage you to separate tanks from infantry just like we do IRL.
Except that IRL, we don't, at least not universally? Example off the top of my head: until 2016 the US Army's Armored Brigade Combat Teams were built around Combined Arms Battalions which each contain 2x Mechanized Infantry Companies and 2x Tank Companies, and since 2016 I believe they've switched over to 2x Armored Battalions and 1x Mechanized Infantry Battalions but both of these use a mix of armor and infantry companies. The Stryker and Infantry BCTs don't use tanks largely for logistical, not tactical, reasons, and even then the Stryker BCTs still use light armored vehicles as part of the core of the formation.
More generally, combined arms has been known as the optimal force composition for large-scale battles since the early stages of WW2, although different powers figured this out at different points in the war. Certainly at the division level as a rule, and in many cases smaller combined-arms formations were used often on an ad-hoc basis (e.g. kampfgruppen).
That said, in Aurora it doesn't matter very much if you use combined arms battalions or single-type battalions organized into larger combined arms formations (divisions etc.), aside from some relatively technical points regarding breakthroughs and other such mechanics. Regardless of how you compose your formations at the lowest level, the targeting is essentially twice-random (random targeting of a formation, then random targeting of elements in that formation, both weighted by relative size/tonnage). This works very nicely from an RP perspective because in principle you can design combined arms or monolithic formations and either will work. If we make the element-level targeting deterministic, there's a clear metagame shift where monolithic formations become clearly optimal, assuming the formation-level targeting remains random (and if it didn't, we'd be opening a whole other can of worms...).
I admit I don't get what you mean by "weighting needs to be "continuum" in nature as a simple Infantry/Armor dichotomy does not exist in C# Aurora" since units are separated by whether they are infantry or light/medium/heavy vehicles already, making it easy for Steve to bias AT weapons to shoot non-infantry. I think there is more to this statement tho, could you clarify?
Basically, there are ranges of both element armor values and weapon AP values which have to be considered. It's easy to say "bias CAP to shoot INF, and bias MAV to shoot VEH". On one hand, what if the enemy force has LVH? Do we bias the MAV to shoot at VEH in particular, to get the best tonnage-destroyed ratio? Or just shoot at anything that isn't INF? What if the enemy force has a mix of normal and power armor INF, do we bias the CAP to shoot the weaker INF?
On the other hand, what about other weapon types? Autocannons and bombardment weapons are effective against light armor but not heavy armor, how do we want to bias these? More generally, how should we account for non-equal tech levels, which we would discover through battlefield intelligence? Do we adjust the bias of our MAV if it turns out the enemy VEH armor is greater than our attack stats, to focus on LVH instead? What about infantry LAV shooting at heavy tanks instead of static CAP nests, do we shift the bias there? Many more cases exist which could be considered.
You end up at a point where we either need to write a complex set of bias rules for every weapon (which are likely to be controversial, to boot), or else bias the targeting to be basically perfect by having every weapon target the element it can score the highest tonnage-weighted kill rate on. That's not to say that the latter is automatically a Bad Thing™, but it would substantially rewrite the balance of Ground Forces (meaning a lot of balancing work for Steve) and in my opinion at least would eliminate a lot of the flexibility we have right now in designing reasonably effective formations.
Ultimately, the idea of "anti-infantry weapons shoot infantry, anti-tank weapons shoot tanks" only works if you have two kinds of weapons and two kinds of units. Aurora does not have this, we have six basic unit types (most of which can vary in armor level as well) and the same number of basic combat weapon types with varying sizes. That's what I mean by "continuum" weighting, we have to come up with a system that works for all weapon and unit base types without leaving easy exploits or suboptimal behavior. The nice thing about random targeting is that you won't not target the thing you want to shoot at, you just can't target it reliably. That's not exactly unrealistic, particularly given the rather abstract, high-level nature of ground combat in Aurora which precludes a lot of the tactical detail that actually decides what your guns can shoot at in a real battle.
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I just haven't seen any good arguments not to. The best argument is that it would make mixed formations weak. But I'd argue that mixed formations are justifiably sub-optimal in most cases and the game should encourage you to separate tanks from infantry just like we do IRL.
Larger units are more mixed, true, but battalions and companies tend to be composed of more or less the same type of unit. An infantry company would be composed of infantry and some heavy weapons teams. A tanks company would be composed solely of tanks. An artillery company of artillery. These would be combined together to make larger units, which is something I think the game should encourage.
As for targeting biases I understand that anti-vehicle would be wasted attacking light vehicles and high-tech anti-personal could do work against lower-tech vehicles of all types, but I still think a little nudge to give weapons a little greater chance to shoot at what they were designed for would still be a good thing. Imperfect, sure, but it would still lead to better outcomes than currently.
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You say you want "a little nudge" but that doesn't tell anyone how you think it should be achieved mechanically.
The mechanics matter, you can't evaluate a proposal based solely on the generality.
The previous posts argue that any specific proposal will be complex and lead to more balance issues than are currently present.
If you can provide a suggestion which doesn't do so then by all means please do.
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Larger units are more mixed, true, but battalions and companies tend to be composed of more or less the same type of unit. An infantry company would be composed of infantry and some heavy weapons teams. A tanks company would be composed solely of tanks. An artillery company of artillery. These would be combined together to make larger units, which is something I think the game should encourage.
What I was trying to point out was that even at the battalion level (typically the formation size most Aurora players will use at least in the early game, 5,000 to 10,000 tons usually) we do see these combined arms force structures. It doesn't make good sense to me to effectively close off that avenue of RPing for players who want to make combined arms formations - and I say this as someone who usually makes distinct infantry and armored formations, myself.
Additionally, many players will use larger formations especially later in the game, regiment or even brigade sized units where combined arms force structures are even more likely. Again, why force these players into a specific design pattern if they want to RP something else?
As for targeting biases I understand that anti-vehicle would be wasted attacking light vehicles and high-tech anti-personal could do work against lower-tech vehicles of all types, but I still think a little nudge to give weapons a little greater chance to shoot at what they were designed for would still be a good thing. Imperfect, sure, but it would still lead to better outcomes than currently.
You say you want "a little nudge" but that doesn't tell anyone how you think it should be achieved mechanically.
The mechanics matter, you can't evaluate a proposal based solely on the generality.
The previous posts argue that any specific proposal will be complex and lead to more balance issues than are currently present.
If you can provide a suggestion which doesn't do so then by all means please do.
I've previously suggested the idea of a "Recon" commander skill which gives SKILL% chance of targeting an "optimal" target instead of a purely random target, which could simply be the target which the weapon has the highest estimated tonnage kill rate against (probably assuming equal tech). This would limit the impact of such a mechanic but give commanders a bit more importance and interest in terms of which commanders you want in charge of different formations. Combined arms formations would be a bit vulnerable to these commanders but not egregiously so which preserves the RP aspects.
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Larger units are more mixed, true, but battalions and companies tend to be composed of more or less the same type of unit.
This statement is false. I know this because my infantry companies also have a few light vehicles. My mechanized have medium vehicle APCs with infantry with a few medium vehicle IFVs. My armored companies also have token infantry accompanying them. Some of my companies are "heavy mechanized" which have heavy and medium vehicles with infantry. There are also motorized support companies which are 1000 tons and they have some light vehicles and a platoons worth of infantry. You can't predict the level of mixing a player wants to do in a given RP context.
My standard companies are 2000 tons and in the case of armor 4000 tons.
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The general problem is that in reality mixing units and combined armies give units and armies abilities that none of those individual components can give you on their own unless they are combined in specific combinations and doctrines. This is the classic the sum of the parts is far greater than the individual parts... like combining tin and copper into Bronze... sort of.
The game encourage you to make mono unit designs as specialised units is always better.
CAP weapon in infantry will always be better than infantry without CAP from every perspective... even if infantry with personal weapons are better for soaking damage against larger weapon even CAP infantry is more than good enough to do the same and vastly better at killing the enemy infantry.
The faster you kill off enemy infantry the faster you can add in your anti-vehicle units... in my case that would be Medium tanks with two anti-vehicle guns of some sort depending on the armour level of the enemy.
Now... I don't meta game Aurora so I NEVER do any of this in a real game as I don't see the point. But from a game mechanic point of view you only need two unit types CAP infantry and Medium Vehicles with either soem CAP or HCAP weapons and then some formation in a mix of light, medium and heavy dual anti-vehicle cannons.
I never see a scenario where you would withdraw infantry from the front line... infantry are pretty good at killing infantry too, so it just is a war of attrition. But tanks with CAP weapons are also good, especially in offensive line as they can more easily cause break through and do even more damage. If the enemy have mostly tanks then the infantry are great as soaking damage too... unless they are mostly CAP vehicles that is... but even then it probably is not meaningful to withdraw infantry versus just pulling your tanks up to engage their tanks.
In my opinion I think the mechanic could have some improvement if you want to reduce the meta gaming of the system.
Personally I don't care... as "winning" the game is NOT my goal (as it is impossible to do that anyway) then I build ground forces from military structures that make sense from a role-play perspective.
Although... I do thin it would have been more fun if the game mechanics had encouraged mixed unit designs and combined warfare without micro managing unit forces. If Steve find the time worth to look into this some more I would not be against it. In my opinion the system does not scale well from small to large engagements and the random nature of combat is not that great as an overall mechanic in general as it encourage boring meta gaming of the system.
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Borealis, modern militaries do mix units even at a small scale. It's routine to attach a tank platoon to provide fire support for an infantry company and it's also routine to attach an infantry platoon to a tank company to provide close-up support. On paper, the organizations look neat and mono-equipped as you said but in reality, cross-attaching is a daily event. Even the Chinese are changing their OOB to the battlegroup system.
And also, the points I made earlier still stand. Arguing "realism" is a wrong path to take in a game that only simulates the strategic scale and operates in 8-hour blocks.
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And also, the points I made earlier still stand. Arguing "realism" is a wrong path to take in a game that only simulates the strategic scale and operates in 8-hour blocks.
I agree that arguing how units function on a tactical level does not make much sense, units operates in a strategic or at least operational level.
In my opinion the game should scale the combat due to the size of the forces involved. In that i think that the time passes for each combat round should be different depending on the forces involved. If the forces are on a company or battalion level then perhaps hourly combat rounds is ok... division sized then 8 hour is ok but if the combat are tens of millions of tons of combat troops then each combat round should probably be more like a week.
The larger the combat the less intense each combat round should get. That way really massive combat would feel more like large scale wars rather than a skirmish of some minor forces.
In my opinion this would add some interesting option to warfare as huge battles would now take more realistic time to be concluded. You also would not need to have a separate time scale between ship boarding combat and planetary combat either as they would be part of the same dynamic system.