22:14 About the 52000 Production opportunity cost. Why do you count infantry equipment as free? It has also an opportunity cost: You got 72500 infantry equipment when you changed the divisions. 72500 * 0.58 Production = 42000. So you “only” would save 10000 Production, which is under 20% of your calculation. And it might be just me, but needing over 20% more manpower for your army and having a 1 combat width more per battalion is not that great.
A better comparison would be to compare 7/2 divisions to 10/0s as they have the same combat width, and after AAT it's a relatively efficient combat width regarding overstocking penalties.
@@huguesdepayens807 Arms against Tyranny. The DLC in which they changed how combat widths work. Before then you just used 20/40 widths to be optimal, now a lot more different widths are viable and the penalties are much less harsh.
@@Fusselikosmall correction: the first DLC to change combat width was No Step Back - AAT did make further tweaks to combat width, but the 20/40 paradigm has been dead for almost 3 years now
Played a game as historical poland with pure infantry + support artillery and tank divisions, got wrecked quickly by Germany. Did again with only heavy artillery infantry, shattered Germany's entire army in about a week. Granted, I changed a lot for the second run. I went Sanationist Right, did Grand Battleplan instead of Superior Firepower (reason was I figured the entrenchment and planning bonuses would either equal or outweigh the superior firepower bonuses, and the land night attack +25% would tip the scales in GBP's favor. Yes, with all the bonuses the Sanation Right branch gets, I did get land night attack +25% before Germany declared war), annexed Lithuania, and rejected the Memel demand to go to war a few months early. Still, the main advantage of adding line artillery is to maximize soft attack, which causes the highest possible enemy casualty rate on an hourly basis. It strains Germany's abilities to replace their manpower and equipment losses much more than pure infantry with support artillery would. It also requires only 500 manpower per battalion instead of 1000, and is 167 men per width vs the 500 of infantry. This means to fully occupy the total combat width of the frontline (important for defending), you need around 35-50% less men with heavy artillery divisions than with pure infantry. Useful for countries with low manpower like Poland. Furthermore, divisions with line artillery take fewer casualties than those without for the same reason. Artillery divisions have fewer men in them, so fewer casualties taken. Simple enough. And then there's the org penalty. Yes, artillery divisions having less org is a problem, but it isn't all that bad. Many players overemphasize org. But if you can make a change to a division that makes it have 20% less org but with 25% more soft attack, yes, the division org will only last 20% as long as before, but the enemy's org will also only last 20% as long because they're being punished harder. So the end result of such a change is that any battles you were already winning, you'll just win faster, which helps build momentum on a strategic level. And when playing Poland, you're running on a time limit when fighting Germany, so any way to accelerate victory in the war is valuable. Also, battles lasting for a shorter time means that your divisions take less hp damage, meaning less damaged to strength, and therefore fewer casualties. Again. Note: Early game artillery has a more substantial advantage over early game infantry (25 base soft attack vs 6, a 4-to-1 ratio) vs late game artillery and late game infantry equipment (34 vs 12, a 3-to-1 ratio). So it's easier to justify adding line artillery to divisions prior to 1940 than after. Finally, there's the biggest reason to add line artillery to divisions. The AI compares the strength of their army vs yours, afaik, by comparing deployed manpower on the line and the total summed up org on the line. By having fewer divisions, with less org and lower manpower, you create the perfect appearance of a weak army, while actually having a very strong one. This convinced Germany to attack me all out repeatedly despite it being a very bad idea. Btw, the worst stat in the game is defense. When your division attack exceeds enemy defense, you get a bonus damage output to all of the excess, which gives an extra boost to artillery divisions that I hadn't mentioned yet. When your division defense exceeds enemy attack, you literally get no benefit at all. Since getting enough division defense to exceed the attack values of AI divisions in the game is literally the easiest thing, all extra bonuses to division defense are literally trash. This is why, even when defending territory, I'll use force attack bonuses to hold the line instead of last stands. Last stands are actual garbage. Finally, I gotta praise GBP. In mots wars in HOI4, the critical phase of the war is the first few weeks, and it's hardest to win when the enemy is numerically superior. GBP entrenchment and planning bonuses give all the same buffs as SP in those first few weeks and more, as they boost hard attack and, in the case of planning, breakthrough. And then you get the land night attack bonus, which counts for even more. GBP is really just the best.
Ok buddy, this is quite confusing. The video maker says the artillery is useless. And you are saying the artillery saved your ass? Thats totally opposite! Im confused.
@@SirPeacemaker I admitted that I didn't do a scientific comparison already. The second run went for heavy artillery only, but it also annexed the Baltics and went to war with Germany ~6 months early over Memel instead of Danzig. It meant, for one thing, that Germany only had the port of Konigsberg in the east, which made it easier to encircle and destroy the east prussian units Germany had. In the original run, my tanks captured Konigsberg but were stopped at Memel. Maybe if I had Memel to begin with, the plain infantry would have worked. Another problem I had in the original run was lack of manpower, since the Sanationist Right path gave me a bunch of recruitable population bonuses that I idn't get in my original run, so overall I just had a bigger army in the second run. Still, there's no question that artillery have higher soft attack per width than infantry equipment, and if you can fully utilize the combat width of the front line, you can maximize enemy casualty rates by maximizing soft attack, which requires artillery.
1. Your tank brigade is 4 times more expensive than line artillery. 144/3=48, 400/2=200 per combat width. Almost 80% more in terms of supplies per width. 2. 200 inf eq 1 per division x 363 divisions are 36000 IC. So i can get 363x20 soft attack or about 3 30 width tank divisions. It's not really inf vs art but art vs tanks. If you can afford it go tanks otherwise use art.
This. Tanks are better than arty yes, but also cost a lot more. So those that can bring out tanks are the ones with industrial capacity to do so. But doctrines are also important, Mobile Warfare, offers the best tank stats for the breakthrough(Blitzkrieg) or for the infantry battalions staying power (Mobile Infantry) so that they can hold out longer. If you go with tanks, you better off using Mobile Warfare, not SF. SF is good for artillery.
Not sure about new width mechanics but before attack values had non linear utility. That is 400 attack is more than twice as useful as 200 attack because of defense/breakthrough mechanics.
thats still a thing, its why tanks are far better at pushing than infantry and you can use the ic saved from not using line artillery to build those tanks! soft attack over the defense/breakthrough of your opponent has a 40% chance to hit instead of a 10%, meaning you do 4x the damage for each point over the defense the bonus for not being pierced is also 40% more damage so a tank unit for each soft attack over defense (it gets far more than artillery) gets 5.6x damage for each point over defence. tanks also do more damage per width yadda yadda you get the picture exponential damage extra modifiers huge breakthrough concentration of force theres a lot of advantages most people are just lazy and bad at micro
I see what you are trying to say, but to say that it is a "noob trap" and that it "doesn't work 95% of the time" it's a bit over exaggerated. As you said, arty gives the division the ability to deliver tons of soft attack without the need of fuel and at a relative cheap cost, losing org and speed in certain terrains, that's it, if you know the pros and cons of it you are good to go imo. Of course tanks are better for attacking, that's their purpose, but first, to get the good tanks you need to spend some time making the research and second, they use fuel. The same exact reasoning goes for CAS. Arty gives you straight away at the beginning of the game a lot of soft attack and with this soft attack you can use your infantry division to attack. Of course, the ideal strategy is to only attack with tanks and to only defend with infantry, but in a lot of situations is very convenient to be able to attack with your regular infantry. So I think it's just a different strategy, with arty you feel a bit more "confident" because regular infantry can be used for both attacking and defending and don't need fuel. With only tanks (as you suggested) you need to keep in mind that all your infatry will have to stay put and never ever move, for any attack you need too move your tanks and in certain regions or terrains it could be difficult because of supply and reliability issues.
The artillery battalion, like any other battalion type, has its pluses and minuses. One minus not mentioned is that an artillery battalion will slow down an infantry battalion more in jungle and forest than a towed anti-air battalion. One plus not mentioned of artillery battalions is that 7-day abilities of generals, Siege Artillery and Makeshift Bridges being a couple of examples of 7-day abilities, cost Command Points based on battalion count, meaning that you get a lot of extra Soft Attack during those 7 days for the amount of Command Points spent. If attacking a Maginot Line for example, especially if your division design is boosted with medium support company flame tanks, then each additional artillery battalion will provide a substantial boost to fort degradation speed for the amount of extra Command Points spent on the 7-day Siege Artillery ability, and at a much lower Industrial Cost of the equivalent number of extra tank battalions. Short version: Towed artillery battalions can slow you down in jungle and forest, but are nice to have if spending Command Points on 7-day abilities.
Excellent point about command abilities. Although, you know how I play. I take the "around the Maginot" focus literally and drive around it. Ooops, no one covered Sedan again. Guess I'll take Paris without firing a shot.
The largest use for line art in my opinion is with marines, naval invasions. Being able to deal so much concentrated damage in a extremely short time is absolutely key to wining the pacific war or when playing free France. (in multiplayer)
While more expensive, you still want artillery divisions for major nations because when a battle starts there is a maximum combat width per tile and your best bet is to fill this width why actual good soft attack divisions no matter the cost. If you look at the efficiency, of course infantry only divisions are the best but in a limited combat width you won't gain any advantages from overstacking your infantry only divisions. A good example of that is China vs Japan in the second sinojapanese war, china has no artillery vs japan full fletched artillery divs. The result is China losing a lot of manpower and more equipment overall.
If you want more firepower per width (and better stats overall), I think tanks are the better bet. And I don't mean space marines, but instead dedicated panzer formations. If you are facing supply problems, line ART isn't doing you any favors. Might as well use tanks. Again, if fuel is an issue, then yes, line ART makes more sense.
@@counterfactualgaming No they're not. Towed Artillery, even the basic one, is 27.5 soft attack (because you *will* have at the very least the 'interwar artillery' tech that increases the base 25 soft attack by 10%, you need it for the tank guns) for 3.5 IC. Just-a-medium-tank with light tank's one-man turret, riveted armour, and heavy machine gun with 8 soft attack, and *NOTHING ELSE* is already more expensive on a per-unit basis (3.6 vs 3.5 IC), AND you need more of them per battalion- you need 50 tanks, but you only need 36 artillery, and sure you get some armour and 10 breakthrough, but the artillery gives you 3x the soft attack, 5x the defence, the same hard attack, and 2/3 breakthrough (6 vs 10), at 2/3 the price of *literally the cheapest tank you can possibly make.* A 9/3 infantry division with support artillery and cav recon (recon gives soft attack bonus for artillery and it's basically free- you should have a surplus of guns and support equipment anyway) and basic 1936 equipment, but with the stat increasing techs (up to 1940 ones) and no doctrines (checked in on Czechoslovakia as they start without one) has 181 soft attack, 275 defence, 54 breakthrough, 230 HP and costs 930 IC. To make an infantry division of equal cost, but with tanks, it would have to be 8/3 with zero support battalions and the aforementioned cheap-ass tanks, and it still costs 940 IC And for that cost we get... 77 soft attack- or 42% of the original value, 208 defence- or 75% of the original value, a bit less hard attack, less HP- 206- or 89% of the original value, and 58 breakthrough- or a measly 7% increase over the original value. Sure, it also has 17 armour, so against most AI units you only suffer 50% losses... unless they put AA in, in which case you're fucked. But even without AA, the battle will last 2.4x longer because you don't have as much soft attack to push with, meaning that in the end you will still suffer more losses because the battle will just take longer, it also means more losses due to the reliability mechanic, and less micro potential- when every battle takes 20 days, there is no way to do an encirclement or any manoeuvrer without the AI being able to relocate units in time. On the other hand- to make an infantry division with equal (or slightly better) offensive stats, but with tanks, it would take a different tank- with a close support gun, heavy machine gun (the secondary turret) and a three-man light tank turret (best breakthrough per IC ratio) and nothing else- again trying to make it as cost effective as possible. Make it a 10/3 (also making it the same CW- 26 vs 27) with artillery and engineer support, and sure such a division finally has the same soft attack- 180 vs 181, better defence- 292 vs 275, better HP- 258 vs 230, (those two mainly due to additional infantry battalion) and 98 breakthrough vs 58, that's almost twice as much breakthrough, AND it still has some armour- 15 to be precise, so again- enough to defend against infantry without AA. BUT, it costs twice as much as the 9/3 artillery one 1873 vs 930, and it's slower because no recon and tanks have harsher negative terrain modifiers than artillery, and it uses oil so unless you have some in-house production that's gonna cost you some civies, and you can't begin production on day 1 because you need xp to create the tank template, you need "interwar artillery" tech for the gun, and you need to research the basic medium tank chassis (unless you use the light tank one... but then you can kiss the armour bye bye, and it's actually even less IC efficient because light tanks use 60 pieces per battalion and most of that tank's cost is in the modules not the chassis) So even with *I M M A C U L A T E* industry micro you're gonna have like 2.2x fewer divisions. Now while sure- France could probably be fine with 55 divisions instead of 120, not every country has the luxury of not having to man long frontlines.
it's interesting to see how the evolution of artillery in the hoi4 has gone. in some of the earliest patches, pre-TfV, artillery was godlike; then it got nerfed. then it got nerfed again. the 7-2 stuck around, partially out of strategic inertia, and I distinctly remember running 14-4 moto-katyusha divisions even in early NSB! But it was NSB, with the close support gun and howitzers on mediums, that put the nail in the coffin for line artillery. or maybe it was completely different, idk, I'm just a senile old veteran talking off memory. Glad I found your channel. I like this content.
Some time ago, I did a video where I used those old 14-4 divisions to win the war. Some viewers were nostalgic. Other players were like "I use that template all the time. It's not outdated."
I have a full library of livestreams where I don't use line ART at all. Still killing 2-3 times as much manpower as I lose. If you don't translate the line ART into more planes and tanks, and then don't use those tanks to push properly, you will be smashing your infantry against enemy positions in less than optimal situations.
Arty fills a rather neiche role in hearts of iron 4. Its primary use is to stack soft attack to obliterate enemies. Usually you would want tanks to do this, but, if you are playing like communist china or some minor nation that cannot afford tanks, your push divisions can be based on arty as it is less demanding tech wise, and offers decent pushing capabilities. defensively the 40 or so soft attack can go a LONG way, especially when paired with entrenchement. Also arty on mountaineers is a decent option as there are decent buffs in the special forces doctrine that buff it further. It depends on how you build your divisions really. Like i say, tanks are optimal for breaching enemy lines but when i play minor nations, i usually go arty. Also every defensive division i make would generally have 1 or 2 arty as i see that it helps a lot in soft attack. Calvary recon support also buffs all the arty by 10% in soft attack which makes for a nice addition in terms of firepower. Overall, it has its pros and cons, but i would not declare it “useless 95% of the time” It’s just you would not add arty on every division.
I would love to see an analysis of different combat widths i personally lile 18 width because its and even number(you don't need line support) and is almost half as likely to fail to reinforce as 30 and 35. Yes larger divisions take less damage to enemies with higher coordination because they have less defence. But large divisions half nearly half the org and its mostly infatry equipment you are loosing anyway.
A simplifying assumption is that 2/3 of the attack gets spread around evenly, and 1/3 gets concentrated at the lowest Organization defending division. As such, you want your lowest Organization defending division on a tile to have a good Armor rating, in order that the attacker will have the bulk of its attack halved due to not having enough Piercing. Example: 3 divisions are defending a tile that is suffering 432 attack. 288 attack, which is 2/3 of that 432 attack, is split 3 ways, meaning each of the 3 defending division receives 96 attack from the evenly split portion of the attack. The low Organization defending division that gets bullied suffers an additional 144 attack, 1/3 of 432, for a total of 96 + 144 = 240 attack to defend against. 240 divided by 432 is about 56%, leaving each of the 2 non-bullied higher Organization defending divisions to face about 22% of the attack. Of course, if there is enough Armor on the bullied low Organization defending division, only 120 of the attack that it receives, half of the 240 attack nominally directed against it, counts toward overwhelming the division Defense stat, even in plain terrain with no fortification. Normally, it only takes 1 heavy tank battalion in a division in order to get a good enough Armor rating to cut the enemy's attack in half. In fact, adding in that 1 heavy tank battalion in advance to 1 of the 3 defending divisions reduces Organization in that division, turning that division into a damage sponge for the other 2 divisions.
Yeah I came to this conclusion as well (for USA). Line artillery kept causing huge losses on offense. Medium tank space marines take 10x less casualties and actually push tiles. Mass infantry with just support + 1 tank is also incredibly supply efficient.
I did not believe this, so I did my own tests, and now I actually agree that line artillery is overrated. In my own tests, I found that adding light SPGs is the most cost-effective way to add soft attack to divisions they performed comparably to medium tank/spgs in the tests, but used fewer resources to build). I just tried a single-player campaign where I only used support artillery for my basic line infantry, and used the freed-up industrial capacity to build motorized 30-width shock troops with light SPGs, and they absolutely tore the AI divisions to shreds.
@@counterfactualgaming Iraq and Saudi Arabia for the tests, because they don't have any unique spirits or focuses (so my tests were done in dessert, but I cheated in max infrastructure and supply hubs).
@@SirPeacemaker SPG=self propelled gun, the game refers to it as SP artillery or just the artillery role in the tank-designer (The hoi4 wiki on the tank-designer explains the different roles) Sorry if I answered the same thing two or three times, it looked to me like my answer got deleted.
I've done that, too. Interestingly, it's hard to do that because a lot of division OOBs were pretty fluid. Just tracking OOB changes to US divisions from Overlord to the end of the war is impossible to mimic in HOI4 because you'd have to pay 25 XP every month to swap TDs in and out of divisions.
To this day I am annoyed that I cannot recreate (for example) Soviet motor rifle divisions because they had regiments that included battalions of types that the game does not allow together, tanks and mot/mech.
This video failed to convince me. First, your stats are with using superior firepower, so +50% soft attack to the support artillery, without it the division seriously lacks firepower (support is still entirely worth it though). Next, your tank template is so expensive and with so little reliabilityyou probably lose half of it when walking on the first mountain tile you encounter. Like seriously, your template is 400 for a battalion, with 136 I can equip my artillery and with the extra 264 I can equip 5 infantry battalions. So a small division against a single battalion. Tanks have their uses and are very strong in this game, but not as a replacement for artillery With a bit more thought tanks as artillery have a niche use on offensive infantry divisions in plains and without any supply issue, since tanks have worst modifiers on most terrain and the template shown in the video will take ridiculous attrition
15:34 with this you could make it even cheeper. You can make it with a light tank chassis, have it use wheels instead of tracks, and put a easy maintenance on it. While it doesn’t make it better width wise it would allow you to make more divisions with them. Now I basically only play MP now so idk about it SP, but a lot of the time it is a good idea to have that cheep soft attack for areas of the front where there are no tanks. For instance on Barbarossa, a lot of times I see Bulgaria players make cheep SP artillery or motorized artillery divisions just to encircle Soviet infantry. It’s also important since most of the time you can’t make your main tanks cater to soft attack in MP because you need to fight enemy tanks, so they need hard attack. And then, if for instance the Soviet Union gets guerrilla warfare tactics at the end of mobile, it can become time consuming to even push their infantry with your main tanks.
This is basically why as Germany I would go for light tanks instead of artillery. Plus you don’t need to trade for more tungsten. And especially considering you will invade so many places you’ll just get free artillery, but the armour and similar soft attack values means you get more bang for your buck than artillery. If you go for enough fighters and CAS, and do strength damage to enemy divisions, eventually even with Light Recon Tanks with no extra armour you will eventually gain the armour bonus against most AI divisions (if you add it to every division you have / disband the armour divisions you start with(as Germany I attack Poland ASAP so if you don’t disband those divisions of armour you won’t have enough to add recon to every infantry division)). Add armour on later or get tech upgrades and you will be laughing once you get medium flamer tanks and stick those on as well as a light TD bat with medium cannons/ or medium tanks / and/or with howitzers. Basically no one will pierce you until 1940, and even then you should then be able to field a few tank divisions to clean things up for yourself(I would rush schwimpanzer and get marines schwims 30 width and use them to take rivers and such for the rest of my army to funnel thru and surround).
Great video, I really liked the minmax optimization approach. Also the supply usage by line arty is a huge point, meaning that you can stack more of pure inf divisions without attrition. Though one point of line arty that was omitted, is that in the case of defense of USSR, for instance, line arty will inflict more casualties and equipment losses to germans, meaning it would be easier to win the war on attrition. But it still can be argued that the same amount of IC spent on planes and tanks can actually inflict much more damage
Hello. I ran tests for something similar, calculating the Defensive power of Infantry and Line Artillery accounted for Damage Dealt to enemy division per manpower losses instead of IC, for my personal use for minor nations with a lot of industry due to overpowered focus trees. When being attacked by German AI's average late 1939 infantry division, which was 9/1 with support artillery and engineers(155 soft/21 cw). I used the formulas of the wiki, and the damage taken was accounted for combat width of the defending division and multiplying the attack accordingly. Accounted for the test were: every 1940 tech. The stats of each component was taken from the division designer, and calculated in Excell, cross referenced to the ingame tooltip on several occasions. This means that the passive buffs were accounted for. Entrenchment (FM with defensive Doctrine, Static warfare spirit of the academy, for every point of entrenchment, +2*1.4 attack and defence) Unaccounted for the test were: Hard attack, as AI germany had only six 18 width tank divisions (3 medium 2 light and 4 motorised), and and italy had a few pure tank divisions, some of them without many actual tanks in them for both countries. Compared to their 115 infantry amd 10 other soft divisions (horse, mountaineer, etc) it is not important. Additionally the german division had 50% hardness. -Also god fear the empty Bulgarian and Hungarian light tank division that manifests in every single game. Recon and battle tactics. From in-game testing, I found that a defensive division with recon took 10% less casualties and dealt 15% more, so I am adding cavalry recon or, even better, rangers. Doctrines. Grand battleplan is the best on static defence, especially because I accounted for fully entrenched infantry on my tests. 10 entrenchment equals to +28% attack and defence when fully entrenched and with the correct FM and spirit of the academy. Piercing and Air attack. Piercing has proved to be unnecessary against Germany and Italy in 1940, but still useful for that rare tank that might appear, and the reduction to Air supperiority and Ground attack is invaluable so I am putting Support AA too. Defence. 155 soft attack/21 cw is going to be outmatched by the defence stat of any sizable infantry division. TLDR, when trying to conserve manpower, for a 50+ mil minor with 250k manpower on limited in 1940, that even with 30 mils on planes, has too many mils to equip it's infantry. The test I made showed that the ideal ratio is 5.8 infantry to 1 line artillery, and concluded that the ideal defensive divisions for 30 and 35 width were 12/2 and 13/3 respectively, with support Artillery, Engineers and Field Hospitals, but in a real game you might want to add recon and AA support companies.
Line Artillery is something that you can put 1 mil on in the early 1936 game and have most of your support ect artillery ready for war in 1939. Support Artillery should be a no brainer in the numbers of artillery for the obvious gains in soft attack. Line Artillery has always been kind of an odd thing. It can be VERY effective but takes time to produce as the creator has stated. The game has changed a lot in the last few years now that we're custom designing navy, air, and tanks now sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse now. Line artillery is VERY effective in special forces such as Marines and Mountaineers, the gains made in soft attack while lowering some of their Amphibious and Mountain/Hill bonuses allows them to power through very very well against other units. The terrain combat width has changed again with the latest expansion Trial of Allegiance. It used to be the optimal combat width for forests was 21 or 42 and while 20 or 40 still worked very well the 21 and 42 width units fit in perfectly for the eastern front which is super forest heavy (know your terrain). You could add in a single line artillery for a boot in soft attack performance without breaking the bank too hard in production numbers. Now the combat width for forest is 60 so its 60, 30, 20, 15 for combat width numbers in forest tiles. The large problem that the OP identified is production or really production timing. Artillery 1 is useful as support artillery but as line artillery you need a LOT of it and Artillery 1 compared to Arty 2 or Art 3 feels very lacking. Also around that time you'll have to replace or reinforce a LOT of artillery in templates especially if you had just 1 mil on artillery in the early game. You'll have to expand that to 7 to 10 factories and it will still take the better part of a year to bring the efficiency up to equip all your divisions. He's also not wrong about the close support gun tanks and CAS advantage. In previous versions of the game Light Tanks were especially meh overall but now with close support gun you can have a tank div that is specifically made to push around enemy infantry while also occasionally getting some overruns. With CAS it may be 1936 CAS but CAS is still CAS, it interacts directly with the frontline combat unit and deals org damage. CAS doesn't have to (or shouldn't have to) fight off enemy air. Fighters fight fighters and the better and higher quantity fighters win the engagement but if you have green air your stocked up CAS will be doing frontline damage to units. TLDR : Support Arty is a must but line Artillery should be reserved for Special Forces and not in huge quantity only 2-3 tops for effectiveness and production cost. 1 or 3 for Mountaineers and 1 or 2 for Marines. You can try to put line arty in normal infantry but the game has changed and its not as good or needed anymore.
in multiplayer, the abundance of AA reduces CAS attack by about 70%, and also shreds it fast enough that you need a lot of factories just to maintain it. of course, the CAS is still worth having because of the ground attack bonus, and the extra damage is a nice bonus because it doesnt use combat width or supply. but you really should have some of your infantry with artillery. generally it is good to have 3 different infantry templates- the cheaper infantry for defensive purposes, and then your "good" infantry is split between 2 different types, 1 that maximizes soft attack and 1 that maxes hard attack.
I was actually avoiding line artillery unless need really bad, bcz of movement and modifiers. So feels good someone else saying the same. I almost never play superior firepower anyway.
Jokes on you though, I use modern warfare, and almost always have 8-9 infantry battalions, and up to 2 artillery battalions. (I have already used up all five of my support companies :P )
That certainly is an option. If you think you need other stats besides SA, it can make sense. I actually use the autocannon on paratrooper light tanks.
I use 8 inf + 6 line artilery + support stuff and this div delete anything on the map with very small casualties. Add antitank to support eq if you fight against tanks. Line artillery was and is the best. You need 8-10 div like this, other divisions can be 14wide regular divs to hold the frontlines till line artillery will do his enemy cleaning job.
Only use case I see for line artillery is running grand battleplan in niche situations. For example, if you stay non-aligned Finland, you don't have manpower to make mostly infantry divisions (even with 200 weekly guy and focuses), so you can put arty instead because even if 50% of your battalions are arty, you're still manpower capped. You could do really cheap tanks instead...but they don't cover whole line as easily and take fuel, which is a problem. Outside of scenarios like that, the other way to use it is for the sort of player who will just line up stuff on the front line and sit there entrenched. Unlike humans, AI will attack into this. Entrenched arty crosses the threshold where AI can't supply enough stuff to de-org full width of it before the attackers run out of org, and thus AI will mulch millions of manpower in half a year or less on wide fronts. After it does, it turns out that 50% strength enemy divisions with poor experience is one way to have enough breakthrough to block crits lol. Not the most exciting way to play, but easy to execute! I wonder if it counts as infantry for mass assault purposes in terms of reorg and reinforce rate? I've never tried arty heavy builds for mass assault, but presumably if you can get really fast reinforce speeds, you could attack from one direction --> add support attacks from 2 others after combat is initiated and just cancel out any time the enemy reinforces, otherwise enjoying non-trivial windows of time where you're +width over enemy. I expect this can easily reinforce meme opponents w/o mass assault or signals, but would be a nightmare to micro against players and countered by someone rolling hardness into it.
Took me a couple days to come back to finish this video. But i wish to say thank you for putting the numbers together on the screen that made it way easier and much appreciated. Also i love the analyst and advice you put on here. Shall try to put it into my gameplay
From my 4000 hours of experience, planes are still kings of battle, space marines are good but expensive and a pain for supply. Also combat with is not as important as it was since the last updates so it is ok to use artillery, personnally I use it along tanks in my divisions and it never went wrong. But in the end, the fact is as long as you have green hair and divisions with at least 50 org, it's all ok.
Honestly I never understood Space Marines. I guess they work in MP when people forget that AT exists, but against the AI they are useless. Every nation puts in support AT and that's enough to pierce anything. I have not been able to build an infantry division that doesn't get pierced by basic AI divs
@@Frontline_view_kaiser They are forbidden in most MP games, as for singleplayer, it depends on the type of tanks you are using, light tanks won't work, you have to use medium tanks with at least 50 or 60 armor. but as I said, it doesn't really matter anyway because in the end it all comes down to air superiority.
@@gabilax2745 Yeah, I get that. But the idea behind it is that the enemy will not be able to pierce my infantry divisions. However if I use medium tanks with 60+ or even heavy tanks with 120+ armor, a basic infantry template with support AT will still pierce them
@@Frontline_view_kaiser I'm not an expert, so I dont know if I'm right but I think AT can only pierce a % of the armor. So it id still usefull, I think
The best answer here is quite simple. First of all, the artillery is just too expensive for spamming it in regular infantry divisions and secondly, most important, you don't need the soft attack at defense (infantry is used for defending first of all); so if you put artillery into infantry and you explain it like "i want to attack more effectively" - bro, just learn tanks and use them for this purpose😅
One day I should do a short video that explains why the armor advantage is so punishing on divisions that can't pierce panzers. The extra ORG damage is really well worth the cost when attacking because you want to just melt ORG and force a retreat, not simply inflict general damage.
I use 21 widths and push just fine, the division isn’t everything, conditions matter far more, with CAS, good grind on generals, good terrain, or just simple nation buffs, you can easily push, in fact, you honestly only need green air with 21 widths
The big problem is you can't have 3 support artys and you'll need the support slot for things that can make your life easier Not so significant in multi-player since you'd be dead very quickly no matter what, since most players can't stay synced for extended periods of time
For the opportunity cost of IC I would like to point out that you completely neglected infantry equipment. Assuming you're using 1939 tech, without an MIO infantry equipment costs .58 and the infantry equipment cost of each battalion of infantry is 100. Now, the infantry equipment for the 365 divisions you switched over to the artillery template would have an IC cost of 116 per division coming to a total of 42340 IC with a rate of 26.47 IC per division. Now, subtracting that from your sum of 52000 IC that would leave the opportunity cost at 9660 which would give you ~535.48 T-34s and 172.5 IL-5 Sturmoviks. While your point on IC efficiency is still valid it has a nearly negligent impact especially when considering it took 365 divisions to get such a large IC inefficiency.
I like your thinking. The infantry equipment cost does factor in to the opportunity cost and I while I don't have the brainpower to answer this question for myself I am interested to know what the combat with would do. With his support arty template he has a width of 16. Small infantry divisions take more damage due to low HP and last I checked 15 width, while being able to fit perfectly into most tiles that aren't plains (forests and hills 60+30 width) wasn't advisable for precisely this reason. Instead 18 width was the bare minimum and while that didn't fit perfectly the HP prevented it from hemorrhaging equipment too much and the rest of the stats (more attack, defense, org, etc..) made up for the lack of divisions you could stack in a tile. I know the width meta has shifted a little bit since then and while I have kept up with it I don't nearly have enough understanding as to why it shifted to be certain of anything aside from these principles Low HP=Resource hemorrhage, and stats can make up for width inefficiency. But surly he's more width savvy than me and could make those divisions a bit bigger to fit in with the current width meta? I mean he messes up the entire experiment using that 16 width division because it doesn't fit and it's only 1 width wider than 15 so it's not going to compete with a bare minimum division of 18 width, doesn't he? Won't the lack of HP effect resource loss and make up for all the equipment and manpower he is supposedly saving with this template? He says this division is capable of defeating AI Germany but at what cost? I'd like to see him use this template to defeat Germany and see how many losses he takes. Personally I doubt it can take on Germany without mass loss, as they include a lot of Line arty in their divisions, I think they use 9-3 divisions. Don't quote me on that, it's been a while since I checked, but even a 18 width arty support division couldn't hold up to that amount of soft attack I had to change my line division to include 2 line arty in order to hold them back after I lost and restarted the run. I made it a 22 width, which did the trick, and I had a smaller army than what he has there. PS if anyone knows what the current width meta is I'd appreciate the knowledge so that I can know what I'm talking about, cause I'm speaking from my ass with completely anecdotal evidence here and it sucks.
You make an excellent point. I was more concerned with just showing players how many guns it takes to put a line ART throughout the entire army and then breaking down that cost. But yes, the infantry kits are a part of the equation depending on how you set up the divisions.
To add on @Alorand and what he commented. Not only should you have compared 2 Line arty vs 3 inf. But also looked at Mass mob Inf. 2v3 Test is on 1936 tech 3x more softattack for arty and that for only around 1.7 times the cost. 2v3 Test on 1940 tech gives around 2.1 times more softattack for arty. Mass mob test 1936: 2x more softattack for arty Mass mob test 1940: around 1.8x more softattack for arty I think this will get even better for Inf on Mass mob with the 1944 inf gun. Eitherway: I think arty should still be used for inf like in 7/2s because you get the softattack of a 28 width (1940 tech) pure inf division while being a 20 width division. Mass mob is different. Sure the test was with 3.2 width vs 3 width. But rushing higher Gun levels could mean that you can get a better ratio earlier. A Mass mob pure inf stack of 19.2 width has also nearly 2x HP (compared to a 7/3) while having 66% the softattack and around 33% more defence. Production micro is also easier.
If I were going to deep dive Mass Mobilization with artillery, then i would actually be focused on those supply consumption reductions that would potentially allow more artillery in supply capped areas. But I'd still prefer the extra tanks or planes with Mass Mobilization than slapping more factories on line ART in many situations. Let the cheap infantry with reduced width hold the line while the T-34s and CAS breakthrough and destroy.
The argument tanks vs artillery kinda moody just because for the tanks to get the good guns, you need to be already down the artillery research tree. For a minor that starts with limited slots, having to research the chassis, the engine and armour modules AND artillery while potentially only having 2-3 research slots is a daunting task. Another argument I'd make in favour of line artillery, is that with MIOs artillery actually gets kinda jacked, with increases to soft attack and breakthrough and a lot of reliability. If you use maintenance with them you will hardly be losing them, be it recovery after battle or attrition. Otherwise I agree, artillery is not a must have like many people make it out to be
This all depends if you're a minor or a majoe tbh. If you're a solo minor and you need line holders maybe artillery is justified, as you won't have the tech/industry to get both tanks and planes and imo planes are more important. If you're a minor in a team? You focus either tanks, planes or line holders, either way it's better to do one thing the best than do everything. And if you're a major you absolutly do have the tech and industry to do tanks, and you should be, cuz you'll need them to push anyway. Edit: if you're maximising for soft attack only then you don't need armour or engines on your tank and you probably want an earlier chassis to make it more IC efficient
Well, what I said about the close support gun also applies here. It's an early tech, and it requires no tungsten, so for minors who want to do something halfway decent with tanks, you just grab that one artillery tech and slap those guns in tanks (if you even need the tech) and just roll. And while line ART is problematic, definitely grab ART techs and put support ART throughout the army. I bet even Tibet can just ignore penalties from not importing tungsten and put 1 MIC on ART and put support ART in their few divisions.
Close support gun tanks only have SA/width of 16, which is little better than line art of 14. When howitzer 2 comes along, this strategy is more viable. But line art is not wrong or noob. Its just different. Depends if you want an army of space marines (in fact, very close to the Anglo-French integrated armour/infantry concept that was destroyed conceptually by blitzkrieg - concentrated armour spearhead with infantry as follow up).
Yeah I think the comparisons between pure infantry vs infantry + art wasn't really ideal because the typical case is adding 1 to 3 artillery to bigger units and fighting in terrain that's not favorable to tanks, no air nearby. Asia, Africa, etc.
Then what template division would your recommend for your attack divisions for a minor with a low factory count ? Regular tank division with the cheapest tanks you can make ?
Cheap tanks are going to be what you need. Depending on your country's resources (do you even have tungsten or chromium?), you want dirt cheap tanks with guns that don't cost extra resources and armor schemes that don't require extra resources. I compare cheap and expensive tanks in this video here: ua-cam.com/video/p9UG-YNcOAU/v-deo.htmlsi=Pr533VfbvyihkoEt It's possible to create tanks that need only 1 steel per factory. Even Tibet can afford it. :)
@@counterfactualgamingwow that was a good video. The TD strat is great. On that video you use medium tanks. Do you think using light tanks the same way is a good idea if you have a low factory count ? Or is it too IC inefficient ?
@@leros6484 You can use light tanks. The advantage is that you can stack armor on light tanks now to high levels at the cost of needing more armor tech and reliability loss. The down side is that light tanks can't mount heavy cannons with their fixed mount. I'm also not sure if the light tank stats for high armor tanks justify the increased cost. At a certain point, the light tanks basically cost the same as mediums.
Probably because playing mainly with the USA, you didn’t take into consideration two huge point in preferring artillery both to men and tanks, which is manpower and oil saving. In late game that makes the difference much more than simple stats.
You might want to go through my livestreams and find the one where I defeated the Soviets using only panzer divisions and air power as the Germans. You don't need to be the US to make effective use of both air power and armor.
If you craft some specialized attacking divisions, I think that would fall into the 5% of situations where the line ART makes sense. Like, I could see you putting a small stack of divisions with line ART in Kiev to hold the city and prep counter attacks. Or maybe you want some line ART in amphibious formations. But putting line ART in the entire Red Army is a waste when you could just have real panzer formations to do the offensive work.
It's not my idea, but it's been suggested before that artillery have some scaling buffs on infantry stats in addition to their soft attack. This would make them more useful while not just giving them more killing power in general.
Why is line artillery considered so bad? When I play I can get soft attack over 200 with 1-3 line artillery, and keep my infantry #’s small and the template thrashed other (edit: majors too, russia hates it, though mix in some at) nations, mind you idk how to run the supply system so it slows down but they work amazingly well in my experience
It's not bad, it's pretty good. He didn't mention terrain maluses for tanks which will shrink their stats significantly plus as he said line artillery is still much cheaper. You mentioned anti tank, you use them against ai? It's waste, you can pierce ai with just anti air.
@@jarvee9407 yeah, only if I’m against russia or Germany tho, I’ll try the aa next time, but I only use that stuff in offensive brigades cause the defense is high enough normally
@@alphawarrior9938 Well I have never touched anti tank even against germany or Russia, aa is probably the best investment after support anti air. How much infantry do you use with that artillery?
Mostly emotional. As other user mentioned opportunity cost argument is weak, as instead of arty you'll need ton of infantry equipment. And comparison per width is also strange, much better to compare per production cost or something
Yes and no. Line ART uses less manpower. So, there's less manpower to lose. But line ART has far lower defense than an INF battalion. So, you will take more damage. And the kicker is that line ART has almost no hit points. So, be prepared for every point of damage to kill comparable manpower despite fewer manpower being used. Hmm, maybe a video on how HP works is called for.
@@counterfactualgaming would be nice to see them compared in the actually game combat in defense and in offence. Upd. And as far as I know in AAT 20w is good again, so 7/2 vs 10/0 can be compared I guess
@@counterfactualgaming i did the math if you want on the MP you will loose 6.7% more men with the arty but will loose 0.4% less rifles and 355.5% more arty by hit. we can get out of it that you should use line arty if you wanna spare your rifles
Question I have about one of the mentioned traps in attacking without tanks. I feel like I've always struggled on two front with tanks and that's one building them early enough to make sure you have filled divisions out and ready to go for them and two what should I be aiming for with them against the AI. I know multiplayer's a completely different ball game there but I don't play it. The problem I have with them is kinda the same problem with planes that you mentioned in the air craft video. Do you go for the easily made ones with low production cost that aren't going to be great or make the super expensive ones that take way too long to replace?
I've done it both ways, but let me break it down like this. There is no reason Germany can't budget 60 MIC to Panzer IVs with the first factories being put on Panzer IVs in 1939 or late 38. If you go cheap, there's no reason you can't have 9k by June of 1941 with 22 being constructed per day. If you go more expensive, you will have fewer, but 9k for Barbarossa allows for 24 panzer divisions (36 width). 24 panzer divisions with cheap tanks should be more than sufficient to curb stomp the Soviets on normal difficulty. And if you are building 22 tanks per day, you can maintain your numbers even as losses mount.
So in the early game its generally better to prioritize aircraft over tanks. Air-war is everything and infantry can push just fine with sufficient air-power. If you to knock out the allies in '37, go all out for planes and infantry, don't bother with tanks until you're gearing up for the soviet union
What do you think of putting support on light tank chassis? AA, AT, Howitzer, and then using wheeled and gun platforms to lower IC... it usually comes out half as expensive so you could theoretically make double to support losses easy. Tell me what you think.
For TDs, I would prefer bigger tanks just to get better stats, but there's no reason you can't make solid TDs with light tanks and high velocity guns. There are some solid use cases for putting an AA gun on a tank chassis, but I consider line AA by itself to be a solid investment regardless of whether you put it on a light tank or not. As for howitzers, all of the howitzers require a fixed mount for the light chassis, so that makes it SPART. And I think SPART is a waste 95% of the time. But the close support gun fits in a regular light turret. So, spam light tanks with close support guns.
@counterfactualgaming yeah thanks for responding, I'm getting at the absolute absurd cheapness of producing these things, you can get away with sometimes 30% off the ic with these things, making it like 1 or 2 ic per unit. Instead of the standard 3 to 4 per unit of the Towed AA or AT or howitzers
This might have been true back in the day but with the current width mechanics you can go wider and add more artilleries, particularly as you don't have enough slots for a full line of support companies and you have to pick and choose which you want to have. Starting with a support artillery is great when you only have a few units but later it is better to push two or three line artilleries into a heavy width attack division and free up the space in the support for something like a flame thrower tank.
Based on this one could conclude that the best division is a size 2 inf + support art.... I have a feeling there are factors beyond what the video covers...
I do mention the importance of things like supply and ORG. But if you think I'm advocating 2xINF and support ART, that's not what I'm saying at all. You want infantry divisions with sufficient width to properly cover tiles, enough ORG and defense to withstand punishment, and for them to be small enough to reinforce to width in stages. And as we saw last night on stream, even if Barbarossa starts late, and you are trying to attack through snow and blizzards, armor and CAS will fold the Soviets like a cheap suit more efficiently than line ART.
@@counterfactualgaming my point was that 10 div with 1 inf + support art would give more soft att per frontage than pretty much anything else. The solution isn't as simple as that, but w/o going into the value of large divitions over small, and the value over the other support battalions, it is easy to miss that.
@@ulfjohnsen6203 Oh yes, support ART is incredibly IC efficient in soft attack, but as a zero-width support, it is insanely efficient at boosting firepower per width. Unlike support companies with buffs that give the same percentage over the entire division regardless of width, so those trucks you spend cover more people with the same buff in larger divisions.
one thing that is probably playing against line artillery battalions, at least in terms of their combat value/cost ratio is that in HOI IV, those units specifically are overinflated in terms of size, as the 36 guns the game requires to a battalion is what a whole regiment was equipped with in most armies (3x12 guns, same can be said for most other units of the artillery/line support type), same with the support company, which has 3 times the guns of most (irl) artillery companies, which is weird as the manpower needed to fill an artillery battalion is consistent with what ran in our world, and the rest of the units (infantry battalions and tank battalions) are more correct with what most armies aligned in terms of equipment (at least for infantry, tanks i need more data as i've only looked at french orbats and they are... weird) point is, even if HoI is just a game and not reality, the cost of a single line artillery battalion is very high for what capabilities it brings to the division, and the support artillery is almost too good in comparison
I don't know what country you are referring to, but NATO standard are 3 guns per platoon, with four combat platoons in one battery. That's 12 guns per Battery. A battalion has three combat batteries (or companies) which makes for a total or 36 guns. The Red Army traditionally has less (9 guns per battery) but I'm not sure about this one
@@Frontline_view_kaiser WWII TO&E for France, Germany, USA & Soviet just looking at infantry divisions France: divisional artillery of 1 medium (75mm) and 1 heavy (105mm or 155mm) regiments, comprised of 3 and 2 groups (eq. to a btn) respectively, each group fields 12 guns (3 batteries of 4 guns) and 671 men for a total of 60 guns and 3355 men (+regimental services and a 8-gun AT battery attached to the medium regiment) Germany: infantry division (1941) aligns a single artillery regiment with 4 line battalions (3xlight and 1xmedium), the battalions aligns 12 guns (in the medium battalion it's 8x 155 hw and 4x 105 guns), no numbers on the crew per btn, but the whole regiment fielded 2500 men, which averages to 625 men/battalion (note that this includes the regiment HQ and sevices) (leaving out the infantry support guns as they complicate the calculations and aren't artillery stricto sensu) USA: divisional artillery in a brigade consisting of 4 battalions (3x 105mm and 1x 155 mm), each consisting of 3 batteries of 4 guns and 100 men each, plus service battery and HQ, for a total of 12 guns and little over 500 men at the battalion, or 48 guns and 2000 men at the brigade USSR: rifle division (1941) had 2 artillery regiments, one light with 2 battalions with 12 guns (ec containing 2 batteries of 4 76mm guns and a battery of 4 122mm howitzers) and one heavy with 3 battalions (2 of 12x 122mm hw and one of 12x 152mm hw) for a total of 60 guns (manpower numbers difficult to say, most sources online don't mention services) the UK was slightly different as the division had 3 regiments of 3 batteries, each containing 8 guns, for a total of 24 guns at the regiment, and 72 at the division (no numbers on the soldiery) all of these are based on a 12 gun (and roughly 500-600 men) battalion/group, and even for those who aren't (UK), the total number of guns in a division can still be divided by 12 couldn't find reliable numbers for other armies engaged in WWII but wouldn't be surprised if we would find similar patterns even in modern time a Field artillery battery doesn't field as many as 36 guns right now i can't seem to find the numbers for a US towed gun btn, but a SP (M109) battalion has 3x line batteries, each fielding 6 guns for a total of 18 guns at the battalion (US field artillery doesn't seem to use Regiments) for a French FA regiment, they have 3 batteries of 8 guns ec, for a total of 24 tubes (not counting AA)
@@Frontline_view_kaiseri can't find a time or place where a FA bty aligned 36 tubes at once, could you point me towards that because i have my doubts tbf
for the love of god, i don´t care what you use when u play in free time, but could you not use the NATO hieroglyphics when you make the video? everyone understands artillery icon, most people don´t understand rectangle with a dot in it
Stop being a child who needs cartoonish shapes. Its a military sim, you're in need of correcting not the OP. Players like you degrade the game. Gatekeeping is obviously justified when slackers cant be bothered to learn the least bit.
I don't use line artillery in my divisions because its really sucks,even at defence where luck of breakthrough doesn't matter i perefer tanks,aviation or "clear" infantry divisions with support company (artillery,light tank,flame med tank,rocket artillery...)
this video reminded me of everything wrong with the last dlc patch, it is the patch that made me want for paradox to truly stop cooking, NSB was pretty bad cuz the supply system is horrible, but it is nowhere as bad as AAT
@@counterfactualgaming i hope they stop fiddling with the balance soo much! If they focused on hoi5 and only added focus trees every dlc to a region i wouldnt mind at all (usually my group does a vanilla meme game every dlc drop, but for aat we didnt get a big one going). However the modding support they have been adding along with the dlcs is very nice, AAT just raises a lot of whys and it really comes out to change for the sake of change and if that goes bad it is very annoying. If they stopped all updates right now it would probably kill the game because the main audience are still the SP people and it isnt like vicy 2 where the game will linger on because there is no new equivalent and i have no clue whether hoi5 will be a "hoi4", a "vicy 2" or a "vicy 3". But eu5 is definitely in the works soo no clue if they are gonna risk both franchises soo close to each other. Tl;dr Focus tree dlcs are fine, even good, but only if they dont go after random parts of the game's balance, (also this sentance reminded me of the consumer goods change with AAT) aside from that i think yes, they should start focusing on hoi5
@@jansatamme6521 I can see why you feel this way. I like the consumer goods change in AAT, but that's because I prefer for it to be impossible to get to zero consumer goods (or even negative consumer goods).
The irony of your statement is that spamming artillery in HOI4 is also not as immersive. Putting 2-4 line ART plus a support ART in all of your infantry divisions is far more artillery than most nations used in the war. But if HOI4 had corps level artillery assets as a game mechanic, I think it would go a long way to making artillery better and more immersive. There's no way to really do this now except for having some heavy infantry divisions with extra line ART attached. Imagine a version of HOI4 where no one used line ART in their templates, but everyone had corps level artillery assets that got assigned to crucial sectors on the front. Now that would be interesting. And I expect the AI to screw it up. 😆
@@counterfactualgaming That's not what I am suggesting - depending on nation, you would usually have a support art for brigade sized units (so basically 10W and less) and 1, maybe 2 line art for infantry division.. Yea, like you say - it's usually on Corps level but we have what we have :D Anyway, I like how BICE does it :)
@@TheArakan94 I see what you are saying. Yeah, you do have to work with what the game gives you. I haven't played BlackICE in awhile. How do they do it these days?
@@counterfactualgaming pretty good I'd say - they got rid of some of the controversial artificial AI boosts, are adding more unique nation armor chassis and reworked economy - now you make steel in factories, there is food and stuff like that. But I haven't played much - waiting for the full MIO support and Air designer before I sink another few hundreds of hours into it :D
Division with 9 infantry battalions and 2 artillery "battalions", will have maximum attack out of all infantry/artillery combination. Pure 12 infantry battalions will have maximum defense. Both of them are good enough to stop attack of infantry divisions, unless they got overwhelmed by numbers. Both of them aren't strong enough to break threw infantry line. What you didn't mention is attrition. Just having artillery support company will have same attrition as having support company and one battalion of line artillery. So it is not as cheap as mentioned here. Also you haven't mentioned that artillery have less manpower requirement. For some nations that can be important consideration.
You need 36 artillery pieces per artillery battalion compared to 50 medium tanks per. Just for round numbers, 2900/50 = 58 battalions. That's about 1/7 of your total army that could have an equipped medium tank battalion with it. Granted, that's about 6-8 full medium tank divisions not including motorized/mechanized cost, which I would agree with you is more useful to the Soviets than having line artillery on infantry, but most countries aren't the USSR and don't have millions of manpower and a gigantic front to maneuver with. The USSR also gets massive penalties to their air force so while CAS is great it only works if you have at least contested air, which during Barbarossa you probably won't until the Germans are already exhausted. In the current meta it's probably true that IW tank space marines are all around the best (although SPAA is better than normal tanks for this), but hopefully at some point this will be fixed, maybe by weighting reliability negatively the way armor is weighted positively. I wouldn't say that makes line artillery a noob trap though, it works against the AI at least. It also has the practical advantage of being generic so you can get it more easily in lend lease or off the market, whereas you're stuck with whatever design other countries made on tanks if you need to import them.
Well, let's not forget that the Soviets also don't get the CAS MIO to boost their planes to insane levels. But I have no problem beating the Luftwaffe in a few months. If it's not obvious, I'm a slave to abusing air power. Last Barbarossa, I fought the entire thing under green air from day 1. Watching German panzers try to attack Riga across a river in red air was comical.
@@counterfactualgaming I haven't played AAT yet but I did see your video about the MIO that adds 50% ground attack or whatever it was. You absolutely can dumpster the AI air force if you're making anti-AI meta fighters, I did a challenge as the UK where I had to keep France from capping to Germany without putting any troops in Europe. I was able to decimate their supply so bad with logistics bombing they only got a few tiles south of the Belgian border.
@@Vaelosh466 You are in for a treat when you get AAT, then. Britain has Supermarine, and it's one of the two best MIOs for light fighters in the game. It's insanely good at making light fighters for killing other fighters.
while yes more org, and width, I think having more soft attack means they win engagements sooner, sooner the battle ends the less casualties you take, and so long run soft attack saves lives, if manpower is a concern playing defense, and saving manpower is the way I go, with manpower artillery, and entrenchment. And having a good defence means you can blead your oponent white while using your tanks as a strategic reserve. I jsut dig in to the most well defended spot I can and with superior soft attack unless they have armor there is little they can do to dislodge me. I may creep forward like a turtule but my deffence is impenetrable for the most part. but yeah if you have oodles and oddles of manpower and you don't care about your mens lives goign without line arteliry is good for freeing up production for more tanks and airplanes.
idc about this video, i will still use them as they are the cheapest way to boost your offensive, as long as you have equipment in stockpile you don't even need air to win with them, axis including japan and soviets don't care about manpower as they get shitton from beggining or collabs anyway, i have not played uk in a long while but usa can easly do sacrifce manpower, and on france you play deffensive for a long time anyway so you don't lose it
Interesting, I had this suspicion since the newest patch after I started playing Finland a lot (historical path leaves you with lots of steel, some chomium, but very little others), so I have been seeing what else works. Can you also do a comparison on line vs support AA under red air conditions or line vs support AT? Some other youtubers suggest that it is worth using line versions of each to increase AA/hard attack as much as possible against the AI while only taking up 1 width each. Thanks
It would take a more in-depth video to do the topic justice, but I would say flat out that if you know you will fight under red air all the time, line AA is something you need support AA. There's like 5 different reasons for this, but you are right in suspecting that you need the AA, hard attack, and even the extra piercing when facing enemy armor.
Interesting. I've been adding Line Artillery as a (mentally) cheap way to get more SA, since the 7-2s were a staple back in the day: even with going the Support Company route in Superior Firepower. I simply didn't think adding SPGs would be competitive production or supply wise for templates. Obviously with minor nations you need to take what you can get and the current Space Marines function off of SPAA-Tanks and LA which is easy-ish for majors to produce (same as an air force), and they can be adapted easily but I digress. I suppose this is something I'll need to take a look at and play around with myself. To me, certain scenarios in which LA I think is just going to do better despite inefficient resource management at the micro level. Something to certainly think about.
One thing I should make a video about at some point in the future is the value of creating divisions that the AI can use well as opposed to divisions that a human can micro effectively. While I can smack the AI around easily, a 7-2 configuration is probably better for the AI than something like 8xINF with just support ART because the AI has an easier time doing broad front offensives and putting those line ART into battle.
You talked about 95% not worthing the line art, here's some "guidace" for the 5%: If you tick this boxes here: low on resources (and mostly bought gear for suplement or simply lack of IC to build the requeried items), low manpower, completly lack of capability to replace lost divisions (playing countries like hungary, greece etc), you will notice that it pays a lot for 9x inf, 3x art +recon, why? Because you can do an two flank attack with just 4 of them mostly without exeeding width, completly overwelm the enemy and in the cheap. Basically the 3x3/ 3x art is exelent for LOCAL supremacy, a player with less divisions can do better in a well planned attack (in the sense of player planed, not planing bonus) while the 3x3 with suport and tanks (very resource diverce and intensive since you need more research, ic and materials) are best when playing german, usa, soviet etc, since you will not be able to micro 34 different fronts at the same, each with 3 to 6 specialized divisions doying niche attack. AGAIN I totally agree with the video, but I think it's very major power centric (with is the 95% of the game to be honest)
Yeah. That's why I mentioned that the 5% of use cases will include minors with resource issues. To be honest, there's always some issue with some minor that I can never fully account for. Just the other day, someone had to remind me that Bulgaria can "steal" MIOs from some other countries. I was like "Wait, they can do that? WTF? I thought Bulgaria was just an IMRO factory!" I'm also major power centric because the sheer amount of electrical power I generate cannot be contained by Tibet or Romania. :)
Interesting video. I watched it because I'm a line artillery lover, though I don't use superior firepower, I now use grand battleplan. However, I plan on making a world conquest with tanks, no infantry pushing.You got a new sub, even though I disagree with you on this issue, I want to hear more from you.
When defending : through CAS, by not being critted (pure infantry has high defence), and by stacking enough infantry units that you can crit the attacker, as breakthrough is not as easy to get as defence. If unfamiliar, the first X damage taken by a division deal reduced damage, where X is the breakthrough / defence stat; the X+1st attack deals significantly higher damage, here referred to as critting. If attacking : don't attack with infantry, ideally. The first choice would be to divert the production that otherwise would go into artillery to make tanks. If you can't use tanks or don't want to do so, then air power is recommended.
I played Argentina with line artillery. It was bloody and long wars, horrible option for me. Also i tried to play with cheap tanks and i won all my wars super fast, all y need is good supply line.
@@counterfactualgaming I dont know what is recent changes in TOA :D i am new player, bought this game 1 month ago and for me line artillery means long war with a lot of casualties and wasted manpower, even if i attack weak countries, but maybe it happens because i am noob i dont know. Invasion with tanks and armored infantry + artillery and logistics AS A SUPPORT is super effective. If supply line is ok, you can end war super fast.
At release, it was insanely powerful. Progressive nerfs have rendered it what it is today/ Sometimes, I wonder if redoing basic combat mechanics to balance artillery better is worthwhile for Paradox.
@@counterfactualgaming I think it would be a pretty good balance if artillery was powerful but expensive, like it is in real life. Just ammunition production with artillery is as important as the guns or in some cases, a lot more important... it would be nice if there was some system for that.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark I'm pretty sure it is that way because in the description for tungsten says it is use for armor piercing rounds, hence producing armor units uses it. I'd just rather have a system where you produce guns and ammo separately.
the problem whit the div builder is that when looking at individual unit it fails completely. example putting a single tank in a div should give it 20 org or something. false it removes org. support artillery lowers org like any other support company (except if its the only unit in the org) HOI4 bug. Like I remember the infantry having 70 org. until you add the second infantry where by org drooped to 60 and they stayed there. also do you really want to compare a 80flat artillery reliability rating vs a tank at 55% (I dont remember the sweet spot on reability but I do remember a tank whit less then 50% realibility would be more danger to its user then its enemy break down, randomly exploding and killing crew and support when hit by bullets in combat and so on, getting stuck in ditches moving to the front). waiting for a new ball bearing to arrive and meanwhile tank is useless. also I think only the US and maybe Germany are the only nation that can think about replacing its Line artilery whit tanks. any other nation thats just out of the question. most nation have problem just getting enouth artilery and small arms for its army.
By no means. The Soviets can easily build a ton of tanks. Even better for the Soviets, they have tons of chromium, so instead of importing tungsten or building infra in tungsten states, they can just run welded armor on cheap close support gun tanks without a problem. France doesn't have as much fuel as the Soviets, but I have no problem getting plenty of heavy or medium TDs in place for Danzig. And France also has plenty of chromium, so they can run a similar trick as the Soviets.
cav recon do that too, line art divisions are very good for local superiority, but if you are trying to push with for example 48 divisions you will simply waste the 3 line art per div by attacking without good planning (planning the attack, not planning bonus) and most of this divisions will just end up wasting supply and IC that could be better on the other army/airforce elements like the video stated. IMO do the recon + 3x art in case of need for a cheap elite division that will push in the local area by player issued comand.
@@adrielcamilo2564 Yeah i get that, but perhaps having dedicated offensive units with line arty is atleast decent, sort of like the roles that tanks have Edit: i see you said that later on in your comment, shoulda read it first.
For a new player, I would recommend something like 6xINF and 1xTD to hold the line. You can use heavy tanks in actual panzer formations for the attack. France has access to significant chromium, so the chromium cost for heavy tanks, welded armor, and heavy cannons isn't a big deal.
What would a good Japanese china war template look like if not with artillery..? Like with this info the best I can think of, and what I use is 9 inf and supp arty. Would anything else be better?
That might be fine for regular divisions. But you will want some armored formations. I don't mean panzer divisions. But some divisions with light tanks or IW heavy TDs to give you some firepower and armor. China can't pierce hardly anything for a long time, so even a smattering of weak tanks in your front line will give you armor advantage. Just make sure you can fuel them.
that was indeed my concern, since as Japan you don’t have much fuel you can’t just go rampaging using navy air AND armoured units all together. Plus there’s the industry game at first I do 45~ civs (30 in most cases) then miles only for china war then dockyard spam. If I want to gain enough nav xp to refit and make new ships (by exercising navy and employ navy commander AND forgetting about air till end of china war) I don’t think you have the resources nor time to actually make a decent armoured corp. unless you actually mean REALLY cheap as s tanks. What about heavy TDs why are you promoting those? You got a video on em? And I’m sure you don’t mean anything that doesn’t have the highest soft attack gun that only has piercing because of the fact that it’s mounted on a chassis.
@@racta7112 IW heavy TDs with a heavy cannon can be used against Britain the US. But since you have IW tank tech at the start, you can start making them right away when you get some army XP. That way, you aren't making useless cheap tanks that the US and Britain can pierce with their infantry kits. But when I say cheap, I really do mean cheap. A close support gun on a starting light tank with the most minimal armor and engines is perfectly acceptable. Wheeled chassis is fine here. I was able to create the cheapest light tank with a close support gun possible (less than 5 production cost) with no armor or engine ticks and I could give my existing cavalry divisions an armor rating of 7.2 by attaching a single battalion of light armor of these cheap tanks. Nothing in China's 1936 arsenal could pierce them. But they would be rubbish against US and Britain, obviously. Worth noting that if you can tolerate a light tank cost of 5.72, you can run the close support gun, no armor ticks, 4 engine ticks, and have a 5 kph tank to run with cavalry formations. It's not real armored warfare, but horses are cheaper than motorized.
Okay but what if I want offensive divisions?? Spamming infantry wont help me with that. And I get it, support artillery is better than line artillery, but just 1 support artillery isnt enough if i want to have offensive divisions. And I also get it that tanks are also better but they are still more expensive and require more research (u also have to research artillery to have a cannon on tanks), that most minor nations just cant afford compared to the USA for example, not even talking abt the supply use and fuel. U just pointed it out that line artillery is worse than tanks but is cheaper and more accessible for minor countries with little economies, bringing more value for its expense.
Good stuuff, just stumbled on this channel. Very informative. Question: I was looking at motorized artillery and that looks to be a much better deal than standard line artillery. It provides Defense, and breakthrough but does not provide org. What is your opinion of motorized artillery?
Motorized artillery is in a weird place where it's not as good as a tank, but it's better than not having any artillery at all. Given that you need fuel for motorized artillery just like tanks, there's an argument to be made that super cheap light tanks with close support guns (not SPART) are a better buy because you only need steel and the light tanks use less width. However, the motorized artillery would still be cheaper in terms of production cost.
You have not convinced me at all... I will speak for single player. One think you don't mention are terrain maluses which kinda make tanks useless in my opinnion (unless massed). What I have found lately is that combat width barely matters as well as air. I don't really understand what are you trying to say. What division templates do you propose and for what use? On the defense, you kinda don't need line artillery, support is enough. Just 9 pieces of infantry with support and engineers should hold the line against almost anything. So in that scenario line artillery isnt really needed, perhaps one batalion max. However on the attack it's different. 9 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 anti air, 1 antiair tank slaps + support artillery of course. With proper use and proper support companies these will shine, however without the line artillery, they don't have enough soft attack to push away enemy divisions, so it's kinda needed. Another great use of artillery are motorized divisions... 9 infantry and 3 motorized artillery. These will push anything, if used properly up to 1942. In all those scenarios line artillery is mandatory as without it you have no soft attack. Also you will save reaserch time which can be used on other things. Maybe I am missing something, but like the only advantage you showed for tanks is the bit of hardness they give the division, it's kinda low tho.
ok let me explain Arty batalion is good becose it uses half the manpower Infantry batalion uses that makes is great for countryes that have great industry but struggle whit manpower like Czechoslovakia/Belgium/Bulgaria
Yep. It's one of the reasons that some players should reconsider their dislike of Mas Assault. While it's not my favorite land doctrine, it has several supply buffs that do make a difference.
@BobbiusRossius Yep. The ol' "No combat width for you!" tactic. It's also funny to proc that tactic with paratrooping Space Marines that land behind German lines, then sit there with tons of extra supply grace while the Germans try to dislodge them. 😁
I put in line artillery to make space for an extra support equipment slot as I am already going to have AA and AT so why should I have support artillery taking up a slot? You are basically arguing for me to drop artillery all together.
Of all the support companies, I would argue that ART, AA, LOG, and ENG (or pioneers if you go that path) should be the priority. AT against a human. And maybe something like flame tanks. But there's no reason to dump support ART for something like HOSP or SIG or rangers or any kind of recon.
@@counterfactualgaming Having a field hospital and armored Recon is more useful than support Artilary. Been playing around with Templates in Red World and 19 Width Infantry Might be the new Meta
22:14
About the 52000 Production opportunity cost. Why do you count infantry equipment as free? It has also an opportunity cost: You got 72500 infantry equipment when you changed the divisions. 72500 * 0.58 Production = 42000. So you “only” would save 10000 Production, which is under 20% of your calculation.
And it might be just me, but needing over 20% more manpower for your army and having a 1 combat width more per battalion is not that great.
A better comparison would be to compare 7/2 divisions to 10/0s as they have the same combat width, and after AAT it's a relatively efficient combat width regarding overstocking penalties.
old meta templates: you could not live with your failures, and where did that bring you? back to me
Wtf does aat mean
@@huguesdepayens807 Arms against Tyranny. The DLC in which they changed how combat widths work. Before then you just used 20/40 widths to be optimal, now a lot more different widths are viable and the penalties are much less harsh.
@@Fusselikosmall correction: the first DLC to change combat width was No Step Back - AAT did make further tweaks to combat width, but the 20/40 paradigm has been dead for almost 3 years now
Played a game as historical poland with pure infantry + support artillery and tank divisions, got wrecked quickly by Germany. Did again with only heavy artillery infantry, shattered Germany's entire army in about a week.
Granted, I changed a lot for the second run. I went Sanationist Right, did Grand Battleplan instead of Superior Firepower (reason was I figured the entrenchment and planning bonuses would either equal or outweigh the superior firepower bonuses, and the land night attack +25% would tip the scales in GBP's favor. Yes, with all the bonuses the Sanation Right branch gets, I did get land night attack +25% before Germany declared war), annexed Lithuania, and rejected the Memel demand to go to war a few months early.
Still, the main advantage of adding line artillery is to maximize soft attack, which causes the highest possible enemy casualty rate on an hourly basis. It strains Germany's abilities to replace their manpower and equipment losses much more than pure infantry with support artillery would.
It also requires only 500 manpower per battalion instead of 1000, and is 167 men per width vs the 500 of infantry. This means to fully occupy the total combat width of the frontline (important for defending), you need around 35-50% less men with heavy artillery divisions than with pure infantry. Useful for countries with low manpower like Poland.
Furthermore, divisions with line artillery take fewer casualties than those without for the same reason. Artillery divisions have fewer men in them, so fewer casualties taken. Simple enough.
And then there's the org penalty. Yes, artillery divisions having less org is a problem, but it isn't all that bad. Many players overemphasize org. But if you can make a change to a division that makes it have 20% less org but with 25% more soft attack, yes, the division org will only last 20% as long as before, but the enemy's org will also only last 20% as long because they're being punished harder. So the end result of such a change is that any battles you were already winning, you'll just win faster, which helps build momentum on a strategic level. And when playing Poland, you're running on a time limit when fighting Germany, so any way to accelerate victory in the war is valuable.
Also, battles lasting for a shorter time means that your divisions take less hp damage, meaning less damaged to strength, and therefore fewer casualties. Again.
Note: Early game artillery has a more substantial advantage over early game infantry (25 base soft attack vs 6, a 4-to-1 ratio) vs late game artillery and late game infantry equipment (34 vs 12, a 3-to-1 ratio). So it's easier to justify adding line artillery to divisions prior to 1940 than after.
Finally, there's the biggest reason to add line artillery to divisions. The AI compares the strength of their army vs yours, afaik, by comparing deployed manpower on the line and the total summed up org on the line. By having fewer divisions, with less org and lower manpower, you create the perfect appearance of a weak army, while actually having a very strong one. This convinced Germany to attack me all out repeatedly despite it being a very bad idea.
Btw, the worst stat in the game is defense. When your division attack exceeds enemy defense, you get a bonus damage output to all of the excess, which gives an extra boost to artillery divisions that I hadn't mentioned yet. When your division defense exceeds enemy attack, you literally get no benefit at all. Since getting enough division defense to exceed the attack values of AI divisions in the game is literally the easiest thing, all extra bonuses to division defense are literally trash. This is why, even when defending territory, I'll use force attack bonuses to hold the line instead of last stands. Last stands are actual garbage.
Finally, I gotta praise GBP. In mots wars in HOI4, the critical phase of the war is the first few weeks, and it's hardest to win when the enemy is numerically superior. GBP entrenchment and planning bonuses give all the same buffs as SP in those first few weeks and more, as they boost hard attack and, in the case of planning, breakthrough. And then you get the land night attack bonus, which counts for even more. GBP is really just the best.
Ok buddy, this is quite confusing. The video maker says the artillery is useless. And you are saying the artillery saved your ass? Thats totally opposite! Im confused.
@@SirPeacemaker believe this guy
@@dominickmaddox9576 But which one? The video creator or this commenter named J7Handle?
@@SirPeacemaker I admitted that I didn't do a scientific comparison already. The second run went for heavy artillery only, but it also annexed the Baltics and went to war with Germany ~6 months early over Memel instead of Danzig. It meant, for one thing, that Germany only had the port of Konigsberg in the east, which made it easier to encircle and destroy the east prussian units Germany had. In the original run, my tanks captured Konigsberg but were stopped at Memel. Maybe if I had Memel to begin with, the plain infantry would have worked.
Another problem I had in the original run was lack of manpower, since the Sanationist Right path gave me a bunch of recruitable population bonuses that I idn't get in my original run, so overall I just had a bigger army in the second run.
Still, there's no question that artillery have higher soft attack per width than infantry equipment, and if you can fully utilize the combat width of the front line, you can maximize enemy casualty rates by maximizing soft attack, which requires artillery.
@@J7Handle So the conclusion is, the artillery is very important to keep in units formation?
1. Your tank brigade is 4 times more expensive than line artillery. 144/3=48, 400/2=200 per combat width. Almost 80% more in terms of supplies per width. 2. 200 inf eq 1 per division x 363 divisions are 36000 IC. So i can get 363x20 soft attack or about 3 30 width tank divisions. It's not really inf vs art but art vs tanks. If you can afford it go tanks otherwise use art.
This. Tanks are better than arty yes, but also cost a lot more. So those that can bring out tanks are the ones with industrial capacity to do so.
But doctrines are also important, Mobile Warfare, offers the best tank stats for the breakthrough(Blitzkrieg) or for the infantry battalions staying power (Mobile Infantry) so that they can hold out longer. If you go with tanks, you better off using Mobile Warfare, not SF. SF is good for artillery.
Not sure about new width mechanics but before attack values had non linear utility. That is 400 attack is more than twice as useful as 200 attack because of defense/breakthrough mechanics.
that aspect has not change afaik
thats still a thing, its why tanks are far better at pushing than infantry and you can use the ic saved from not using line artillery to build those tanks!
soft attack over the defense/breakthrough of your opponent has a 40% chance to hit instead of a 10%, meaning you do 4x the damage for each point over the defense
the bonus for not being pierced is also 40% more damage
so a tank unit for each soft attack over defense (it gets far more than artillery) gets 5.6x damage for each point over defence. tanks also do more damage per width yadda yadda you get the picture exponential damage extra modifiers huge breakthrough concentration of force theres a lot of advantages most people are just lazy and bad at micro
I see what you are trying to say, but to say that it is a "noob trap" and that it "doesn't work 95% of the time" it's a bit over exaggerated. As you said, arty gives the division the ability to deliver tons of soft attack without the need of fuel and at a relative cheap cost, losing org and speed in certain terrains, that's it, if you know the pros and cons of it you are good to go imo. Of course tanks are better for attacking, that's their purpose, but first, to get the good tanks you need to spend some time making the research and second, they use fuel. The same exact reasoning goes for CAS. Arty gives you straight away at the beginning of the game a lot of soft attack and with this soft attack you can use your infantry division to attack. Of course, the ideal strategy is to only attack with tanks and to only defend with infantry, but in a lot of situations is very convenient to be able to attack with your regular infantry.
So I think it's just a different strategy, with arty you feel a bit more "confident" because regular infantry can be used for both attacking and defending and don't need fuel. With only tanks (as you suggested) you need to keep in mind that all your infatry will have to stay put and never ever move, for any attack you need too move your tanks and in certain regions or terrains it could be difficult because of supply and reliability issues.
The artillery battalion, like any other battalion type, has its pluses and minuses.
One minus not mentioned is that an artillery battalion will slow down an infantry battalion more in jungle and forest than a towed anti-air battalion.
One plus not mentioned of artillery battalions is that 7-day abilities of generals, Siege Artillery and Makeshift Bridges being a couple of examples of 7-day abilities, cost Command Points based on battalion count, meaning that you get a lot of extra Soft Attack during those 7 days for the amount of Command Points spent. If attacking a Maginot Line for example, especially if your division design is boosted with medium support company flame tanks, then each additional artillery battalion will provide a substantial boost to fort degradation speed for the amount of extra Command Points spent on the 7-day Siege Artillery ability, and at a much lower Industrial Cost of the equivalent number of extra tank battalions.
Short version: Towed artillery battalions can slow you down in jungle and forest, but are nice to have if spending Command Points on 7-day abilities.
Excellent point about command abilities. Although, you know how I play. I take the "around the Maginot" focus literally and drive around it. Ooops, no one covered Sedan again. Guess I'll take Paris without firing a shot.
The largest use for line art in my opinion is with marines, naval invasions. Being able to deal so much concentrated damage in a extremely short time is absolutely key to wining the pacific war or when playing free France. (in multiplayer)
While more expensive, you still want artillery divisions for major nations because when a battle starts there is a maximum combat width per tile and your best bet is to fill this width why actual good soft attack divisions no matter the cost. If you look at the efficiency, of course infantry only divisions are the best but in a limited combat width you won't gain any advantages from overstacking your infantry only divisions. A good example of that is China vs Japan in the second sinojapanese war, china has no artillery vs japan full fletched artillery divs. The result is China losing a lot of manpower and more equipment overall.
If you want more firepower per width (and better stats overall), I think tanks are the better bet. And I don't mean space marines, but instead dedicated panzer formations. If you are facing supply problems, line ART isn't doing you any favors. Might as well use tanks.
Again, if fuel is an issue, then yes, line ART makes more sense.
@@counterfactualgamingTanks are big investments, and they use up oil.
@@dashua1735 yep tanks requires. so much army XP its insane.
@@counterfactualgaming No they're not.
Towed Artillery, even the basic one, is 27.5 soft attack (because you *will* have at the very least the 'interwar artillery' tech that increases the base 25 soft attack by 10%, you need it for the tank guns) for 3.5 IC.
Just-a-medium-tank with light tank's one-man turret, riveted armour, and heavy machine gun with 8 soft attack, and *NOTHING ELSE* is already more expensive on a per-unit basis (3.6 vs 3.5 IC), AND you need more of them per battalion- you need 50 tanks, but you only need 36 artillery, and sure you get some armour and 10 breakthrough, but the artillery gives you 3x the soft attack, 5x the defence, the same hard attack, and 2/3 breakthrough (6 vs 10), at 2/3 the price of *literally the cheapest tank you can possibly make.*
A 9/3 infantry division with support artillery and cav recon (recon gives soft attack bonus for artillery and it's basically free- you should have a surplus of guns and support equipment anyway) and basic 1936 equipment, but with the stat increasing techs (up to 1940 ones) and no doctrines (checked in on Czechoslovakia as they start without one) has 181 soft attack, 275 defence, 54 breakthrough, 230 HP and costs 930 IC.
To make an infantry division of equal cost, but with tanks, it would have to be 8/3 with zero support battalions and the aforementioned cheap-ass tanks, and it still costs 940 IC And for that cost we get... 77 soft attack- or 42% of the original value, 208 defence- or 75% of the original value, a bit less hard attack, less HP- 206- or 89% of the original value, and 58 breakthrough- or a measly 7% increase over the original value. Sure, it also has 17 armour, so against most AI units you only suffer 50% losses... unless they put AA in, in which case you're fucked. But even without AA, the battle will last 2.4x longer because you don't have as much soft attack to push with, meaning that in the end you will still suffer more losses because the battle will just take longer, it also means more losses due to the reliability mechanic, and less micro potential- when every battle takes 20 days, there is no way to do an encirclement or any manoeuvrer without the AI being able to relocate units in time.
On the other hand- to make an infantry division with equal (or slightly better) offensive stats, but with tanks, it would take a different tank- with a close support gun, heavy machine gun (the secondary turret) and a three-man light tank turret (best breakthrough per IC ratio) and nothing else- again trying to make it as cost effective as possible. Make it a 10/3 (also making it the same CW- 26 vs 27) with artillery and engineer support, and sure such a division finally has the same soft attack- 180 vs 181, better defence- 292 vs 275, better HP- 258 vs 230, (those two mainly due to additional infantry battalion) and 98 breakthrough vs 58, that's almost twice as much breakthrough, AND it still has some armour- 15 to be precise, so again- enough to defend against infantry without AA.
BUT, it costs twice as much as the 9/3 artillery one 1873 vs 930, and it's slower because no recon and tanks have harsher negative terrain modifiers than artillery, and it uses oil so unless you have some in-house production that's gonna cost you some civies, and you can't begin production on day 1 because you need xp to create the tank template, you need "interwar artillery" tech for the gun, and you need to research the basic medium tank chassis (unless you use the light tank one... but then you can kiss the armour bye bye, and it's actually even less IC efficient because light tanks use 60 pieces per battalion and most of that tank's cost is in the modules not the chassis)
So even with *I M M A C U L A T E* industry micro you're gonna have like 2.2x fewer divisions. Now while sure- France could probably be fine with 55 divisions instead of 120, not every country has the luxury of not having to man long frontlines.
I like your name though. It fits.
it's interesting to see how the evolution of artillery in the hoi4 has gone. in some of the earliest patches, pre-TfV, artillery was godlike; then it got nerfed. then it got nerfed again. the 7-2 stuck around, partially out of strategic inertia, and I distinctly remember running 14-4 moto-katyusha divisions even in early NSB! But it was NSB, with the close support gun and howitzers on mediums, that put the nail in the coffin for line artillery.
or maybe it was completely different, idk, I'm just a senile old veteran talking off memory.
Glad I found your channel. I like this content.
Some time ago, I did a video where I used those old 14-4 divisions to win the war. Some viewers were nostalgic. Other players were like "I use that template all the time. It's not outdated."
I tried listening to you. I then lost the most men I have in years. Line artillery go brr...
I have a full library of livestreams where I don't use line ART at all. Still killing 2-3 times as much manpower as I lose.
If you don't translate the line ART into more planes and tanks, and then don't use those tanks to push properly, you will be smashing your infantry against enemy positions in less than optimal situations.
Taureor style. Infantry only.
Arty fills a rather neiche role in hearts of iron 4. Its primary use is to stack soft attack to obliterate enemies. Usually you would want tanks to do this, but, if you are playing like communist china or some minor nation that cannot afford tanks, your push divisions can be based on arty as it is less demanding tech wise, and offers decent pushing capabilities. defensively the 40 or so soft attack can go a LONG way, especially when paired with entrenchement. Also arty on mountaineers is a decent option as there are decent buffs in the special forces doctrine that buff it further. It depends on how you build your divisions really.
Like i say, tanks are optimal for breaching enemy lines but when i play minor nations, i usually go arty. Also every defensive division i make would generally have 1 or 2 arty as i see that it helps a lot in soft attack. Calvary recon support also buffs all the arty by 10% in soft attack which makes for a nice addition in terms of firepower.
Overall, it has its pros and cons, but i would not declare it “useless 95% of the time”
It’s just you would not add arty on every division.
I would love to see an analysis of different combat widths i personally lile 18 width because its and even number(you don't need line support) and is almost half as likely to fail to reinforce as 30 and 35. Yes larger divisions take less damage to enemies with higher coordination because they have less defence. But large divisions half nearly half the org and its mostly infatry equipment you are loosing anyway.
I'll consider that a vote for more division template videos. :) And you are quite right about the differences between large and small formations.
Me when I see the sauce
A simplifying assumption is that 2/3 of the attack gets spread around evenly, and 1/3 gets concentrated at the lowest Organization defending division.
As such, you want your lowest Organization defending division on a tile to have a good Armor rating, in order that the attacker will have the bulk of its attack halved due to not having enough Piercing.
Example:
3 divisions are defending a tile that is suffering 432 attack. 288 attack, which is 2/3 of that 432 attack, is split 3 ways, meaning each of the 3 defending division receives 96 attack from the evenly split portion of the attack. The low Organization defending division that gets bullied suffers an additional 144 attack, 1/3 of 432, for a total of 96 + 144 = 240 attack to defend against. 240 divided by 432 is about 56%, leaving each of the 2 non-bullied higher Organization defending divisions to face about 22% of the attack.
Of course, if there is enough Armor on the bullied low Organization defending division, only 120 of the attack that it receives, half of the 240 attack nominally directed against it, counts toward overwhelming the division Defense stat, even in plain terrain with no fortification. Normally, it only takes 1 heavy tank battalion in a division in order to get a good enough Armor rating to cut the enemy's attack in half. In fact, adding in that 1 heavy tank battalion in advance to 1 of the 3 defending divisions reduces Organization in that division, turning that division into a damage sponge for the other 2 divisions.
Yeah I came to this conclusion as well (for USA). Line artillery kept causing huge losses on offense. Medium tank space marines take 10x less casualties and actually push tiles. Mass infantry with just support + 1 tank is also incredibly supply efficient.
The US is also going to get the most out of integrated support since the US can easily afford to slap on 5 support companies without batting an eye.
I did not believe this, so I did my own tests, and now I actually agree that line artillery is overrated.
In my own tests, I found that adding light SPGs is the most cost-effective way to add soft attack to divisions they performed comparably to medium tank/spgs in the tests, but used fewer resources to build).
I just tried a single-player campaign where I only used support artillery for my basic line infantry, and used the freed-up industrial capacity to build motorized 30-width shock troops with light SPGs, and they absolutely tore the AI divisions to shreds.
I love to hear it when you guys do your own test to see if my advice works for you. What country did you run for your test?
@@counterfactualgaming Iraq and Saudi Arabia for the tests, because they don't have any unique spirits or focuses (so my tests were done in dessert, but I cheated in max infrastructure and supply hubs).
@@atypicalprogrammer5777 Can you please explain what exactly is light SPGs? Thank you.
@@SirPeacemaker SPG=self propelled gun, the game refers to it as SP artillery or just the artillery role in the tank-designer (The hoi4 wiki on the tank-designer explains the different roles)
Sorry if I answered the same thing two or three times, it looked to me like my answer got deleted.
@@atypicalprogrammer5777 So you are saying, in the unit designer put on light tank chasis artillery? And thats the best unit?
Great analysis overall but when comparing templates why didn't you compare 2 line artillery vs 3 infantry to make it equal width?
I honestly didn't think of it that way until you mentioned it. That might have put the differences into starker relief.
Counter-argument I want to build and recreate divisions that was used in real life. Stats be dammed I am larping and I will enjoy my slow collapse.
I've done that, too. Interestingly, it's hard to do that because a lot of division OOBs were pretty fluid. Just tracking OOB changes to US divisions from Overlord to the end of the war is impossible to mimic in HOI4 because you'd have to pay 25 XP every month to swap TDs in and out of divisions.
To this day I am annoyed that I cannot recreate (for example) Soviet motor rifle divisions because they had regiments that included battalions of types that the game does not allow together, tanks and mot/mech.
Adrahill moment
Line artillery is the greatest.
This video failed to convince me. First, your stats are with using superior firepower, so +50% soft attack to the support artillery, without it the division seriously lacks firepower (support is still entirely worth it though). Next, your tank template is so expensive and with so little reliabilityyou probably lose half of it when walking on the first mountain tile you encounter. Like seriously, your template is 400 for a battalion, with 136 I can equip my artillery and with the extra 264 I can equip 5 infantry battalions. So a small division against a single battalion. Tanks have their uses and are very strong in this game, but not as a replacement for artillery
With a bit more thought tanks as artillery have a niche use on offensive infantry divisions in plains and without any supply issue, since tanks have worst modifiers on most terrain and the template shown in the video will take ridiculous attrition
15:34 with this you could make it even cheeper. You can make it with a light tank chassis, have it use wheels instead of tracks, and put a easy maintenance on it. While it doesn’t make it better width wise it would allow you to make more divisions with them. Now I basically only play MP now so idk about it SP, but a lot of the time it is a good idea to have that cheep soft attack for areas of the front where there are no tanks. For instance on Barbarossa, a lot of times I see Bulgaria players make cheep SP artillery or motorized artillery divisions just to encircle Soviet infantry. It’s also important since most of the time you can’t make your main tanks cater to soft attack in MP because you need to fight enemy tanks, so they need hard attack. And then, if for instance the Soviet Union gets guerrilla warfare tactics at the end of mobile, it can become time consuming to even push their infantry with your main tanks.
Wheels reduce hardness.
This is basically why as Germany I would go for light tanks instead of artillery. Plus you don’t need to trade for more tungsten. And especially considering you will invade so many places you’ll just get free artillery, but the armour and similar soft attack values means you get more bang for your buck than artillery.
If you go for enough fighters and CAS, and do strength damage to enemy divisions, eventually even with Light Recon Tanks with no extra armour you will eventually gain the armour bonus against most AI divisions (if you add it to every division you have / disband the armour divisions you start with(as Germany I attack Poland ASAP so if you don’t disband those divisions of armour you won’t have enough to add recon to every infantry division)). Add armour on later or get tech upgrades and you will be laughing once you get medium flamer tanks and stick those on as well as a light TD bat with medium cannons/ or medium tanks / and/or with howitzers.
Basically no one will pierce you until 1940, and even then you should then be able to field a few tank divisions to clean things up for yourself(I would rush schwimpanzer and get marines schwims 30 width and use them to take rivers and such for the rest of my army to funnel thru and surround).
Great video, I really liked the minmax optimization approach. Also the supply usage by line arty is a huge point, meaning that you can stack more of pure inf divisions without attrition. Though one point of line arty that was omitted, is that in the case of defense of USSR, for instance, line arty will inflict more casualties and equipment losses to germans, meaning it would be easier to win the war on attrition. But it still can be argued that the same amount of IC spent on planes and tanks can actually inflict much more damage
Hello. I ran tests for something similar, calculating the Defensive power of Infantry and Line Artillery accounted for Damage Dealt to enemy division per manpower losses instead of IC, for my personal use for minor nations with a lot of industry due to overpowered focus trees. When being attacked by German AI's average late 1939 infantry division, which was 9/1 with support artillery and engineers(155 soft/21 cw). I used the formulas of the wiki, and the damage taken was accounted for combat width of the defending division and multiplying the attack accordingly.
Accounted for the test were:
every 1940 tech.
The stats of each component was taken from the division designer, and calculated in Excell, cross referenced to the ingame tooltip on several occasions. This means that the passive buffs were accounted for.
Entrenchment (FM with defensive Doctrine, Static warfare spirit of the academy, for every point of entrenchment, +2*1.4 attack and defence)
Unaccounted for the test were:
Hard attack, as AI germany had only six 18 width tank divisions (3 medium 2 light and 4 motorised), and and italy had a few pure tank divisions, some of them without many actual tanks in them for both countries. Compared to their 115 infantry amd 10 other soft divisions (horse, mountaineer, etc) it is not important. Additionally the german division had 50% hardness.
-Also god fear the empty Bulgarian and Hungarian light tank division that manifests in every single game.
Recon and battle tactics. From in-game testing, I found that a defensive division with recon took 10% less casualties and dealt 15% more, so I am adding cavalry recon or, even better, rangers.
Doctrines. Grand battleplan is the best on static defence, especially because I accounted for fully entrenched infantry on my tests. 10 entrenchment equals to +28% attack and defence when fully entrenched and with the correct FM and spirit of the academy.
Piercing and Air attack. Piercing has proved to be unnecessary against Germany and Italy in 1940, but still useful for that rare tank that might appear, and the reduction to Air supperiority and Ground attack is invaluable so I am putting Support AA too.
Defence. 155 soft attack/21 cw is going to be outmatched by the defence stat of any sizable infantry division.
TLDR, when trying to conserve manpower, for a 50+ mil minor with 250k manpower on limited in 1940, that even with 30 mils on planes, has too many mils to equip it's infantry. The test I made showed that the ideal ratio is 5.8 infantry to 1 line artillery, and concluded that the ideal defensive divisions for 30 and 35 width were 12/2 and 13/3 respectively, with support Artillery, Engineers and Field Hospitals, but in a real game you might want to add recon and AA support companies.
Line Artillery is something that you can put 1 mil on in the early 1936 game and have most of your support ect artillery ready for war in 1939.
Support Artillery should be a no brainer in the numbers of artillery for the obvious gains in soft attack.
Line Artillery has always been kind of an odd thing. It can be VERY effective but takes time to produce as the creator has stated. The game has changed a lot in the last few years now that we're custom designing navy, air, and tanks now sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse now. Line artillery is VERY effective in special forces such as Marines and Mountaineers, the gains made in soft attack while lowering some of their Amphibious and Mountain/Hill bonuses allows them to power through very very well against other units.
The terrain combat width has changed again with the latest expansion Trial of Allegiance. It used to be the optimal combat width for forests was 21 or 42 and while 20 or 40 still worked very well the 21 and 42 width units fit in perfectly for the eastern front which is super forest heavy (know your terrain). You could add in a single line artillery for a boot in soft attack performance without breaking the bank too hard in production numbers. Now the combat width for forest is 60 so its 60, 30, 20, 15 for combat width numbers in forest tiles.
The large problem that the OP identified is production or really production timing. Artillery 1 is useful as support artillery but as line artillery you need a LOT of it and Artillery 1 compared to Arty 2 or Art 3 feels very lacking. Also around that time you'll have to replace or reinforce a LOT of artillery in templates especially if you had just 1 mil on artillery in the early game. You'll have to expand that to 7 to 10 factories and it will still take the better part of a year to bring the efficiency up to equip all your divisions.
He's also not wrong about the close support gun tanks and CAS advantage. In previous versions of the game Light Tanks were especially meh overall but now with close support gun you can have a tank div that is specifically made to push around enemy infantry while also occasionally getting some overruns. With CAS it may be 1936 CAS but CAS is still CAS, it interacts directly with the frontline combat unit and deals org damage. CAS doesn't have to (or shouldn't have to) fight off enemy air. Fighters fight fighters and the better and higher quantity fighters win the engagement but if you have green air your stocked up CAS will be doing frontline damage to units.
TLDR : Support Arty is a must but line Artillery should be reserved for Special Forces and not in huge quantity only 2-3 tops for effectiveness and production cost. 1 or 3 for Mountaineers and 1 or 2 for Marines. You can try to put line arty in normal infantry but the game has changed and its not as good or needed anymore.
12 infantry battalions with 3 line artillery battalions always works like a charm for me idk why you are saying it’s bad.
did bro even watch the vid
in multiplayer, the abundance of AA reduces CAS attack by about 70%, and also shreds it fast enough that you need a lot of factories just to maintain it.
of course, the CAS is still worth having because of the ground attack bonus, and the extra damage is a nice bonus because it doesnt use combat width or supply.
but you really should have some of your infantry with artillery. generally it is good to have 3 different infantry templates- the cheaper infantry for defensive purposes, and then your "good" infantry is split between 2 different types, 1 that maximizes soft attack and 1 that maxes hard attack.
I was actually avoiding line artillery unless need really bad, bcz of movement and modifiers. So feels good someone else saying the same. I almost never play superior firepower anyway.
If you use line artillery along with line AA you dont needs tanks to push all you need is air
Jokes on you though, I use modern warfare, and almost always have 8-9 infantry battalions, and up to 2 artillery battalions. (I have already used up all five of my support companies :P )
You can improved auto cannon instead of close support gun for more well round stats and it only cost on 1 production cost.
That certainly is an option. If you think you need other stats besides SA, it can make sense. I actually use the autocannon on paratrooper light tanks.
I use 8 inf + 6 line artilery + support stuff and this div delete anything on the map with very small casualties. Add antitank to support eq if you fight against tanks. Line artillery was and is the best. You need 8-10 div like this, other divisions can be 14wide regular divs to hold the frontlines till line artillery will do his enemy cleaning job.
Only use case I see for line artillery is running grand battleplan in niche situations. For example, if you stay non-aligned Finland, you don't have manpower to make mostly infantry divisions (even with 200 weekly guy and focuses), so you can put arty instead because even if 50% of your battalions are arty, you're still manpower capped. You could do really cheap tanks instead...but they don't cover whole line as easily and take fuel, which is a problem.
Outside of scenarios like that, the other way to use it is for the sort of player who will just line up stuff on the front line and sit there entrenched. Unlike humans, AI will attack into this. Entrenched arty crosses the threshold where AI can't supply enough stuff to de-org full width of it before the attackers run out of org, and thus AI will mulch millions of manpower in half a year or less on wide fronts. After it does, it turns out that 50% strength enemy divisions with poor experience is one way to have enough breakthrough to block crits lol. Not the most exciting way to play, but easy to execute!
I wonder if it counts as infantry for mass assault purposes in terms of reorg and reinforce rate? I've never tried arty heavy builds for mass assault, but presumably if you can get really fast reinforce speeds, you could attack from one direction --> add support attacks from 2 others after combat is initiated and just cancel out any time the enemy reinforces, otherwise enjoying non-trivial windows of time where you're +width over enemy. I expect this can easily reinforce meme opponents w/o mass assault or signals, but would be a nightmare to micro against players and countered by someone rolling hardness into it.
You might have something there with going heavy into reinforce speed, but I think you are right about the difficulty of microing it.
Took me a couple days to come back to finish this video.
But i wish to say thank you for putting the numbers together on the screen that made it way easier and much appreciated.
Also i love the analyst and advice you put on here.
Shall try to put it into my gameplay
You are quite welcome.
This explains why my 10k stockpile of artillery goes down to -5k in 1 month of battleplanning
Yep. It's also why you will sometimes see AI nations in the same boat.
From my 4000 hours of experience, planes are still kings of battle, space marines are good but expensive and a pain for supply. Also combat with is not as important as it was since the last updates so it is ok to use artillery, personnally I use it along tanks in my divisions and it never went wrong. But in the end, the fact is as long as you have green hair and divisions with at least 50 org, it's all ok.
Honestly I never understood Space Marines.
I guess they work in MP when people forget that AT exists, but against the AI they are useless.
Every nation puts in support AT and that's enough to pierce anything. I have not been able to build an infantry division that doesn't get pierced by basic AI divs
@@Frontline_view_kaiser They are forbidden in most MP games, as for singleplayer, it depends on the type of tanks you are using, light tanks won't work, you have to use medium tanks with at least 50 or 60 armor. but as I said, it doesn't really matter anyway because in the end it all comes down to air superiority.
@@gabilax2745 Yeah, I get that.
But the idea behind it is that the enemy will not be able to pierce my infantry divisions.
However if I use medium tanks with 60+ or even heavy tanks with 120+ armor, a basic infantry template with support AT will still pierce them
@@Frontline_view_kaiser I'm not an expert, so I dont know if I'm right but I think AT can only pierce a % of the armor. So it id still usefull, I think
but if you're a minor nation you can't compete with planes because AI spam CAS
The best answer here is quite simple. First of all, the artillery is just too expensive for spamming it in regular infantry divisions and secondly, most important, you don't need the soft attack at defense (infantry is used for defending first of all); so if you put artillery into infantry and you explain it like "i want to attack more effectively" - bro, just learn tanks and use them for this purpose😅
One day I should do a short video that explains why the armor advantage is so punishing on divisions that can't pierce panzers. The extra ORG damage is really well worth the cost when attacking because you want to just melt ORG and force a retreat, not simply inflict general damage.
I use 21 widths and push just fine, the division isn’t everything, conditions matter far more, with CAS, good grind on generals, good terrain, or just simple nation buffs, you can easily push, in fact, you honestly only need green air with 21 widths
After 1k hour i realize still many stuff I didn't know about this game
And that's why I do this stuff. Sometimes I don't even know these things until I test them out. 😃
Use line artillery with grand battle plan to get supply down and maximize the effectiveness of the artillery.
I really hope they reverse a little of what they'd done to artillery. It used to be at least okay as a tank alternative for poor countries.
Starts off with: "Stop using line artillery, you noob". Thems are fightn words my friend. Can't wait for the rest of the video 😂
The big problem is you can't have 3 support artys and you'll need the support slot for things that can make your life easier
Not so significant in multi-player since you'd be dead very quickly no matter what, since most players can't stay synced for extended periods of time
So, the meta build is to desync before your enemy can win? 🤣
i like 8/3s now for pushing and 10/0 for line holding
For the opportunity cost of IC I would like to point out that you completely neglected infantry equipment. Assuming you're using 1939 tech, without an MIO infantry equipment costs .58 and the infantry equipment cost of each battalion of infantry is 100. Now, the infantry equipment for the 365 divisions you switched over to the artillery template would have an IC cost of 116 per division coming to a total of 42340 IC with a rate of 26.47 IC per division. Now, subtracting that from your sum of 52000 IC that would leave the opportunity cost at 9660 which would give you ~535.48 T-34s and 172.5 IL-5 Sturmoviks. While your point on IC efficiency is still valid it has a nearly negligent impact especially when considering it took 365 divisions to get such a large IC inefficiency.
Otherwise there were some great points all around and there's still some very useful information given, thanks for the vid!
I like your thinking.
The infantry equipment cost does factor in to the opportunity cost and I while I don't have the brainpower to answer this question for myself I am interested to know what the combat with would do. With his support arty template he has a width of 16. Small infantry divisions take more damage due to low HP and last I checked 15 width, while being able to fit perfectly into most tiles that aren't plains (forests and hills 60+30 width) wasn't advisable for precisely this reason. Instead 18 width was the bare minimum and while that didn't fit perfectly the HP prevented it from hemorrhaging equipment too much and the rest of the stats (more attack, defense, org, etc..) made up for the lack of divisions you could stack in a tile. I know the width meta has shifted a little bit since then and while I have kept up with it I don't nearly have enough understanding as to why it shifted to be certain of anything aside from these principles Low HP=Resource hemorrhage, and stats can make up for width inefficiency. But surly he's more width savvy than me and could make those divisions a bit bigger to fit in with the current width meta?
I mean he messes up the entire experiment using that 16 width division because it doesn't fit and it's only 1 width wider than 15 so it's not going to compete with a bare minimum division of 18 width, doesn't he? Won't the lack of HP effect resource loss and make up for all the equipment and manpower he is supposedly saving with this template?
He says this division is capable of defeating AI Germany but at what cost?
I'd like to see him use this template to defeat Germany and see how many losses he takes. Personally I doubt it can take on Germany without mass loss, as they include a lot of Line arty in their divisions, I think they use 9-3 divisions. Don't quote me on that, it's been a while since I checked, but even a 18 width arty support division couldn't hold up to that amount of soft attack I had to change my line division to include 2 line arty in order to hold them back after I lost and restarted the run. I made it a 22 width, which did the trick, and I had a smaller army than what he has there.
PS if anyone knows what the current width meta is I'd appreciate the knowledge so that I can know what I'm talking about, cause I'm speaking from my ass with completely anecdotal evidence here and it sucks.
@@mindlesspirate2864I believe the current best widths are 10, 15, and 35 IIRC
You make an excellent point. I was more concerned with just showing players how many guns it takes to put a line ART throughout the entire army and then breaking down that cost. But yes, the infantry kits are a part of the equation depending on how you set up the divisions.
@@oseansoldier 18, 20, 25, & 30 are also meta rn depending on terrain
To add on @Alorand and what he commented. Not only should you have compared 2 Line arty vs 3 inf. But also looked at Mass mob Inf.
2v3 Test is on 1936 tech 3x more softattack for arty and that for only around 1.7 times the cost.
2v3 Test on 1940 tech gives around 2.1 times more softattack for arty.
Mass mob test 1936: 2x more softattack for arty
Mass mob test 1940: around 1.8x more softattack for arty
I think this will get even better for Inf on Mass mob with the 1944 inf gun.
Eitherway: I think arty should still be used for inf like in 7/2s because you get the softattack of a 28 width (1940 tech) pure inf division while being a 20 width division.
Mass mob is different. Sure the test was with 3.2 width vs 3 width. But rushing higher Gun levels could mean that you can get a better ratio earlier. A Mass mob pure inf stack of 19.2 width has also nearly 2x HP (compared to a 7/3) while having 66% the softattack and around 33% more defence. Production micro is also easier.
If I were going to deep dive Mass Mobilization with artillery, then i would actually be focused on those supply consumption reductions that would potentially allow more artillery in supply capped areas.
But I'd still prefer the extra tanks or planes with Mass Mobilization than slapping more factories on line ART in many situations. Let the cheap infantry with reduced width hold the line while the T-34s and CAS breakthrough and destroy.
The argument tanks vs artillery kinda moody just because for the tanks to get the good guns, you need to be already down the artillery research tree.
For a minor that starts with limited slots, having to research the chassis, the engine and armour modules AND artillery while potentially only having 2-3 research slots is a daunting task.
Another argument I'd make in favour of line artillery, is that with MIOs artillery actually gets kinda jacked, with increases to soft attack and breakthrough and a lot of reliability. If you use maintenance with them you will hardly be losing them, be it recovery after battle or attrition.
Otherwise I agree, artillery is not a must have like many people make it out to be
This all depends if you're a minor or a majoe tbh.
If you're a solo minor and you need line holders maybe artillery is justified, as you won't have the tech/industry to get both tanks and planes and imo planes are more important.
If you're a minor in a team? You focus either tanks, planes or line holders, either way it's better to do one thing the best than do everything.
And if you're a major you absolutly do have the tech and industry to do tanks, and you should be, cuz you'll need them to push anyway.
Edit: if you're maximising for soft attack only then you don't need armour or engines on your tank and you probably want an earlier chassis to make it more IC efficient
Well, what I said about the close support gun also applies here. It's an early tech, and it requires no tungsten, so for minors who want to do something halfway decent with tanks, you just grab that one artillery tech and slap those guns in tanks (if you even need the tech) and just roll.
And while line ART is problematic, definitely grab ART techs and put support ART throughout the army. I bet even Tibet can just ignore penalties from not importing tungsten and put 1 MIC on ART and put support ART in their few divisions.
Close support gun tanks only have SA/width of 16, which is little better than line art of 14. When howitzer 2 comes along, this strategy is more viable. But line art is not wrong or noob. Its just different. Depends if you want an army of space marines (in fact, very close to the Anglo-French integrated armour/infantry concept that was destroyed conceptually by blitzkrieg - concentrated armour spearhead with infantry as follow up).
Yeah I think the comparisons between pure infantry vs infantry + art wasn't really ideal because the typical case is adding 1 to 3 artillery to bigger units and fighting in terrain that's not favorable to tanks, no air nearby. Asia, Africa, etc.
6 inf, 1 medium tank, and 1 AA with rangers, support artillery, and logistics seems to be ideal, at least for me.
This is why I would like artillery to have some role other than being soft attack source.
Then what template division would your recommend for your attack divisions for a minor with a low factory count ? Regular tank division with the cheapest tanks you can make ?
Cheap tanks are going to be what you need. Depending on your country's resources (do you even have tungsten or chromium?), you want dirt cheap tanks with guns that don't cost extra resources and armor schemes that don't require extra resources. I compare cheap and expensive tanks in this video here: ua-cam.com/video/p9UG-YNcOAU/v-deo.htmlsi=Pr533VfbvyihkoEt
It's possible to create tanks that need only 1 steel per factory. Even Tibet can afford it. :)
@@counterfactualgamingwow that was a good video. The TD strat is great. On that video you use medium tanks. Do you think using light tanks the same way is a good idea if you have a low factory count ? Or is it too IC inefficient ?
@@leros6484 You can use light tanks. The advantage is that you can stack armor on light tanks now to high levels at the cost of needing more armor tech and reliability loss. The down side is that light tanks can't mount heavy cannons with their fixed mount. I'm also not sure if the light tank stats for high armor tanks justify the increased cost. At a certain point, the light tanks basically cost the same as mediums.
@@counterfactualgamingperfect thanks a lot for the valuable information
Probably because playing mainly with the USA, you didn’t take into consideration two huge point in preferring artillery both to men and tanks, which is manpower and oil saving. In late game that makes the difference much more than simple stats.
You might want to go through my livestreams and find the one where I defeated the Soviets using only panzer divisions and air power as the Germans. You don't need to be the US to make effective use of both air power and armor.
Difference between using it only in attacking divisions VS your entire army
If you craft some specialized attacking divisions, I think that would fall into the 5% of situations where the line ART makes sense.
Like, I could see you putting a small stack of divisions with line ART in Kiev to hold the city and prep counter attacks. Or maybe you want some line ART in amphibious formations. But putting line ART in the entire Red Army is a waste when you could just have real panzer formations to do the offensive work.
I think they need to rebalance artillery so that pure infantry lines should suffer huge causalities when against artillery without artillery
It's not my idea, but it's been suggested before that artillery have some scaling buffs on infantry stats in addition to their soft attack. This would make them more useful while not just giving them more killing power in general.
Why is line artillery considered so bad? When I play I can get soft attack over 200 with 1-3 line artillery, and keep my infantry #’s small and the template thrashed other (edit: majors too, russia hates it, though mix in some at) nations, mind you idk how to run the supply system so it slows down but they work amazingly well in my experience
It's not bad, it's pretty good. He didn't mention terrain maluses for tanks which will shrink their stats significantly plus as he said line artillery is still much cheaper.
You mentioned anti tank, you use them against ai? It's waste, you can pierce ai with just anti air.
@@jarvee9407 yeah, only if I’m against russia or Germany tho, I’ll try the aa next time, but I only use that stuff in offensive brigades cause the defense is high enough normally
@@alphawarrior9938 Well I have never touched anti tank even against germany or Russia, aa is probably the best investment after support anti air.
How much infantry do you use with that artillery?
@@jarvee9407 6 usually
Mostly emotional. As other user mentioned opportunity cost argument is weak, as instead of arty you'll need ton of infantry equipment. And comparison per width is also strange, much better to compare per production cost or something
Thank you for the video. What about the losses (manpower)? Shouldn't they be lower by using more artillery?
no they would be higher since arty have way less hp than inf so each attack kills more
@@tritojean7549proof?
Yes and no.
Line ART uses less manpower. So, there's less manpower to lose. But line ART has far lower defense than an INF battalion. So, you will take more damage.
And the kicker is that line ART has almost no hit points. So, be prepared for every point of damage to kill comparable manpower despite fewer manpower being used.
Hmm, maybe a video on how HP works is called for.
@@counterfactualgaming would be nice to see them compared in the actually game combat in defense and in offence.
Upd. And as far as I know in AAT 20w is good again, so 7/2 vs 10/0 can be compared I guess
@@counterfactualgaming i did the math if you want on the MP you will loose 6.7% more men with the arty but will loose 0.4% less rifles and 355.5% more arty by hit.
we can get out of it that you should use line arty if you wanna spare your rifles
Question I have about one of the mentioned traps in attacking without tanks. I feel like I've always struggled on two front with tanks and that's one building them early enough to make sure you have filled divisions out and ready to go for them and two what should I be aiming for with them against the AI. I know multiplayer's a completely different ball game there but I don't play it. The problem I have with them is kinda the same problem with planes that you mentioned in the air craft video. Do you go for the easily made ones with low production cost that aren't going to be great or make the super expensive ones that take way too long to replace?
I've done it both ways, but let me break it down like this.
There is no reason Germany can't budget 60 MIC to Panzer IVs with the first factories being put on Panzer IVs in 1939 or late 38. If you go cheap, there's no reason you can't have 9k by June of 1941 with 22 being constructed per day. If you go more expensive, you will have fewer, but 9k for Barbarossa allows for 24 panzer divisions (36 width). 24 panzer divisions with cheap tanks should be more than sufficient to curb stomp the Soviets on normal difficulty. And if you are building 22 tanks per day, you can maintain your numbers even as losses mount.
So in the early game its generally better to prioritize aircraft over tanks.
Air-war is everything and infantry can push just fine with sufficient air-power.
If you to knock out the allies in '37, go all out for planes and infantry, don't bother with tanks until you're gearing up for the soviet union
Artillery is the king of war!
Finally a new video!
What do you think of putting support on light tank chassis? AA, AT, Howitzer, and then using wheeled and gun platforms to lower IC... it usually comes out half as expensive so you could theoretically make double to support losses easy. Tell me what you think.
For TDs, I would prefer bigger tanks just to get better stats, but there's no reason you can't make solid TDs with light tanks and high velocity guns.
There are some solid use cases for putting an AA gun on a tank chassis, but I consider line AA by itself to be a solid investment regardless of whether you put it on a light tank or not. As for howitzers, all of the howitzers require a fixed mount for the light chassis, so that makes it SPART. And I think SPART is a waste 95% of the time. But the close support gun fits in a regular light turret. So, spam light tanks with close support guns.
@counterfactualgaming yeah thanks for responding, I'm getting at the absolute absurd cheapness of producing these things, you can get away with sometimes 30% off the ic with these things, making it like 1 or 2 ic per unit. Instead of the standard 3 to 4 per unit of the Towed AA or AT or howitzers
@@counterfactualgamingbut then if there to big speed becomes a problem, like i usualy prefer 9km an hour minimum
I think you forgot to look at the higher negatives tanks bring into different tiles.
This might have been true back in the day but with the current width mechanics you can go wider and add more artilleries, particularly as you don't have enough slots for a full line of support companies and you have to pick and choose which you want to have. Starting with a support artillery is great when you only have a few units but later it is better to push two or three line artilleries into a heavy width attack division and free up the space in the support for something like a flame thrower tank.
Based on this one could conclude that the best division is a size 2 inf + support art.... I have a feeling there are factors beyond what the video covers...
I do mention the importance of things like supply and ORG. But if you think I'm advocating 2xINF and support ART, that's not what I'm saying at all. You want infantry divisions with sufficient width to properly cover tiles, enough ORG and defense to withstand punishment, and for them to be small enough to reinforce to width in stages.
And as we saw last night on stream, even if Barbarossa starts late, and you are trying to attack through snow and blizzards, armor and CAS will fold the Soviets like a cheap suit more efficiently than line ART.
@@counterfactualgaming my point was that 10 div with 1 inf + support art would give more soft att per frontage than pretty much anything else. The solution isn't as simple as that, but w/o going into the value of large divitions over small, and the value over the other support battalions, it is easy to miss that.
@@ulfjohnsen6203 Oh yes, support ART is incredibly IC efficient in soft attack, but as a zero-width support, it is insanely efficient at boosting firepower per width. Unlike support companies with buffs that give the same percentage over the entire division regardless of width, so those trucks you spend cover more people with the same buff in larger divisions.
one thing that is probably playing against line artillery battalions, at least in terms of their combat value/cost ratio is that in HOI IV, those units specifically are overinflated in terms of size, as the 36 guns the game requires to a battalion is what a whole regiment was equipped with in most armies (3x12 guns, same can be said for most other units of the artillery/line support type), same with the support company, which has 3 times the guns of most (irl) artillery companies, which is weird as the manpower needed to fill an artillery battalion is consistent with what ran in our world, and the rest of the units (infantry battalions and tank battalions) are more correct with what most armies aligned in terms of equipment (at least for infantry, tanks i need more data as i've only looked at french orbats and they are... weird)
point is, even if HoI is just a game and not reality, the cost of a single line artillery battalion is very high for what capabilities it brings to the division, and the support artillery is almost too good in comparison
I don't know what country you are referring to, but NATO standard are 3 guns per platoon, with four combat platoons in one battery.
That's 12 guns per Battery. A battalion has three combat batteries (or companies) which makes for a total or 36 guns.
The Red Army traditionally has less (9 guns per battery) but I'm not sure about this one
@@Frontline_view_kaiser WWII TO&E for France, Germany, USA & Soviet just looking at infantry divisions
France: divisional artillery of 1 medium (75mm) and 1 heavy (105mm or 155mm) regiments, comprised of 3 and 2 groups (eq. to a btn) respectively, each group fields 12 guns (3 batteries of 4 guns) and 671 men for a total of 60 guns and 3355 men (+regimental services and a 8-gun AT battery attached to the medium regiment)
Germany: infantry division (1941) aligns a single artillery regiment with 4 line battalions (3xlight and 1xmedium), the battalions aligns 12 guns (in the medium battalion it's 8x 155 hw and 4x 105 guns), no numbers on the crew per btn, but the whole regiment fielded 2500 men, which averages to 625 men/battalion (note that this includes the regiment HQ and sevices) (leaving out the infantry support guns as they complicate the calculations and aren't artillery stricto sensu)
USA: divisional artillery in a brigade consisting of 4 battalions (3x 105mm and 1x 155 mm), each consisting of 3 batteries of 4 guns and 100 men each, plus service battery and HQ, for a total of 12 guns and little over 500 men at the battalion, or 48 guns and 2000 men at the brigade
USSR: rifle division (1941) had 2 artillery regiments, one light with 2 battalions with 12 guns (ec containing 2 batteries of 4 76mm guns and a battery of 4 122mm howitzers) and one heavy with 3 battalions (2 of 12x 122mm hw and one of 12x 152mm hw) for a total of 60 guns (manpower numbers difficult to say, most sources online don't mention services)
the UK was slightly different as the division had 3 regiments of 3 batteries, each containing 8 guns, for a total of 24 guns at the regiment, and 72 at the division (no numbers on the soldiery)
all of these are based on a 12 gun (and roughly 500-600 men) battalion/group, and even for those who aren't (UK), the total number of guns in a division can still be divided by 12
couldn't find reliable numbers for other armies engaged in WWII but wouldn't be surprised if we would find similar patterns
even in modern time a Field artillery battery doesn't field as many as 36 guns
right now i can't seem to find the numbers for a US towed gun btn, but a SP (M109) battalion has 3x line batteries, each fielding 6 guns for a total of 18 guns at the battalion (US field artillery doesn't seem to use Regiments)
for a French FA regiment, they have 3 batteries of 8 guns ec, for a total of 24 tubes (not counting AA)
@@quentintin1 No, you're right.
I was only familiar with modern organisation. I had no idea that WW2 batteries were so small.
Thanks for the lesson 👌
@@Frontline_view_kaiseri can't find a time or place where a FA bty aligned 36 tubes at once, could you point me towards that because i have my doubts tbf
for the love of god, i don´t care what you use when u play in free time, but could you not use the NATO hieroglyphics when you make the video? everyone understands artillery icon, most people don´t understand rectangle with a dot in it
Stop being a child who needs cartoonish shapes. Its a military sim, you're in need of correcting not the OP.
Players like you degrade the game. Gatekeeping is obviously justified when slackers cant be bothered to learn the least bit.
Then they'll learn two things today.
Susan protected you, awww. My reply got 1984'ed, must be nice to be so insulated and papered and catered to ad nauseam.
It's not that hard to figure it out, if you watch any historical video about any battle these icons will be used. It's not hard to learn.
I don't use line artillery in my divisions because its really sucks,even at defence where luck of breakthrough doesn't matter i perefer tanks,aviation or "clear" infantry divisions with support company (artillery,light tank,flame med tank,rocket artillery...)
Please post pictures of the cat
this video reminded me of everything wrong with the last dlc patch, it is the patch that made me want for paradox to truly stop cooking, NSB was pretty bad cuz the supply system is horrible, but it is nowhere as bad as AAT
Serious question: Would you want them to work on HOI5 instead of pushing more DLC for HOI4?
@@counterfactualgaming i hope they stop fiddling with the balance soo much! If they focused on hoi5 and only added focus trees every dlc to a region i wouldnt mind at all (usually my group does a vanilla meme game every dlc drop, but for aat we didnt get a big one going). However the modding support they have been adding along with the dlcs is very nice, AAT just raises a lot of whys and it really comes out to change for the sake of change and if that goes bad it is very annoying. If they stopped all updates right now it would probably kill the game because the main audience are still the SP people and it isnt like vicy 2 where the game will linger on because there is no new equivalent and i have no clue whether hoi5 will be a "hoi4", a "vicy 2" or a "vicy 3". But eu5 is definitely in the works soo no clue if they are gonna risk both franchises soo close to each other.
Tl;dr Focus tree dlcs are fine, even good, but only if they dont go after random parts of the game's balance, (also this sentance reminded me of the consumer goods change with AAT) aside from that i think yes, they should start focusing on hoi5
@@jansatamme6521 I can see why you feel this way. I like the consumer goods change in AAT, but that's because I prefer for it to be impossible to get to zero consumer goods (or even negative consumer goods).
Well.. As long as you don't care about authenticity, roleplaying and immersion, go right ahead :)
The irony of your statement is that spamming artillery in HOI4 is also not as immersive. Putting 2-4 line ART plus a support ART in all of your infantry divisions is far more artillery than most nations used in the war.
But if HOI4 had corps level artillery assets as a game mechanic, I think it would go a long way to making artillery better and more immersive. There's no way to really do this now except for having some heavy infantry divisions with extra line ART attached. Imagine a version of HOI4 where no one used line ART in their templates, but everyone had corps level artillery assets that got assigned to crucial sectors on the front. Now that would be interesting.
And I expect the AI to screw it up. 😆
@@counterfactualgaming That's not what I am suggesting - depending on nation, you would usually have a support art for brigade sized units (so basically 10W and less) and 1, maybe 2 line art for infantry division.. Yea, like you say - it's usually on Corps level but we have what we have :D
Anyway, I like how BICE does it :)
@@TheArakan94 I see what you are saying. Yeah, you do have to work with what the game gives you. I haven't played BlackICE in awhile. How do they do it these days?
@@counterfactualgaming pretty good I'd say - they got rid of some of the controversial artificial AI boosts, are adding more unique nation armor chassis and reworked economy - now you make steel in factories, there is food and stuff like that.
But I haven't played much - waiting for the full MIO support and Air designer before I sink another few hundreds of hours into it :D
Division with 9 infantry battalions and 2 artillery "battalions", will have maximum attack out of all infantry/artillery combination. Pure 12 infantry battalions will have maximum defense. Both of them are good enough to stop attack of infantry divisions, unless they got overwhelmed by numbers. Both of them aren't strong enough to break threw infantry line.
What you didn't mention is attrition. Just having artillery support company will have same attrition as having support company and one battalion of line artillery. So it is not as cheap as mentioned here. Also you haven't mentioned that artillery have less manpower requirement. For some nations that can be important consideration.
You need 36 artillery pieces per artillery battalion compared to 50 medium tanks per. Just for round numbers, 2900/50 = 58 battalions. That's about 1/7 of your total army that could have an equipped medium tank battalion with it. Granted, that's about 6-8 full medium tank divisions not including motorized/mechanized cost, which I would agree with you is more useful to the Soviets than having line artillery on infantry, but most countries aren't the USSR and don't have millions of manpower and a gigantic front to maneuver with. The USSR also gets massive penalties to their air force so while CAS is great it only works if you have at least contested air, which during Barbarossa you probably won't until the Germans are already exhausted.
In the current meta it's probably true that IW tank space marines are all around the best (although SPAA is better than normal tanks for this), but hopefully at some point this will be fixed, maybe by weighting reliability negatively the way armor is weighted positively. I wouldn't say that makes line artillery a noob trap though, it works against the AI at least. It also has the practical advantage of being generic so you can get it more easily in lend lease or off the market, whereas you're stuck with whatever design other countries made on tanks if you need to import them.
Well, let's not forget that the Soviets also don't get the CAS MIO to boost their planes to insane levels.
But I have no problem beating the Luftwaffe in a few months. If it's not obvious, I'm a slave to abusing air power. Last Barbarossa, I fought the entire thing under green air from day 1. Watching German panzers try to attack Riga across a river in red air was comical.
@@counterfactualgaming I haven't played AAT yet but I did see your video about the MIO that adds 50% ground attack or whatever it was. You absolutely can dumpster the AI air force if you're making anti-AI meta fighters, I did a challenge as the UK where I had to keep France from capping to Germany without putting any troops in Europe. I was able to decimate their supply so bad with logistics bombing they only got a few tiles south of the Belgian border.
@@Vaelosh466 You are in for a treat when you get AAT, then. Britain has Supermarine, and it's one of the two best MIOs for light fighters in the game. It's insanely good at making light fighters for killing other fighters.
while yes more org, and width, I think having more soft attack means they win engagements sooner, sooner the battle ends the less casualties you take, and so long run soft attack saves lives, if manpower is a concern playing defense, and saving manpower is the way I go, with manpower artillery, and entrenchment. And having a good defence means you can blead your oponent white while using your tanks as a strategic reserve. I jsut dig in to the most well defended spot I can and with superior soft attack unless they have armor there is little they can do to dislodge me. I may creep forward like a turtule but my deffence is impenetrable for the most part. but yeah if you have oodles and oddles of manpower and you don't care about your mens lives goign without line arteliry is good for freeing up production for more tanks and airplanes.
idc about this video, i will still use them as they are the cheapest way to boost your offensive, as long as you have equipment in stockpile you don't even need air to win with them, axis including japan and soviets don't care about manpower as they get shitton from beggining or collabs anyway, i have not played uk in a long while but usa can easly do sacrifce manpower, and on france you play deffensive for a long time anyway so you don't lose it
What’s wrong with 18w? Whats better?
Interesting, I had this suspicion since the newest patch after I started playing Finland a lot (historical path leaves you with lots of steel, some chomium, but very little others), so I have been seeing what else works. Can you also do a comparison on line vs support AA under red air conditions or line vs support AT? Some other youtubers suggest that it is worth using line versions of each to increase AA/hard attack as much as possible against the AI while only taking up 1 width each. Thanks
It would take a more in-depth video to do the topic justice, but I would say flat out that if you know you will fight under red air all the time, line AA is something you need support AA. There's like 5 different reasons for this, but you are right in suspecting that you need the AA, hard attack, and even the extra piercing when facing enemy armor.
Interesting. I've been adding Line Artillery as a (mentally) cheap way to get more SA, since the 7-2s were a staple back in the day: even with going the Support Company route in Superior Firepower. I simply didn't think adding SPGs would be competitive production or supply wise for templates. Obviously with minor nations you need to take what you can get and the current Space Marines function off of SPAA-Tanks and LA which is easy-ish for majors to produce (same as an air force), and they can be adapted easily but I digress.
I suppose this is something I'll need to take a look at and play around with myself. To me, certain scenarios in which LA I think is just going to do better despite inefficient resource management at the micro level. Something to certainly think about.
One thing I should make a video about at some point in the future is the value of creating divisions that the AI can use well as opposed to divisions that a human can micro effectively. While I can smack the AI around easily, a 7-2 configuration is probably better for the AI than something like 8xINF with just support ART because the AI has an easier time doing broad front offensives and putting those line ART into battle.
You talked about 95% not worthing the line art, here's some "guidace" for the 5%: If you tick this boxes here: low on resources (and mostly bought gear for suplement or simply lack of IC to build the requeried items), low manpower, completly lack of capability to replace lost divisions (playing countries like hungary, greece etc), you will notice that it pays a lot for 9x inf, 3x art +recon, why? Because you can do an two flank attack with just 4 of them mostly without exeeding width, completly overwelm the enemy and in the cheap. Basically the 3x3/ 3x art is exelent for LOCAL supremacy, a player with less divisions can do better in a well planned attack (in the sense of player planed, not planing bonus) while the 3x3 with suport and tanks (very resource diverce and intensive since you need more research, ic and materials) are best when playing german, usa, soviet etc, since you will not be able to micro 34 different fronts at the same, each with 3 to 6 specialized divisions doying niche attack. AGAIN I totally agree with the video, but I think it's very major power centric (with is the 95% of the game to be honest)
Yeah. That's why I mentioned that the 5% of use cases will include minors with resource issues. To be honest, there's always some issue with some minor that I can never fully account for. Just the other day, someone had to remind me that Bulgaria can "steal" MIOs from some other countries. I was like "Wait, they can do that? WTF? I thought Bulgaria was just an IMRO factory!"
I'm also major power centric because the sheer amount of electrical power I generate cannot be contained by Tibet or Romania. :)
What do you think about the divisions bittersteel presented in the video he just made? He's using line artillery.
Haven't seen it yet. I guess I have reason to go watch it.
Interesting video. I watched it because I'm a line artillery lover, though I don't use superior firepower, I now use grand battleplan. However, I plan on making a world conquest with tanks, no infantry pushing.You got a new sub, even though I disagree with you on this issue, I want to hear more from you.
Good luck with your WC. I did a Barbarossa on livestream a few months back with just Panzer IIs and motorized. It was a lot of fun. :)
How am i supposed to break the enemy units without line artillery and less soft attack?
When defending : through CAS, by not being critted (pure infantry has high defence), and by stacking enough infantry units that you can crit the attacker, as breakthrough is not as easy to get as defence. If unfamiliar, the first X damage taken by a division deal reduced damage, where X is the breakthrough / defence stat; the X+1st attack deals significantly higher damage, here referred to as critting.
If attacking : don't attack with infantry, ideally. The first choice would be to divert the production that otherwise would go into artillery to make tanks. If you can't use tanks or don't want to do so, then air power is recommended.
I played Argentina with line artillery. It was bloody and long wars, horrible option for me. Also i tried to play with cheap tanks and i won all my wars super fast, all y need is good supply line.
Just curious, did you fight these wars after the recent changes in TOA? I'd be curious how cheap tanks attrition in the terrain in South America.
@@counterfactualgaming I dont know what is recent changes in TOA :D i am new player, bought this game 1 month ago and for me line artillery means long war with a lot of casualties and wasted manpower, even if i attack weak countries, but maybe it happens because i am noob i dont know. Invasion with tanks and armored infantry + artillery and logistics AS A SUPPORT is super effective. If supply line is ok, you can end war super fast.
@@bigr5333 That makes sense.
another thing, artillery is boring. using that production in tanks and planes makes for a more engaging and enjoyable gaming session
It's weird how bad artillery is in Hoi4, considering how ridiculously strong it is in real life.
At release, it was insanely powerful. Progressive nerfs have rendered it what it is today/ Sometimes, I wonder if redoing basic combat mechanics to balance artillery better is worthwhile for Paradox.
@@counterfactualgaming I think it would be a pretty good balance if artillery was powerful but expensive, like it is in real life. Just ammunition production with artillery is as important as the guns or in some cases, a lot more important... it would be nice if there was some system for that.
@@Orangnus I always figured ammunition was just included in production which is why you eat through so much infantry equipment and artillery.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark I'm pretty sure it is that way because in the description for tungsten says it is use for armor piercing rounds, hence producing armor units uses it. I'd just rather have a system where you produce guns and ammo separately.
Thank you.
Soft attack go brrrr
the problem whit the div builder is that when looking at individual unit it fails completely.
example putting a single tank in a div should give it 20 org or something.
false it removes org.
support artillery lowers org like any other support company (except if its the only unit in the org) HOI4 bug.
Like I remember the infantry having 70 org. until you add the second infantry where by org drooped to 60 and they stayed there.
also do you really want to compare a 80flat artillery reliability rating vs a tank at 55% (I dont remember the sweet spot on reability but I do remember a tank whit less then 50% realibility would be more danger to its user then its enemy break down, randomly exploding and killing crew and support when hit by bullets in combat and so on, getting stuck in ditches moving to the front).
waiting for a new ball bearing to arrive and meanwhile tank is useless.
also I think only the US and maybe Germany are the only nation that can think about replacing its Line artilery whit tanks.
any other nation thats just out of the question. most nation have problem just getting enouth artilery and small arms for its army.
By no means. The Soviets can easily build a ton of tanks. Even better for the Soviets, they have tons of chromium, so instead of importing tungsten or building infra in tungsten states, they can just run welded armor on cheap close support gun tanks without a problem.
France doesn't have as much fuel as the Soviets, but I have no problem getting plenty of heavy or medium TDs in place for Danzig. And France also has plenty of chromium, so they can run a similar trick as the Soviets.
what about ranger support companies? they give a nice buff to line artillery. that paired with superior firepower could be pretty good
cav recon do that too, line art divisions are very good for local superiority, but if you are trying to push with for example 48 divisions you will simply waste the 3 line art per div by attacking without good planning (planning the attack, not planning bonus) and most of this divisions will just end up wasting supply and IC that could be better on the other army/airforce elements like the video stated. IMO do the recon + 3x art in case of need for a cheap elite division that will push in the local area by player issued comand.
@@adrielcamilo2564 Yeah i get that, but perhaps having dedicated offensive units with line arty is atleast decent, sort of like the roles that tanks have
Edit: i see you said that later on in your comment, shoulda read it first.
So for a nation like France what is your suggestion for a division to hold the line and for a attack division. Thanks for the very informative video.
For a new player, I would recommend something like 6xINF and 1xTD to hold the line. You can use heavy tanks in actual panzer formations for the attack. France has access to significant chromium, so the chromium cost for heavy tanks, welded armor, and heavy cannons isn't a big deal.
What would a good Japanese china war template look like if not with artillery..? Like with this info the best I can think of, and what I use is 9 inf and supp arty. Would anything else be better?
That might be fine for regular divisions. But you will want some armored formations. I don't mean panzer divisions. But some divisions with light tanks or IW heavy TDs to give you some firepower and armor. China can't pierce hardly anything for a long time, so even a smattering of weak tanks in your front line will give you armor advantage. Just make sure you can fuel them.
that was indeed my concern, since as Japan you don’t have much fuel you can’t just go rampaging using navy air AND armoured units all together. Plus there’s the industry game at first I do 45~ civs (30 in most cases) then miles only for china war then dockyard spam. If I want to gain enough nav xp to refit and make new ships (by exercising navy and employ navy commander AND forgetting about air till end of china war) I don’t think you have the resources nor time to actually make a decent armoured corp. unless you actually mean REALLY cheap as s tanks. What about heavy TDs why are you promoting those? You got a video on em? And I’m sure you don’t mean anything that doesn’t have the highest soft attack gun that only has piercing because of the fact that it’s mounted on a chassis.
@@racta7112 IW heavy TDs with a heavy cannon can be used against Britain the US. But since you have IW tank tech at the start, you can start making them right away when you get some army XP. That way, you aren't making useless cheap tanks that the US and Britain can pierce with their infantry kits.
But when I say cheap, I really do mean cheap. A close support gun on a starting light tank with the most minimal armor and engines is perfectly acceptable. Wheeled chassis is fine here. I was able to create the cheapest light tank with a close support gun possible (less than 5 production cost) with no armor or engine ticks and I could give my existing cavalry divisions an armor rating of 7.2 by attaching a single battalion of light armor of these cheap tanks. Nothing in China's 1936 arsenal could pierce them. But they would be rubbish against US and Britain, obviously.
Worth noting that if you can tolerate a light tank cost of 5.72, you can run the close support gun, no armor ticks, 4 engine ticks, and have a 5 kph tank to run with cavalry formations. It's not real armored warfare, but horses are cheaper than motorized.
And with the supply grace trick it’s like you don’t need supply in china… alright will make em next time I play. Thank you very much!
@@racta7112 You are quite welcome! 😀
Okay but what if I want offensive divisions?? Spamming infantry wont help me with that. And I get it, support artillery is better than line artillery, but just 1 support artillery isnt enough if i want to have offensive divisions. And I also get it that tanks are also better but they are still more expensive and require more research (u also have to research artillery to have a cannon on tanks), that most minor nations just cant afford compared to the USA for example, not even talking abt the supply use and fuel. U just pointed it out that line artillery is worse than tanks but is cheaper and more accessible for minor countries with little economies, bringing more value for its expense.
Your explonatoins are clear. Maybe clearest what I have seen. That is not a small thing.
That game really needs that since it is a real mess.
First time I disagree with you, false economy. I use both in my divisions and actually cause casualties.
Good stuuff, just stumbled on this channel. Very informative. Question: I was looking at motorized artillery and that looks to be a much better deal than standard line artillery. It provides Defense, and breakthrough but does not provide org. What is your opinion of motorized artillery?
Motorized artillery is in a weird place where it's not as good as a tank, but it's better than not having any artillery at all. Given that you need fuel for motorized artillery just like tanks, there's an argument to be made that super cheap light tanks with close support guns (not SPART) are a better buy because you only need steel and the light tanks use less width. However, the motorized artillery would still be cheaper in terms of production cost.
You have not convinced me at all... I will speak for single player.
One think you don't mention are terrain maluses which kinda make tanks useless in my opinnion (unless massed).
What I have found lately is that combat width barely matters as well as air. I don't really understand what are you trying to say. What division templates do you propose and for what use?
On the defense, you kinda don't need line artillery, support is enough. Just 9 pieces of infantry with support and engineers should hold the line against almost anything. So in that scenario line artillery isnt really needed, perhaps one batalion max.
However on the attack it's different. 9 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 anti air, 1 antiair tank slaps + support artillery of course. With proper use and proper support companies these will shine, however without the line artillery, they don't have enough soft attack to push away enemy divisions, so it's kinda needed.
Another great use of artillery are motorized divisions... 9 infantry and 3 motorized artillery. These will push anything, if used properly up to 1942.
In all those scenarios line artillery is mandatory as without it you have no soft attack.
Also you will save reaserch time which can be used on other things.
Maybe I am missing something, but like the only advantage you showed for tanks is the bit of hardness they give the division, it's kinda low tho.
Meanwhile I play infantry only and with lots of line because I hate tanks
this is definetly not the meta
ok let me explain Arty batalion is good becose it uses half the manpower Infantry batalion uses that makes is great for countryes that have great industry but struggle whit manpower like Czechoslovakia/Belgium/Bulgaria
i have had a good run with 9/2 infantry divisions
You can't put more than 1 support arty on a division now can ya
Supply is just too huge of a factor these days to be making such rookie mistakes.
Yep. It's one of the reasons that some players should reconsider their dislike of Mas Assault. While it's not my favorite land doctrine, it has several supply buffs that do make a difference.
@BobbiusRossius Yep. The ol' "No combat width for you!" tactic.
It's also funny to proc that tactic with paratrooping Space Marines that land behind German lines, then sit there with tons of extra supply grace while the Germans try to dislodge them. 😁
I make separate offensive artillery infantry and it wins easily. Lol.
I put in line artillery to make space for an extra support equipment slot as I am already going to have AA and AT so why should I have support artillery taking up a slot? You are basically arguing for me to drop artillery all together.
Of all the support companies, I would argue that ART, AA, LOG, and ENG (or pioneers if you go that path) should be the priority. AT against a human. And maybe something like flame tanks. But there's no reason to dump support ART for something like HOSP or SIG or rangers or any kind of recon.
@@counterfactualgaming Having a field hospital and armored Recon is more useful than support Artilary. Been playing around with Templates in Red World and 19 Width Infantry Might be the new Meta
@@Bluesonofman I am not familiar with Red World. Link the mod?