Slitherine

That could cause other problems. 15 strength units were not just powerful, they also lasted longer. In a game where single attacks could easily knock at least 5 strength off, that mattered a lot. Paying 250% PP cost just to bring a unit up to the strength it was before it got hit by a Ju 87 on turn 1 is going to drain PP's quickly.

I'd rather see experience having a bit less of an impact on combat, possibly combat with leaders. The extra possible maximum strength already boosts combat potential. We shouldn't want a situation where 15 strength units can crush anything in their path or a situation where the player only has awesome 15 strength super units, but making it very difficult to maintain a higher experience level doesn't suit the lethality of the average battle. A slower experience gain so that your core doesn't consist of elite units after 1/3 of a campaign's missions might be a better solution.

To be fair, the devs have put in the non-auto replenish between battles, so with effective prestige tweaking I believe this will be very effective against the typical mass 5 star 15 steamroller because you simply won't be able to afford maintaining that level of strength.
Also, they mentioned they will implement experience caps, hopefully with lots of customization features in the standard and for custom campaigns, which should further alleviate the problem.

Without auto-replenish and with experience caps, playing at 0% PP is pretty much suicidal/impossible, which only encourages people to play at 100% PP.

I'm not sure 0% PP or 100% PP are going to be options. Seems like there are just difficulty settings planned.

Also, another problem with suppression artillery units: They're useless.
A 1 strength 1 star artillery unit removes 1 entrenchment per shot. A 15 strength 5 star artillery units removes 1 entrenchment per shot. The 1/1 is not going to kill any units, but how many units is that 15/5 going to kill? 2? maybe 3? Horrible considering the cost and effort it would take it to make a 15/5 Artillery unit. It's MUCH more effective to just have a soak off infantry unit go in, get completely wrecked, but also take 5 guys with him and consume enemy ammunition. Then just buy a new dirt cheap infantry unit to replace him.

Hell, most of the time I kill enemy artillery units, it's because they've run out of ammunition firing in support against my swarm attacks.

Decided to try out the cheat codes to test my theory... yea, that's disgusting.

Cost of 105mm artillery? 225
Cost of standard infantry? 70
Cost to raise infantry from 1 strength back to 10? 22, or 1 if you abuse the free basic replacements that the deployment phase offers.

Good evaluation. We'll fix that.

If I might suggest:
Artillery in their defensive role should not be massacring huge amounts of units. The current suppression model is potent but not overpowering for defensive artillery units.
However, Artillery in their offensive role is woefully inadequate.

So leave defensive artillery alone, as 'suppression' based, but change artillery so that when they fire offensively, they are actually capable of killing large swaths of units. If 10 inf can kill 6 guys, and 20 can kill all 10, then that 20 strength artillery should be able to kill... 6-8 on the estimate.

If that sounds overpowering, I suggestion having two fire modes for Artillery.
Suppression mode: Consume 1 ammo per shot, behaves as the current suppression model.
Battery (Assault, bombardment, whatever you want to name it) mode: Consume 2 ammo per shot, but is capable of inflicting casualties more befitting a normal attack.

What about making artillery to inflict lasting suppression? Then suppression done by it will make much more sense for the offensive.

Lasting suppression is something that would have to be balanced carefully, we don't want single artillery units more or less turning entrenched infantry into sitting ducks after one shot.

It would only make the Sturmpioniere problem from PG2 worse (the unit had higher initiative than the standard infantry, and with experience levels the initiative only increased, so due to it also ignoring entrenchment it generally wrecked a defending unit before it could do anything) as a 1-2 punch using an artillery unit and a pioniere unit would mean the defender won't have much of a chance to do anything. It would seriously complicate building a defensive position and would further increase the advantage of being the active player (in PG, you're often screwed when you're the second player or the non-phasing player).

comradep wrote:Lasting suppression is something that would have to be balanced carefully, we don't want single artillery units more or less turning entrenched infantry into sitting ducks after one shot.

Well, lasting siuppression is clearly more mild than kills. In PG we had a killer artillery and it was overpowered, now we have artillery which we suspect is underpowered, so lasting suppression might well be the right compromise.

Another idea I had is to tweak lasting suppression so that it persists only for one hand-to-hand (zero range) attack. After that it would disappear completely or partially.

I've been using the 88 ATG as a replacement for artillery units. The current bugged 88 is exactly what artillery should be (maybe a little too strong though cause the 88 has awesome attack values).
It would be really overpowered if defensive fire was equally strong, but if defensive fire was reduced to the current 'suppression' style, I think it would be perfect.

Powerful killing tool for offense, decent and meaningful but not unbreakable defensive fire.

Well, lasting siuppression is clearly more mild than kills.

Not as I see it. If an arty unit in PG killed, say, 4 strength out of 10, the other 6 can still fire when attacked. If an artillery unit would, say, kill 1 strength but suppress 5 or so, you end up with a weaker unit than with PG arty, overpowered as it might've been (in almost every *** General game, by the way). Lasting suppression just turns a unit into a sitting duck.

Overpowered tactical bombers, and pioniere having such a high initiative that the defender couldn't really return fire won me more scenarios in previous PG titles than artillery by itself. As artillery couldn't move and fire, you still had to plan ahead. With tactical bombers, you could simply fly around almost half the map each turn and zap something.

comradep wrote:Not as I see it. If an arty unit in PG killed, say, 4 strength out of 10, the other 6 can still fire when attacked. If an artillery unit would, say, kill 1 strength but suppress 5 or so, you end up with a weaker unit than with PG arty, overpowered as it might've been (in almost every *** General game, by the way). Lasting suppression just turns a unit into a sitting duck.

I assumed that with the same stats arty would suppress the same amount it would kill with old PG rules. Underlying formulas are the same for kills and suppression, it is only a question of percentage of hits which go to kills or suppression respectively.

Even in that case, there's still the problem that even with limited lasting suppression, after an attack you could have a unit that after let's say 4 or so strength points are suppressed, and 6 or so are killed by infantry, can't defend.

comradep wrote:Even in that case, there's still the problem that even with limited lasting suppression, after an attack you could have a unit that after let's say 4 or so strength points are suppressed, and 6 or so are killed by infantry, can't defend.

This is solved if lasting suppression is cancelled by the first non-ranged attack. You can still disable unit's ability to shoot back, but then you will need to do a massive bombardmenet with several units, and it will last for only one attack after that. This is not unrealistic, and should not unbalance the game too much.

That sounds like a big mess. What possible kind of visual indicators would you use to signify that kind of behavior?

For the sake of debate. Your first artillery unit suppresses 5 kills 0. Your second artillery suppresses 4 and kills 1. Infantry attacks the unit you've bombarded twice. All 9 suppressed, are they automatically forced to retreat without firing back? Sounds like no defense could possibly stand up to multiple artillery bombardment, but maybe that's how it should be. If you spend 500+ prestige for multiple artillery pieces, used them all on a single target, and don't get many 'kills' out of it, maybe you should be able to easily unseat entrenched units.

That also sounds it's going to be a balance issue.
People who are rich enough to afford expensive artillery units save increasing amounts of prestige as their artillery units circumvent the most costly type of engagement, combat vs entrenched units. As they save more money by avoiding casualties from normally costly city fighting, the player becomes enabled to buy more artillery to fill their core, and on goes the snowball down the mountain.

In PzC units do not retreat as long as they have some entrenchment left, so heavy bombardment would give you one "safe" attack, but not drive defending unit out of a city that easily.

Oh, so that's why that 1 strength infantry unit is so damn stubborn. It would take an outrageous amount of bombardment and ammunition to completely strip a unit of it's entrenchment, so that would probably help against an unbalancing prestige snowball.

It seems to me that this model for artillery would basically be a cushion against high casualty encounters that would otherwise gut your expensive elites. Honestly I'm not sure I would use artillery units though, I'm pretty infatuated with just throwing mass infantry into entrenched opponents. It's just so damn effective and efficient, plus I actually enjoy taking casualties in a masochist sort of way. It certainly feels a lot better than just steamrolling with 5 star 15s like other PG titles.

In PzC units do not retreat as long as they have some entrenchment left, so heavy bombardment would give you one "safe" attack, but not drive defending unit out of a city that easily.

Even when attacked by a unit that ignores entrenchment, like (presumably) a pioniere unit?

comradep wrote:Even when attacked by a unit that ignores entrenchment, like (presumably) a pioniere unit?

Yes. Pioneers ignore entrenchment in combat, but they cannot drive entrenched unit out of its fortified position.