Slitherine

There are spoilers for DLC 41 herein.

There have been a lot of talk on whether experience matters or not. Experience not only improves the stats for your units, but also allows you to overstrength. Combined with generally good use of units, it becomes very powerful. See Exhibit A.

Exhibit A:

This was at the last scenario of DLC 41 right before DV, on Rommel difficulty. I had no knowledge of any of the maps, and I didn't even deploy the best variant of various types of units, since I stopped caring about halfway through the DLC. For instance, I used the same 3 starting towed artillery in the last scenario as I did the first, even though normally I would've changed that.

The infantry I lost was an auxiliary in Crete, and the AT unit a green Marder II I bought for kicks and left on a forest without artillery support. The recon units, of course, were lost having been sent out to see what the maps were like, as I have never played them before.

Why didn't I lose anything? See Exhibit B:

Exhibit B:

The problem was combat stats like these. A combination of overstrength and boosted stats make my units invincible against the AI. I can't imagine why other players want experience to matter even more. If your units aren't ever in danger, how would that be interesting?

How could I afford elite reinforcements and overstrengthing everything on Rommel you ask? Because my units rarely even took strength damage, much less were in any danger of getting destroyed. Only in the scenario Streets of Moscow (absolutely EPIC, btw) were my units even in danger of being destroyed. Perhaps if I had not played so many games of Urban Warfare they would be, but as it stood, I beat the hardest mission of the scenario handily, mostly because of all these 3 star units I had vs the 0-1 star units of the Soviets.

On the attack, a StuG IIIB attack, a stuka attack, and a PzIV attack usually meant I lost no strength against anything except the KV tank, to which I might lose 1 or 2 strength in the worst case. Proper use of experienced units made even the scenarios I recognized as well-designed and in theory challenging to be quite easy.

Can you imagine a combination of stronger experience modifiers with the late-war units, the Panthers/Tigers? You won't ever take damage on your units, making it so you won't need to spend prestige to reinforce them, and you'll find the game very boring unless the AI were given pure elite JS2/SU-100s. As it stands, I'm already somewhat concerned about that.

To be fair, this resulted in numerous stat changes, notably the PzIVF had its defenses lowered, the StuG IIIB was nerfed slightly, the T34 had its armor increased slightly. But the German units, with their experience and combined-arms tactic, will be vastly superior to the Soviets.

For those of you interested in my opinions (AKA many complaints), especially those of you who want the game to be harder, see below:
viewtopic.php?t=29337

I think the current experience system is mostly fine, but there is one big room for improvement. I feel experience isn't felt enough is for infantry and other low-stat units. The best solution is one which many turn-based games do these days, like the Civ series, which is to use fractions in the calculations. This will likely require some reworking of the code, and probably won't happen until at least an expansion is out, but why not? This will solve any sort of rounding problems. For those of you who play Civ4, the "binary science" strategy was more or less fixed by going to a fractional system for commerce calculations. No reason why it can't be done in this game, or really any game these days.

What is experience cap for units in this one?

I think the current experience system is mostly fine, but there is one big room for improvement. I feel experience isn't felt enough is for infantry and other low-stat units.

Havn't got to try out 41 DLC but i definitely agree with this comment. Experienced troops seen to get hammered as often as not in combat with green troops (results really vary). Add to this, that most infantry combat tends to occur in close or city terrain, so all troop on the board have the same defense rating and theres almost no practical difference between the standard infantry of the various nationalities. Artillery suppression covers it up somewhat but in the end troop vs troop combat in PzC feels bland and has no flavour.

To be fair, this resulted in numerous stat changes, notably the PzIVF had its defenses lowered, the StuG IIIB was nerfed slightly, the T34 had its armored increased slightly. But the German units, with their experience and combined-arms tactic, will be vastly superior to the Soviets.

Excellent, there's no more Pz IV with GD of 13 in moscow anymore , way to go guys.
Looking forward very much to 41, seems my paypal download is working so far

Naxor wrote:What is experience cap for units in this one?

375 i believe in the final scenario

soldier wrote:Add to this, that most infantry combat tends to occur in close or city terrain, so all troop on the board have the same defense rating and theres almost no practical difference between the standard infantry of the various nationalities. Artillery suppression covers it up somewhat but in the end troop vs troop combat in PzC feels bland and has no flavour.

The impact that experience has on infantry has been noted, although whether or not we will ever see a change in that department remains to be seen.

The new Soviet SMG infantry is actually an experiment in more diverse infantry. It has some unusual characteristics, strong attack values, poor initiative, strong close defense, poor ground defense, but it remains to be seen how much effect this will have.

The new Soviet SMG infantry is actually an experiment in more diverse infantry. It has some unusual characteristics, strong attack values, poor initiative, strong close defense, poor ground defense, but it remains to be seen how much effect this will have.

Iv'e got some online games going with the new patch, will have to check it out. I'd be up for another belting if you have time these days.

Uh oh my DLC download just failed half way through

deducter wrote:I think the current experience system is mostly fine, but there is one big room for improvement. I feel experience isn't felt enough is for infantry and other low-stat units. The best solution is one which many turn-based games do these days, like the Civ series, which is to use fractions in the calculations. This will likely require some reworking of the code, and probably won't happen until at least an expansion is out, but why not? This will solve any sort of rounding problems. For those of you who play Civ4, the "binary science" strategy was more or less fixed by going to a fractional system for commerce calculations. No reason why it can't be done in this game, or really any game these days.

I mostly agree with your assessment, but I suspect that migrating to fractional calculations will not help us much in experience department. I mean hey, if infantry has close defense of 2 and 3 stars, will it really help if it has 2.6 CD instead of 2? I doubt it, unless the formulas are also adjusted somehow. But there is another problem too - even if we want to give a bigger exp boost to CD of infantry, we don't want to give bigger exp boost to tanks, and they use CD values in the same range. So, unless some sort of differentiation between unit classes is introduced, it is hard to solve experience problem in the right manner.

soldier wrote:Iv'e got some online games going with the new patch, will have to check it out. I'd be up for another belting if you have time these days.

Sure, I'll make some time for another game, just take your pick and let me know when it's ready.

I will have to continue my "no elite-reinforcements" campaign in GC40 (from a GC39 core) to be able to comment on this.

I am leaning towards something like:
If the right family tree offers the best unit in a given time frame, then a veteran, highly experienced and overstrenghted unit will perform better than the same unit in a regular, some experience, 10-strength form.
However, outside the right family tree, a regular, some experience, 10-strength unit can perform better than a veteran, highly experienced and overstrenghted unit in the right family tree.

I've now run the first few levels of the new DLC with my modified XP settings (drastically slower XP gain, but more XP impact) and I'm beginning to think the best "solution" would be to ensure weak units get SOME benefit beyond the overstrength.

For the generally weaker units of the 39/40 DLC, and in the context of 2 XP stars max, my tweaked settings worked pretty good, I'd say.
But in the 41 DLC, 3 star units with reasonable stats become absolutely unstoppable - which is a problem, of course.
I'm SLIGHTLY exaggerating, but I think it's the impact of initiative that's making the biggest differenct (i.e. is the most problematic).

I set the ratio to 1/100 to ensure INF get some benefit for each XP star, and it works pretty good with the first and second star, but when a unit has 3 XP stars, it literally can ignore bad terrain (unless it's rivers), positioning, support etc. and still enjoy outstanding combat predictions. Heck, even enemy artillery support doesn't seem to make much difference any longer.

Back to the drawing board, I guess.
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rezaf

Interesting post
I also changed the XP gain settings on my DLC campaigns you suggested. At FM setting it really slows your units from getting to good too fast and you have to pour in the prestige to get any stars happening at all. Makes the DLC quite tough, I highly recommend it. I havn't tried changing XP's impact settings and I don't think i will because, it actually works quite well for most units already (as Deducter pointed out in the OP). Altering XP's impact would have effects across the board which I'm not that keen on as I think only low stat units (especially infantry) need it.

soldier wrote:I also changed the XP gain settings on my DLC campaigns you suggested. At FM setting it really slows your units from getting to good too fast and you have to pour in the prestige to get any stars happening at all. Makes the DLC quite tough, I highly recommend it. I havn't tried changing XP's impact settings and I don't think i will because, it actually works quite well for most units already (as Deducter pointed out in the OP). Altering XP's impact would have effects across the board which I'm not that keen on as I think only low stat units (especially infantry) need it.

Yeah, the slower XP growth works really well and I still recommend it. My first attempt started at 5%, but that's too harsh, imo. Starting in the 20% ballpark and dropping from there works pretty well, though.

About XP impact - essentially I wrote the same in my last post, didn't I?

Though I played one more scenario from both sides of the fence yesterday, and at least some of the stuff I described is actually attributed to the better equipment.
Infantry still can't charge headlong into a heavy tank, and heavy artillery support will be a hindrance, but they'll perform significantly better at 3 XP stars than at 1, which is sort of what I had in mind.
Tanks cut through other units like butter, especially AA guns are now much less of an obstacle - they'd slaughter tanks in the '39 and '40 DLCs, but now, it's pretty easy to brush them away with frontline tanks instead of waiting for an ART unit to shell them out of their positions.
But I've found that using a captured soviet tank for that purpose works almost just as well - despite the fact that it just started out at 0XP and thus my impact-changes cannot be the root cause.
A big part of the effect must be attributed to the fact that the new DLC plays very differently from the previous ones, which can be read as a compliment to the scenario makers.

I'll be keeping an eye on this.
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rezaf