Additional Unit types

[Schnurri]

Is there any interest in some future version (not this release obviously) for adding additional corps units? I'm thinking specifically of Mountain Corps and Cavalry Corps. Might even give the Germans the Cossack Corps if they conquer the Cossack homeland. The Mountain Corps might have better odds in mountainous terrain and perhaps better movement overall. Just a thought.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

It's certainly possible to have as upgrade to regular corps similar to SS, Guards and Para. It's not that much mountain terrain, through, where the unit can be of use. Cavalry could have movement 5, but not use oil and be able to move faster in swamp.

[Diplomaticus]

Since you've brought it up, I've been curious to know which were the elitist of the elite in WWII. In the game, assuming tech parity, the Red Army Shock Armies must surely be the best units. In the real war, which unit(s) would you least like to find yourself facing, and why?

[Schnurri]

It's certainly possible to have as upgrade to regular corps similar to SS, Guards and Para. It's not that much mountain terrain, through, where the unit can be of use. Cavalry could have movement 5, but not use oil and be able to move faster in swamp.

I was think the cavalry would be useful against partisans as they were used in real world. Also, MT. Corps would be useful in Caucasus and Transylvania/Balkans. Just fun to have additional controls and it is historical. Mt. Corps/Lt. Infantry were evidently used extensively on steppes as rapidly moving infantry.

[pk867]

In ww2 there were just a few divisions and not corps size units. The US had one the 10th as the Germans had one that operated in Yugoslavia. There was 38, but I think it would be abused and gamey tactics would arise. Which would cause more changes and delays. When you start having everything in it becomes un-wieldy to get a handle on it.

It is chrome, but the scale of the game. I don't know. You can rename some units for yourself, but I believe it washes out in the end.

[Schnurri]

Germans actually had a fair number.

* XV Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XVII Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XVIII Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XIX Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XXI Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XXII Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XXXVI Mountain Corps (Germany)
* XXXXIX Mountain Corps (Germany)
* LI Mountain Corps (Germany)
* LXIX Mountain Corps (Germany)
* LXXXVII Mountain Corps (Germany)
* Norwegen Mountain Corps (Germany)

Germans had relatively few corps sized cavalry units (2?) but the Russians had a number.

Whether or not it is worth it I don't know.

[edit]

[ncali]

Although it might be fun and add flavor to the game to have these units, I don't know if it would really add too much. It might just be a little extra complexity for not a lot of value.

[rkr1958]

In the game, assuming tech parity, the Red Army Shock Armies must surely be the best units.

The Guard units were the elite units in the Red Army. The lowest were penal units composed of low level criminals or soldiers who had committed some minor military infraction. The casualty rate among the penal units was extremely high. For example, these units were used to clear minefields. They cleared the mines by stepping on them. Next came the shock troops. These troops really didn't fair much better than the penal units. Shock units would attack on a broad front. Their purpose was to expose weak points in the axis line in which the elite guard units were sent to exploit. Stalin was once quoted as saying that it takes a brave man to be a coward in the Red Army.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

The biggest issue I see with cavalry units and to a lesser degree mountain units is that a side may overbuild them.

For cavalry units to have an effect on the game we need to increase the movement from 4 to 5. Since cavalry units don't burn oil it means Germany can build hordes of them to support the panzers. Then we have a balance issue. It can be compensated by letting the cavalry units have -1 to ground attack and/or -1 to shock attack/air defense to simulate that horse units couldn't carry a lot of heavy weapons with them. But then the cavalry units will become rather weak.

Mountain units could get +1 ground attack in mountain hexes and maybe pay 1 MP less to enter a mountain hex. If we also let mountain units get bonuses in rough terrain then we might have a balance issue there. If you can only use them for mountain hexes then the value of the unit is quite limited.

The simplest could be to let the players start the game with a fixed number of mountain and cavalry units and not allow them to get more. Then we don't need to code functionality for purchase etc. We can also control the balance issue. But that goes against the game philosophy where you can build what you want.

If we only want the chrome and not special functionality we could let the mountain units behave exactly like corps units. You can then manually rename a unit and add Mtn or Mountain and the image changes, but the unit won't behave differently. The same with cavalry. It can be a mech unit, but if you rename to Cav or Cavalry the icon will change. But it maybe sounds wrong that cavalry units consume oil and mountain units can't perform better than other units in mountains.

Regardless of what we do we should not introduce a major change here because game balance might be disrupted. Chrome changes is another matter. They won't alter the balance.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Another simple way to deal with this could be the following.

Mech units
As long as the mech units use 1 oil they are called motorised units for major powers except USSR and cavalry units for USSR and minor powers. Once the oil increases to 2 they are called mech units. Images change accordingly. This way you build mech units, but how they look depend on the tech. So "true" mech units will be those burning 2 oil. We could then let units flagged as cavalry use 0 oil instead of 1 oil. That would affect the Hungarian and Romanian mech units and the Russian mechs. Combat wise they will be the same.

In a fact we have it like this for unit images since tech 0, 1 show a motorised unit while the true mech images appear at higher techs.

Mountain units
We could prohibit purchase of mountain units, but e. g. let corps units who stay in a home country (or friendly) mountain hex and get to max entrenchment in a mountain get the tag Mtn in front on the unit. To prevent autoconversion we could pop-up a dialog box saying the unit has become eligible to be converted to a mountain unit. Do you accept. The downside with that is that you will get the question each turn if the unit remains at max extrenchment in a mountain hex. There aren't many mountain hexes on the map and players will normally not place units there unless it's important.

This simulates the corps training in mountains to become a mountain corps. A mountain unit can have +1 ground attack in mountain hexes, but nothing else. If we want the mountain unit to not be something that players want to build many of then we could e. g. give the mountain unit more positive values in mountain hexes and maybe even rough hexes, but -1 to movement range except in mountain / rough hexes. This means you would prefer to use the mountain unit in rough terrain. It would simply perform worse in clear and forest terrain. Then you get a specialized unit you use where it's needed, but not everywhere. This way you don't want too many mountain units or you lose the mobility elsewhere.

By doing this we need no purchase coding and we see some image changes. We could let the unit be renamed once they switch status.

One example would be that the German mech units in 1939 will use motorised images and have names like X Armeekorps (mot.) instead of X Panzergrenadierkorps. Once the mech tech is high enough for oil consumption 2 (or another factor) then we can change the name to X Panzergrenadierkorps. This way the Germans will have motorised and mech images.

The Russian cavalry images will change to mech images later in the war.

In a fact we have a variant of this already since we allow Shock Army for Russians to be interpreted as a Mech unit. So we could also allow a unit with cavalry in the name to be a Mech army, but just with a different image than the mech image.

The changes proposed will not affect game balance much because the units are in fact the same as the "parent" unit and cost the same. So the unit you see as motorised or cavalry is in fact a mech unit with the stats of the mech unit at the time.

[rkr1958]

I vote that we put this on hold for GSv2.10. Personally, I think we have a lot of recent changes that need to be properly playtested and don't see us releasing GSv2.10 to Slitherine until late March at the earliest as it stands now.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

I'm not speaking about v2.10, but how it can be done if we go that way at all.

[Kragdob]

Mountain units
We could prohibit purchase of mountain units, but e. g. let corps units who stay in a home country (or friendly) mountain hex and get to max entrenchment in a mountain get the tag Mtn in front on the unit. To prevent autoconversion we could pop-up a dialog box saying the unit has become eligible to be converted to a mountain unit. Do you accept. The downside with that is that you will get the question each turn if the unit remains at max extrenchment in a mountain hex. There aren't many mountain hexes on the map and players will normally not place units there unless it's important.

If you increase the price (say 45) and the bonus will not be huge (there should not be any penalty in clear terrain IMHO) then there should not be hordes of 'just in case' mountain units as regular INF will suffice in most cases and will be cheaper.

My idea of cavalry would be -1 to Atack/defense + 1 to movement and maybe some juicy bonus - like those units does not pay +2 when moving on hexes adjacent to enemy (all 3 cases described in manual). The cost of 45 or 50 would make it uneconomical for those unit to replace INF or MECH but you get some nice recon units (like Soviets had).

If this is to be implement then maybe add unit_type field somewhere so name does not matter? Right now I cannot rename any unit with 'fortress' in the name because game tells me it cannot rename SS units

[Peter Stauffenberg]

New unit types will be part of v2.2, v3.0 or whatever if we continue to work after v2.1. Adding them now will risk introducing bugs so the release of v2.1 will be delayed by 1-2 months.

[Kragdob]

New unit types will be part of v2.2, v3.0 or whatever if we continue to work after v2.1. Adding them now will risk introducing bugs so the release of v2.1 will be delayed by 1-2 months.

This is exactly what I mean.