That's awesome. It didn't occur to me to go to grandpa (ASL) for help. It does seem to provide a useful baseline, and confirms what I suspected-- rate of fire and maneuverability tend to weigh more in an assault than big guns at this scale. I do understand however how armor also plays a part in terms of the "imposing presence", although that's already kinda modeled by the extra penalties to morale (the probability of which scales with armor) incurred by soldiers facing an assaulting Hard Vehicle. I also like your base numbers.
(07-04-2021, 01:35 PM)LostLT Wrote: ^This type of abstraction if properly implemented would generalize the varying degrees of AFV lethality in assaults that is currently based on how much armor a tank has. Unfortunately, I don't know how one could do this.. based on the way the game computes Vehicle Assault Values - the closest way I can think of would be to intentionally generate a low vehicle assault value (while still keeping armor and vehicle infantry values intact to determine losses) and then modify it with a *much higher* weapons value to make up the difference for it to be closer to what it should be.
Ah, but that we already have! In its current state, the Assault Mod works by lowering the Infantry Assault Value to 1. Since this value is also part of the vehicle assault value calculation, by setting it to 1 we've effectively lowered the Vehicle Assault Value by an order of magnitude.
That's what I tried to compensate by raising the Vehicle Infantry Value to 200 (the goal being keeping the stock end values untouched), before further testing showed this results in "soft" vehicles getting assigned most of the losses in combined arms assaults (making them even more brittle) and conversely turns hard vehicles into bullet-absorbing behemoths thanks to their invulnerability.
So the solution I came up with ties neatly with the first part of the mod in that the assault value *needs* to be transferred to the vehicle weapons for all the pieces to fall neatly into place. This can be achieved by increasing the weapons' AV by, as you noticed, a considerable amount. On to the implementation woes...
The problem is that, unlike infantry, vehicles have variable armor and, consequently, very varied final Assault Values. So when you remove Armor from the assault value calculation (it isn't really removed, but reduced to a negligible amount) and transfer that FP to the weapons, the challenge suddenly becomes how to make a heavy tank more lethal than an armored car armed with the same weapons.
I had created a number of Excel tables and ran numbers looking for middle-ground values based on weighted averages, but a couple of days ago it hit me... we can simply define new weapons and give them the assault value we need to arrive at the target final values. From a design philosophy standpoint, I'm perfectly OK with this. The stock game not always recognizes differences in weapons-- a 37mm gun is the same no matter whether it's a Hotchkiss model or the supposedly much more advanced PS-1 (had to look in Wikipedia to find some examples
). This approach would actually add more control and granularity over the modelling of AFVs, and would actually address concerns about the (in some folks' opinion) inordinately high lethality of assaulting heavy tanks.
Consider the example offered by the manual on page 57:
"For example, given a tank with an armor value of 36, a Vehicle Infantry Value of 20, an Infantry Assault Value of 20, and a Hard Vehicle Value of 24, the assault value of the vehicle would be: (36 – 4) * 20 * 20 / 24 = 533.3"
Suppose we use the mod and want to ensure this tank with 24 armor has a final assault value of 533. We'd simply take the modded base AV value of (36-4) * 20 * 1 / 24 = 26 (!) and increase the weapons AV to arrive at the final value of 533. If the tank uses weapons not shared with any other vehicle, then all that remains is splitting the difference between the different weapons (possibly using factors for different classes) and on to the next vehicle. If, however, the weapons are shared with other vehicles, we can use the editor to create new weapon instances specific to this tank with the AV needed to reach the final value of 533.
Unless I'm missing something obvious, the result of all this would be that assaults would yield the same results as the stock game (thus not affecting existing scenarios), BUT disrupted/pinned/demoralized infantry would get penalized correctly, AND the assaulting power of AFVs would be decoupled from their armor in a meaningful way, with the possibility of further adjustments/modding if needed.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you very much for your suggestions!
Charles
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