Major gameplay change - reducing speed of gaining experience

[macroeconomics]

I think toning down the benefits from x.p. is a better solution than slowing down x.p gains. Right now it's already quite hard for infantry to get x.p. The only units to get super high x.p. levels are the German panzers. That's because they can attack multiple times per turn and can concentrate multiple units into an attack to ensure 7:1 odds. The latter is important because replacements/reinforcements greatly dilute x.p. gains. Even if x.p gains were limited to 1 x.p. per battle I can still see a German player boosting panzer corps to 100 x.p. in a couple of years.

Instead if the benefits from x.p. being at 20-40 were reduced by 20%, the benefits from x.p. being from 41-60 were reduced by 40%, the benefits from x.p. at 61-80 were reduced by 60% and the benefits from x.p at 81-100 were reduced by 80%, that would in aggregate reduce the x.p benefits for a 100 x.p. unit by 40%. And that would hold no matter how a German player attempts to game x.p. gains to his mobile units.

[aspqrz02]

Actually, experience gain should decline fairly rapidly with time out of combat ... especially for the Panzers ...

Did you know, for example, that most German tanks used Eyeball Mk. I for targetting and rangefinding?

(Yes, they usually had Stadiametric or Optical, and trained to use these, but actually *didn't* as it was faster to simply estimate on the fly)

Their tactics showed that it was more effective, since you could not only get off the first shot, but have a much higher chance of first shot hitting.

So their tank commanders trained extensively in doing just this.

Problem.

The skill is tangibly ephemeral. Being out of combat (one leave, for example) for as short a period as a week, resulted in significant loss of ability.

So, make combat experience equally ephemeral. Only Doctrine should offer a permanent, lasting increase (sans casualties - its effect should be reduced by excessive casualties in the way standard experience now is) ... Battle Experience should start to decline immediately ... and, of course, there should be a cap, probably a multiple of Doctrine value ... beyond a certain point soldiers, especially soldiers and much less so airmen and sailors, have a limit to how much they can process ... beyond that they become either psychological casualties or actual casualties.

You did know, for example, that the pre-war German euthanasia program was primarily intended not as a racial cleansing method, though this was often how it was sold, but, much more cynically, and hidden away in the documentation, it was done to free up asylum/sanitarium beds for expected psychological casualties in a war that was, by their (incorrect, as it turned out) planning expectations, some five to seven years off.

And, of course, you know that the US War Department estimated, based on WW1 and early WW2 experience, that a typical soldier was good, allowing for individual differences, somewhere between 200-250 days in a combat theater of operations before they became a psychological casualty (the Allies, in general, handled psychological casualties very very badly, effectively taking a 100% military loss for each, whereas the Germans, ruthless as they were, had a much better system and were able to return most of their casualties to some degree of military effectiveness) ... and around 250=300 days before they became an actual combat casualty.

In effect, averages being what they are, it was a race between becoming a psychological casualty or an actual casualty ... and experience didn't help.

Experience was the *problem*.

(NB: It is believed that a significant number of *actual* casualties amongst long-serving soldiers were, in fact, the result of psychological factors that did not result in an obvious breakdown, but reduced military effectiveness to the point where carelessness or risk taking or whatever became the reason for the actual casualty.)

So there is a good case not only for experience ephemerality, but also for experience caps which, if exceeded, actually result in experience/effectiveness *loss* because the troops are simply worn out.

YMMV.

Phil

[doomtrader]

I would really like to avoid adding new rules and new tables into the units data files, which we will have to track.

I'm still sure that we need some change, and the kind of change I have proposed can be very easy reverted without the need of releasing the patch.
Also it might work with a proposition made in other thread that unit always should gain some losses.

On the other hand this is right that Infantry units gain experience a way slower, because at the beginning they are able to attack usually only once. But thats makes sense in dome way, as the Armored units were the elites and spearheads of each army.

In the long run, freeboy's proposition looks most interesting.

[oldspec4]

Will there be a hotfix for a gameplay change anytime soon? My current Russian grand campaign is on hold for now.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

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