Bigger battles, more divisions?

[El Savior]

Airborne Assault: Red Devils over Arnhem was (and still is) one of my all-time favourites game. Highway to the Reich seems to be much like the old game. Do anyone know is engine able to simulate larger battles (more divisions)?

*off-topic warning*

I was looking a document from Stalingrad and hopefully someday we can have large scale strategy game about WWII. Dream about AA engine were you can handle divisions in whole Europe map.

*off-topic warning off*

Still waiting Highway to reich to be finished soon.

El Savior

[Mr.Frag]

Do anyone know is engine able to simulate larger battles (more divisions)?

I don't see why not from a logic standpoint, it already handles multiple divisions, so why would it not handle a couple more? If you are talking about multiple corps/army units, it will probably be more a limit of your computer cpu then the game

The question is what battle are you trying to simulate where even more divisions were in play then during Market Garden in such a small area over such a short period of time?

[JJKettunen]

Originally posted by El Savior
Airborne Assault: Red Devils over Arnhem was (and still is) one of my all-time favourites game. Highway to the Reich seems to be much like the old game. Do anyone know is engine able to simulate larger battles (more divisions)?

I'd say larger battles need a different unit scale, FE only regimental HQs, most of the combat units would be Bns with odd company here and there. It would mean a lot of changes to the game engine naturally.

Originally posted by Mr Frag
The question is what battle are you trying to simulate where even more divisions were in play then during Market Garden in such a small area over such a short period of time?

In fact Market Garden's unit density is rather low, and overall this was the case on the western front more often than not. Especially late war Soviet offensives had incredible unit densities. As for an example (taken from BFC's forum) :

Iasi-Kischinjow Operation, August 1944 (Kischinjow would probably be called Kischinew in German unit histories)

Operations of 3rd Ukrainian Front (GOC General Tolbuchin)

Main effort of the front is in the sector of the 37th Army (GOC Lieutenant General Scharochin). Main effort of 37th Army is 66th Rifle Corps and 6th Guards Rifle Corps. The 37th Army has a 4km wide breakthrough frontage assigned to it. It is divided in two groupings, two corps up, one corps reserve. According to plan, it is supposed to break through the depth of the German/Romanian defense in 7 days, to a distance of 110-120km, with the distance to be covered in the first four days 15km each.

66th Rifle Corps (GOC Major General Kuprijanow) consisting of two groupings (61st Guards RD, 333rd RD up, 244th RD reserve). Attached are 46th Gun Artillery Brigade, 152nd Howitzer Artillery Regiment, 184th and 1245th Tank Destroyer Regiment, 10th Mortar Regiment, 26th Light Artillery Brigade, 87th Recoilless Mortar Regiment, 92nd and 52nd Tank Regiment, 398th Assault Gun Regiment, two Pioneer Assault Battalions, and two Light Flamethrower Companies.

Corps frontage 4km
Corps breakthrough frontage 3.5km (61st RD 1.5km, 333rd RD 2km)

Densities per kilometer of frontage:
Rifle battalions 7.7
Guns/mortars 248
Tanks and assault guns 18

Superiority
Infantry 1:3
Artillery 1:7
Tanks and assault guns 1:11.2

There is no man-power information for the divisions, but expect them to have between 7,000 - 7,500 men each, 61st GRD maybe 8,000-9,000. The soldiers were prepared over the course of August by exercising in areas similar to those they had to attack, and being brought up to speed on special tactics needed to overcome the enemy in their sector.

Density in 61st GRD sector per kilometer of frontage:
Rifle battalions 6.0
Guns/mortars 234
Tanks and assault guns 18

Density in 333rd RD sector per kilometer of frontage:
Rifle battalions 4.5
Guns/mortars 231
Tanks and assault guns 18

[El Savior]

Originally posted by Mr.Frag
The question is what battle are you trying to simulate where even more divisions were in play then during Market Garden in such a small area over such a short period of time? [/B]

I was thinking usermade scenarios... Maybe even one made by myself.

[Arjuna]

El Savior,

The current AA engine is best suited where the unit scale is a company. To change this scale would require a lot of work. There are no intrinsic limitations on the number of units that can be in a game. However, as was suggested above, the real limiter is CPU speed.

With the revised HTTR force structure we end up with over 600 units on the map and that is for a whole Corps on each side. That is quite a lot of units. Once all these units are on the map together the line of sight calculations each minute, the route finding and planning seriously challenge the CPU. That is why we have had to raise the min specs. Slower machines can still run the game. It's just that most users would not tolerate the speed. In a recent test I did on our min spec test machine ( a Celeron 550 ) it was getting through 3 minutes of game time for every minute of real time on Day 5 of the Arnhem campaign, which has the max number of units on-map.

BTW the same test machine running one of the medium sized scenarios with around 200 units was getting through 28 minutes of game time every one minute of real time. So the number of units has marked impact on speed. Every time you add an extra unit to a side the number of LOS checks goes up exponentially. We have optimised LOS checking and now include a visibility table with each map. There is not much more that we can do to improve this aspect of the simulation, except increasing the period between checks. But that would reduce the quality of the simulation.

( FYI the above timings were on a test build, which does a lot of extra checking as the game plays. The final release build will probably double those speeds. )

So to handle much larger forces we would really need to change the scale and manouvre regiments around. But that has a different flavour to it. Who knows maybe in the future.