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First, I had sort of hoped to have these kinds of discussions in the beta forum (here), but I think lucky1 was right and it is kind of buried and less visible. It's not like the forum is super busy, might as well open this up ....

I want to get some perspective on anything desirable to balance out the national capability offsets, both in terms of game balance and plain old build motivations (i.e. motivations for what kinds of units are built where).

First, here is a recap of the implementation in the current test version of Global Glory.

For National Capability offsets, minor nations are: Spain, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Turkey, India. A nation is either "minor" in this regard, or not. There is no finer distinction between nations.

Minor nations suffer a penalty for all attack values and evasion for some unit types. If the unit suffers a penalty, the exact same penalty is applied for all attack values and the evasion value, to make it easier to remember, understand, and display.

The penalties per unit type (all minor nations) are:
0: HF, LF, TF, CV, Mil
-1: SF, HB, TB, Fighter, Inf, Art, Flak
-2: Mech

Minor nations can now build more units, in particular they may all build infantry, artillery and flak. Some can build fighters (Italy and Rumania). Italy can build armor and bombers. India can no longer build transports.

Here are two points I consider ripe for discussion:

Italian subs

Perhaps the biggest game impact is that a flood of Italian subs is no longer nearly so effective. There is a floor on capability penalties for subs of 2 for torp and 3 for evasion, so at the start of the game Italian subs are not yet penalized, but they will be penalized as Germany researches sub attributes to higher levels.

How can we keep a good German sub campaign in the game? I think it is a good thing that the National Capability offsets encourage building German subs instead of Italian subs, but they may need to be enhanced. My suggestion is to increase the World Standard of submarine torp and/or evasion (currently set to 3 and 2 respectively).

minor nation artillery

Minor artillery has the -1 penalty. Thinking through how I would play this, I think that I would mostly focus on purchasing minor artillery. This doesn't feel right, I think minor infantry should be more of the logical choice. I was thinking that maybe a -2 penalty for minor artillery would be better.

Remember that the lower limit can be set high enough so that the -2 penalty may not be of importance unless the Player researches the attributes. I.e. it could be that minor artillery starts of with a -1 effective penalty at game start, but if research takes the attributes farther from the floor then the minors don't benefit from it immediately.

Initial thoughts....
 
1) Italian subs. I always thought that the flood of Italian subs was grossly unrealistic. As such, I heartily applaud the changes made thus far. Not surprisingly, I am a bit concerned about making German subs too strong. Although I have not played enough games with the beta to comment with any authority, I posit here that a principal benefit of a German sub war is diverting WA resources to research ASW and to replenish transports. If ASW is less than one below sub evasion it is extremely difficult to score a hit. As it stands, it is very difficult and costly to get ASW to level 3, not to mention level 4. So, I am a bit concerned about making it easier for evasion to get higher faster. Perhaps ASW world standard could also be raised. It will still take longer to catch up because of the larger number of light fleets in the allied inventory. In terms of opportunity cost of building subs in Germany rather than Italy, I would suggest that this is actually not as significant as one would think. With expanded minor country production, Germany et cie will be able to produce more decent units than she is currently able to due to population restrictions. Once the war with Russia heats up, I think this is a big advantage. Second, in the early and mid game, it is possible to build tac bombers in Italy, rather than subs. Compared to allied counterparts, these tac will generally be superiour throughout the game. Italian stukas may be used in a naval war and elsewhere, although they do not contribute to CAM. As such, I really think more play testing should be done before fiddling with sub attributes.
 
2) Artillery. I think I would be fine for a -2 penalty for minor arty. Moving it lower hurts India and Australia more than Italy, but as you mention, this will only become pronounced in mid-game once tech developments move well beyond neutral standards. As for Axis artillery, a -2 penalty will make Italian and other artillery a bit more susceptible to air attack. I think this is a good thing because I am already concerned about how longer production times and long range modifiers have made it more difficult to mount amphib attacks against even moderately defended coastlines. However, I would also like to see more play testing before this change is implemented.
 

I don't see a need to adjust the WS for subs. They can still be worthwhile for the Germans to build, depending on strategy - and, as Lucky points out, their is a substantial cost for the Allies to fight them effectively as is. Overall, I like the artillery adjustment to -2.

Since Italy's subs played virtually no part in the Battle of the Atlantic, I don't see a problem with Italian subs becoming an undesirable build for that purpose. Italy's subs and crews were not on par with the Germans, and besides they didn't have the range to operate in the Atlantic. IMO the Germans still have a big incentive to build at least 5 U-boats and tech them up fast.

For the other German minors, I don't believe any more combat penalties are called for. IMO placing a -2 offset on minor artillery would make them almost useless; might as well take them off the build menu.

In both of the test games I've played so far I built nothing but artillery with Rumania, Hungary and Italy (after an initial surge of transports). This allowed the Germans to protect their coastline and still have 50-75% as much artillery as Russia. While it was a nice fit for a German build strategy; from a simulation standpoint it was pretty unsatisfying ... not much chance that the Axis could have cooperated to such an extent that certain countries only produced one unit type, which they then seamlessly integrated into Germany's force structure throughout Europe.

I see three problems in all of this:

1) Players (on both sides) have too much incentive to build artillery because it is too cheap.

A quick scan of the OOB in any good operational level WWII game on the East Front/West Front/ will show that infantry battalions far outnumbered artillery battalions (by a ratio of 2 or 3 to 1). One reason for this was because - compared to an infantry unit - artillery units are far more costly to train, equip, and keep supplied with ammunition. I'd really like to test GG with artillery cost increased to 3; maybe even raise the supply expenditure for attacking artillery to 2 SPs.

2) Players have too much incentive to produce artillery because it is too powerful.

An especially cheesy tactic (which I use too) is attacking solely with massed artillery to annihilate small numbers of adjacent enemy units ... with the artillery neatly "bouncing" back to its own territory, thereby avoiding being exposed to a counterattack. I can't think of any large WWII battle where anything remotely like this ever happened.

It's also pretty out of synch with another rule in AWD. If artillery units can't even capture an empty region on their own, then why should they be able to enter an occupied enemy region, annihilate all the defenders, and exit like a mechanized force?

I would suggest that artillery (and flak for that matter) SHOULD capture regions just like other land units; to eliminate the cheesy "bounce" tactic. But at the same time they need to be heavily penalized for fighting without infantry/armor units in front of them. On the attack, I would suggest simply prohibiting fire by any artillery/flak units in excess of the total number of attacking maneuver (infantry/militia/para/armor) units ... i.e., without screening combat units in front of them they can't close with the enemy. And on defense these units should incur a heavy penalty (perhaps -2LA & -2EV) in the second round of land combat if they are directly engaged by an enemy maneuver unit.

3) There is no incentive/mechanism to make players want to produce a realistic mix of units with their minor allies (a realistic mix basically meaning a balanced force of infantry/armor/artillery/aircraft/etc. that any independent nation state would want to produce if it had the means). I'm mostly referring to Germany here, since the Commonwealth countries WERE integrated into the UK's force structure to a great extent. Some approaches that might create the proper incentives are:

(a) Allow "offset" minor units to achieve CAM on their own if they have all the necessary unit types. This would give an incentive for minor countries to produce infantry, artillery, armor and bombers; and to deploy them together.

(b) Require "offset" minor units to use supplies from their own country. This would make it costly (and a major pain in the butt keeping track of the supplies) for minors to build a single unit type that winds up getting scattered throughout a major power's domain.

(c) Force players to build a mix of units by removing all the non-militia unit types from their factory menus, instead manually placing a mix of unit types on their production spirals (like the extra Rumanian transports in GG). These production "pools" could be augmented once or twice during the course of the game by "mobilization" political events. At the same time I would suggest that many of the at start minor country armies (especially the "all-militia" forces of Hungary & Rumania) are obsolete with the new offset rules ... shouldn't there be more infantry/artillery/flak in the mix?

Making artillery a "tie-breaker" unit for region control could work. I.e., if there are no mil/inf/para/arm units from either side, then count art+flak to determine who retreats. That way, you still need boots to really control territory, but artillery bounces don't work (or are more challenging to implement, since you don't want to kill everything - sort of like strafing in A&A).

I see the problem with unit balance for minors. It seems like it comes back to old discussions of CA. Like CA should not be an all or nothing thing, but somehow dependent on proportions of units.

For example,

1) define as many as possible groups of 1arm+1inf+1art (minimum group size 3)
2) from any remaining units, add up to +1arm + 3inf + 1art + 1 flak to each group (maximum group size is 8=1arm+4inf+2art+1flak or 8=2arm+4inf+1art+1flak)
3) further restrict that a group must be all of one nationality
4) count similar groups for the defender
5) defending or attacking group, cancel one such opposing group.
6) remaining (uncancelled) groups get a +1 partial (land unit) CA, applicable to either defender and attacker.
7) if there is an attacking TB and no defending TB, then remaining (non-cancelled) attacking groups get full +3 CA (i.e. +2 more than the partial CA)

Even for the WA, this seems reasonable to me. The different nations did tend to operate somewhat distinctly. With this scheme, they still operate in the same region, but each nation wants a balance of land unit types.

Ideas like this have come up before. I am for something like this, but I didn't pursue it because it didn't seem worth the complexity given the stable state of the game.

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead
1) define as many as possible groups of 1arm+1inf+1art (minimum group size 3)
2) from any remaining units, add up to +1arm + 3inf + 1art + 1 flak to each group (maximum group size is 8=1arm+4inf+2art+1flak or 8=2arm+4inf+1art+1flak)
3) further restrict that a group must be all of one nationality
4) count similar groups for the defender
5) defending or attacking group, cancel one such opposing group.
6) remaining (uncancelled) groups get a +1 partial (land unit) CA, applicable to either defender and attacker.
7) if there is an attacking TB and no defending TB, then remaining (non-cancelled) attacking groups get full +3 CA (i.e. +2 more than the partial CA)

Note that this is not as difficult for the player as it might sound. It is simple to count the number of groups: just take min(arm,inf,art). The unit class with the minimum quantity determines how many groups you and the enemy have. The rest is just how many more units can get shoehorned into those groups in order to experience the benefit.

I seem to recall some of those threads ... a couple of them spun of into pages of math and formulas as lots of folk chimed in with variations. Like you always say ... simple is good. [8D]

Without having processed the implications of what WH has suggested (which I think I would not mind), I would, for the purposes of discussion, throw out one of the ideas that came up when I raised the issue of arty being too strong - make the build time 3 turns, rather than two. Of course, I would also suggest that the WS for arty be raised again back to where it was before. This would, in my mind, create incentive to have more inf, would alleviate some of the problems associated with every coastal hex bristling with three arty etc.....
 

Ugh. I should read more carefully. Sgt. Rice already mentioned that arty was too cheap....

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead
1) define as many as possible groups of 1arm+1inf+1art (minimum group size 3)
2) from any remaining units, add up to +1arm + 3inf + 1art + 1 flak to each group (maximum group size is 8=1arm+4inf+2art+1flak or 8=2arm+4inf+1art+1flak)
3) further restrict that a group must be all of one nationality
4) count similar groups for the defender
5) defending or attacking group, cancel one such opposing group.
6) remaining (uncancelled) groups get a +1 partial (land unit) CA, applicable to either defender and attacker.
7) if there is an attacking TB and no defending TB, then remaining (non-cancelled) attacking groups get full +3 CA (i.e. +2 more than the partial CA)

Had to read this a couple of times but it makes sense to me now. I like it! Only question I have is how step #5 works in practice ... seems you could have groups of 3 AND groups of 8 on either/both sides of the battle ... how do you decide which groups get cancelled?

Example; if the attacker has a CA group with 3 units and a CA group with 7 units and a TB, while the defender has a single CA group with 5 units ... which attacking CA group gets the +3 bonus?

Although I think WH's combined arms "group" idea is interesting, it significantly weakens what I have thought for some time is a relatively moderate bonus. The way things are now, the combined arms bonus is nice if you can get it - but it affects your whole attack. If the group change were implemented, it becomes easy to partially negate and may not really be worth too much effort to think about for larger battles. I think you would have to increase the combined arms bonus to at least 4/2 (for complete/partial) or provide some other enhanced benefit (a small defensive bonus). But I think I prefer things as is. Although it's imperfect, I don't think combined arms is "broken" such that you need to rethink the whole thing.

As it is, the minor countries' units (such as Italy) don't contribute to combined arms or to negating the bonus. So that's good. And I have to say the minor artillery is particularly vulnerable to air due to the very weak evasion (starting at 4).

As to artillery build times, I think the current difficulty upgrading artillery evasion strikes a nice balance. Historically, the big builder of artillery was the Soviet Union - which used artillery to level the playing field in some major battles. The game favors artillery builds for the SU because they can afford the population costs. If artillery cost is increased to 3, it would be very hard for the SU to build much (but not so hard for the Germans). In my opinion, this would skew the Eastern Front battles in favor of the Axis.

If people feel the current system doesn't go far enough to devaluing artillery, just reduce artillery starting evasion to 4 and/or artillery land attack and see how that works. Another possibility would be to increase the WS for infantry attack (but not evasion). Personally, I'd rather see whether a small change or change works and then let it be tested extensively - rather than rethinking the whole system.

In a way, I've never liked the CA bonus at all. By which I mean, I would rather that the units have attributes which just naturally compliment each other.

I think that artillery, with its suppression attack, is almost there.

My preference for artillery is that it rarely kills things, but instead makes it much easier for other units to kill things. Hence the proposal from a couple of months ago to reduce artillery evasion to 4 and increase the suppression-damage level from 5*durability to 6*durability. With artillery evasion reduced it wouldn't be all that much harder to damage with air (if at all), and with the increase in the suppresion damage level artillery would be a bit worse at actually damaging units, instead yielding suppression that enables other units to cause damage.

In this way, artillery becomes complimentary with infantry. Artillery doesn't do much damage on its own, but enables infantry to do more damage.

The other problem here, which actually prompted the CA discussion, was how to encourage units of a nationality to tend to stick together. Perhaps it is the simple brilliance of Gary's design that it didn't matter before, but on the other hand I personally always used Hungarian and Rumanian militia on the Atlantic wall anyway. One of the big things that has changed is simply that you explicitly see which nation the units come from.

I do like in principle some kind of CA for units of like nationality, it seems the best way to encourage cohesion of national forces. In a way it seems sort of more reasonable than the existing CA rules.

I've no particular plans at this point. Just continue to think and listen to ideas.

I also think units that fire op-fire should have their capability decremented for every op-fire they fire (reset at end of turn). It used to be that way in GGWAW-1, I don't recall why it changed. I think maybe just generally to make amphib landings more difficult.

But I think you ought to be able to throw suicidal landing units against artillery and *eventually* be able to get someone on shore. And I feel that op-fire being never depleted makes it a little too powerful.

I believe (but would have to go thorugh an implementation effort) that this would be easily and best implemented so that if many artillery are defending only a few would fire (until the landing unit is damaged), and hence the remainder would not fire and would not suffer the depletion.

It also, for example, would allow one to run a few HFs through narrows to deplete artillery op-fire, then run transports through. I think this is perfectly legitimate and desirable, it allows you to provide "escorts" which actually help with op-fire.

All this I mention because of the voiced perspective that artillery defended against amphib a little too well.

I, like Forwarn, do not find combined arms to be 'broken' per se. Indeedm it is kinda fun.... I often am sitting on the edge of my seat when strafing a territory stacked with AA in the home of eliminating the lonely tac bomber just so I can get CA. I have to balance the likely damage of my own units against the benefits of combined arms.  If the bonus is diluted too much, it won't be worth worrying about. For WH's proposal to work in encouraging more historic builds, CA still has to be worth getting....
 
A lot of ideas are being contemplated for arty. In terms of its actual ground strength, I am actually fairly happy about the latest changes. As for their inability to occupy territory, I am guilty as the next guy in terms of bouncing arty to eliminate militia. Perhaps one might abstract this as having the arty never actually enter the territory; units are destroyed from afar... Dunno. I am not hugely convinced that this is a bad thing, but would not object if arty / AA did not bounce. My biggest concern (and perhaps others do not share it, so chime in!) with cheap arty is that the Atlantic Wall is often nigh insurmountable (forcing invasions of Spain and Portugal in many games. I am a bit leery about having decreasing op-fire for straits, but would have to try it to be sure. That said, I think decreasing op-fire for amphib invasions would be interesting. Another idea that has popped to mind is to have the amphib limit count only for units that make it ashore. So, if I have a large number of transports and a large number of inf (but only transport level 5, for example), I might be willing to stage a D-Day (or more like a Dieppe!) against a moderately lightly defended coast.....
 
 

I just skimmed this thread. I think the CA is important and worthwhile to simulate 'blitzkrieg' and encourage contruction of all unit varieties.
 
I think artillery is rather too powerful vis a vis infantry and would support increasing the build time to 3, or reducing the units fired at to 1.

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead

Italian subs

At the outbreak of WWII Italian subs were equal or even superior to German subs both in quality and numbers. Only during the war better subs were developed in Germany. So this change would mirror the historical events and IMO until about 1942 Italian subs are still worth their money as Germany usually does not get to EV 4 before then.

No need to balance out the game here from my perspective.

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead

minor nation artillery

I would apply a similar approach here as above, at the outbreak of the war the differences in technology did not appear to be a striking as later on (after improvements were pushed by the need to gain an edge). Thus there should be a -2 modifier and a floor to Artillery equal to average starting levels, making minor countries arty almost equal in 1939-40 but increasingly inferior as soon as artllery tech is researched.

ORIGINAL: WanderingHead

1) define as many as possible groups of 1arm+1inf+1art (minimum group size 3)
2) from any remaining units, add up to +1arm + 3inf + 1art + 1 flak to each group (maximum group size is 8=1arm+4inf+2art+1flak or 8=2arm+4inf+1art+1flak)
3) further restrict that a group must be all of one nationality
4) count similar groups for the defender
5) defending or attacking group, cancel one such opposing group.
6) remaining (uncancelled) groups get a +1 partial (land unit) CA, applicable to either defender and attacker.
7) if there is an attacking TB and no defending TB, then remaining (non-cancelled) attacking groups get full +3 CA (i.e. +2 more than the partial CA)

While I support a CAM that is supporting a more realistic and proportional build strategy I doubt that a rule as above will be easy enough to grasp. I also miss Tac bombers in the mix. If individual groups or units would get CA bonus while others would not the effect of CA should be increased, otherwise the impact of CA would be washed down.

Also the idea that equal numbers would offset (cancel) the other side's CA is not to my liking. In fact as many units as reasonable should get CA bonus, both attacking and defending. The other side's capabilities should not impact my own units negatively IMO.

ORIGINAL: Marshall Art
At the outbreak of WWII Italian subs were equal or even superior to German subs both in quality and numbers. Only during the war better subs were developed in Germany. So this change would mirror the historical events and IMO until about 1942 Italian subs are still worth their money as Germany usually does not get to EV 4 before then.

No need to balance out the game here from my perspective.

I don't know what you are basing this statement on. I've read Clay Blair's very detailed history of the u-boat wars and the battle of the Atlantic. Karl Doenitz always struggled to find useful roles for the Italian subs, and in general they accomplished very little. Italian subs in the Atlantic sunk only 106 ships of the 1904 allied ships sunk to August 1942.

Italian subs in the Atlantic contributed very little. I don't have figures for the Med.

At start of WWII Germany had 57 operational U-boats, out of about 30 were Atlantic boats. Italy had more than 100. The reason why they were not as successful was the fact that most were used in the Med which is a very unfriendly area to subs. Not much shipping to sink there either. It was also almost impossible to break out towards the Atlantic from the Med. Although 106 ships may not sound like a lot, given that the Italians in the Atlantic operated from German held ports in France with scarce support and little coordination with German U-boats its not too bad either. As far as I know, Dönitz never had command over the subs in the same fashion as German subs in the Med never operated under Italian command.

Assuming greater cooperation and better support among the Axis powers there is little doubt that 100 subs (even if only a fraction was Atlantic going) would not have greatly increased Axis success in the early war years.

The conclusion I feel from this thread is penalize minor nation artillery -2, with a high enough floor that this penalty is only -1 or 0 at the beginning of the war and the penalty is effectively only -2 after research enhances the Player's levels.

No other major tweaks necessary, especially for this patch since I'd like to get it out (I don't really want to redo CA right now).