Historical Artillery for Kaiserreich
***Historical Artillery for Kaiserreich***
Version: 1.0.1
Summary:
Historical Artillery rescues artillery from the dustbin of Paradox’s questionable design choices and restores it to its historical importance, all with a keen focus on game balance and playability. Now coming to Kaiserreich so you can break the chains/maintain the balance/reclaim the birthright with the glorious historicity of 9 INF 4 ART divisions!
Why This Mod Exists:
I’ve always been bothered by the way the division designer in HOI4 works. On one hand, players and the AI are encouraged to build divisions with a width of 20. On the other hand, the weird combat widths of artillery, anti-tank, and anti-air battalions seem designed to make them as unoptimal as possible, and make it impossible to create an even vaguely historical-looking division without it being laughably bad. It also seems that Paradox made a deliberate decision to abstract line artillery into infantry battalions, which explains why no countries start with any line artillery in their divisions. The de-emphasization of artillery doesn’t just offend the sensibilities of perfectionist history nerds such as myself – it negatively affects the game’s balance by devaluing advantages in industry and leaving the AI too vulnerable to things like tanks and paratroopers.
Main Features:
– Artillery, anti-air, and anti-tank battalions each cost 0.5 combat width. The optimal 20-width infantry division should now consist of 9 INF and 4 ART/AA/AT battalions. This mod isn’t balanced around 40 width divisions because I consider those to be an exploit, but if you do use them they shouldn’t be any more broken than they are in vanilla.
– Non-rocket artillery soft attack has been increased by 10% and defense has been increased by a whopping 50%. If you want to hold the line you better bring artillery.
– Rocket artillery has gotten a 10% boost to soft attack and a 20% boost to breakthrough. Rocket artillery is great for cheap breakthrough units but doesn’t have the sustained fire to blunt attacks like regular artillery does.
– Artillery, anti-air, and anti-tank battalions are half the size but use just as much manpower. Without factoring in this mod’s other balance changes, 2 modded artillery battalions are essentially equivalent to 1 vanilla artillery battalion except they now use twice as much manpower and cost more organization. If this seems like a nerf that’s because it mostly is, and it’s necessary to counter this mod’s other buffs, discourage excessive artillery spam, and allow for greater freedom when designing divisions.
– Although the stats of anti-air and anti-tank equipment are unchanged, the lower combat width of artillery and the smaller size of AA and AT battalions make it more viable to include them in your divisions.
– SPG battalions now cost 1 combat width. These have not been halved in size like the other types of artillery battalions as that would require a total rebalance of armored battalions, which is outside the scope of this mod.
– Most industrialized countries now start with line artillery in their armies, and less advanced countries start with less or no artillery.
– The AI will actually build enough artillery to properly equip its divisions. This brings down division spam (because fewer factories are being used for infantry equipment) and makes the AI a little more resilient to the types of strategies employed by competent players.
-Because this mod discourages division spam, I reduced the manpower and equipment used by infantry battalions from 1500/150 to 1250/125, which is the midpoint between Kaiserreich’s values and vanilla’s values. The manpower used by militia battalions has been reduced from 1500 to 1250, but I left militia equipment at 75.
The Future of this Mod:
I will continue to tweak this mod based on player feedback and my own observations. I am looking into tweaking motorized battalions and other types of support companies in a future patch.
Compatibility:
Historical Artillery for Kaiserreich is incompatible with any other submods that change starting land units/templates, AI templates, anti-air/anti-tank/artillery equipment, and most types of brigades. It should be compatible with most other types of mods that do not conflict with Kaiserreich.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
