Historically Optimal Divisions
This mod reimagines the way units affect organization and combat width in order to reflect the historical reality of which division templates proved to be the most optimal during World War 2.
The vanilla version of HOI4 treats infantry as the most organized units in a division. But this doesn’t make any sense. A mass of infantry without any artillery, signals or reconnaissance is a disorganized mess that will fall apart in battle. The historical reality is that support companies (signals, military police, logistics) increased the organization of divisions in WW2. This mod reflects this reality by assigning infantry a base organization of 10, while most other units have an organization value of 40 or higher. Infantry are good for increasing your combat strength (HP), but you need a lot of support companies to keep them organized.
The vanilla version of HOI4 also arbitrarily assigned a standard combat width of 80 to prevent infinite unit stacking in provinces. This led players to create ahistorical division templates (most famously, 7 infantry battalions and 2 artillery battalions) in order to game the system. This mod reconfigures the combat width of infantry, artillery and tanks in order to reflect the templates that proved most efficient during the war. In particular, to reflect the unwieldy nature of large tank formations, tanks have a very high combat width (10), so you can only place a few in a division. Likewise, no army found it optimal to cram as many artillery regiments as possible into a division, so this mod effectively limits artillery per division at 1 battalion by assigning artillery a combat width of 13 (you can add an artillery support company though, mainly for the sake of allowing parachute divisions to have artillery).
**Update April 3, 2021**: In order to make motorized infantry divisions consistent with other templates, the combat width of artillery units has been changed from 13 to 11, the combat width of all infantry is now 1, and the combat width of all tanks has been changed from 10 to 7. Triangular infantry divisions will now have a combat width of 20 instead of 40. In order for tank divisions to have a combat width of 40, you will need to add anti-air and anti-tank battalions (which is what WW2 armies did historically).
**2nd Update April 3, 2021**: Bonuses to organization from land doctrine research have been scaled accordingly. More bonuses for support company organization (usually +5 or +10 per relevant research item) have been added, since these are really what drive a division’s organization level in this mod.
Updated numbers:
Infantry: 10 organization, 1 combat width
Tanks: 30+ organization, 7 combat width
Artillery: 40 organization, 11 combat width
AA and AT: 40 organization, 1 combat width
Motorized Infantry: 14 organization, 1 combat width
Mechanized Infantry: 18 organization, 1 combat width
Motorized artillery: 40 organization, 11 combat width
Self-propelled artillery: 40 organization, 11 combat width
Self-propelled AA and AT: 40 organization, 1 combat width
Engineer company: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Field hospital: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Logistics company: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Maintenance company: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Military police: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Reconnaissance companies: 50 organization, 0 combat width
Signal company: 70 organization, 0 combat width
