Wanted to give another brief update and decided to make it into something more along the way!
So basically my testing continues to go very well and I feel I'm learning very quickly. Tonight I managed to track down the cause of why certain nations wouldn't deploy their armies as aggressively as other nations (or their navies at all) prior to an actual outbreak of war. It appears to be tied to forcesplan within the region data in the cvp file. Germany and a select few others had theirs set to 2, while most other nations had no entry at all. Giving everyone else an entry of 2 to match Germany results in them deploying forces in the manner I'd expect them to. I'm sure it has other functions that I'm not aware of, but I'll be taking d-bassett up on his offer and spamming him with a bunch of questions tonight to learn more.
But with that part out of the way, I'm moving on to the next stage of development. The first stage was almost entirely to test and figure out how to do what I want, but now I'm beginning the actual process towards creating a genuine mod and I wanted to outline my general plan and allow everyone an opportunity to weigh in with their thoughts and general feedback. As such, I'm going to steal the concept of dev diaries so that I can keep things clear and precise without trying to cover everything all in one go. This will be the first of them, and will cover my experience with the larger army sizes and how I plan to make them work in my actual mod so that events can play out in a more historical way while also being more fun.
Making the great war great again with larger armies!
So I'd like to start off by saying that I generally like the larger armies and more dramatic conflict they create. This was known as the great war afterall, the most massive and intense conflict in human history up to this point in history. The tiny armies that you find in vanilla just fail to instill this feeling into the game at any point and the concept of trench warfare is impossible when you don't even have enough units to actually create a front in the first place.
Having said that, I don't like how the conflict is such a 0 to 100 affair with so much of the conflict front loaded into those first few months and then losing the intensity as nearly the entire fighting forces decimate each other. Even worse is how little I'm able to manipulate the AI to move and utilize those troops in a manner that I'd like. Theater/battlezone controls and hotspots are nice features, but just aren't enough to allow for the intensity of the war to ramp up along historical lines with the initial rapid advance of armies rushing towards the sea prior to settling into the concept of trench warfare that we're all so familiar with. Basically these larger armies just create a massive blob of forces on the border, or soon rushing to the border, for an extremely intense slugging match. Not what I'd consider ideal, at least not for what I'm after.
So I believe I've come up with a solution that's somewhere in the middle.
Basically, I'm going to have fewer units on the map prior to the war (still significantly more than vanilla) to represent the standing armies that each nation maintained, and then use events that place units on the map through the early months of the war to represent each nation mobilizing their forces. Each nation had different speeds at which they could mobilize their forces, and not all of their forces just magically appeared on the map ready for use at that exact point in time, and since I can't otherwise finesse how the AI chooses to deploy their forces without adversely effecting them in other ways, this just seems to be the best way to accomplish it. The fact that I'll have smaller ORBATS and fewer units needing to be placed at game starts speeding up my cache times is just a very pleasant bonus!
I believe the way I'm going to do it will be to create multiple events for each combatant based loosely on where they drew their forces from. Using condition checks to make sure the country continues to own a specific hex before rewarding them with the troops from that event. So let's say you're playing Russia, and you manage to hit Germany hard enough to take East Prussia from them (A difficult task to do as Russia will mobilize much more slowly than Germany does) then it simply doesn't make sense that they'll be able to still get those troops for free dropped into their lap at Berlin for use wherever, or worse, continuing to appear in the territory you now occupy. If you lose major population centers early, then you won't continue to get your mobilized troops from those occupied populations. If you manage to fulfill your nation's historical plans to end the war by Christmas or at least making significant early gains, then you'll be making the rest of the war easier on yourself as they'll have less people they can try to mobilize to continue fighting. Ending the war early will be a priority with plenty of incentive to attack with massive offensives in an effort to accomplish it, just as it was historically.
I believe this is the best way to enable historical results, without railroading them. From a historical standpoint, each side had numerous early opportunities that very well could have turned into major victories that might have potentially ended the war in their favor without having to drag on as long as it did. Just because those opportunities were squandered historically doesn't mean you'll have to suffer through a war that's forced to drag on through heavy handed means. I don't want it to be super easy though either. You might be playing a game as Germany, and you might be able to win some early victories but as you push further into enemy territory, not only will you be stretching your supply lines, but you'll be moving further away from your reinforcements as they're mobilized, and your enemies reinforcements will be growing more dense the longer it takes you to push. This will make it harder for a human player to just steamroll through the AI, but not impossible if you're crafty. At least that's the idea I plan to be building this system around. Strike hard early on to take as much as you can to weaken the enemy, and then slog it out until some kind of advantage presents itself.
And the final thing I'm going to mention for this update is that I am giving strong consideration to increasing unit sizes. I haven't actually looked into what would be required to do that and then balance it with my current plans, but it's something I've very strongly considering.
It's going to take a fair bit of work, and I expect that it's probably going to be about a week before I have a basic implementation in place. There's a lot more I have planned as well, from economic changes, tech changes, the potential for an earlier start date, and attempting to improve AI competitiveness in long term games by having them expand infrastructure, build supply nodes, and resource extraction where it makes sense, but all of that will be discussed later. I'll be discussing my planned economic changes both for the short term and for long term games in the next update.
Obviously I'm open to any feedback, ideas, or suggestions so feel free to let me know whether you approve of my plans or think it's just a bad idea, or maybe you just have an additional idea to throw into the pot! lol. I have big plans for this mod and I really want to try to make it something that we can all enjoy.
