Some comments on game mechanics and campaigns

[FeroKapo]

Let me first state that I enjoy playing UoC2 and think that it is one of the best games of its kind. Its game mechanics are certainly more realistic and superior to those of Panzer Corps or Order of Battle. However, in my humble opinion it still has a few flaws, and for upcoming updates and campaigns, I would like to offer some constructive criticism on them. So far I have played the historical tracks of the western (almost completed) and Blitzkrieg campaigns (completed), all on classic difficulty.

Game mechanics:
First, I think that morale is missing as an element. Especially for the Blitzkrieg campaign and late western campaign, and possibly also for the Barbarossa campaign (going to play that next). Constant air attacks and fast breakthroughs had a debilitating effect on the defenders and led to low combat efficiency and most importantly many routed or surrendering units. The mechanic of stragglers tries to emulate this, but it works only on the units that are attacked directly. An option could be to convert some strength points to suppressed for all units, if a victory objective is taken early.

Second, gaining experience is unrealistic. It is easy to farm experience by suppressing units with suppressive fire, or mopping up fully suppressed units. I don't see how a tank unit would reach elite status by overrunning three helpless infantry units. A more realistic mechanic would take the odds into account, so that suppressing or killing a single strength step of an entrenched enemy in difficult terrain gives more experience that the mentioned farming.

Third, I think that air power is too weak. I don't want bombers to wipe out entire units, which would be unrealistic, too. However, very often they do not even suppress enemy steps, and they do not disrupt any enemy supply and movement. At least for the western campaign, that was the RAF's and USAF's main effect: German units were unable to move during the day, and cut off from supplies. Maybe give air units more suppressive firepower, and allow them to disrupt supplies by targeting a hex instead of a unit. Repair could be automatic in the following turn, and supply lines might need some (game) redesign to prevent constant disruption at the source hexes.

Fourth and last, I would really welcome an overview order of battle window for all my units, to make it easier to reallocate specialists and reinforcements during the battle preparation.


Campaign design:
First, I think that scenario difficulty is too uneven. My personal play style is that I hate repetition, so I think that for an experienced player, every scenario should be winnable at the first try, but only barely so. Those like me who prefer progression over perfect scores can continue, while those that like to get a perfect run can try again. As I wrote, I play on classic. In both the western and Blitzkrieg campaigns, after some initial struggles, I now often get gold medals on the first try, and for silver medals I am usually only one turn late on some objective, which I think is a bit too easy (but I am certainly not going to restart on hard...). Success with bonus objectives varies. But then there are some scenarios that clearly depend on some luck and a perfect execution. Prime example is Blitzkrieg's sickle stroke, which is just highly annoying and no fun at all. I stopped playing UoC2 a while after my first tries, and wasn't sure I want to come back at all. Crete is another example, where indeed you have to use a bit of trial and error to find out where to drop. Looking at historical maps helps, which brings me to my next point.

Second, the players have limited freedom in trying different (ahistorical) approaches to victory. Several factors influence this, like the many very small or very short scenarios, that do not allow any attempt to repair a wrong decision, except restarting. Also, it would be great to be able to move some units during battle preparation (or is that possible andI have missed that somehow?). Another factor is the uneven utility of specialists, where engineers are expensive but mostly worthless because they die so quickly, while artillery plus anti-tank for infantry is clearly the winning combo; or the HQ's decisive actions of ponton bridges, suppressive fire, or set-piece attack versus mostly useless recon and feint attacks. If the scenarios were larger and longer, then different approaches could work, and more HQ actions would become useful.

Third, unrealistically high starting experience of units. In Blitzkrieg, some Allied units have veteran and even elite experience. From where? Those were their first battles, and performance was often quite bad. On the Axis side, I keep seeing veteran or even elite units in late 1944 and 1945, when the Wehrmacht was but a shadow of its former effectiveness, and most units had very little training and combat experience. Maybe the high experience is to make the scenarios more balanced and interesting, but then it clashes with the game's aspirations to be historical.

Forth and last, speaking of historical, I am very much looking forward to trying the ahistorical campaign paths, and I was very disappointed when I saw that the Barbarossa campaign has no ahistorical track. Changing history is a motivating aspect for many players of historical strategy games, me included. I hope that you plan to include some ahistorical scenarios in future campaigns!

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If you made it until here, thanks for reading! I hope that my arguments made some sense for you, even if you disagree with them. @Devs: keep up the good work, and take your time (UoC2 was worth the long wait); I'd rather wait and pay more (after all, I know you've got to make a living!) than have many new campaigns that are not up to the standard you have established so far.

[TheLastSterling]

Fair points. I personally thinking UoC does a great job as is regarding your opinion. Units being represented at 'Division' means a lot of your points are represented abstractly. And I think that's the main point, Abstraction.

1st point. Suppression is partially morale. Suppressed steps representing the level of the units ability but also willingness to engage the enemy. While widescale panic did occur, unit cohesion was still strong enough that retreated units did return to following orders.
"I never mind men running as long as they come back."

2nd point. Probably too complex a system for the UoC engine. Yes Suppression farming is an exploit, but attacking weakened enemies represent a units learning to become much more proficient in their role. A lot of technical experience was learnt when the Germans occupied Austria when their motorized units moved in. Mechanics became better at fixing vehicles and logisticians at supplying mobile units.

3rd point. Player's turn can represent the daylight hours when the Germans aren't able to efficiently move about. Airpower is easily an overestimated thing in war. The Russian Sturmoviks was less about how good the plane was, and more to do the mass attacks they performed. An air attack is not guaranteed to do anything, but playing the allies you generally have plenty more air attacks to try again.
Also I think that the Germans have less trucks so the blitzkrieg's supply air attack is unneeded.

And to speed things up since I got work in a few minutes

Engineers: you use them best with set piece attack. they are not shock troops, they are demolition experts.

Unit veterancy; Abstract way to show a units stubbornness. Also to keep brigade sized units from being bulked up to a Division size unit; really wished UoC had a "Max step" option for units imo.

Alt TL: the problem with Barbarossa and Moscow is that all that really changes is you doing better/sticking with the operations' timetables. Blitzkrieg's case has much more variance since your fighting in so many places. in Moscow's case, the campaign is very short. As I recall from the 1st UoC, the more prestige you have, alter TL missions become unlocked in the campaign.

[TheLastSterling]

Originally posted by Misty Blue ✿:

Originally posted by TheLastSterling:

Unit veterancy; Abstract way to show a units stubbornness. Also to keep brigade sized units from being bulked up to a Division size unit; really wished UoC had a "Max step" option for units imo.

Doesn't UC2 already have that for some armor units? IIRC, some US armor units have a max of 4 steps.

That's the us_arm_42_cc. An entirely separate unit that us_arm_42.

It's used to represent the 'heavy' armored division of the us 2nd and 3rd armored division. Though Interesting not the 1st armored which finally transition a little later into Italy.

[TheLastSterling]

Originally posted by Misty Blue ✿:

Oh, I see.

I play this game so much but never really look deeply into the mechanics. I wonder if knowing the mechanics would have made me a better beta tester.

I'm working on fixing my rebalancing mod so going through the game files on unit /specialist stats is something I've done so I'm very much aware of small details.

I should probably post my spreadsheet of stats somewhere.

[TheLastSterling]

Originally posted by Misty Blue ✿:

Nice. I shall try the mod sometime later.

Don't. It's actually not work.

[William H. Harrison]

I mostly agree with your points about scenario design. I think many of the smaller scale and shorter scenarios suffer from having only a few really viable strategies. 5-6 turns is too short imo. 14ish feels about right usually. 20ish is too much, its hard to properly balance scenarios that go that long. I think the game shines at the larger operational level; Unthinkable is the best scenario in the game right now in my opinion, precisely because it has room for players to pursue different strategies.

I disagree about specialists and HQ abilities. Engineers are probably the 2nd most important specialists in the game, after artillery. The trick is you have to only use them in set piece assaults. Besides that, every specialist has a useful role to fill, and my ideal army composition has all of them, which is how it should be. Recon in force and feint attack can save you an entire turn in certain situations. They're far from useless.

[pendantry]

Interesting thread. Good to see that this fine game is generating such useful feedback. I'm really looking forward to UoC3 (though I fear that I may be dead before it's released!)

[FeroKapo]

@TheLastSterling:
My main point is that suppression does not represent morale well enough, because only directly attacked units or those out of supply are affected, the latter often not having much effect during the short scenarios. Instead, the AI often launches suicidal "attacks" (moving into my territory to cut supply lines) with units almost fully suppressed. Not very realistic.

Regarding Barbarossa ahistorical scenarios, a classic decision point is to press on towards Moscow instead of encircling Russian armies in the Kiev pocket. Not saying that it would be the road to victory, but certainly an interesting option. Another one is to spend prestige to press on with depleted troops in early August, instead of allowing the historical pause of several weeks in August.

@William H. Harrison:
Engineers can be useful under specific circumstances, but their first position in the loss queue together with the fact that they have to be at exactly the right place at the right time, with an HQ within reach with enough command points, and that set-piece attacks block that hex for further attacks (with often only two hexes from which to attack), I decided to not bother, and have been successful with that. I have used feint and enforced recon when there was nothing else to do, but usually there was (logistics, bridge repair or building, etc. etc.).


I have just finished the last historical Victory in the West scenario, and would like to add another suggestion for improvements:

The current "City in ruins" mechanic is just making the game less enjoyable and should be replaced by something less stochastic and more deterministic. Three reason: First, realism. A city is not a single building that -if hit at its weak spot- crumbles into ruins. That a single artillery barrage could render en entire city hex in ruins is highly unrealistic. Second, too big effect on combat. While a city in ruins should be easier to defend, in UoC2 a hex in ruins becomes almost impenetrable to attacks, with extremely high losses even for experienced attackers vs depleted regular defenders. Third and last, the impact on the above on the scenario design. In the last scenario of V in the W, it is crucial to occupy enough of the Ruhr pocket quickly to link up the rest of the territory to rail supply. Otherwise, no chance to win. Unfortunately, in my first attempt, a crucial city hex would turn to ruins, effectively blocking my attacks (nvm that most of Ruhr urban area should be ruins to begin with in that scenario, due to several years of Allied strategic air warfare). I did not manage to link up my eastern units to rail supply by turn 6. Complete disaster. I did what I hate to do: Restart the scenario. Almost same steps by me, just no bad luck and no city in ruins. Result: Supply link established in turn 4, and complete and easy victory on Turn 8 (one turn before turn limit on Classic difficulty). One single instance of bad luck caused this difference. That is not good scenario design, sorry.

Again, maybe I am missing some tactical option here, but the only alternative to careful artillery use to defeat entrenched defenders in city hexes seems to be massive losses by infantry attacks without artillery. And each set-piece attack doubles the odds for ruins...

[Soullessweare]

I If you don't use feint attack, recon in force or engineers, you're complaining about a situation you created yourself. Seriously, feint attack is THE BEST HQ ability in the game. A guaranteed 1 suppression without a chance of city in ruins. Get it to a cost of 1 and a single HQ can breach ANY fortification. Recon in force is what gets you the hex next to your target so you can shuffle your forces through.

This is exactly what the game is about, quickly gathering the amount of firepower where it's needed.

Setting up one or two arty + engineer divisions that can set-piece and/or attack on the next turn is the other option.

Seriously, if you don't use these tactics, how on earth have you gotten through Italy?

Also, there is an option to show the column you're rolling on. If it's 4, your chances of losing anything are small, if it's 5, infinitesimally so. Both show up as 0:2 odds. So does a 3, btw, but that has like 40% chance of becoming a 1:1 or worse.

[William H. Harrison]

Yeah, the whole point of italy is teaching you to use engineers and set piece attack to defeat fortifications. Monte cassino must be a nightmare without engineers; With them its very easily managed. Regarding city in ruins, if you keep adding more artillery to your units you increase the likelihood of city in ruins. With just one art specialist the chance is low (but still really annoying). Its the Artillery that causes city in ruins, not the engineers. Also, suppressing fire is MORE likely to cause city in ruins.

All that said I completely agree that city in ruins is poorly thought out. Having it depend on random chance is really frustrating. Maybe cities having 'hit points' where they can sustain one artillery bombardment or air attack without being ruined, and the second always ruins them, would be a better system. Whatever the system, it should not depend on chance.

[FeroKapo]

Before I reply to the previous posts, let me restate that I consider most of my comments suggestions for non-critical issues. Regarding game mechanics, only the city-in-ruins one is an annoyance I would really like to see changed. I also realize that campaign design is a bit of an opinionated issue, with different play styles demanding different scenarios. Still, I would very much welcome a bit more freedom for ahistorical approaches and room for error, both of which require larger and longer scenarios.

@William H. Harrison:
I am using only one artillery specialist per unit, and set-piece attack (to utilize engineers best) requires artillery.

@Soullessweare:
Thanks for the interesting suggestion, but I foresee two issues: First, I need to get the offer to reduce feint command point cost. Since I think that maximizing total command points is the first priority, this may not happen at all, or very late. Second, indeed it requires a lot of reshuffling and occupying the target hex in the same round. I found that the terrain often severely limited my movement options in reshuffling units for multiple attacks.

I have actually gotten just fine through Italy by using the default engineers, and relying not too much on them:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608653863
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608653960

I have only reloaded the first three scenarios a couple of times to experiment and learn about the mechanics (neither manual nor tutorial prepare you enough for the actual game..., especially not landing your units in Sicily), Overlord (did the mistake of trying something unorthodox), Battle of the Bulge (was way too optimistic about Hagenau and got my entire southern front rolled back), and End at the Elbe, because of what I mentioned above.

EDIT: For full disclosure, I should mention that before Overlord, I played through the historical track of Blitzkrieg, where overall I was less successful. Although the only scenario I retried was Sickle Stroke, but that one I think I tried 7 or 8 times before succeeding... oh, and Merkur once, as I mentioned earlier. Again, shouldn't have tried something unorthodox.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608670179
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608670124
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608670069

[Soullessweare]

It's really interesting to see we can have such different opinions on the same game :)

I for instance COMPLETELY disagree with your statement that it's more important to first get more total command points.

Consider you start out with 6 CP and feint attack costs 3, as do suppressive fire, set-piece attack, pontoon bridge, repair bridge and emergency supply. Now if you increase your CP to 7 or 8, what extra capability did you get? NONE. If you decrease the cost of feint attack to 2 however, you can suddenly do it 3 times instead of 2. Only after you have a good amount of cheaper abilities does it become interesting to have 7 or 8 CP. If you don't buy too many additional HQ abilities at the first few conferences you're almost guaranteed to get 2 out of 3 of set-piece, feint and suppressive fire to 1 or 2 CP cost.

Moreover, the cheaper abilities come at a cost of 20 Prestige or even 0. Increased CP starts at 50 or 60 iirc. Prestige much better spent on mobile artillery, engineers or special forces.

Speaking of special forces, are you aware of their perks? They negate some defensive shifts, give you better (less) casualties, don't die as easily as engineers and actually add a giant amount of base attack value (8 or so, to a unit that has 12 max without specialists).

I agree it would be a hassle to feint attack 7 times in a row. But one or two feint attacks, before or after a set-piece attack, followed up by a normal attack by a unit with special forces, mobile artillery (artillery shift DOES work in a city once the defender is no longer entrenched) and maybe even a tank specialist (for the high base attack value mostly, since armor shift doesn't help in cities) should finish off almost anything.

Also, units only recuperate 1 to 3 (or 2 to 4, I'm not sure) dots of supply, depending on veterancy. So if you feint attack a regular unit 4 times this turn, it will be 2 dots weaker at the start of next turn.

Terrain can severely limit your options, true. But most often this happens when there are only one or two hexes that you can attack from, that don't belong to you at the start of your turn. Those will 'trap' the first unit that moves into them. This is where recon in force shines.

I can see how the randomness of 'city in ruins' can bother some people. To me it just means I need to prepare for the eventuality. Leave some air attacks, have another mobile unit in range just in case, buy that paratrooper card whenever you can. On Normal difficulty you can usually afford to mess up a single turn and still get everything on time. On Classic it can indeed completely mess up your timetable. But then again, the devs have repeatedly stated they didn't balance the scenarios to guarantee the possibility of getting everything on Classic.

I recently played the new tutorials and tutorial campaign and they were MUCH better that what we had at release date. I don't know if you have, but I think they're actually decent at going through the basics of dislodging enemy forces.

[William H. Harrison]

Some arguments in favor of command points first:

-Once you get 9, you get a new option of taking prestige instead of either of the upgrades. I think its like 30 prestige. If you go straight for 9 command and then always chose the prestige, you can get a pretty significant amount. This is most notable with the Mediterranean theater HQs, since they have lower xp requirements. You can get a net positive prestige of like 300 from both of them. So I wouldn't say command points cost more; its a long term investment.

-command points give you more flexibility. Reducing the cost of one ability is good, but a lot of the time you need to use a variety of abilities in a turn. Think suppressing fire + river assault crossing + pontoon bridge on the rhine scenarios. WIth just 6 cp thats not possible, with 9 it is. its not practical to invest in the more niche abilities like river crossing or fortify position, so when you have 9 cp its a lot easier to use them.

-Reorging stragglers costs 1 cp, and if you only have 6 that can be a huge dent in your available abilities. With 9 cp its not such a big deal.

- Set up stage of battle always costs 1 cp to pull a specialist off a unit. Having 9 cp gives you a lot more flexibility with setting up your army. Plus, sometimes you need to repair bridges too, which can severely limit your options if you only have 6 cp.

Personally, I always go for command points and then the free prestige. The only abilities that I reduce cost for are feint attack, because when you need feint you typically need to use it a lot. Suppressing fire is also maybe worth it.

Units (friendly and enemy) always recover 3 dots of suppression every turn, unless they are out of supply.

[FeroKapo]

@Soullessweare:
Great to see that more than one tactical approach seems to work! That's how it should be, and I guess it invalidates my criticism on uneven utility of specialists and HQ command actions (although there are still several HQ actions, mostly defensive ones, that i have never used against the AI; but I guess they are needed for PvP).

I am aware of the special forces perks, and have tried to use them as much as possible. But is it possible to buy special forces? I can't remember. The Wehrmacht doesn't have them, anyway.

I also have to admit that your approach simply does not fit my preferred play style. It's weird: I love to spend lots of time examining every nook and cranny of the map and enemy before starting the battle, looking for the weak spot and different paths to advance, thinking about how to split up my forces when and where, etc. etc. But I loath to spend time on orchestrating the perfect move that involves half a dozen units to attack and occupy a single hex in one turn.


Otherwise, William has made my point better than I could have. Those are exactly the reasons why I prefer more command points first. If I am very low on prestige for some reason, or an interesting free specialization is offered, I'll choose that. Otherwise, command points first, specializations later.

[Soullessweare]

I understand the points about CP first. My tactic is to get CP when my choices are not either pontoon bridge, repair bridge, resupply, oversupply, recon or any of the offensive ones.

I've never intentionally aimed for the free prestige benefit of 9 CP. It's an interesting idea, but I must say I'm usually swimming in prestige a 3 specialist divisions already. For me the bottlenecks are more the turns in which I need to do everything at once and those fortifications that prevent me from sticking to the Classic timetable.

I agree it's totally possible to never use counter-attack or rearguard, at least in the Allied campaign. When you don't, you probably won't ever buy recon if force either.

Concerning supply recovery, this is from the manual:

Recovery: once back in supply, units are able to recover suppressed steps according to the
following schedule:
● Green: 1/turn (in MTN: 0/turn)
● Regular: 2/turn (in MTN: 1/turn)
● Veteran & Elite: 3/turn (in MTN: 2/turn)

Edit1: You can definitely buy special forces in the Allied campaign. Not so in the German one. They don't even have them, although the get the beefed up SS mobile units.

Edit2: I also usually don't need to reorganize so much in the preparation phase because I try to pull off all engineers and special forces by the end of a scenario.

[TheLastSterling]

Although the manual says recon always is in position 1, that's not true in the case of the British since their recon is attack value 5 while the engineer is attack value 6. The game ordering specialist by highest attack if the share the same position.

Personally, I think the engineers should have been balanced with a position 2 in the attack, BUT with a attack value of 4. Basically +1 to attack position but 1/2 attack value.

That's what I'm planning to do in updating my 'not working' mod atm.