Things you should know about combat in EIR: Answers to "WTF is with these TP's?" and other questions.

Land Combat:

There are a number of changes in the EIR combat model that will be a suprise to vanilla HOI players. The combat resolution is considerably slower, something that people who are familiar with slow combat systems ike in the Multiplayer Enhancement Modification (MEM) will be familiar with. To others it will be a complete change. For one thing support defense is effective and efficient because combat takes so long. Defenders can and will use this to their advantage, funnelling new troops into a single province battle, and retreating the disorganized ones to refit and reorganize. This means that effective offensives often need new province combat techniques. It is not simply good enough to throw you army in mass at the enemy position, knowing that mass will win.



What has been done?

Combat modifiers:

Basically the main changes are too various combat modifiers, the Ground Defense Efficiency (when no defenses left) has been raised from a value of 1.0 to 1.8. At the same time, all land doctrines have been given greater frequency of "defensive combat" events to increase the intrinsic defensive qualities of defenders, which is too low in HOI II vanilla. Furthermore, there have been changes to bonuses for "enveloped" (attackers are attacking from 3 or more provinces). There has also been a slight increase to combined arms bonus, and a few other tweaks here and there.

Terrain. movement and attack:

In order to compensate for the fact that defenders now have more intrinsic defensive ability, terrain modifiers have been reduced for most terrain. In HOI II it was necessary to give substantive bonuses for defenders defending in terrain (forest, jungle, across rivers, marsh, swamp, hills and mountains) to make defenders defensible at all. Since defenders now how much more substantial bonuses across the board, they can now defend to a certain extent in "plains"and without an adjustment attacking into terrain would be nearly impossible, so it was changed.

SPECIAL NOTE: armoured units attacking across rivers get a far greater malus than motorized units. This because motorized units do not "attack from their vehicles", as one time EIR player General Sherman pointed out, "they dismount and attack as infantry".

Movement for mechanized units (Tanks, Motorized and Mechanized) have all been reduced substantially in rough terrain, particularly Forest, Swamps and Jungle.

Naval War

Naval war has been liberated from the unrealistic ranges of HOI II air/naval combat. This has been affected mostly by reducing the range of the naval bomber type unit, and also the "fighter" unit type that has been removed from the game entirely. Now Naval Bombers are really restricted to operations near the shore as was true in the early war, at the same time the naval bombing abilities of Tactical Bombers, Strategic bombers. Later model Nav. Bomber units types have increased range. For the most part long range bomber do little damage to naval units, but act effectively as scouts locating enemy task forces. A whole new Doctrine Tree has been added to augment the abilities of air units operating at sea. This system was developed in co-operation with Durruti and Zsolo from the MEM mod team, and consequently also benefits from Durruti's redesign of the map and Zsolo's sea zone system to accommodate the new air dynamics.

In the Pacific theater it is no longer possible to win the naval war using land based air alone.

NOTE: If you haven't yet read the HOI II wiki Naval Primer and are taking on a naval power in EIR, it is a good idea to do so because there is a good chance your opponents have. Most of it applies in EIR, just as in vanilla.

Naval Unit Range:

The main change to the core values of the Naval Units themselves has been a substantially reduction in range for all of the older model ships, in line with the values originally proposed by Zsolo -- he designed an excellent system for this. A level 1 DD has a range of just 800KM. To give an idea of what this means we can say that the maximum range of a carrier task force, supported by level IV light cruisers brings a Japanese Naval task force just within striking distance of PH, when operating from the original Japanese base territory.

DD's CL's and Anti-Submarine War and Capital ship screens:

It doesn't take long for people to realize that in vanilla HOI II, one can easily spam cheap DD's for screens and simply ignore the CL class of ships. Along the lines of changes originally introduced into the MEM system by Fiendix, changes have been made to give these two unit types distinct combat rolls: DD's are for anti sub war, and CL's are for screens. CL's have longer range, which makes them ideal for escorts, but their ASW capabilities have been reduced. DD's are still cheaper than CL's but more expensive than in vanilla and have more limited range, but superior ASW features.

Command limit, and overstacking:

Command limits for naval commanders have been halved across the board. At the same time fleet over-stacking maluses for every unit over 2 (not including transports) has been increased as well. The overall effect is to make smaller fleets more effective than larger fleets. Large fleets are still good of course when well commanded, but smaller fleets are not swamped when well organized and led. This has an number of advantages. For one thing it helps the AI since the AI's for the major fleet powers have been tuned to produce smaller "attack" fleets, and this means they can make more effective use of their superior lower ranked admirals.

WTF is with these TP's?

TP's are broken up into two categories of unit. Now there are ATP's and Transports. Transports are low range shipping units representing freighter and converted passenger craft used to make long range transport missions from port to port. It takes a while to get used to but by using the rebase command, from port to port, they can be used to transport armies on long distance voyages, but can not be used to perform invasions. ATP's look like the regular HOI II TP's and function in the same way. .

The main purpose for this innovation is to force players to build their invasion flotillas. UK can no longer engage in Normandy sized invasion in 1939 but must build that capacity. Transports are cheaper than regular TP's which are very expensive.

NOTE: One difficulty is that the Transports will not automatically move to a port when loaded just by clicking on the destination province. In order to make them work you need to click on the unit, and use the drop down "mission" menu and then select the "rebase" command and "right click" on the destination port province. When unloaded they work normally.

Visibility

In order to reduce the overall frequency of naval engagements and enhance the hunt and evade aspect of naval war, visibility has been somewhat reduced for all models of surface ships.

Has sub convoy raiding been changed?

No. It remains as it was designed in the 1.3beta2 patch. However, as noted above DD's now have superior ASW characteristics, but are likewise more expensive.

Air and Naval Bases:

What is with the idiotic TC load from undeployed bases?

This is incentive for players to build bases in province, and to stop people exploiting the air combat system by using the "leapfrogging exploit" to move their air force forward without org loss, or to keep a Naval Base at hand to make it appear suddenly deep in enemy territory.

Airbase costs:

Because we want people to build airbases in province, we also have to allow them to build them quickly, so the IC costs have been increased and the build time decreased. A single airbase takes about a month to build but costs 5 IC.

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For a straighforward copy over zip version go here: Goerings Delay -- NZQS -- 1.3b.rar

The Mod can also be set up with the Jones Generic Mod Enabler and has worked fine in that mode in my tests. This version has everything in it, 1.3beta, JSGME and the East is Red patch, and can be installed straight to your Armageddon 1.2 (ZBLV) folder without disrupting vanilla at all. It has the 1.3beta exe update and JGSME Mod system right in it. Just unzip to your main doomsday folder, copy the contents of the folder, then past into the main folder, then enable the mod using the JSGME system. Once you execute the JSGME it is pretty self-explanatory: EIR NZQS --ARMA 1.3beta complete 1.3b

Small patch from XTPS or NZQS 1.2 to NZQS 1.3b: Goering EIR -- Patch 1.3b

It would be a dangerous folly for the British people to underrate the enduring position in world history which Mussolini will hold; or the amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control and perseverance which he exemplifies.

Sir Winston -- 1937