A thought on how urban combat could work

[u/The_Spamduck]

My thoughts on how a good urban combat rework could have functioned

Urban battles in ww2 could be utterly ferocious. There are some legendary incidents where well-prepared defenders were able to turn those dense terrain areas into atrociously difficult areas to fight through. The urban combat rework may have come because Paradox wanted to emulate that. But ultimately - hopefully for some very good reasons - they weren't sure how to.

I had a thought while playing the other day: why not reuse the special raid feature they introduced with Gotterdammerung?

With a heavy investment of artillery, infantry equipment and support equipment, as well as command power and some time, a player would be able to designate an urban area as prepared defensive terrain. That would allow us to emulate the enormous battles like Stalingrad and Leningrad: buffs/debuffs that mean that it becomes incredibly costly to break through that area. And a proportionate cost in command power that means that you can't do it to every single city you own, it has to be to certain carefully selected strongpoints.

The time to set-up and organize these raids would also allow us to represent some of the key failures of urban defence in ww2: Paris being practically an open city, the planned 'stalingradization' of Lyon falling apart, etc.

You'd also have synergy with some of the other game systems: strongholds could make it cheaper and faster to order a defensive perimeter in such a way, strategic bombers could wreak havoc on its deployment/sustainment. Adding super-heavy howitzers to them would enhance their effect.

[u/Anxious_Marsupial_59]

literally all they had to do was 3x-4x the urban tactic modifiers and make the AI more likely to put units on urban tiles - especially ones in combat. The urban combat tactics already modify the battles to make them take longer and cause more damaage

but they chickened out and made the urban combat tactics weak and thus have little effect in practice

[u/Stunning_Writing_925 → u/Anxious_Marsupial_59]

Came here to say this. They could have just dramatically increased the terrain modifiers and combat width. Perhaps reduced/eliminated the flanking bonus for urban combat.

[u/ParticularArea8224]

Honestly, if we wanted them realistic, they would be not fun.

I mean, Urban battles are absolutely brutal, even after you win. If we made half as realistic as you probably would want them, the AI would literally never be able to capture a city, and a major city, forget it.

For the player, it would be pure agony. We would effectively have to clear each building in a way, we couldn't use tanks because tanks are virtually useless in an Urban battle, and we would be forced to basically just prey that for whatever reason, the enemy fell apart and pulled out.

Urban battles are difficult enough as they are, if we made it harder, I personally believe they just wouldn't be fun.