Update 1.0.7.7

After an extended development period, Update 1.0.7.7. is finally here, with the Kharkov map, UI improvements, Soviet 1941 updates, a new air pricing formula, some sweet quality of life improvements and a crucial fix to one of the most insidious CAOS combat bugs we have ever uncovered.


Welcome to the Eastern Front! Kharkov is our first historical USSR map and it is a wholly unique experience that differs dramatically from existing maps due to its sheer size. Kharkov combines the mobility of the Russian Steppe with the powerful defensive anchors of fierce urban combat, and the logistical threat of inadequate infrastructure. We have meticulously modeled the region as close to history as we could get using pre-war Soviet maps, and the result is a beautiful nightmare. In some sectors you will fight for dense industrial suburbs, in others you'll be mired in marshes and thick forests, and sometimes there is hardly a settlement to be found for dozens of kilometers and nary a paved road in sight. Your flanks will be vast, your spearheads overextended, and the roads never seem to lead where you need them to...so dive in and enjoy the hospitality of the Soviet Union!

Kharkov also prototypes a few new changes coming to other large-scale maps in the future, namely a slower reinforcement tempo to give breakthroughs more time to expand before defender counter-attacks, and a highly experimental Army + (approximately 11 divisions) starting point level.


Update 1077 also brings a host of revisions to Soviet forces in 1941 to better reflect the chaotic state of the Soviet Armed forces at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet 1941 OB has been expanded, but units now deviate far more from their official tables of equipment and training levels are lower. When played strictly historically, the Soviet 1941 OB tends to either strangle its opponent through sheer volume of force and Zone of Control locks… or collapse spectacularly. However, unshackled from the training and morale limitations induced by the Great Purge and constant re-organizations in custom scenarios, the Soviet military can be truly dangerous. Just take a quick look at some of the graphs below to see just how dangerous the Soviets can become if they are fighting on an even footing.
[h2]Unit revisions and additions[/h2]
[h3]Armor/Mech:[/h3]
Updated tank type allocation in the 2nd and 5th tank divisions to better match strength reports on the eve of war.
Brought motorized infantry battalions of the 2nd, 4th, 5th and 7th tank divisions up to ToE strength, as these units were relatively close to establishment personnel strength.
Added armored car recon companies to tank regiment HQs where appropriate.
Added 15th Motorcycle Regiment, from the 1st Mechanized Corps (Leningrad).
Lowered training levels of most KV and T-34 equipped units from recruit to conscript, stemming from extremely limited training available to crews on new vehicles, due to Soviet security concerns.
Lowered training levels of infantry and artillery in mechanized and motorized divisions from recruit to conscript, as Soviet mechanized forces suffered from most of the same officer and NCO shortages as standard rifle divisions.

[h3]Infantry:[/h3]

• Infantry divisions re-organized in accordance with their June 22 OBs. This places most infantry divisions at roughly 85% ToE strength, further modified by equipment, organizational, and manpower, variations according to the Front they are subordinate to.
  
• Added 168th Rifle Division (Leningrad), a near war-time establishment infantry division.
  
• Added 117th Rifle Division (STAVKA Reserve) a 2nd line reserve division, near full peacetime establishment, but desperately short on SMGs.
  
• Motorized the howitzer regiments of many infantry divisions.
  
• Added 120mm PM-38 mortars to infantry regimental artillery batteries where appropriate.
  
• Raised training levels of cavalry regiments from conscript to recruit, as these units were typically less affected by the radical reorganizations of 1940.
  
• Lowered training levels of the 1st and 211th Airborne Brigades (1st Airborne Corps) from experienced to recruit, as like many VDV units at the time, they were still forming and undergoing training at the time of the invasion.
  
• Added missing 76mm M1938 batteries (4 guns) and AA/HMGs (6 sections) to heavy weapons battalion of Airborne Brigades.
  

[h3]Artillery:[/h3]

• Added 403rd and 108th Howitzer Artillery Regiments (High Power). With 36 and 24 203mm B-4 howitzers respectively.
  
• Added 3 cannon and 6 corps artillery regiments, armed with various mixtures of 152mm ML-20s and 122mm A-19s. Regiment strengths vary wildly, as some battalions retain the pre-1940 8-gun organization, while some use the more recent 12-gun battalion org. Some regiments have a full 4 battalions, some only have 2, etc. Total gun counts vary between 20 and 48 guns per regiment.
  
• Reduced motorized movement speed for division-level Soviet artillery in 1941 from 15 to 12 to reflect shortages of prime movers and chronic reliance on civilian tractors to transport guns.
  
• Units equipped with 203mm B-4, 122mm M1910/30, and 152mm M1909/30 howitzers motorized movement speed reduced from 15 to 12 in all other years as well, as these guns suffered from slow towing speeds due to their carriage designs.
  

[h2]Equipment Changes:[/h2]

• Added pre-war SOV Inf(Apr) ’41, to distinguish infantry squads that are near, or at, ToE strength, from their underequipped brethren.
  
• Removed close air support mission roll from MiG-3s, as Soviet battlefield communications could not effectively coordinate close air missions in 1941.
  
• Increased breakdown rate for T-26s from 20% to 30%
  
• Increased breakdown rate for BT-2s from 20 to 25%.
  
• Reduced breakdown rate of T-35 heavy tanks from 80% to 50%. T-35s historically had some of the highest mechanical readiness rates among Soviet vehicles at the start of the war. Primarily because they were concentrated in units with better logistical support. Still, the CAOS breakdown rate considers both actual breakdown rates and maintenance hours, so their breakdown rate remains high.
  

[h2]The Air Pricing Problem[/h2]
The previous air price formula had 3 key problems:

1. Aircraft were slightly too expensive from 1943 onwards
   
2. It excessively punished multi-role aircraft by adding an additional price for every mission they could perform. This created a serious air balance problem for nations that relied on multirole aircraft for air superiority, notably the USA and Great Britain.
   
3. It made bombers that were also capable of strike missions (PE-2s) unreasonably expensive.
   

Collectively, these problems created a head-to-head meta where players frequently did not buy air superiority aircraft at all on turn 1 in 1944/1945 games, and instead simply turned those points into more ground units. Moreover, the historically air-focused nations of the USA and Britain were less likely to buy aircraft because their multirole squadrons were prohibitively expensive to deploy in substantial numbers.

While shorting air forces to bolster ground force should be an option, and sometimes even a desirable option, it was effectively always the optimal choice under the old pricing system.

[h2]Our Solution:[/h2]
In update 1.0.7.7 we have rebalanced the air price formula to moderately reduce the cost factor of air superiority missions, made interdiction missions completely free, and slightly reduced the cost factor for bombing missions. In general, fighter costs are reduced by 20% and bombers by 10%.

The lists below display some highlights from each nation.

USA:

 P-47D price reduced from 17.54 to 13.96 (20% reduction)
 P-51D price reduced from 16.6 to 13.42 (19% reduction)
 P-40F price reduced from 12.61 to 11.07 (12% reduction)
 P-39D price reduced from 12.49 to 8.79 (29% reduction)
 P-38G price reduced from 13.67 to 11.39 (16% reduction)


Great Britain:

 Typhoon Ib price reduced from 14.41 to 12.4 (14% reduction)
 Spitfire XXI price reduced from 18.63 to 13.7 (26% reduction)
 Spitfire IXe price reduced from 15.04 to 10.83 (28% reduction)
 Spitfire Vb price reduced from 9.9 to 7.92 (20% reduction)
 Hurricane IIb price reduced from 9.21 to 6.17 (33% reduction)


Germany:

 ME262 A-1a price reduced from 25.06 to 20.05 (20% reduction)
 FW-190 A-8 price reduced from 16.6 to 13.33 (20% reduction)
 FW-190 G-8 price reduced from 17.11 to 14.9 (13% reduction)
 BF109 G-6 price reduced from 13.57 to 10.46 (23% reduction)
 BF-109 F-4 price reduce from 9.34 to 7.48 (20% reduction)
 BF-110 G-2 price reduced from 16.33 to 11.54 (29% reduction)
 JU-87 D-5 price reduced from 9.77 to 6.77 (30% reduction)


USSR:

 LA-7 price reduced from 12.09 to 10.21(15% reduction)
 Yak-9D price reduced from 8.9 to 7.43 (16% reduction)
 Yak-7 price reduced from 6.36 to 5.09 (20% reduction)
 Yak-3 price reduced from 6.45 to 5.16 (20% reduction)
 PE2-FT price reduced from 11.51 to 8.51 (26% reduction)
 IL-2M price reduced from 9.03 to 7.03 (22% reduction)

The updated New Game screen, neat, categorized, and built with plenty of room for expansion in mind.

• Added an option to toggle the hex grid on/off. This can be changed in the Options menu, or in game using the F2 hotkey.
  
• Updated the Create Game screen to be cleaner and more user friendly. The updated menu also allows the player to select both Red and Blue orders of battle from the create game screen. Players can still choose to change their OB in the ready screen if desired.
  
• Updated unit requisition window to be larger, made divisions between data fields clearer and left some extra room for further improvements in the future.
  
• Air requisition menu now displays air unit names and training levels (As graphics, instead of as numbers), at all times.
  
• Updated the Save and Load games screens, they are now larger and we fixed a bug that could cause the save screen to skip characters as a player typed save names in scenarios with high unit counts.
  
• Added a hotkey (Shift+P) to place retreat rally points for selected units.
  
• Added a button to the air orders menu to automatically place all air orders. Place any air orders you want to micromanage, then let the AI place the rest for you.
  
• Added a button to the air orders menu to cancel all planned air missions.
  
• Barrage reports now show the percent of effectiveness lost (to terrain, etc.), instead of just the raw value lost.
  
• Improved the graphic for all orders menus to make them more readable by adding clear cell-divisions between orders.
  

• Fixed a bug that could cause units to fail to conduct a march attack when another friendly unit was destroyed, anywhere on the map, earlier on the same impulse. This was caused by a bug in the system that semi-randomizes which of your units move first on any given impulse. This bug was the cause of the vast majority of combats where units failed to participate, or failed to attack at all.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the defender’s reinforcement point to appear inside the attacker’s starting spawn zone in Attack scenarios on very large maps (Paris and Lake Okum).
  
• Fixed a pair of duplicate British unit names on the 1940 and 1944 OBs.
  

Update 1.0.7.7 is really 3 smaller updates wearing a trench-coat, that tackle separate pieces of our 2024/2025 design roadmap (Air price overhaul, UI update, Soviet 1941/Kharkov map). These updates ended up bundled together due to a number of personal time constraints that are unrelated to CAOS. Now that 1.0.7.7 is out, we are very excited to say we have major news regarding Operation Sealion, which will be announced in mid-April. In the mean time, development will primarily focus on AI and further UI improvements, but we also have some new historical 1941 OBs cooking on the side-burner that we look forward to seeing in action.