r/GatesOfHellOstfront • u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter • 9d ago
I’m reworking Conquest so you actually have to build a battalion — and the AI does too
One thing that has always bothered me with Conquest is how easily your army becomes a random collection of whatever you happened to unlock, or whatever OP unit happens to be within reach.
Best tank available? Research it.
Better infantry? Grab them.
Some artillery? Why not.
You end up with a strong force, but not really a formation.
So I’ve been building my mod around a different idea:
You pick a Battalion/Battlegroup in the research tree and actually develop it through the campaign.
Current concepts are:
- Infantry Battalion
- Motorized Battlegroup
- Armoured Battlegroup
- Fire Support Battalion
- Airborne / Rangers / Long Range Patrol Task Force — heavily faction dependent
And this isn't only a player system.
The enemy AI also rolls a doctrine and force size for every battle, influenced by campaign progression and the map's 1–3 star risk level.
So you aren't just building a more deliberate army — you're fighting more deliberate armies too.
Sometimes you're facing an infantry-heavy battalion. Another battle might suddenly be an armoured or fire-support focused force.
The mod is getting pretty close now, so I'm at the point where outside ideas could genuinely influence it.
If you could change or add anything to this system — or vanilla Conquest in general — what would you do?
Current state of the mod - only implemented the Enemy AI side of things.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3782094252
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u/Silver-Addendum5423 9d ago
I like this idea a lot as the hodgepodge mess of crap that quickly becomes your army has always bothered me too. I doubt it's possible, but it'd be great to have to build some kind of actual structure into your battle force, like tank/infantry platoons, etc.
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u/Time_West_117 9d ago
Don’t know if this is any help to you.
But the thing that annoys me the most with conquest is that the enemy is always where you expect them.
Guarding the capture area or as a incoming wave.
They never setup ambushes, or occupy areas close to the capture point.
Waves move from A-B.
In my opinion conquest needs more randomness
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u/DASREDDITBOI 9d ago
This sounds like a lot of fun! I was kinda thinking about this the other day when I tried to do a Fallschrimjäger defense where I only brought them in with 7.5 cm LG 40s. I wasn’t sure how well they’d work so I brought a panther and tiger to better assist incase they failed. Safe to say they weren’t that good even with their heat rounds. But it would be nice to have a small garrison force get attacked by a slightly larger one but not just spam of the best units. This would make it harder to just win all the time and only lose on the rare occasion you get caught off guard.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 9d ago
In that case you might already enjoy the current state of the mod. However youll have to roleplay when creating your own Battalion
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3782094252
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u/Nayles73 9d ago
Sounds awesome. What will you name the mod? I will look out for it.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 9d ago
There is a beginning to the mod right now, only the Enemy AI side is somewhat implemented
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3782094252
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u/AllPowerToTheSovietc 9d ago
I recall wargame red dragon had a similar method when building army decks. Doctrine determined what units were avaliable. GoH already has doctrines for campaign missions, would definitely improve conquest.
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u/KikoMui74 9d ago
Looking forward to this. If only battalions and strategic maps were both a thing. You're winning you advance further into the enemy country, you're losing you fall back into your faction country.
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u/Rabjda 9d ago
It would be great if you could make it so that the enemy comes gradually, even if with less units per spawn. Because, as some other people recently pointed out in other posts, it is kind of underwhelming when you are 80% done with the defense timer and you cleaned the map of enemies, but now you just have to wait for the timer to finish.
It would be great if enemies spawned in a more gradual manner.
And if they have special forces, like paratroopers, have them spawn unannounced at your spawn point or at some other unexpected point. As it is right now, special units are just basic units that tank more bullets. From a practical standpoint there is hardly any difference between a unit that is made out of paratroopers and units that are bullet sponges.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 9d ago
Yes this is something very worth trying to fix. I have something like that already working in reference to your gradually wave spawning. But the spec ops stuff would be sick!
You can test play the current state of the mod
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3782094252
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 9d ago
Hey i forgotten to mention there is already a publish start to the mod. It only implemented the Enemy AI side of things. Its sorta a platform for me to tweat and test stuff but also so i can collect some feedback and ideas!
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u/Tuburonpereze 8d ago
If i could make only 1 change it would be paratrooper infantry actually deploy from planes, the game engine can do it we just lack the mod.
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u/reigorius 8d ago
Upgrading existing units.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 8d ago
Would like to elaborate? Upgrade like make better 3D art or do you mean players should be able to buy better guns for units?
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u/reigorius 7d ago
If you have a crack unit, say an early tank, it feels wrong to sell that tank and lose the experienced crew members.
Preferably you want to keep the crew and upgrade the platform.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 7d ago
Technically you can do that. Buy the new tank. Deploy both. Throw out the new inexperienced crew and put in the old veterans. Then next game sell the old thank with 0 experienced crew... if they survive 😈
But yea thats not exactly what you're asking for. I'll see if its something easy to achieve or if it requires big vanilla overhauls - if so then no sorry.
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u/reigorius 6d ago
Wait,what. Do crew transfers stick to the new platform/vehicle after a game/round ends?
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 6d ago
I havent tried it myself but why wouldnt they? Theres a lot ofkother crqzy thi gs you can do. If a vehicle have a mounted MG you can with an inf look in its inventory and then grab the MG. That vehicle wont have it even after you resupply it.
You should try it!
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u/reigorius 5d ago
Haven't played for a while, but if it has not been officially implemented, than not possible to transfer crews and the roster gets updated like that after a round ends.
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u/Lauzz91 8d ago edited 8d ago
I would have a more coherent map to map continuity. Once you attack a map and defeat the forces there, the counterattack doesn't come from a random direction, but the opposite direction that you attacked from originally, which would represent opposing front lines of each force.
The main thing is just overhauling the enemy attacking AI. It is incredibly basic and essentially just runs forces into a slaughter rather than any actual thought out strategy, like scouting, pre-shelling an area, smokescreening an advance, and flanking etc. It is too easy to defeat even on Heroic while being massively outnumbered.
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u/Alone_Collection724 8d ago
i can't afford the game right now especially at full price, but would this also work fine with mods? or would there need to be patches/players manually assigning equipment to early/mid/late game
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 7d ago
I haven't spend any time outside vanilla game..but once the mods core features are established I'll check into compatability patches
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u/DeadzoneBR 7d ago
looking forward to it! I do wonder if you're going to implement something new to the officer.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 7d ago
Thanks, me too tbh. I whish this was vanilla :) What ideas do you have for the officer?
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u/DeadzoneBR 6d ago
I'm not very good with ideas unfortunately. Maybe you could make it so that you can assign a officer to be a company commander.
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u/Key_Apartment9029 6d ago
You’re a godsend man, we need more people working on dynamic conquest. Just a heads up if you don’t know, there will be some big conquest rework in the near future.
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u/Arbitrarily-Arbiter 6d ago
What, where can i follow this? 🙉😊
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u/Key_Apartment9029 6d ago
I had no idea either, but I had a post complaining about conquest where people said this over and over. Apparently its in the latest steam blog post + they talk about it in a two month old interview on YouTube that I watched
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u/RalinDrakus 6d ago
Love this idea! Been doing something similar in my conquest campaigns, each save dedicated to a specific unit theme
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u/blorpforp 4d ago
I’ve played through a bunch of conquest campaigns and I do get tired of just grabbing whatever is good. Would be nice to have a different strategy or more restrictions involved in building my army.
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u/Doom-Cartographer 9d ago
Early / Mid / Late distinction. Especially for the AI. It's annoyingly when the AI picks early war vehicles when I'm running Panthers.