The following is a copy of a PM sent Johan and King, and posted here at Johan's advice.
It regards a change introduced in 1.1 with regards to orders given by shift+right clicking: if you issued multiple attack orders in HoI2 and HoI3 1.0, your units would carry on their attacks without pausing to regroup. It is no longer the case in HoI3 1.1: planning attacks in advance no longer gives this benefit, your forces will stop after they attack.
Beware that this is a long read, as it is an extensive and detailed argument.
**
I played HoI2 since its release and in this game, as in HoI3 1.0, it has always be possible to queue up attack orders in advance. If several defended provinces were on the way of units ordered to attack several provinces in succession, the forces sent on queued-up attack moves did not pause to regroup upon encountering one of the new defenders. It was hardly relevant in HoI2, with short battles and an attack delay usually much shorter than the time it took to move from one province to the next. However, in HoI3, battles last a lot longer, and movement between smaller provinces is considerably shorter, and several times shorter than the attack delay at the beginning of the game.
The HoI2 mod which introduced a combat system closest to what we now have in HoI3 was the Total Realism Project. It had extended the regroup delay to 48 hours. The direct result of this change meant a wholly different style of play: where you could be perfectly content to attack province-by-province, you now had to plan several moves in advance, ie. create a much more comprehensive and realistic attack plan.
This also worked very well in HoI3 1.0 - the demo AAR linked in my signature gives an example of how chaining attack orders was used in a totally non-exploitive way, to set up a thoroughly planned offensive which achieved realistic results (and hit a realistic snag).
Unfortunately, as it stands now, as soon as an attack force encounters new enemies, it pauses to regroup, for delays of the order of 96 or 120 hours with Operational Level Organization at its 1940 or 1938 tech level. It does so even with queued-up, planned orders. I have been told that this is WAD, and I'm going to explain why, in operational and in balance terms, I am convinced it was a mistake.
The nature of the current offensive system means that with a coherent defense - ie. one in which not all troops are poured on the frontline and some are kept as a reserve on a second line - the only possibility to exploit a breakthrough is if your enemy commits the error of having no reserves to shore up his line.
I will now underline a few important terms and give plausible definitions and examples in WWI and WWII warfare (the same terms are not always employed the same way by all the military thinkers), and their relationships with HoI3 gameplay; the definitions are derived from Heinz Guderian's "Acthung-Panzer!"
- Breakthrough is achieved when you manage to traverse all the defensive lines on a segment of the frontline. On the HoI3 scale, Breakthrough is what happens when the attacker brings the defenders to 0 Organization and begin occupying the province. Note that Breakthrough does not imply any subsequent troop movements in the rear of the enemy's frontline.
Breakthrough was consistently achieved in the latter stages of WWI. The Allies managed Breakthrough on the West Front in 1917 and 1918 on increasingly wide frontages, up to 15 kilometres at a time on a regular basis. The Germans managed Breakthrough on the West Front in their 1918 offensives, involving great force concentration and the use of storm troops.
Neither the Germans nor the Allies were able to score decisive victories in 1917-18 in the wake of their breakthroughs, they only managed to seize limited amounts of terrain and had to stop their offensive. This was not, however, what happened in 1939 in Poland, in 1940 in France and in 1941 in the Soviet Union - in all three cases, the Germans were able to exploit their breakthroughs.
Breakthrough does not always have consequences on the operational level, as we have just seen. Exploitation has: it occurs after a Breakthrough, when the attacker is able to keep pushing forwards even deeper behind the enemy lines. A number of disruptive actions are now taken by the offender, among which we'll underline two: the attack of enemy reserves before they have had time to establish a new frontline, no matter how tenuous it is or how poor the defensive positions are; an invasion of enemy territory which will allow following troops to establish new frontlines on your terms, possibly surrounding large bodies of troops or cutting them off supplies.
The best example of successful exploitation on the operational level is what Guderian and Rommel managed in France in 1940. It took them 12 days to reach the Channel from their starting positions, and though they did pause to regroup at times, it was never for more than a few hours. Their chief concern was to keep pressing forward.
They encountered a good number of new enemy formations on the way, sometimes in the form of whole divisions, and engaged and soundly defeated them in most cases, though there was quite a bit of heavy fighting involved - Rommel's "Ghost Division" holds the dubious honor of being the German unit with the greatest casualty ratio in the campaign of France. They were also counterattacked on the way.
Still, they reached the Channel in less than 288 hours. In game terms, those are the delay imposed after four attacks with 1940 Operational Level Organization techs. Meaning they can only have paused and regrouped three times on the way (less than four) - assuming they kept moving for most of that time and consistently encountered new units in the last few hours of a regroupment delay at worst. A far-fetched proposition, and not one in line with history.
If it were just a matter of a few hours' delay to achieve the same objectives, it would be annoying, but not utterly incoherent. What is incoherent is the form offensives are forced to take with HoI3 1.1. They are, by definition, Step-by-step offensives: each time you encounter a new defender, the attack stops.
Step-by-step offensives are exactly what both Germans and Allies did in late WWI on the West Front. There was always a reason why a successful breakthrough was not followed - the supporting infantry could not follow, the cavalry needed time to regroup (!), the plan was to seize one village at 09:15 and the next at 11:30 with a two hour-pause between the two, the infantry were exhausted and could not press further, and so forth.
The result was that the defender always had time to bring reserves (on some occasions making, by the way, a rather extensive use of trucks on both sides) and to establish new positions in front of the attackers and on the attackers' flanks. After the initial breakthrough, all follow-up attacks, be they spread over several hours or over several weeks, consistently failed to meet success.
Why was exploitation possible in WWII and not in WWI? Heinz Guderian gives the answer in his work of reference "Achtung-Panzer!": the attackers interrupted their advance and did not press forward before the defenders had time to establish new positions, forming a new frontline.
In HoI3 1.1, attack delay means that no matter what happens, the attackers interrupt their advance and do not press forward before the defenders have had time to dig in and bring reinforcements. I'm not the one saying the impossibility or the failure to consistently plan ahead-of-time for the exploitation of a breakthrough is characteristic of WWI warfare, Guderian says so.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what is forced on the player. Unless you're lucky or the AI is incapable of forming a second line of troops or have reserves to shore up its lines, no matter how thin the resulting line is, your offensive is practically over as soon as it starts.
The practical application for this game mechanic? In Player-versus-player Barbarossa, as the Russian or as the French, if I form a second line filled only with HQs or single brigades, the attackers will stop in front of them without fail and pause for several days to regroup, and I in turn will be able to shift forces to reform a second line behind the areas where they advanced. They'll push forward; it will be completely impossible for them to break my line for a couple of months at the least without a massive amphibious operation or a massive paradrop.
So much for Dunkerque and the million-man encirclements in Barbarossa.
I'm talking a lot about tank warfare, but the same basically applies with late-war Soviet offensives, between 1943 and 1945: the steamroller started moving, it continuously kept pushing, and stopped a few hundred kilometres further when the offensive lost steam and it was impossible to keep pushing forwards.
The only reason why those are still doable is because by 1943-1945, tech advances may have reduced the regroup delay to 48 hours, or even 24 hours if you really set your mind to it. Incidentally, it means the Ardennes offensive - ultimately a failure - could be performed at the pace and in the operational conditions of Blitzkrieg, but the 1940 campaign can't without AI weakness or blunders.
How queued-up orders aren't much of an exploit
... since it was apparently intended to remove the ability for divisions to keep attacking as long as they followed their initial orders:
> You have to plan ahead of time. In a majority of cases you won't know if, or where, the enemy has reserves at the start of the operation; you know even less how he will move what he has, or just how much time you'll give him to do so
> The consequence is any subsequent attacks are going to be less than optimal. In a large number of cases, only a fraction of your spearhead will engage the next enemy and the rest will first appear as reinforcements (in other words, they will be delayed, but they might not be stopped)
> Your spearhead might also encounter stiffer resistance than you have planned for. In the best of cases, this will only result in a delay. It might also wreck the operation you've planned - one of your pincers achieves its objective and stays where it is, but the other pincer gets stalled for a week! It might also prove too much resistance, and in this case your offensive loses steam and grinds to a halt. Cancel orders, regroup, try again - if you're not subjected to a counterattack
> Your attacking forces might also be counterattacked from their flanks. Once the execution of planned orders has begun, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, and with the present system, with 1:5 odds in a flanking counterattack, the enemy is already going to successfully delay your attack for several days, especially if your spearhead enters the field progressively. This can also wreck your plans and force you to stop your offensive
> This is especially true since while you, as the attacker, don't have the possibility to issue new orders without stopping your offensive, the defender is perfectly free to give attack orders to his own troops, or to deploy reserves farther along your axis of advance. Once the execution of the planned offensive has begun, the defender can still react without penalty; the attacker can't
> What applies for the mobile forces also applies for the infantry. If you want to minimize manpower losses on your side when reducing a pocket or simply pushing your front forwards, you pay for it with additionnal delays. If, on the other hand, you decide that speed is more important, you plan several attacks in succession, but every attack after the first isn't optimally performed, you lose more men and more ORG, and bad planning can make the overall plan fail. In essence, you're trading men and efficiency for speed, and this is really a decision you have to make when planning an operation
To sum it up, yes, queued-up attack orders do allow to gain time, but you don't get that extra attack speed for free - in fact you take more risks, attacks after the first ones will often be less efficient and involve reinforcements, sometimes your plan will backfire and open you to counter-attacks, and even if it doesn't it is almost guaranteed you will take more losses! It isn't an exploit or a gameplay imbalance, it's simply a decision.
To conclude
The design decision to make planned attacks behave like single attacks seems to me to have very few advantages and many drawbacks.
What measure of gameplay balance it brings can be put in question, especially since successive planned attacks have a cost. The only real balancing problem could be balancing Player with AI, if the latter is not able to queue up orders. If the AI really cannot attack in-depth, and the AI is subjected to the same attack delays as the player, it might still be possible to give AI a "discount" on the delay, or to make that delay irrelevant to the AI.
On the other hand, it forces on the player a much more WWI approach of warfare in the initial stages of the war - the era of Blitzkrieg, seeing lightning advances which won't happen again after 1942, when in-game they start becoming more of a possibility...! This is totally counter-intuitive.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks to be restored, and not for delays to be reduced across the board: the design decision to increase delays between two attack orders make sense. It's the impossibility to give an attack order in-depth which doesn't.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks to be restored because aside from multiplayer or not wanting to pause to give orders again - UI advantages - there is absolutely no reason to prefer planned offensives to step-by-step ones. In fact there are even drawbacks! When a large proportion of games played are SP ones, this actually discourages players from planning their attacks.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks because it rewards players for planning in advance and taking risks - it is what you do at war when planning an operation.
I hope that you will forgive me for the long read, and that these concerns will be heard. And if you should decide that what you did in 1.1 with regards to queued-up attacks was the best default option, I would ask that at least, an option is offered for players at game start to choose between "always regroup after an attack" and "planned attacks don't need regroup time".
**
You're spared the pleasantries which come at the end of a letter
Thanks for reading through this
It regards a change introduced in 1.1 with regards to orders given by shift+right clicking: if you issued multiple attack orders in HoI2 and HoI3 1.0, your units would carry on their attacks without pausing to regroup. It is no longer the case in HoI3 1.1: planning attacks in advance no longer gives this benefit, your forces will stop after they attack.
Beware that this is a long read, as it is an extensive and detailed argument.
**
I played HoI2 since its release and in this game, as in HoI3 1.0, it has always be possible to queue up attack orders in advance. If several defended provinces were on the way of units ordered to attack several provinces in succession, the forces sent on queued-up attack moves did not pause to regroup upon encountering one of the new defenders. It was hardly relevant in HoI2, with short battles and an attack delay usually much shorter than the time it took to move from one province to the next. However, in HoI3, battles last a lot longer, and movement between smaller provinces is considerably shorter, and several times shorter than the attack delay at the beginning of the game.
The HoI2 mod which introduced a combat system closest to what we now have in HoI3 was the Total Realism Project. It had extended the regroup delay to 48 hours. The direct result of this change meant a wholly different style of play: where you could be perfectly content to attack province-by-province, you now had to plan several moves in advance, ie. create a much more comprehensive and realistic attack plan.
This also worked very well in HoI3 1.0 - the demo AAR linked in my signature gives an example of how chaining attack orders was used in a totally non-exploitive way, to set up a thoroughly planned offensive which achieved realistic results (and hit a realistic snag).
Unfortunately, as it stands now, as soon as an attack force encounters new enemies, it pauses to regroup, for delays of the order of 96 or 120 hours with Operational Level Organization at its 1940 or 1938 tech level. It does so even with queued-up, planned orders. I have been told that this is WAD, and I'm going to explain why, in operational and in balance terms, I am convinced it was a mistake.
The nature of the current offensive system means that with a coherent defense - ie. one in which not all troops are poured on the frontline and some are kept as a reserve on a second line - the only possibility to exploit a breakthrough is if your enemy commits the error of having no reserves to shore up his line.
I will now underline a few important terms and give plausible definitions and examples in WWI and WWII warfare (the same terms are not always employed the same way by all the military thinkers), and their relationships with HoI3 gameplay; the definitions are derived from Heinz Guderian's "Acthung-Panzer!"
- Breakthrough is achieved when you manage to traverse all the defensive lines on a segment of the frontline. On the HoI3 scale, Breakthrough is what happens when the attacker brings the defenders to 0 Organization and begin occupying the province. Note that Breakthrough does not imply any subsequent troop movements in the rear of the enemy's frontline.
Breakthrough was consistently achieved in the latter stages of WWI. The Allies managed Breakthrough on the West Front in 1917 and 1918 on increasingly wide frontages, up to 15 kilometres at a time on a regular basis. The Germans managed Breakthrough on the West Front in their 1918 offensives, involving great force concentration and the use of storm troops.
Neither the Germans nor the Allies were able to score decisive victories in 1917-18 in the wake of their breakthroughs, they only managed to seize limited amounts of terrain and had to stop their offensive. This was not, however, what happened in 1939 in Poland, in 1940 in France and in 1941 in the Soviet Union - in all three cases, the Germans were able to exploit their breakthroughs.
Breakthrough does not always have consequences on the operational level, as we have just seen. Exploitation has: it occurs after a Breakthrough, when the attacker is able to keep pushing forwards even deeper behind the enemy lines. A number of disruptive actions are now taken by the offender, among which we'll underline two: the attack of enemy reserves before they have had time to establish a new frontline, no matter how tenuous it is or how poor the defensive positions are; an invasion of enemy territory which will allow following troops to establish new frontlines on your terms, possibly surrounding large bodies of troops or cutting them off supplies.
The best example of successful exploitation on the operational level is what Guderian and Rommel managed in France in 1940. It took them 12 days to reach the Channel from their starting positions, and though they did pause to regroup at times, it was never for more than a few hours. Their chief concern was to keep pressing forward.
They encountered a good number of new enemy formations on the way, sometimes in the form of whole divisions, and engaged and soundly defeated them in most cases, though there was quite a bit of heavy fighting involved - Rommel's "Ghost Division" holds the dubious honor of being the German unit with the greatest casualty ratio in the campaign of France. They were also counterattacked on the way.
Still, they reached the Channel in less than 288 hours. In game terms, those are the delay imposed after four attacks with 1940 Operational Level Organization techs. Meaning they can only have paused and regrouped three times on the way (less than four) - assuming they kept moving for most of that time and consistently encountered new units in the last few hours of a regroupment delay at worst. A far-fetched proposition, and not one in line with history.
If it were just a matter of a few hours' delay to achieve the same objectives, it would be annoying, but not utterly incoherent. What is incoherent is the form offensives are forced to take with HoI3 1.1. They are, by definition, Step-by-step offensives: each time you encounter a new defender, the attack stops.
Step-by-step offensives are exactly what both Germans and Allies did in late WWI on the West Front. There was always a reason why a successful breakthrough was not followed - the supporting infantry could not follow, the cavalry needed time to regroup (!), the plan was to seize one village at 09:15 and the next at 11:30 with a two hour-pause between the two, the infantry were exhausted and could not press further, and so forth.
The result was that the defender always had time to bring reserves (on some occasions making, by the way, a rather extensive use of trucks on both sides) and to establish new positions in front of the attackers and on the attackers' flanks. After the initial breakthrough, all follow-up attacks, be they spread over several hours or over several weeks, consistently failed to meet success.
Why was exploitation possible in WWII and not in WWI? Heinz Guderian gives the answer in his work of reference "Achtung-Panzer!": the attackers interrupted their advance and did not press forward before the defenders had time to establish new positions, forming a new frontline.
In HoI3 1.1, attack delay means that no matter what happens, the attackers interrupt their advance and do not press forward before the defenders have had time to dig in and bring reinforcements. I'm not the one saying the impossibility or the failure to consistently plan ahead-of-time for the exploitation of a breakthrough is characteristic of WWI warfare, Guderian says so.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what is forced on the player. Unless you're lucky or the AI is incapable of forming a second line of troops or have reserves to shore up its lines, no matter how thin the resulting line is, your offensive is practically over as soon as it starts.
The practical application for this game mechanic? In Player-versus-player Barbarossa, as the Russian or as the French, if I form a second line filled only with HQs or single brigades, the attackers will stop in front of them without fail and pause for several days to regroup, and I in turn will be able to shift forces to reform a second line behind the areas where they advanced. They'll push forward; it will be completely impossible for them to break my line for a couple of months at the least without a massive amphibious operation or a massive paradrop.
So much for Dunkerque and the million-man encirclements in Barbarossa.
I'm talking a lot about tank warfare, but the same basically applies with late-war Soviet offensives, between 1943 and 1945: the steamroller started moving, it continuously kept pushing, and stopped a few hundred kilometres further when the offensive lost steam and it was impossible to keep pushing forwards.
The only reason why those are still doable is because by 1943-1945, tech advances may have reduced the regroup delay to 48 hours, or even 24 hours if you really set your mind to it. Incidentally, it means the Ardennes offensive - ultimately a failure - could be performed at the pace and in the operational conditions of Blitzkrieg, but the 1940 campaign can't without AI weakness or blunders.
How queued-up orders aren't much of an exploit
... since it was apparently intended to remove the ability for divisions to keep attacking as long as they followed their initial orders:
> You have to plan ahead of time. In a majority of cases you won't know if, or where, the enemy has reserves at the start of the operation; you know even less how he will move what he has, or just how much time you'll give him to do so
> The consequence is any subsequent attacks are going to be less than optimal. In a large number of cases, only a fraction of your spearhead will engage the next enemy and the rest will first appear as reinforcements (in other words, they will be delayed, but they might not be stopped)
> Your spearhead might also encounter stiffer resistance than you have planned for. In the best of cases, this will only result in a delay. It might also wreck the operation you've planned - one of your pincers achieves its objective and stays where it is, but the other pincer gets stalled for a week! It might also prove too much resistance, and in this case your offensive loses steam and grinds to a halt. Cancel orders, regroup, try again - if you're not subjected to a counterattack
> Your attacking forces might also be counterattacked from their flanks. Once the execution of planned orders has begun, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, and with the present system, with 1:5 odds in a flanking counterattack, the enemy is already going to successfully delay your attack for several days, especially if your spearhead enters the field progressively. This can also wreck your plans and force you to stop your offensive
> This is especially true since while you, as the attacker, don't have the possibility to issue new orders without stopping your offensive, the defender is perfectly free to give attack orders to his own troops, or to deploy reserves farther along your axis of advance. Once the execution of the planned offensive has begun, the defender can still react without penalty; the attacker can't
> What applies for the mobile forces also applies for the infantry. If you want to minimize manpower losses on your side when reducing a pocket or simply pushing your front forwards, you pay for it with additionnal delays. If, on the other hand, you decide that speed is more important, you plan several attacks in succession, but every attack after the first isn't optimally performed, you lose more men and more ORG, and bad planning can make the overall plan fail. In essence, you're trading men and efficiency for speed, and this is really a decision you have to make when planning an operation
To sum it up, yes, queued-up attack orders do allow to gain time, but you don't get that extra attack speed for free - in fact you take more risks, attacks after the first ones will often be less efficient and involve reinforcements, sometimes your plan will backfire and open you to counter-attacks, and even if it doesn't it is almost guaranteed you will take more losses! It isn't an exploit or a gameplay imbalance, it's simply a decision.
To conclude
The design decision to make planned attacks behave like single attacks seems to me to have very few advantages and many drawbacks.
What measure of gameplay balance it brings can be put in question, especially since successive planned attacks have a cost. The only real balancing problem could be balancing Player with AI, if the latter is not able to queue up orders. If the AI really cannot attack in-depth, and the AI is subjected to the same attack delays as the player, it might still be possible to give AI a "discount" on the delay, or to make that delay irrelevant to the AI.
On the other hand, it forces on the player a much more WWI approach of warfare in the initial stages of the war - the era of Blitzkrieg, seeing lightning advances which won't happen again after 1942, when in-game they start becoming more of a possibility...! This is totally counter-intuitive.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks to be restored, and not for delays to be reduced across the board: the design decision to increase delays between two attack orders make sense. It's the impossibility to give an attack order in-depth which doesn't.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks to be restored because aside from multiplayer or not wanting to pause to give orders again - UI advantages - there is absolutely no reason to prefer planned offensives to step-by-step ones. In fact there are even drawbacks! When a large proportion of games played are SP ones, this actually discourages players from planning their attacks.
I am arguing for the differenciation between planned attacks and step-by-step attacks because it rewards players for planning in advance and taking risks - it is what you do at war when planning an operation.
I hope that you will forgive me for the long read, and that these concerns will be heard. And if you should decide that what you did in 1.1 with regards to queued-up attacks was the best default option, I would ask that at least, an option is offered for players at game start to choose between "always regroup after an attack" and "planned attacks don't need regroup time".
**
You're spared the pleasantries which come at the end of a letter
Thanks for reading through this 
