Can someone explain how the USA is supposed to take just Louisiana with the current frontlines?

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klopkr

Chief suggester at the suggestion factory
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Aug 12, 2013
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I'm seriously not understanding how the frontline system is supposed to simulate real tactics in Important historical wars of the vicky 2 time period.


How am I supposed to take Louisiana? How am I supposed to push for Atlanta? How am I supposed to get around DC?


How am I supposed to take mexico city? Can my naval invasion do a march to mexico city or will they slowly take over all of southern mexico?
 
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you don't worry about it. it's your generals' problem.
 
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I'm seriously not understanding how the frontline system is supposed to simulate real tactics in Important historical wars of the vicky 2 time period.


How am I supposed to take Louisiana? How am I supposed to push for Atlanta? How am I supposed to get around DC?


How am I supposed to take mexico city? Can my naval invasion do a march to mexico city or will they slowly take over all of southern mexico?
I was asking similar question. All they said is that generals march towards wargoal and that they are considering letting players choose directions, which I REALLY hope they will.
Invasions will probably be this week's dev diary but I think we can already assume that in a simple reality of single frontline, invasion is a good way to make some change in war or indeed get faster to the points we desire.
 
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You could order a naval invasion, which would open up a second front in Louisiana, or you could order your generals to conquer Arkansas and Louisiana, and then as they win battles, they conquer more and more provinces until you reach Louisiana. That would also split the USA-CSA front into two different fronts, after which you could assign more troops to the new Texas front that you just created, and defeat them there first while defending against Confederate attacks at the Eastern front, slowly depleting them of resources and manpower.
 
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or you could order your generals to conquer Arkansas and Louisiana

The point is, under current build you cannot do this. They advance towards wargoals. And you can't add new wargoals during the war.

This is an issue I think almost everyone agrees with. System has to be changed so that you can order particular generals to advance to particular objectives on ad hoc basis.

Without it, system will probably be frustrating. With it, the system has a potential to be good and rewarding
 
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It seems you are correct. That is indeed a little disappointing. That also makes me wonder what happens if your generals complete their goals and occupy the state you’re trying to conquer. If the enemy doesn’t surrender, do your generals just stop advancing into enemy territory and start defending?
 
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It seems you are correct. That is indeed a little disappointing. That also makes me wonder what happens if your generals complete their goals and occupy the state you’re trying to conquer. If the enemy doesn’t surrender, do your generals just stop advancing into enemy territory and start defending?
Might have to micro the generals with giving them more goals..? Or maybe they keep on taking until there is peace unless ordered to defend.
Then again the war system supposedly wasnt entirely finished so go figure.
 
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It seems you are correct. That is indeed a little disappointing. That also makes me wonder what happens if your generals complete their goals and occupy the state you’re trying to conquer. If the enemy doesn’t surrender, do your generals just stop advancing into enemy territory and start defending?

The dev diary also said that generals tend to attack in what they perceive as favourable terrain (among other unsaid elements). So maybe your general will simply continue to attack in a direction he will see as such even without any tactical objective in mind ?
For example after conquering the state that was your wargoal your general will be more likely to continue to advance towards plains than towards hills or mountains (except if he has a special trait making him favouring this specific terrain).
 
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Other than the naval invasions (which I agree should still be possible, there were like three of them in the war?) I think US Civil War in general is something that a automatic logic might be able to represent.

First there is the Eastern Theatre. This kind of intervening space between the capitals and industrial heartlands should be a natural schwerepunkt of the game's war logic almost regardless of wargoals (with some kind of limited/border wars being the only exception). The relatively small area wedged between the sea and the Appalachians would also mean large concentration of forces and there would be essentially no way to move without bumping into opposition. The Shenandoah Valley would form a natural flanking avenue however.

Second there is the Western Theatre, much more wider in it's geographic scope, with worse infrastructure and dominated by large navigable rivers that go all the way to Union industrial heartland at Pennsylvania. The rivers would become the natural avenue of Union advance.

And the Trans-Mississippi Theatre and the Pacific Coast would be tertiary theatres by nature of their low population density and relative unimportance. Only small armies should show up for fighting here, at least until/if Union starts pushing into Texas.

The dev diary also said that generals tend to attack in what they perceive as favourable terrain (among other unsaid elements). So maybe your general will simply continue to attack in a direction he will see as such even without any tactical objective in mind ?
For example after conquering the state that was your wargoal your general will be more likely to continue to advance towards plains than towards hills or mountains (except if he has a special trait making him favouring this specific terrain).

That one was pretty questionable IMO. Even if your general is mountain expert, mountains are never favourable terrain. It's something that should be more useful if you absolutely must attack in mountains. And for US Civil War, being a forest expert would be very useful as the terrain tended to be rugged in comparison to most of Europe, but they still should try to advance along better terrain if they can.
 
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The dev diary also said that generals tend to attack in what they perceive as favourable terrain (among other unsaid elements). So maybe your general will simply continue to attack in a direction he will see as such even without any tactical objective in mind ?
For example after conquering the state that was your wargoal your general will be more likely to continue to advance towards plains than towards hills or mountains (except if he has a special trait making him favouring this specific terrain).
I can imagine the enemy's capital will always act as a backup target for your generals to gravitate towards after achieving your wargoals.
 
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I havent seen or read anything in DD22 and DD23 that suggests that this new system would not be able to handle a scenario like the one in the youtube videos.

Has there been any confirmation that there would be no breakthroughs, encirclements, naval invasions?

I feel that people just assume that the new approach will just be two passive AI Hoi4 style doing nothing and make assumptions on whatever frustrated them most in earlier Paradox titles.

Let the developers do their work. We are about to see something new and the last two DD are not even the tip of the iceberg.
 
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The dev diary also said that generals tend to attack in what they perceive as favourable terrain (among other unsaid elements). So maybe your general will simply continue to attack in a direction he will see as such even without any tactical objective in mind ?
For example after conquering the state that was your wargoal your general will be more likely to continue to advance towards plains than towards hills or mountains (except if he has a special trait making him favouring this specific terrain).
This is a good point. Maybe we can't order a general to take Louisiana specifically but he may advance in Louisiana if he sees it as a good opportunity.
However OP's concern still stands with regard to naval invasions, whose scope is often far more narrow. If I invade near Mexico City is to take the capital, not to open a second vast front in southern Mexico. A limited use of focal point of war seems inevitable to me.

I think the issue most of us are scared about is every war ending in a slow uniform push/retreat across the front, sorta like a perpetual trench warfare. While devs said we can kinda influence this by choosing a general with appropriate traits I'm not sure how this would work on a very large front. How can I be sure the general who prefer to cut deeply into enemy territory is going to be assigned in Louisiana if I have a single front running for thousands of miles?
 
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I think the issue most of us are scared about is every war ending in a slow uniform push/retreat across the front, sorta like a perpetual trench warfare. While devs said we can kinda influence this by choosing a general with appropriate traits I'm not sure how this would work on a very large front. How can I be sure the general who prefer to cut deeply into enemy territory is going to be assigned in Louisiana if I have a single front running for thousands of miles?

The irony here that neither McClellan (a very cautious general who would have been better in staff or administrative job) who invaded the Virginia Peninsula or Benjamin Butler (an incompetent political general) who occupied New Orleans were really the kind of general to prefer to cut deeply into enemy territory. Though I suppose you could say it's really the US Navy that captured New Orleans.

A possible logic could be that an aggressive general (AS Johnston) pulls lots of troops in a section of a front to fight a big battle (Shiloh) with another aggressive general (Grant), after the battle is lost the game might then recognize that that particular section of the front has become too depleted of rear area troops that allows the Navy to opportunistically attack and capture a weakly held but strategically important city.
 
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I think the issue most of us are scared about is every war ending in a slow uniform push/retreat across the front, sorta like a perpetual trench warfare. While devs said we can kinda influence this by choosing a general with appropriate traits I'm not sure how this would work on a very large front. How can I be sure the general who prefer to cut deeply into enemy territory is going to be assigned in Louisiana if I have a single front running for thousands of miles?

As far as we know there isn't a way for the player to assign a general to a specific part of the front, a dev was asked if it was possible for a mountain expert general to "sticks to the mountains" and the dev's answer was that it wasn't the case because said general would be tasked with defending the entire front not just the mountain part of it but that having severals generals on the defend order would increase the chance of the mountain expert to fight on his preferred terrain.

it's a point I'm actually rather confused about, because in the same message the dev is also saying that you can order a general to attack or defend against a specific army but if I don't know where my and the enemy armies are on the frontline then how is the game going to chose where the battle is going to happen ? Is it decided by the preferred terrain of the army that is targetted by the order ? So if Army A is specifically asked to defend against Army B then the battle is likely to happen on a terrain the general of army B favoured because that's where said general would have start his advance right ? And same if Army A is ordered to specifically attack against Army B I guess. But what happened if Army A is asked to attack Army B and Army B has been asked to defend against Army A ? Is it random then ? o_O

Here the whole dev answer :
Your mountain expert will favor defending in the mountains if this is possible. But he can't hunker down in the mountains and never risk getting attacked outside of a mountain province, because he's been charged to defend the entire Austrian front - not to avoid engagements with the enemy if a mountain encounter is impossible. If there are multiple defending Generals on that front though, this increases his chances to only be engaged in his preferred terrain. You tell your Generals who to advance and defend against; they try to accomplish this to the best of their ability given the resources you've made available to them.
 
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As far as we know there isn't a way for the player to assign a general to a specific part of the front, a dev was asked if it was possible for a mountain expert general to "sticks to the mountains" and the dev's answer was that it wasn't the case because said general would be tasked with defending the entire front not just the mountain part of it but that having severals generals on the defend order would increase the chance of the mountain expert to fight on his preferred terrain.

it's a point I'm actually rather confused about, because in the same message the dev is also saying that you can order a general to attack or defend against a specific army but if I don't know where my and the enemy armies are on the frontline then how is the game going to chose where the battle is going to happen ? Is it decided by the preferred terrain of the army that is targetted by the order ? So if Army A is specifically asked to defend against Army B then the battle is likely to happen on a terrain the general of army B favoured because that's where said general would have start his advance right ? And same if Army A is ordered to specifically attack against Army B I guess. But what happened if Army A is asked to attack Army B and Army B has been asked to defend against Army A ? Is it random then ? o_O

Here the whole dev answer :
Would be great if @lachek or any of devs answered this one, this looks like really a basic thing to know how frontlines work but I guess we will learn maybe after couple of dev diaries :( (not this week, maybe not next)
 
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you don't worry about it. it's your generals' problem.

You know that line of thinking is the same line of thinking that politicians (at least of this variety) had in WW1 when it came to their generals who didn't care about casualties. They are the military men, they know what they are doing. What they say it's a meatgrinder and they just need more men to overload the meatgrinder? Well they must be right, after all it is a generals problem. I'm sure the politicians don't need to demand accountability of their generals to lower casualties and take better care of their soldiers and planning to reduce casualties.

All you need do is listen to Dan Carlin's Blueprint For Armageddon where he certainly talks about this in later parts of the series.
 
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Hopefully, the game will represent Lee's offense on the defense methods that kept the CSA afloat (taking it to the Yankees in Maryland and PA to take pressure off Richmond and avoid a siege). Also, I hope that Sherman's march through SC and GA can be represented as well as the Confederate invasion of KY.
 
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What if, when selecting a general for a front, you could preview their plans to accomplish the goal?

This general plans to take this route while the other general believes it should be done going that way?
 
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