there's a marked difference between fighting a good battle of attrition and sending 300,000 men to die without gaining any ground. the first one is a viable strategy, the second one is grounds for a court martial
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It's really worrying that the developers have not said a word on this thread yet. I'm starting to wonder whether the pre-order might have been a mistake (first pre-order in my life, and likely the last, because the entire concept is cancerous, and it's now being reinforced again as I'm not even sure whether the release product will be worth playing), because I don't want to play a game against utterly incompetent AI that essentially kills any notion of challenge in the game.
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Don't worry yourself so much. from things i've seen in the World War Wednesday the AI looks just fine, far more capable than HOI3 AI. the Maginot line is a special circumstance and da9l and steelvolt specifically commentated they were working on that aspect so that germany wouldn't bash its head against it so hard.
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I hope that's true, because besides the AI situation the game looks amazingly well polished for a Paradox game. It's common practice for the games to be buggy and sometimes unplayable on release day (as you probably already know), and lacking content (then added by expansions, DLCs and free patches), but in the past decade they've nicely moved away from this. Hearts of Iron III release was a disaster, I hope that the sequel will be the complete opposite to reinforce everyone's trust in the company.
I for one am pretty excited about the AI, HOI3 was an absolute disaster, the AI was horrible. It will probably do some funky stuff sometimes (like the Danzig landing and the Maginot attack), but overall it seems pretty competent.
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The german army DID NOT break through the maginot line in WW2. They broke through the Ardennes avoiding the maginot line and then encircling them. They still took heavy casualties taking them "from behind" and so did the allies when they had to fight their way into germany through them.
Maybe the maginot line could be nerfed for gameplay reasons but it was really strong in a historical sense.
I'm assuming thousands of troops are stuck up against a British division in Danzig. I assume a bunch are hopped up against the Soviet border. I also assume the AI is being entirely unaggressive in what should be a 30 day offensive to end the Netherlands. This all looked entirely fixed in previous versions of the game. :< I noticed how spectacular the AI did with troop assignment this looks horrid. Maybe this is just a more extensive stress test and the Ai failed.
Besides that I assume another problem is the fact all they do is research doctrine which is global bonuses. I bet the AI doesn't do the same. I'm not sure, just a assumption. The fact you can finish the majority of doctrine before 41 is strange. Heck in other streams they finished the entire thing I believe in 41 or 2. Doctrines need tied in with experience. Its total bullshit they can constantly research doctrine in my view. A lot of tactics were learned by fighting not sitting around and magically coming up with ideas that only came around because of warfare. The ideas that even existed before the war were based on previous experience not magical research. I think a good solution is the total amount of XP earned unlocks doctrines so you can further down the tree. Something like that. Some gate of actual experience required. It'll help the AI because I assume they aren't set to bum rush doctrines.
Besides that I assume another problem is the fact all they do is research doctrine which is global bonuses. I bet the AI doesn't do the same. I'm not sure, just a assumption. The fact you can finish the majority of doctrine before 41 is strange. Heck in other streams they finished the entire thing I believe in 41 or 2. Doctrines need tied in with experience. Its total bullshit they can constantly research doctrine in my view. A lot of tactics were learned by fighting not sitting around and magically coming up with ideas that only came around because of warfare. The ideas that even existed before the war were based on previous experience not magical research. I think a good solution is the total amount of XP earned unlocks doctrines so you can further down the tree. Something like that. Some gate of actual experience required. It'll help the AI because I assume they aren't set to bum rush doctrines.
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I highly doubt that "attrition warfare" means "attack the enemy at the strongest position you can find, don't even bother to look for better alternatives, because we have more men and material anyway." Because that is exactly what the AI did in the stream.
The attrition warfare you guys talk about reminds me more of the soviet tactic in WW2: draw the enemy in, but keep his losses constantly high, slow him down ect. And even the Soviets learned eventually to disengange from risky battles and rather retreat than risk encirclement of the whole army.
WW1 was an attrition warfare not because people thought this was a smart or good way to wage war. It became a stalemate because offensive tactics and offense-possibilities didn't catch up with defensive ones. There were plenty of tires to force a breakthrough and restart the mobile war from both sides of the conflict. They just all miserably failed, that's all.
If the doctrine research becomes an issue in the game, i assume they will fix it after release. I trust paradox that they will rebalance the game for quite a while with free patches after release.
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To be fair, while I'm skeptical about HoI IV AI, the Danzig attack is pretty good. It ties up a lot of German troops. The British just need to fill one defensive province while the Germans have to completely encircle it through several provinces & have enough troops to prevent a British break-out. The Brits are probably not suffering that much and them keeping Danzig seems like a very, very good idea as it gives trouble to Germany.
While I highly doubt it's possible - the British holding Danzig until Operation Barbarossa would be an amazing opportunity to cut off the Germans. But, of course, that sounds unlikely, as the British likely have trouble providing adequate air support (not sure if there's an air base in Danzig, so that's a penalty for planes operating out of the isles) and the Germans really have a ton of troops to be pounding them.
You people are seriously making this a bigger deal than it should be. They LITERALLY COMMENTED ON ALL THOSE ISSUES LIVE ON STREAM. It's like you weren't even there. The Ai guy literally said that the German AI should not linger on in it's attacks so long and that he thought it was fixed. So either the fix was not live in the build or not as finished as he thought. Danzig is being held because Germany pushed all British troops in Poland into Danzig. Daniel commented that it was odd that it was still being held, but we know from the Poland stream how defensible this spot is. Because the Brits have complete naval superiority, they might just be cycling their troops in and out right from England. And Germany needed so long to choose Around the Maginot Line because they DID NOT ANTICIPATE the war with France so early. They were just started on improving their Naval bombers -by the way a good choice, as that could hinder the Brits from further embarassing them at Danzig- and needed to finish it. Also, don't forget that foci take longer to complete during war time, so the wait was even longer. The first thing the German AI did when it finished that focus was to go for Around the Maginot Line.
Also, did you really play the same HOI3 as me, where the AI was completely retarded and was in binary mode of either never moving troops to new fronts or pulling ALL of them over. It was ridiculus. So far the HOI4 AI looked pretty good to me, at least better than HOI3. The only concerns I had till now are balance concerns, as Itally seems ahistorically good, taking Cairo all the time and pushing Into France when France is an AI, or China being a too much of a pushover.
Also, did you really play the same HOI3 as me, where the AI was completely retarded and was in binary mode of either never moving troops to new fronts or pulling ALL of them over. It was ridiculus. So far the HOI4 AI looked pretty good to me, at least better than HOI3. The only concerns I had till now are balance concerns, as Itally seems ahistorically good, taking Cairo all the time and pushing Into France when France is an AI, or China being a too much of a pushover.
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@joeenochs
My apologies - I wrote that during an insomnia attack, and although I thought I'd differentiated design from AI, clearly I didn't do so as intended. The point I was trying to make is that design is one circle, AI another, and although those circles overlap considerably, they are still discrete components of building a game, with specialist people and skills being needed for both.
Headbutting the Maginot until concussion is an AI issue certainly, as is leaving the Siegfried so weak, but how much latitude there should be about the AI launching speculative ventures, such as sending the BEF to Danzig and so on, would in my view be a design decision. But when Number7 says that the AI even for vanilla 1.0 will still be streets ahead of hoi3 I totally agree, and as it will be an ongoing work-in-progress for a very long time to come, measured critiques are valid but panic certainly isn't.
My apologies - I wrote that during an insomnia attack, and although I thought I'd differentiated design from AI, clearly I didn't do so as intended. The point I was trying to make is that design is one circle, AI another, and although those circles overlap considerably, they are still discrete components of building a game, with specialist people and skills being needed for both.
Headbutting the Maginot until concussion is an AI issue certainly, as is leaving the Siegfried so weak, but how much latitude there should be about the AI launching speculative ventures, such as sending the BEF to Danzig and so on, would in my view be a design decision. But when Number7 says that the AI even for vanilla 1.0 will still be streets ahead of hoi3 I totally agree, and as it will be an ongoing work-in-progress for a very long time to come, measured critiques are valid but panic certainly isn't.
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There's similarly a marked difference between gaining ground at the cost of 100k deaths, and not gaining any despite the losses. Once you commit to such extent, decision to pull out becomes increasingly harder (as it's not easy to predict the final outcome, until that outcome happens, and to justify the losses taken so far with little to show for it) In the most drastic cases you get things like Verdun.
Also, "a good battle of attrition" and not gaining any ground (in that particular encounter at least) aren't mutually exclusive; but that's another story.
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They did break through after the the Ardennes assault, more towards the date of France's surrender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#Fall_Gelb
Scroll down to "Collapse of the Maginot Line"
The majority of it was not broken through in fact, but the Germans still broke through at about 15-20% of the forts and enveloped the Maginot line, taking the cities behind it such as Nancy and Verdun.
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Well said. HOI2 and 3 had pretty bad AI and it took Their Finest Hour to make it decent. Everything before it (including HOI 2 and 3 mods) were all about increasing difficulty by giving hardcoded bonuses to AI, maluses for the player and often, free divisions by event.
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To be fair though, that article notes it only happened after the French effectively pulled out, leaving fortifications with skeletal crews, and even then it took some heavy, slow progressing fighting. In the WWW game something similar happened at certain point (Germans nearly breaking through a province with couple divisions left at little remaining strength) but the players reinforced the weakened spot with the reserves, while historically what happened was quite the opposite
From the WWW videos I saw so far, the AI is quite capable, initiating and closing pockets, attempting marine landings, etc.
However, sometimes it decides to go into a suicide attack which leaves me bamboozled. I mean, yeah, I remember the AI of Tiberian Sun that just built up few units of the same type and just sent them away, but:
1. This is 2016, AI algorithms should be more complex than that.
2. This is not a silly isometric RTS, AI should be capable of creating a whole queue of events and update them on the fly.
3. Continuing 2 and adding to the things said above - AI should know that it needs X amount of forces for the next battle. Essentially if WWW continued "historically", the French Commune will withstand the German invasion and in 1941 instead of Germany steamrolling through Brest, it would be USSR plowing through Poland somewhere mid-September.
Also, as a newbie to HoI series of games - is there such a thing as public support? Or is it integrated into "Unity"? Meaning - Germany practically lost on the Maginot Line, leaving 500k dead. Such a suicidal attack should technically leave the country paralized and the public support of the goverment in tatters, increase desertion and draft refusal and general unrest. I mean, look at what was happening in USSR in the first months of the war historically, and even a much closer example - Afghanistan War of '80s.
However, sometimes it decides to go into a suicide attack which leaves me bamboozled. I mean, yeah, I remember the AI of Tiberian Sun that just built up few units of the same type and just sent them away, but:
1. This is 2016, AI algorithms should be more complex than that.
2. This is not a silly isometric RTS, AI should be capable of creating a whole queue of events and update them on the fly.
3. Continuing 2 and adding to the things said above - AI should know that it needs X amount of forces for the next battle. Essentially if WWW continued "historically", the French Commune will withstand the German invasion and in 1941 instead of Germany steamrolling through Brest, it would be USSR plowing through Poland somewhere mid-September.
Also, as a newbie to HoI series of games - is there such a thing as public support? Or is it integrated into "Unity"? Meaning - Germany practically lost on the Maginot Line, leaving 500k dead. Such a suicidal attack should technically leave the country paralized and the public support of the goverment in tatters, increase desertion and draft refusal and general unrest. I mean, look at what was happening in USSR in the first months of the war historically, and even a much closer example - Afghanistan War of '80s.
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The public support is abstracted into the national unity thing -- it can take small hits or gains as results of events (like ace pilot dying) but other than that it's mainly affected by losing control of valuable national provinces. Losing manpower won't affect it per se, but if you lose the manpower to the point you can't field enough armies to defend your territory (let alone attack) you're going to lose ground, and with that the unity will crumble.
It can be argued the very example you give, the opening of eastern front, is in support of the current system rather than for what you suggest... as the Russians didn't just fold up early, even though they lost people in hundreds of thousands.
I guess you are right. Is there any information as to how the Unity system works?