An Idea: Take Airforces and Submarines off the map

[alanschu]

I am not against an "abstraction" of sorts and would probably be okay if I gave air orders to airbases, rather than to individual wings. I have never really been a fan of HOI's air model (from multi hour air engagements, among other things). It'd be interesting if something similar to maybe, War in the Pacific could be done, although that is a turn based game.

The idea of setting plane types to particular missions where, for the most part, they were left to "commander's discretion" for targeting and the like with CAP levels being set and intercepting craft responding to detection. Should operational plans require it, however, specified targets could be made, and the airbase panes attempting to accommodate the strike make up to the best of her ability.

 

[vota dc]

Convoys are offmap because they never sunk an important ship, submarines and air force did that. It would be weird watching fleet disappear because something abstract.

 

[D Inqu]

Great idea! Been raised a few times already.

The stacks of dozens of submarines and the so-called "air battles" of HOI3 need to go. They are neither fun, nor realistic. Massive stacks of fighters and bombers fighting out over a couple of hours looks and feels terrible.

Abstacted aircraft could be assigned to support specific armies/spearheads quite easily. Much more strategic planning - which is good. Much less of seeing stacks of supposedly hundreds of aircraft forming over a single retreating division -also good. You actually get proper campaign for air superiority.

Same with subs. They never moved around in supertacks, nor did they engage entire fleets in battle. Convoys are abstract, so should be the subs.

 

[Smothmoth]

I'm all for this to an extent, the way HOI handles submarines and air wings is pretty terrible. I don't think abstraction across the board is a perfect solution however, but abstracting commerce raiding for submarines or other ships and any kind of extended air campaign for planes would be perfect.

For example managing any kind of large scale commerce raiding across the Pacific is a tedious nightmare, the only realistic solution I've been able to work with is to create a new HQ, move it to the middle of the pacific, assign all the submarines to it, and put them under AI control. Attempting something like the Battle of Britain manually is also just as bad, and unfortunately the AI can't handle something like that in HOI3 at all. Extended strategic bombing campaigns are also tedious, and produce very little impact. Abstracting these systems would give the player more control, in a much less tedious way, and the results can be portrayed much more realistically than the existing model.

 

[Opus]

Great idea! Been raised a few times already.

The stacks of dozens of submarines and the so-called "air battles" of HOI3 need to go. They are neither fun, nor realistic. Massive stacks of fighters and bombers fighting out over a couple of hours looks and feels terrible.

Abstacted aircraft could be assigned to support specific armies/spearheads quite easily. Much more strategic planning - which is good. Much less of seeing stacks of supposedly hundreds of aircraft forming over a single retreating division -also good. You actually get proper campaign for air superiority.

Same with subs. They never moved around in supertacks, nor did they engage entire fleets in battle. Convoys are abstract, so should be the subs.

But convoys aren't really abstracted that much in HOI3. They do exist, you have to build them, they have a path on the map, you need to set them to go from point A to B. You just don't see them as counters. You can however see their paths and where they are lost if they are.

So really, they are more of a proper unit then not in HOI3.

 

[Opus]

...

For example managing any kind of large scale commerce raiding across the Pacific is a tedious nightmare, the only realistic solution I've been able to work with is to create a new HQ, move it to the middle of the pacific, assign all the submarines to it, and put them under AI control.

But isn't this a great way to reflect strategic warfare? You assign a number of subs to a HQ and let them do the work. No need for you as supreme commander to click every singel unit to make them do stuff.

The AI is somewhat not to be trusted to do this properly, I do agree on that, but the AI improvment in general are massive from say SI to TFH alone. I do expect the AI in HOI4 to be able to preform simple tasks properly. In an Japan TFH-game I usually ends up with 8-10 HQ:s for different things, to properly manage things like that. I don't think it's tedious, it's really a thing you need to spend a couple of seconds on every once in a while, and then you're basicly set up for the rest of the game.

Don't really se the need to abstract it.

Besides, Subs are cool. People want subs, not abstractions of subs.

 

[D Inqu]

But convoys aren't really abstracted that much in HOI3. They do exist, you have to build them, they have a path on the map, you need to set them to go from point A to B. You just don't see them as counters. You can however see their paths and where they are lost if they are.

So really, they are more of a proper unit then not in HOI3.

Just like the OP is proposing we build subs/aircraft. They do exist, you have to build them, only take out the completely unrealistic and boring micro. Just like you get messages about hit convoys by subs, you may get similar messages when subs get sunk by escorts. Air battles could do with a daily report on casualties/theater

 

[Smothmoth]

But isn't this a great way to reflect strategic warfare? You assign a number of subs to a HQ and let them do the work. No need for you as supreme commander to click every singel unit to make them do stuff.

Sure, if it was flavored better. They way I have to do this in game pulls me right out of the experience. I make a new theater HQ so it has enough coverage range to hit most of the pacific, I move it over to an island I control in the middle of the pacific, then group up my subs and assign them to this new theater, and finally put everything under AI control. It would be so much better if there was a dedicated menu to handle this kind of action instead of having to improvise.

Don't really se the need to abstract it.

Besides, Subs are cool. People want subs, not abstractions of subs.

Because the current model in game doesn't work right, and the proposed way of abstracting them makes a whole lot more sense gameplay wise and realism wise. You would still get subs, you just won't have to micromanage them unrealistically to produce any meaningful results.

 

[Beagá]

Just like the OP is proposing we build subs/aircraft. They do exist, you have to build them, only take out the completely unrealistic and boring micro. Just like you get messages about hit convoys by subs, you may get similar messages when subs get sunk by escorts. Air battles could do with a daily report on casualties/theater

Awful, just awful. If you don´t get input from what is really happening you would just put into auto and don´t care.

Air wings and subs allow you to have a palpable input on the damage they are doing MUCH better than reading a lame ass report every day. "50 bombers and 50 fighters lost" yawn. Where? What they damaged? How much?

For a very silly analogy, it would be like playing a Sonic game where you order him to go to the end of the level and then it would say how many rings and how many enemies he killed. Sounds good to you? Because to me it sounds like crap.

 

[Rudawitz]

I like this idea. Assign planes to an area of the map (or army), give them priorities that they carry out continuously and focus some of them on a single province to support an offensive or something. Meanwhile other ground units in the area/army still get the bonuses provided by the planes that are not earmarked for the offensive, without all the fuss and micro management that it would currently entail.

Edit: In the long run at least, since no babysitting would be needed and the air missions would be tied to the ground units not the provinces.

 

[D Inqu]

Awful, just awful. If you don´t get input from what is really happening you would just put into auto and don´t care.

Air wings and subs allow you to have a palpable input on the damage they are doing MUCH better than reading a lame ass report every day. "50 bombers and 50 fighters lost" yawn. Where? What they damaged? How much?

To me (and it seems many many others), it's "awful, just awful" to have stupid head-on clashes between supposedly hundreds of fighters and CAS resolved in a couple of hours. This stuff never happened IRL. Instead we want, you know, strategic planning for an air superiority campaign.

The current air planning is too micro heavy, unrealistic and hurting strategic gameplay. If you have air superiority, it should affect operations on the ground as a whole, from planning to execution. Not a nonsense "bomb a couple of retreating divisions with stacks of bombers while fighting off stacks of enemy fighters". One of the critical aircraft for the German air force on the Eastern front was the Fw189 - a recon plane. Instrumental in both strategic and tactical planning, and the Soviets rewarded generously anyone who would shoot one down. Unfortunately it had no place in the abstract HOI2 and HOI3. Equally, the most common air support was a force of around a dozen planes making a difference on the battlefield, with the key technology being integration of airforce personnel inside the infantry, to coordinate the air support better. None of the current stacks.

We already have the theatre interface, from HOI3. It will supposedly get much more detail with the announced operations planning. Air and sub warfare can be easily integrated inside.

 

[Beagá]

I´m not saying the air war is well done, but I totally oppose the OP´s approach.

If air wing basing and losses weren´t managed in such a silly way we wouldn´t have thousands of little air battles. I Always advocated that the stacking penalty should be smaller but planes suffer loss of organization faster, need more time to Reorg and pilots should exist as a resource.

Therefore air offensives SHOULD be powerful, but very costly if you don´t have air superiority or there is heavy AA and missions shouldn´t happen on a daily basis unless air wings are very well organized. There is also the issue that if you dpn´t have AA brigades then you can´t fight back planes, and we all know AA was spread instead of so focused. It´s one of the flaws of HOI brigade system, which mods like HPP tried to improve by making the mixed support brigades.

As for air recon, it´s just one of the dozens of things that don´t have a real place in a grand strategy game in the scale of HOI, and BTW air recon was much more critical regarding sea battles than ground. If you want to put air recon, first make a decent naval scouting system THEN focus on land.

 

[Opus]

To me (and it seems many many others), it's "awful, just awful" to have stupid head-on clashes between supposedly hundreds of fighters and CAS resolved in a couple of hours. This stuff never happened IRL. Instead we want, you know, strategic planning for an air superiority campaign.

The current air planning is too micro heavy, unrealistic and hurting strategic gameplay. If you have air superiority, it should affect operations on the ground as a whole, from planning to execution. Not a nonsense "bomb a couple of retreating divisions with stacks of bombers while fighting off stacks of enemy fighters". One of the critical aircraft for the German air force on the Eastern front was the Fw189 - a recon plane. Instrumental in both strategic and tactical planning, and the Soviets rewarded generously anyone who would shoot one down. Unfortunately it had no place in the abstract HOI2 and HOI3. Equally, the most common air support was a force of around a dozen planes making a difference on the battlefield, with the key technology being integration of airforce personnel inside the infantry, to coordinate the air support better. None of the current stacks.

We already have the theatre interface, from HOI3. It will supposedly get much more detail with the announced operations planning. Air and sub warfare can be easily integrated inside.

While I do agree that the current system may not represent real life in a proper way, I don't see what abstracting it would do good. Or at least, I don't see what it would do better then to get the system working properly instead. The solution to a flaw doesn't have to be "remove the feature" or "abstract it so that it really isn't that feature anymore", but to fix it.

Get the AI to realise that just because I assigned a couple of bombers and fighters to my AG, that doesn't mean that it should do meaningless strikes at heavy AA-defended provinces and be shot down in 5 minutes. Make us be able to set each and every group of wings to differnt areas of defence (as for now, if you click "defend region" instead of "province", all aircrafts follow that order. Not just the one you want to defend a certain region).

Automatisation, in a proper way and with options to do it manually if you wish, is to prefere over abstraction of features like this. People will acctually expect to be able to controll their aircrafts and subs, not to controll abstractions of them.

I actually think that this is the most important aspect of this. While I, personally, could live with an abstraction (even if it do sound increadably boring), most people will want to controll thir "not land or regular fleet"-units in the first war where these acctually where a huge thing. A WW2-game where you cannot controll a big aspect of what made WW2 unique, is less of a WW2 game I think.

 

[D Inqu]

I´m not saying the air war is well done, but I totally oppose the OP´s approach.

If air wing basing and losses weren´t managed in such a silly way we wouldn´t have thousands of little air battles. I Always advocated that the stacking penalty should be smaller but planes suffer loss of organization faster, need more time to Reorg and pilots should exist as a resource.

Therefore air offensives SHOULD be powerful, but very costly if you don´t have air superiority and missions shouldn´t happen on a daily basis.

That would be even worse. The size of the airfore of most of the majors were in excess of 10k planes. Bearing in mind the size of the air unit, that's at least 100 units. If the stacking penalty is smaller, it would only encourage the crap stack-on stack battles, that are not strategic, not fun, and completely remove a pontial part of strategic gameplay.

Missions should not happen once/per month, they should be done several times a day. The battle for air superiority does not stop, it only has more intense and less intense periods. Possessing air superiority should give a major advantage on the ground, not let bomb a couple of divisions on a front containing 200 divisions.

 

[Beagá]

Rubbish. Both Luftwaffe and RAF+USAAF never sent 10k planes on missions every day over Europe, your point is moot. Ever occured to you that some planes would be on the ground being repaired/maintenance? Which is already more than well abstracted by wings with low ORG and less Strength?

 

[D Inqu]

While I do agree that the current system may not represent real life in a proper way, I don't see what abstracting it would do good. Or at least, I don't see what it would do better then to get the system working properly instead. The solution to a flaw doesn't have to be "remove the feature" or "abstract it so that it really doesn't is that feature anymore", but to fix it.

Get the AI to realise that just because I assigned a couple of bombers and fighters to my AG, that doesn't mean that it should do meaningless strikes at heavy AA-defended provinces and be shot down in 5 minutes. Make us be able to set each and every group of wings to differnt areas of defence (as for now, if you click "defend region" instead of "province", all aircrafts follow that order. Not just the one you want to defend a certain region).

Automatisation, in a proper way and with options to do it manually if you wish, is to prefere over abstraction of features like this. People will acctually expect to be able to controll their aircrafts and subs, not to controll abstractions of them.

The OP suggestion to fix the problem by removing the current completely abstract stacks, and replace them with realistic strategic aircraft management. With the equipment feature in HOI4, it should be possible to build a realistic airforce and manage it properly, not copycat land divisions.

This will coincidentally remove a number of the famed airforce expoits, that made it banned in many multiplayer games.

 

[Opus]

I like this idea. Assign planes to an area of the map (or army), give them priorities that they carry out continuously and focus some of them on a single province to support an offensive or something. Meanwhile other ground units in the area/army still get the bonuses provided by the planes that are not earmarked for the offensive, without all the fuss and micro management that it would currently entail.

Edit: In the long run at least, since no babysitting would be needed and the air missions would be tied to the ground units not the provinces.

If I do not missunderstand you, this has been possible for years. You assign your fighter wings (or whatever type of planes you wish) to the OOB and put it on AI-control.

 

[Beagá]

Sigh... the exploits are possible for many reasons, having air wings on the map is NOT ONE OF THEM.

 

[D Inqu]

Rubbish. Both Luftwaffe and RAF+USAAF never sent 10k planes on missions every day over Europe, your point is moot. Ever occured to you that some planes would be on the ground being repaired/maintenance? Which is already more than well abstracted by wings with low ORG and less Strength?

Who ever said about sending 10k planes simultaneously? You are so boxed in that abstract stack system. Please think outside that box.

You manage a realistic airforce through the operations/theatre screen. Some missions happen all the time:
1. Pairs of fighters go on free hunts
2. Recons survey enemy troop movements and defences
3. Small groups of bombers take out key targets.

Just like you would prepare a land operation, the airforce will prepare for major operations, be it a 100-bomber raid or support for a major offensive.

 

[Opus]

The OP suggestion to fix the problem by removing the current completely abstract stacks, and replace them with realistic strategic aircraft management. With the equipment feature in HOI4, it should be possible to build a realistic airforce and manage it properly, not copycat land divisions.

This will coincidentally remove a number of the famed airforce expoits, that made it banned in many multiplayer games.

While I do get this, how could I be able to controll my airforce tactically? Not all games are with SU, USA, GER or GB where these type of MM gets tedious. Put your airforce on abstracted AI-controll as Hungary against Yugoslavia and watch them fail misserably is not something I would like when I need that extre per cent of firepower to win the decisive battle.

If MM is the problem, there are ways to solve that (there are in HOI3). If unrealistic stacks that fights unrealistic airbattles are the problem, it really needs to be balanced against gameplay: Would it be better if you had thousand of little airbattles all over the map, that lasted for 1/10 of a second (Real life time that is) and where you would have no chance to see what's going on? No.

So, since you want to be able to see your air units (for immersion and you know, a modern age war game without air units is kind of stupid), use them in special missions from time to time, but not wanna MM a huge airforce all the time, there's really one solution: Get the current system to work, rather then to abstract it. Get the AI to not waste all the planes their given and make us be able to tell the AI what we want it to do with the units we give them.

Or am I missing something crucial here?