Battle Planner what is it really?

[Modestus]

Slowly this new and what was a promising feature is revealing itself, for a while I struggled to understand the concept behind this new mechanic imagining that it would be some sophisticated method to create detailed and elaborate plans but could never quite figure out how it would work.


Now it t appears to be nothing more then a convoluted method to move your Divisions under AI control, a slightly more improved version of what was in HOI III not particularly elaborate and certainly not a method that you would want to use to create a detailed plan unless your a masochist , of course the lack of an OOB should have been a warning.


Anyhow it turns out that a Plan will consist of drawing a Front-line, an arrow back to your territory and any Division that you wish to form this Front-line you will attach to that Arrow and once you execute your Plan the AI will move those Divisions forward in whatever manner it thinks best to form this front-line.


Even without an enemy this is a ludicrously awkward method of moving Divisions for example if you want to create a Front-line you first need to decide where you want that Front-line to be, how wide you intend it to be, how many Divisions this would require and then how many Divisions you want in each Province.


So a quick test to see if your awake, you want a Front-line 5 Provinces wide with 3 Divisions in each Province how many Divisions do you need to attach to your Arrow? The answer is clearly 15 but know imagine the need to think like this when creating a Plan for the invasion of the USSR ,wont that be fun?


But it gets even better because once you have done all this, made your plans calculated the lengths of the Front-lines and attached your Divisions to cover those Front-lines nothing has happened its only a Plan not one Division has moved.


So know try and imagine this with an enemy army whose sole intention will be to disrupt every instruction you have made and ask yourself was it really worth it to create those plans or maybe you really should have just moved those Divisions manually?

Edit: I forgot to mention you may also want to be move a PZ Division or for that matter any Division to a specific Province so add that into the stew as well.

Edit 2: Something else I forgot I am assuming your Divisions are actually in good locations to implement your Plans so before you execute your Plan make sure to check that everybody is in position and also that your not using any Divisions that are intended to hold open any breakthrough corridors.

 

[Joppos]

The planner concept in itself seems rather fine to me. The likely tediousness and awkwardness comes solely from the fact that you can't have any premade sub/subsubgroupings under a general/plan. Any kind of detailed planning becomes a chore of constantly picking individual divisions from various places along the front, instead of simply picking those panzer/motorized or inf/inf-AT/inf-eng groups you tailored before. Considering that plans are likely to change at a regular interval, the only viable method of allocation is selection boxing the nearest semi-random units which of course makes for a very uncontrolled and potentially frustrating game. If the game gets balanced around this it will be guaranteed to get rather silly.

 

[Modestus]

The planner concept in itself seems rather fine to me. The likely tediousness and awkwardness comes solely from the fact that you can't have any premade sub/subsubgroupings under a general/plan. Any kind of detailed planning becomes a chore of constantly picking individual divisions from various places along the front, instead of simply picking those panzer/motorized or inf/inf-AT/inf-eng groups you tailored before. Considering that plans are likely to change at a regular interval, the only viable method of allocation is selection boxing the nearest semi-random units which of course makes for a very uncontrolled and potentially frustrating game. If the game gets balanced around this it will be guaranteed to get rather silly.

Some form of command structure would certainly help as you could more easily select and direct small groups of Divisions to specific locations along a Front line.

podcat described the system as “ being helpful manual control of a lot of divisions than a detailed hands-off-playing system ” but its actually not very helpful in fact an OOB would achieve as much and with a lot less complication.

As far as I am concerned we have lost an OOB and replaced it with a Battle Plan system that makes almost no sense unless the player is willing to trust his AI to do most of the work and if you try and take back some of this control by creating more detailed Plans you should quickly come to the realisation that your just better off ignoring the Battle Planner.

 

[Art1985]

The planner concept in itself seems rather fine to me. The likely tediousness and awkwardness comes solely from the fact that you can't have any premade sub/subsubgroupings under a general/plan. Any kind of detailed planning becomes a chore of constantly picking individual divisions from various places along the front, instead of simply picking those panzer/motorized or inf/inf-AT/inf-eng groups you tailored before. Considering that plans are likely to change at a regular interval, the only viable method of allocation is selection boxing the nearest semi-random units which of course makes for a very uncontrolled and potentially frustrating game. If the game gets balanced around this it will be guaranteed to get rather silly.

I think that it is not hard for developers to make some kind of hierarchy system for players to organize their armies under one commander (army group). But I don't think that we need HQ on the map.

 

[Modestus]

I would strongly reccommend that people should listen again to the Podcast from Idle thumbs (three moves ahead), in particular from about 0.33 to 0.38.

 

[Bernard Black]

Well sorry but i think your following quote is stretching reality:

Slowly this new and what was a promising feature is revealing itself, for a while I struggled to understand the concept behind this new mechanic imagining that it would be some sophisticated method to create detailed and elaborate plans but could never quite figure out how it would work.

at least your aforementioned expectation of a spophisticated but difficult to understand concept of the battle planner hasn't stopped you from making a lot of posts in which you stated your dissappoval of the idea in quite unambigious if not even devisive terms. To start by giving the impression you were open minded to the idea is, i think, misleading. I get it: You don't like the changes they made. Be it the map, the models, the counters or in this case the Battle Planer, you rather keep things the way they were and you are very well entitled to this opinion.

I am not saying every change is for the better and if the Battle Planner will work they way they envisioned will be seen at launch but i am willing to let them them try.Just because you can't see this work for yourselves doesn't mean it can't, people not agreeing with you on that matter aren't necessarily that foolish as you might think.

I know your opinions now, you have made them very clear in numerous posts in numerous threads, you have been heard. Why don't give it a rest? Don't you think its worth to wait at least until we have some more reliable info from a dev diary maybe. I am sorry but i am getting a bit tired of the Doom and Gloom.

Regards.

 

[Modestus]

Listen to some people who played the game then come back to me.

See my post above yours .

 

[fabius]

As far as I am concerned we have lost an OOB and replaced it with a Battle Plan system that makes almost no sense unless the player is willing to trust his AI to do most of the work and if you try and take back some of this control by creating more detailed Plans you should quickly come to the realisation that your just better off ignoring the Battle Planner.

Early on I thought that 'they' said that was exactly one of their reasons for it. To balance the AI.

My thoughts at this point are that it's potentially a very good idea that at the moment looks (not necessarily is) very basic; but has lots of room to be improved on and add depth. And pitfalls; mentioned above is one- how will battle plan/AI handle break through corridors.

 

[Johan]

Plenty of stuff wrong in the OP.

You dont draw arrows.. You drawoffensive and defensive lines and attach divisions to them.

Algoritms are far more likely to determine ideal distributions of large amounts of data. Like what the battleplanner does for you.

Humans are far better at pattern recognition.. Ie to determine what Xmeans, and where Y may give Z.

 

[paranoidsteve]

Early on I thought that 'they' said that was exactly one of their reasons for it. To balance the AI.

My thoughts at this point are that it's potentially a very good idea that at the moment looks (not necessarily is) very basic; but has lots of room to be improved on and add depth. And pitfalls; mentioned above is one- how will battle plan/AI handle break through corridors.

Upon watching Quill vid. and seen the number of generals he had available i know exactly how i will be handling break through corridors. However i would like some idea how long a plan has to be a plan before it starts giving bonuses and the level of those bonuses with longer time frames.

 

[Midden]

One thing in favour of the battle plans I saw in the videos, is they sort of look like, front lines on maps and history books so in that respect I would like to use the system as it looks to engage immersion and flavour.

One thing I would humbly suggest is the OP would benefit from an edit to remove the emotional adjectives, they may actually distract from the points you are making.

 

[Modestus]

Plenty of stuff wrong in the OP.

You dont draw arrows.. You drawoffensive and defensive lines and attach divisions to them.

Algoritms are far more likely to determine ideal distributions of large amounts of data. Like what the battleplanner does for you.

Humans are far better at pattern recognition.. Ie to determine what Xmeans, and where Y may give Z.

Arrows I presume are to assign Divisions to whatever Offensive or Defensive lines you draw?

Whether you need to draw any arrows I dont know.,

In fact what are Arrows for?

 

[mdw1985]

Plenty of stuff wrong in the OP.

You dont draw arrows.. You drawoffensive and defensive lines and attach divisions to them.

Algoritms are far more likely to determine ideal distributions of large amounts of data. Like what the battleplanner does for you.

Humans are far better at pattern recognition.. Ie to determine what Xmeans, and where Y may give Z.

Wait, does this mean, you don't draw any arrows for movements??? You only draw the front lines in offensive and defensive matters??? How will i be able to do the battleplan as detailed as podcat already told with that???

 

[Modestus]

Early on I thought that 'they' said that was exactly one of their reasons for it. To balance the AI.

My thoughts at this point are that it's potentially a very good idea that at the moment looks (not necessarily is) very basic; but has lots of room to be improved on and add depth. And pitfalls; mentioned above is one- how will battle plan/AI handle break through corridors.

podcat stated that the initial vision was overly complicated and we moved away from that so I think that Paradox originally had no pun intended bigger Plans for the Battle Planner, this is disappointing because I don’t know where they can go from here.


Even the chaps at three moves ahead were wondering about this.

 

[Centurion1973]

Wait, does this mean, you don't draw any arrows for movements??? You only draw the front lines in offensive and defensive matters??? How will i be able to do the battleplan as detailed as podcat already told with that???

You can make that frontline just 1, or 2 provinces wide on both ends and assign it division(s) which you want to advance that way.

 

[Hans_Schnitzel]

Arrows I presume are to assign Divisions to whatever Offensive or Defensive lines you draw?

Whether you need to draw any arrows I dont know.,

In fact what are Arrows for?

The arrows are just there so you can drag the divisions on them. On the arrow is written "X Divisions", so you drag five onto it and then 5 divisions will head towards that offensive/defensive line.

But yeah, about all those "muh armored spearheads" that's actually really easy to do in a battleplan. You just draw three offensive lines next to eachother. Left flank, center, right flank Lets say you want to have a big armored speard head push the center. You make the center 2-3 provinces wide, while the right and left flank cover 10 provinces each. To the flanks you assign like 20 divisions (so around 2 in each province), to the center you assign 20, too (so ~10 divisions in the two provinces) and that way you created a Schwerpunkt for your army.

 

[bigb4486]

While we're on the subject and have some PI prying eyes, are AI held to the same battleplans or are they free to move units without penalty?

The plan system is a good idea, and I'll use it. Until things go wrong and I need to adapt on the fly. Hopefully the punishment for that isn't too bad.

 

[Modestus]

You can make that frontline just 1, or 2 provinces wide on both ends and assign it division(s) which you want to advance that way.

That may work but the further away you make the Front-Line even if it is narrow the more likely the AI will take whatever route it wants. The only way that I can see you can guarantee the AI will follow a specific route is to manually move it.


It would appear from what we have seen that it does not have to follow arrows that are part of a Plan.

 

[Centurion1973]

While we're on the subject and have some PI prying eyes, are AI held to the same battleplans or are they free to move units without penalty?

The plan system is a good idea, and I'll use it. Until things go wrong and I need to adapt on the fly. Hopefully the punishment for that isn't too bad.

AI nations also use battleplans.

 

[Centurion1973]

That may work but the further away you make the Front-Line even if it is narrow the more likely the AI will take whatever route it wants. The only way that I can see you can guarantee the AI will follow a specific route is to manually move it.


It would appear from what we have seen that it does not have to follow arrows that are part of a Plan.

We will still have ability to move units manually, so if you have that big an aversion to battleplans, just pretend they dont exists. I plan to use detailed plans for realism purposes and at the same time limiting AI ability to screw my plans. If, from time to time, I need to make some important mode manually, I will just do it.