Battle Planner what is it really?

[Bernard Black]

In single player I can see the use and against AI I see it has a helpful feature. As I said above I have a issue with bonusing AI to make it viable is something I'm strongly against. Its not creating good AI its creating boofazoo AI. But in MP....player versus player. Controlling troops will always beat not controlling troops...AI pathing among many things is inferior to player hands. The best thing the AI has is efficiency and all that really is being more attentive players and really just knowing far more in strings then the player because its not apart of the program. My point is making plans I feel won't work and will fail if one side is controlling units directly.

You are basicly concerned about a balancing issue. How big will the Battle plan bonus be. It will need to be high enough that loosing it by manually intervening needs to be carefully considered but not so low, that doing everything manually is always the better option, therefore rendering itself useless. I can see this being a main point of contention for the whole lifespan of HoI4.

If a plan fails, there will be much debate if it is the fault of the AI, or a poorly devised plan by the player. Don't forget, your battle plan is basicly telling your troops what you would do roughly manually yourself anyway and if you have to deviate from it quite substantially it might not have been such a good plan in the first place. You are not giving everything to the AI, the AI will try to do what you told it to do and will act in these limits.

If they pull the battle plans off well, even in multiplayer you will want to use a battle plan against your opponents for the bonus, and both players will have to intervene in their plans at certain points. At which point it is best will possibly be a main theme of the game.

It is a difficult task they have set themselves, so i get the scepticism but i think it is possible.

Regards

 

[tommylotto]

In Hoi3 you could really customize how your AI army fought. You could automate it at the corps, army, army group or theater level. You could automate at the corps level and give each corps its own objectives and based upon the objectives selected, the AI would draw a front for you. Some times your orders made nonsense. It was very difficult to understand how the AI prioritized objectives and drew fronts and often did it in inefficient ways. So, it usually did a better job if you did not automate at corps level but rather at army group or theater level. At a higher level, the AI made a hot mess of any organization that you made, but it was more transparent where the front is and how it was going to move towards its objectives.

Now when watching Quill's HoiIV invasion of Yugoslavia by Italy, I had Hoi3 flashbacks. The nonsensical movement of the armies looked just like an Hoi3 AI invasion on that same front. The need to intervene to avoid disaster was the same. It made me wonder, are we dealing with new lipstick on the same pig? The AI cannot keep your units organized. So, they give us no means to organize our units -- problem solved. The AI cannot efficiently be automated at lower levels of command. So, they limited the number of generals but increase the number of divisions they command -- problem solved. It seems they are trying to force us to play the game the way the AI approaches the game -- disorganized and high level. It's like sausage and politics, the results will make sense, but closely watching the process will drive you nuts.

Now clearly, the new BP system is an improvement from automating HQ's in Hoi3, but how so? You have more transparent control over the designation of the front. In Hoi3, you designated an objective and the front drew itself, sometimes poorly. Now we control the front drawing process. That is improvement. But how does the AI move your army from point A to point B. To me it looks familiar, and will cause the many players like me to pull our hair out. Again, it seems they are designing the game to force the player to move his armies the same way the AI moves its armies. This may be brilliant game design, as it will put the human and AI opponents on a more level playing field, making for a much more challenging single player experience. However, being an obsessive compulsive megalomaniac control freak, it might be that the biggest challenge of this game is going to be... Letting go.

 

[wingo]

If I remember correctly, Quill18 said in his video that currently as long as divisions are assigned to a plan, they will get the bonus, even if you micromanage them manually. So basically, just put divs into a broad plan for as long as possible, and after hostilities start override AI commands manually where appropriate and you should still get bonus. But that does not mean its final, remember, still alpha + bugs.

 

[Jakalak]

Well you answered this question:


with this paragraph


The point is, that nobody can answer the question you raised, not us or the devs and certainly not from looking on screenshots or videos. If you think the concept of the Battleplanner is sound, which i think it is. Then you have to wait for the implemantation to see if it works out or not. Right now i don't think anyone can make that call. Well we can be sure that it wont remove ALL micromanaging, we can answer that much.

If it doesn't work at all, then we play like HoI3, thats the worst case for the Battleplanner. Depending on how well the feature will be implemented it will be used with varying degrees of player interventions, because it will never be as good as a player doing everything manually. But this brings also new gameplay decisions into the game, you will have to decide if deviating from the plan and loosing your prepardness bonus is worth exploiting the opening in the enemy lines, which you didn't anticipate in your plannings. If the feature is well done, than this will be a difficult and fun decision.

So realisticly the far ends of Battleplanner capabilities will be: None at all and not as good as a human. But i think if it is good enough its well worth the effort, I'll reserve judgement until then. Also regarding your concern about them probably not changing features after they are finished I just say: EU IV patch 1.12. I have never seen a developer changing core features as radicially as PDX there in a game almost 2 years out.

Regards

Can we know for certain? No, we can't.

Looking at the videos and reviews is, however, the most certain we've ever been so far. If you would like everyone on this forum to simply shut up and go home until the game is released, then say so. Otherwise, commenting on the information we have is... kind of what people on forums about upcoming games do?

 

[Bernard Black]

If you would like everyone on this forum to simply shut up and go home until the game is released, then say so. Otherwise, commenting on the information we have is... kind of what people on forums about upcoming games do?

I think i have been far to wordy on these forums already, that it should be obvious that i don't want that. I don't know why you bring up this false dichotomy. I think there is plenty of room between shutting up and making calls on unfinished features seen in gameplayfootage.

Yes commenting on information that is available is what people do on these forums, which makes it always a bit bordering on futility. However i put it to you, that there are things that are more ore less worthwhile to comment on and there is also the way in which things are discussed. In general things that are visually represented on the screen are easier assessed than things that work in the background. And the workings of the Battleplanner are mostly in code. You can still say alot about the Battleplanner idea and (i certainly have): Where its grounded in reality, what its supposed to do, how it could do that, what it needs to be balanced around and all the design things that come with that.

What is not a fruitful course of conversation is saying: " I am not for or against it, i want to know how it works" because that is putting the second step before the first. You need to decide for yourself if you agree with the design goal. If you do we have to wait until its done to see if it works. If you dont, then it shouldn't matter to you if it works, because you don't want it anyway.

I read a post from podcat where he bascily said, that they haven't come around to code the more advanced stuff they want in the battleplanner yet, so how can we make a judgement on that?

Its like telling a child that said it wants to be an author that it can never be that because you haven't seen a book from it.

Regards

 

[zach6844]

I still don't understand why people continue to argue about a feature that clearly isn't fully finished/hasn't even had a DD yet.

 

[Modestus]

I still don't understand why people continue to argue about a feature that clearly isn't fully finished/hasn't even had a DD yet.

Interest?

 

[Theodorian]

I still don't understand why people continue to argue about a feature that clearly isn't fully finished/hasn't even had a DD yet.

This pretty much sums it up, I think.

 

[Jakalak]

I think i have been far to wordy on these forums already, that it should be obvious that i don't want that. I don't know why you bring up this false dichotomy. I think there is plenty of room between shutting up and making calls on unfinished features seen in gameplayfootage.

Is there? Do you know, for sure, which features are no longer subject to change, and therefore we're allowed to 'make calls on'?

A pamphlet distributed to the community would be helpful.

Yes commenting on information that is available is what people do on these forums, which makes it always a bit bordering on futility. However i put it to you, that there are things that are more ore less worthwhile to comment on and there is also the way in which things are discussed.

I agree with your first statement, but I think the second statement is contradictory. Very little, if anything at all, that we say here will matter, in the long run. From that point of view, what does it matter what we comment on?

What is not a fruitful course of conversation is saying: " I am not for or against it, i want to know how it works" because that is putting the second step before the first. You need to decide for yourself if you agree with the design goal. If you do we have to wait until its done to see if it works. If you dont, then it shouldn't matter to you if it works, because you don't want it anyway.

I read a post from podcat where he bascily said, that they haven't come around to code the more advanced stuff they want in the battleplanner yet, so how can we make a judgement on that

I think there's a misunderstanding here.

I think that the general feeling is that no one here is, in theory, opposed to a battle plan system. What people are opposed to is the removal of systems that, arguably, make manual control easier (OOB's, etc), in addition to heavily incentivizing the use of the battle plan as opposed to manual control, to the point where whether or not manual control is actually a viable option is in question.

In that sense, the battle plan system can be improved as much as the devs can, but if the spirit (at least that I see) against manual control continues, people will still be upset.

I still don't understand why people continue to argue about a feature that clearly isn't fully finished/hasn't even had a DD yet.

even assuming what we post here has much of an impact, what are the chances of a finished, complete feature that has had a lot of time and effort put into it (rapidly... kind of) approaching a deadline getting altered or scrapped, against the chances of a feature that has not been fully fleshed out but (at least many of us) feel that we can understand the guiding spirit behind getting altered or scrapped?

That sentence is really poorly put together, hopefully it's intelligible. I think it's just that many of us feel that we're rapidly running out of time to actually voice concerns/etc, regardless of whether or not we feel these concerns will influence much.

--

I'm sorry, I'm being a little snarky.

I guess it's just impatience and frustration, hah.

 

[zach6844]

What i mean is, just a large amount of complaining. They have plenty of time to make things clear. Just the continual complaining without all the info is annoying. It really isn't just "interest" in a lot of the comments that I've seen. a large amount of it is mindless info-less bashing in a fair amount of the forum . Makes it less fun to even look at this forum.

Note: Not really talking about this thread, per say, just a majority of threads that even talk about the battle plans. It just morphs and turns really ugly, if you know what i mean.

 

[Bernard Black]

Is there? Do you know, for sure, which features are no longer subject to change, and therefore we're allowed to 'make calls on'?

A pamphlet distributed to the community would be helpful.

I'm sorry, I'm being a little snarky.

Yea i was about to say some day they will introduce a Tax on snarky comments then you have to keep your wallet close to your chest.

I agree with your first statement, but I think the second statement is contradictory. Very little, if anything at all, that we say here will matter, in the long run. From that point of view, what does it matter what we comment on?

It is only contradictory if you see it as a binary choice. I think there are varying degrees of usefulness (in the meaning of useful and meaningful for us, not that is has much impact on the devs). As i said its a lot about the how and what gets discussed and i think zach6488 put it very well: A lot of times its not just innocent "interest" that drives these comments. He said it well, i tend to get too wordy.

I think there's a misunderstanding here.

I think that the general feeling is that no one here is, in theory, opposed to a battle plan system. What people are opposed to is the removal of systems that, arguably, make manual control easier (OOB's, etc), in addition to heavily incentivizing the use of the battle plan as opposed to manual control, to the point where whether or not manual control is actually a viable option is in question.

In that sense, the battle plan system can be improved as much as the devs can, but if the spirit (at least that I see) against manual control continues, people will still be upset.

Actually no, i dont think we misunderstand, your answer fits perfectly to what you quoted from me. I appreciate that are clear in what your problem is, that makes is a lot easier and worthwile to address.

One overall design goal was to reduce the micromanagement, if i remember correctly its stated in the first DevDiary. The battle Planner is one tool to achieve that (i dont know if they have others with that particular goal in mind) and there will be necessarily repercussions to the way the game will be played. If you could just ignore it and play like HoI3 it would be a bad design. You disagree with the design goal and therefore, as you stated, remain to be upset and there is very little that can comfort you, i am afraid.

My impression is that, proper implementation assumed, you will always want to use the battle Planner for you operations and will intervene manually at certain points. If thats not your style than you are at odds with the vision the devs have for their game and the battle planner is merely a proxy for your dissappointment and there is little to be done about that.

That sentence is really poorly put together, hopefully it's intelligible. I think it's just that many of us feel that we're rapidly running out of time to actually voice concerns/etc, regardless of whether or not we feel these concerns will influence much.

I managed to understand it, but i had to read it twice . The same i wrote above applies here i think. You have to keep in mind what the devs want to achieve with the game when commenting. If the suggestions go against the design goals, they won't have much impact, no matter how desperatly you voice them. If on the other hand you suggest something that is in accordance with the design goal it is much more likely to be picked up.

But don't be too worried. Paradox have massively overhauled features in EU4 and CK2 well after launch, if they felt they had something better or could improve it. That gives me confidence that they will improve and develop the game after launch, provided it remains popular like the other 2 main titles

Regards