Command, shouldn't be: "the short-term command each division's battle plan"

[尾张猫]

If "can make a division of short action" battle plan, then with hoi3 no distinction, should put an end to such a situation.

If the HOI4, players can still through the battle plan, command each division for action. That makes no sense.

（I can't speak English）

 

[Sloeberjong]

No offence, but I have no clue what you're trying to say. Something about commanding divisions during a battle plan that makes no sense? I guess Google translate didn't get the message across. What is your native language? Maybe someone here can help out that way...

 

[fredgiblet]

I think I know what he's talking about.

In HoI4 you can order specific units to break from AI controlled battle plans and accomplish some other goal, on completing that they will return to AI control and resume following the plan.

 

[Sun_Killer]

i really like this feature. This was a big problem in hoi3 i had do detach my units if i wanted to give extra commands or initiate a attack where AI thought there is no reason for attack.

 

[fredgiblet]

Agree 100%. Especially with HoI3's horrendous AI. SO MANY TIMES I've watched a unit sit there with a clear province in front of it and not advance, even if the province was VP, or the last province in an encirclement.

 

[Krakow]

I think I know what he's talking about.

In HoI4 you can order specific units to break from AI controlled battle plans and accomplish some other goal, on completing that they will return to AI control and resume following the plan.

And he is against the idea,believing that it goes the same way as in Hoi3.
(BTW I believe this to be Chinglish)

 

[Modestus]

There was always going to be a problem with Battle Plans because to have value not only must they offer the player a reward (Planning bonus) they must also reward the player if they spend more time creating them.


The bonus should have been applied depending on the level of detail you invested in your Plan and not just on the time that you wait.


For this to work you need a hierarchical command structure that the game can recognise so if you assign all of your Divisions to OKH and draw a single Offensive Front line then your Bonus would be less then if you had assigned 3 Front lines to 3 Army Groups and only if the player invested time creating instructions for each Corps should they gain the maximum bonus.


Of course no matter how detailed or sophisticated a plan the chances are that you will need to intervene but you should only lose the bonus at the level of the command structure at which you intervene, so if you manually change the instructions for a PZ Division only that PZ Division will lose the bonus, if you change the instructions for a whole Army the whole Army loses the bonus.


Logically this should mean that the more time you spend creating detailed plans for a structured army the greater the bonus and the less likely you will want to manually intervene.


What we have now is a bonus that is gained simply because you wait and a bonus that cannot be lost if you manually intervene, complete nonsense.

Edit: In case people misunderstand I would like to see a more sophisticated Battle Plan mechanic that rewards time spent making a plan and not some animation of a soldier scratching his arse as he waits for an undeserved bonus to miraculously increase.

 

[fredgiblet]

I can see what you're saying, but I don't think it's necessarily a good simulation of reality. In reality the plans may very well include things down to that level of detail, however they will also be constantly adjusted on the fly, meaning that in game putting plans that detailed would almost immediately result in the need for departures of SOME kind that in the real world would have little to no impact on the overall plan.

Additionally taking a single division and sending it 1-2 provinces over but still on the same axis of advance would put it drastically outside the planned supply lines or air cover areas, having it return to the regular advance afterwards would almost totally eliminate what disadvantages occurred.

 

[尾张猫]

And he is against the idea,believing that it goes the same way as in Hoi3.
(BTW I believe this to be Chinglish)

yeah ！！！ yeah ！！ yeah ！！

 

[CrasherZZ]

yeah ！！！ yeah ！！ yeah ！！

Funny thing, I was just reading the DD about the Battle Plans, and the same thought occured to me too. You can go ahead and micro move a division that's in the the battle plan without losing the battle plan bonus, and then it returns to Battle Plan control. Since I haven't had time to watch the WWW videos, I can't imagine how that works and seems to defeat the purpose of the battle plans. I can only guess that if the battle plans are not executed well by the AI, human players will demand the option to micro-move.

I'm wondeing if another purpose of battle plans, together with removing the HOI3 HQs and OOBs, is to try to reduce the disadvantage that the AI has against human players. When using battleplans the AI is not at a disadvantage because the human player is not actually executing all the movements and attacks, the AI is. Removing HQs and OOBs removes a lot of complexity for the AI as well.

 

[fredgiblet]

There's probably going to be a limit on how much micro you can do and still get the planning benefits, if not right away then afterwards if it turns out to be unbalanced.

 

[Modestus]

I can see what you're saying, but I don't think it's necessarily a good simulation of reality. In reality the plans may very well include things down to that level of detail, however they will also be constantly adjusted on the fly, meaning that in game putting plans that detailed would almost immediately result in the need for departures of SOME kind that in the real world would have little to no impact on the overall plan.

Additionally taking a single division and sending it 1-2 provinces over but still on the same axis of advance would put it drastically outside the planned supply lines or air cover areas, having it return to the regular advance afterwards would almost totally eliminate what disadvantages occurred.

If you have 100 Divisions under the command of a single Field Marshal and draw a single offensive Front line for those Divisions the game will consider it to be a Battle Plan and you will start to gradually accumulate a bonus however I would argue that its not really a Plan and that any bonus should be limited to reflect what is clearly a lack of any real Planning.


Lets assume that the above can only allow for a maximum bonus of 10% however if you also had under the command of that Field Marshal 3 Army Groups and each Army Group was assigned its own Front line the maximum bonus should rise to 20% because there is now more Planning and so on down the command structure which each level of command increasing the maximum allowed bonus.


To gain the maximum Planning bonus you would......


1\ Issue instructions for the AI at a Corps level, effectively your micromanaging your Battle Plan.


2\ Have as many levels of command as possible, a PZ Corps directly subordinate to an Army Group would have less of a Bonus then if it was subordinate to a PZ Army\Army Group.



Of course there would be no reason why the player could not issue instructions for the AI at an army level or at an Army Group level, the bonus would be less but perhaps you would gain more freedom to adjust the Plan when its being implemented without losing the smaller bonus.



Of course your right, when faced with the reality on the ground a Plan may need to change but you do not create a Plan with the intention of changing it, the whole point of a good Plan is for it to work.


At present the game play involved when creating a Plan is not great and as the OP pointed out you can take manual control at any time without losing the bonus which effectively means that the Battle Plan system is really only a movement system, a means to tell the AI where you roughly want your Divisions to go, there is no real military Plan.


I recognise that this discussion is academic since we do not have a command structure worth the name but perhaps further down the road Paradox will see ways to improve the system.

 

[potski]

"Some years ago, there was a group in the staff college of which some of you may have heard, Leavenworth Staff College. This was before our entry into World War One, and in that course it was necessary to use a number of maps and the maps available to the course were of the Alsace-Lorraine area and the Champagne in France. But a group of "young Turks" came along who wanted to reform Leavenworth. They pointed out it was perfectly silly for the American Army to be using such maps which could after all be duplicated in other areas without too much cost--they would get some area maps where the American Army just might fight a battle. So they got, among other things, maps of the area of Leavenworth and of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and in succeeding years all the problems have been worked out on those maps. The point is, only about two years after that happened, we were fighting in Alsace-Lorraine and in the Champagne.

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

So, the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven't been planning you can't start to work, intelligently at least.

That is the reason it is so important to plan, to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may one day be called upon to solve--or to help to solve."

Eisenhower 1957

 

[CrasherZZ]

If you have 100 Divisions under the command of a single Field Marshal and draw a single offensive Front line for those Divisions the game will consider it to be a Battle Plan and you will start to gradually accumulate a bonus however I would argue that its not really a Plan and that any bonus should be limited to reflect what is clearly a lack of any real Planning.


Lets assume that the above can only allow for a maximum bonus of 10% however if you also had under the command of that Field Marshal 3 Army Groups and each Army Group was assigned its own Front line the maximum bonus should rise to 20% because there is now more Planning and so on down the command structure which each level of command increasing the maximum allowed bonus.


To gain the maximum Planning bonus you would......


1\ Issue instructions for the AI at a Corps level, effectively your micromanaging your Battle Plan.


2\ Have as many levels of command as possible, a PZ Corps directly subordinate to an Army Group would have less of a Bonus then if it was subordinate to a PZ Army\Army Group.



Of course there would be no reason why the player could not issue instructions for the AI at an army level or at an Army Group level, the bonus would be less but perhaps you would gain more freedom to adjust the Plan when its being implemented without losing the smaller bonus.



Of course your right, when faced with the reality on the ground a Plan may need to change but you do not create a Plan with the intention of changing it, the whole point of a good Plan is for it to work.


At present the game play involved when creating a Plan is not great and as the OP pointed out you can take manual control at any time without losing the bonus which effectively means that the Battle Plan system is really only a movement system, a means to tell the AI where you roughly want your Divisions to go, there is no real military Plan.


I recognise that this discussion is academic since we do not have a command structure worth the name but perhaps further down the road Paradox will see ways to improve the system.

Your ideas make a lot of sense. The main drawback might be that it increases the advantage of the human player over the AI because as the movement and command & control system gets more complex the less skilled the AI will be at using it. It's s trade off, a more realistic system favors the human player while a simplistic system is better for the AI.

 

[Surimi]

If microing was completely unnecessary or offered no benefit, then people would complain that the game was just an automated slugfest between two competing AIs following predetermined patterns.

Podcat, I feel, explained the design goals of the system quite well. It isn't meant to replace micro, but rather to give players the option of handing off all the useless and boring micro involved in just moving units around over to the AI while still retaining control of any bits they found interesting or wanted to take a direct hand in. Overall, that seems like the best possible balance.

There's nothing to say you can't just leave it all up to the AI, but I don't see a problem in you being punished (relatively speaking) for doing so. That's always going to be the case with AI, because it simply isn't as good at these kinds of tasks as a skilled human.

 

[Modestus]

Your ideas make a lot of sense. The main drawback might be that it increases the advantage of the human player over the AI because as the movement and command & control system gets more complex the less skilled the AI will be at using it. It's s trade off, a more realistic system favors the human player while a simplistic system is better for the AI.

Yes it could favour the player more then the AI but the AI has not much of a chance anyhow especially if the player is a major so I would rather increase the game play for the player then trying to level the playing field with the AI which can only mean your heading in one direction and its not to West Point.

 

[Modestus]

If microing was completely unnecessary or offered no benefit, then people would complain that the game was just an automated slugfest between two competing AIs following predetermined patterns.

Podcat, I feel, explained the design goals of the system quite well. It isn't meant to replace micro, but rather to give players the option of handing off all the useless and boring micro involved in just moving units around over to the AI while still retaining control of any bits they found interesting or wanted to take a direct hand in. Overall, that seems like the best possible balance.

There's nothing to say you can't just leave it all up to the AI, but I don't see a problem in you being punished (relatively speaking) for doing so. That's always going to be the case with AI, because it simply isn't as good at these kinds of tasks as a skilled human.

Battle Plans do appear to be an automated slugfest between two competing AI with the certainty that the Player will need to intervene to give its own AI a clip on the back of the ear.


I think I asked this before from someone else but what do you consider to be the boring bits?


The useless and boring micro involved in just moving units is perhaps the whole point of the game, the favourable positioning of your forces is what allows you to gain victory and is not only crucial for the successful implementation of a Plan but it many cases the foundation of a Plan.

 

[Ostheim]

I don't see anything at all wrong with this feature...in fact I think it's exactly the compromise we needed. One thing I hated about HOI3 was the all-or-nothing approach to AI control, it was a nightmare switching between micro management and AI control.

 

[AddMinus]

If microing was completely unnecessary or offered no benefit, then people would complain that the game was just an automated slugfest between two competing AIs following predetermined patterns.

Podcat, I feel, explained the design goals of the system quite well. It isn't meant to replace micro, but rather to give players the option of handing off all the useless and boring micro involved in just moving units around over to the AI while still retaining control of any bits they found interesting or wanted to take a direct hand in. Overall, that seems like the best possible balance.

There's nothing to say you can't just leave it all up to the AI, but I don't see a problem in you being punished (relatively speaking) for doing so. That's always going to be the case with AI, because it simply isn't as good at these kinds of tasks as a skilled human.

Although this i a good point, I still think it would be better if you lost your planning bonus when you start to micro-manage. After all these divisions are no longer following the battle plan so why should they get the bonus?

For example, I as the human player see a good opportunity for an encirclement, so I break off some divisions from the overall plan for this specific task. I have judged this will give me more benefit than the planning bonus. The rest of the divisons continue with the plan and keep the bonus.

From the look of WWW it seems like I should draw a plan, wait for it to give the maximum bonus, order the attack then just manage my whole army as normal from HOI3.

 

[Ostheim]

Although this i a good point, I still think it would be better if you lost your planning bonus when you start to micro-manage. After all these divisions are no longer following the battle plan so why should they get the bonus?

For example, I as the human player see a good opportunity for an encirclement, so I break off some divisions from the overall plan for this specific task. I have judged this will give me more benefit than the planning bonus. The rest of the divisons continue with the plan and keep the bonus.

From the look of WWW it seems like I should draw a plan, wait for it to give the maximum bonus, order the attack then just manage my whole army as normal from HOI3.

I think some of you guys are misunderstanding what is meant by planning here.

Think for a moment abstractly, it's not as if officers down the chain have a magical battle map that must be followed exactly to benefit...It's a general plan to organize an operation, not an exact blueprint down to the last soldier.

It's preparing an operation in every way--materially and training etc--not just drawing routes on the map. It represents actual supply and combat readiness for given objectives. It would be a nice feature even if there was no AI control involved.

Think Operation Barbarossa...that plan was not followed exactly, but did preparing for that exact plan help the Germans attack? Yes!