Originally posted by bkdull
PBI - Ok, I see where you are coming from. I was going from a "blank slate" approach to the division template, but you are saying that each division type (armored, airborne, marine...) would have its own specific template. Did I miss a post somewhere?
That's more or less what I was saying, yes. Each nation should have pre-existing, ready to build, division templates, for those players that either don't want to, or don't feel ready to, tinker with different divisional structures.
When designing new division templates, though, I think we should be able to select from among the different types, but these would be empty templates that we'd then be able to fill up the battalion slots for. Even these "empty" templates wouldn't truly be empty. What they'd represent would be the HW and support services for that type of diviison. For example, if I was building an airborne division, by default, the div HQ, the div logistics and maintanence, the div signals and medical, the arty, eng, AA, AT, would all be there and would all be equipped and organized as airborne variants. All I'd have to worry about is assigning the 12 line battalion slots. I could use up all 12 or less, if I wanted. I'd also have to take care not to assign battalions to my budding airborne division that would ground it. If I assigned non-parachute or non-glider battalions, or non-airmobile arty, or tanks battalions other than airbone tanks battalions, well, then my "airborne" division wouldn't be making any airborne drops, but it would certainly be one hell of a powerful infantry division, since paratroopers were traditionally the cream of their respective armies.
2Coats, no problem, I'll add my BZ to include the lads that originally came up with the gradual naval reinforcement
The way higher command formations are implemented in HoI always did leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, too. For a while, I, too, was assigning my FMs to single, fast divisions in order to better utilize my commanders. It's got to change, though.
I think CommanderCody has the right idea in that HQs have to be units in their own right, but I don't think higher HQs should have any sort of combat units attached. We should definitely have corps, army, and army group HQs, and they should give a bonus to the divisions under their command, like CommanderCody suggested.
Instead of having HQs possess combat units of their own, why not take the current FM command bonus and tweak it, so that divisions within the influence of their corps HQ receive the benefits, either partially or fully, of the corps commander, and so on up to army group HQ, with a FM at army group HQ providing a fraction of his benefit to the divs in his army group, of course, with an army commander providing a benefit somewhere in between the FM and corps commander?
We could also tie this in with supply, so that supply flows through the HQs rather than through individual units and further that a given HQ can only supply subordinate HQs, in the case of army group and army HQs, or its subordinate divs, in the case of corps HQs. This would encourage maintaining some semblance of real world comand and control structures. There'd have to be a special case to supply independant divisions, of course. Maybe we could say that in your own national territory, divisions draw supply as individual units? That would solve the need to have a corps or army HQ for every colonial garrison, for example, and still give a reason to have logical command structures even inside your own country, as the HQ command benefits would still apply, of course. We might also further modify the supply through HQs rule to allow for islands to be supplied directly, without need of a higher HQ, so that the island hopping campaigns in the Pacific could have a chance of being undertaken.
Along with this, there'd have to be some difficulty in switching divisons and corps and armies around, to represent the rather huge logistic and administrative undertaking such moves require. Perhaps we could allow free subordination when a unit comes out of the production/repair/upgrade queue (but NOT the redeployment queue), but that to transfer units would require either DI expenditure, or result in some other type of effect, such as org loss and/or a temporary movement reduction?
We might also wish to look at changing the command limits for leaders from the current 3/9/12 model. Perhaps a corps HQ could command no more than 6 divisions, an army HQ no more than 4 corps, and an army group HQ no more than 4 armies? Additionally, if a given HQ had a commander below minimum rank (Lt Gen for corps, Gen for army, Field Marshal for army group), then the units subordinate to that HQ would not receive any benefits from that leader's trait or skill and might suffer some sort of combat penalty?
P.S. Just to reinforce what CommanderCody said, production would definitely be by division and not battalion, though I do think it would be nice to have a battalion pool so that, if things were getting desperate, say, and we needed more divisions in a hurry, we could always rip some battalions out of some of those nice, 12-battalion divs and use them to create more divs.
Also, I do like CommanderCody's suggestion on being able to motorize or not motorize the individual battalions of a division. Of course, we'd have to work out just what that would mean in terms of movement and combat stats in a division that has both motorized and non-motorized.
