Do we really need hours ?

[Yaiko]

Why a 4-part day won't work. Assuming you have 1 for each 6 hours period, first being morning, day, evening, and night. Assuming my armies are attacked, or I attack another army and find the battle isn't going so good. Well, lets say the intial meeting of the armies doesn't tell enough about who is winning. Now in the 'day' part of the battle, I find out my forces are horribly losing! Oh noes! So I order my aircraft in. During the evening phase, my force is even worse off, and the aircraft arrive, but despite ordering them into the air during the day, they won't arrive until evening. And of course the evening has to encompass some sort of penalty for being unable to see as well. I just want that. For Naval Aircraft too! Geez, order the planes to do a mission...Hell, a Navy will be sunk in 6 hours.

As for prefering to have the AI's reinforcements mvoe in all at once, sure it might make it a -bit- harder, or easier. What if the enemy is completely defeated by the next 6 hours cycle and such, now a whole fresh army engages your army, without the penalty of actually being part of fighting with the currently beaten units.

I don't feel you can get the intensity of WWII by fluttering away WWII in a few ticks of a clock. Your massive battles that sometimes occur, you'll only get a few rare updates and such.

I do think playability takes priority over the 'airchair general' feeling. In truth, for a better feeling of that. Turn your HoI supper slow and go about your day, occasionally stopping by to give orders. It will, uh, simulate the general sleeping or something.

 

[unmerged(29126)]

I can tell I'm fighting a losing battle here ...

Well if you attack a stack that's bigger than yours or are attacked by one then you made a mistake in assessing the enemy's strength and you'll have to live with it. Your troops should be suffering for it (this is a general "you" not a specific one). If you haven't taken care of CAS beforehand (by giving something like an intercept-order) you should suffer too. Being able to SCRAMBLE your squadrons in an emergency at an hours (even quicker) notice is what Fighter Command did IRL but could well be abstracted in my scenario ... (enemy bombing mission detected: battle ensues: casualties are calculated) (enemy engaging our landforces: start CAS misson)
You mustn't forget that I'm also advocating an adjustment of damage-values.

The Naval-bomber thing ... they are overpowered IMO ... but if a navy has to pass under an uncontested sky they will suffer ... after all that's what the Battle of Britain was all about, also the Bismarck running for (air-)cover. You would actually have to plan ahead (possibly a slight problem for the AI, I'm not saying that what I'm rooting for here has no problems)... with the current system I can redeploy my Tac bombers from France to Russia in 10 hours (suffering 75% org loss) and still bomb the crap out of the Russians :wacko:

The intensity thing ... I somehow agree ... a day-by-day account would be a bit ... errr ... bureaucratic. However, apart from D-Day the Heads of State did not sit at the phone all day waiting for the hourly results to come in ... you set up the pieces launch them at one another at have to live with the results.

The playability thing ... I prefer either (a) grand strategy without the frickly hour-managing thing (I use the word thing a lot cuz I'm tired but can't sleep)
where I ignore most pop-ups or in the chaos forget about entire fronts or (b) the hands-on approach WITH frickly-hourly controls but then I want more options than simply attacking. As I said before: 100% firepower of an entire army group brought to bear in one hour, no wonder with odds of 36:12 battles are over so quickly. What about 1h of softening up the target with arty, what about flanking/probing for one hour ? But there we enter the realm of operational level warfare which is not in the scope of this game (or so I'm told).

Somehow the scaling just doesn't seem right to me. The game developers probably know more of the problems involved than I ever will, and I'm willing to bow to the view of the majority. Just consider this an intellectual exercise.

 

[unmerged(19411)]

There should be a game time option to advance by days, rather than just speeding up the hours.

Would make MP game's, and slow SP games much quicker and will allow you to get to the action quicker.

 

[Earl Uhtred]

There should be a game time option to advance by days, rather than just speeding up the hours.

I think that's beyond the scope of an option. Everything seems to rest on the clock.

 

[vertinox]

I agree. Just think about the detailed planning of Operation Overlord, which was almost planned down to the minute. You should be able to order troops to attack at dawn etc.

The thing that made me scratch my head about HoI1 was the fact that you couldn't really tell your forces to not attack at night with the extra night time penalty unless you had them totally disengage. One would think the attackers would at least tone down the assault at night unless you specifically told the unit to do so or night time fighting became a doctrine of some sort.

 

[unmerged(28147)]

I see the hours as needed, since from hour to hour things can turn around in a battle. If you cut the hours out and replaced them as such the game would become less real time like and more turn based like IMHO.

 

[Claude Luster]

Yes, we need hours. It was an important part of operations of all kind.

A also agree. Go hours!

 

[unmerged(17581)]

Well, the posters on the pro-hour side seem to be arguing that since battles can change dramatically between hours, especially naval and air battles, and since operations were sometimes planned to the minute, that hours should be included. But in my opinion, since HOI2 (or so I'm told) will be a grand-strategy game, the mechanisms that neccessiate (sp?) hours are either more operational/tactical than strategic, as in a division arriving in a 100-mile wide province two hours before an enemy division does, or extremely unrealistic, such as fleets having to be told to retreat from a sea zone even though they have lost half of their ships and the air battle system that is currently implemented in HOI...... Nuff said.

Basically, if the game is differentiating between something as minute as an hour's difference (heh) on a divisional scale, it should not be doing so. Once it is not doing so, hours are no longer neccesary, and a quarter-day system will greatly speed up games, as well as making it more strategic in nature.