Does HOI4 still have corps,army,army group ?

[Karlburg]

WW2 Grand strategy wargame with no Corp, Army, Armygroup and theatre HQ... da Funk!?
I agree, that HOI3 was for "normal person" a big mess, but just cut out very important part from the game... hmy:

5 km high Toy soldiers, no Counters, no OOB... "Select all units and conquer Europe!" Let the fun begin! :blink:

And we havent seen any Devs comments on this.

There are good hex and counter grand strategy wargames without HQs, they're not necessary for a good game.

 

[Vlad_Constantin]

I doubt that, if we will not have Divisions why design a Division designer?

Because the division still exists in the game, and will work like brigades in HOI III.

 

[Beagá]

There are good hex and counter grand strategy wargames without HQs, they're not necessary for a good game.

No, but they aid GREATLY in organizing fronts and AI behavior in a game like this.

 

[Jazumir]

I honestly dont think, i´d be able to quote one post, or name one forumite, who´d say that the OOB-system of III should have made it to IV 1:1, as is. It was a prime example of a lot of complexity buying little depth. But i dont think that is an inherent property of any OOB-system and i do think, that one could be devised, that adds a lot of depth (apart from its mere organizational/immersional purposes) for just a little extra-complexity.

To get rid of divisional leaders was definetaly a step in the direction of killing complexity that added close to zero depth (simply because of the sheer numbers of commanders to assign). With that, half of the horrendous start-game tedium is out.

There´s so many things that could have been done with the OOB-system, i could fill pages upon pages with it (and probably did over the course of the past few years, here on this forum). It could (and imho should) be one of the central pillars of the entire game. The conveyed boni of III arent even the tip of the iceberg here really, for an iceberg has to have a tip - while the OOB-system could do without such boni. HQs could:
- store and distribute supplies and fuel to subordinates
- hold support brigades that can get called upon by subordinated divs in battle (corps only)
- have air support (and cover) attached to them, so that you dont have to order your airforce around but it instead support the ground troops under the same HQ automatically.
- influence (if not wholly define) doctrinal research, with its commanders

That´s four meaningful functions, aside from organizing your forces and immersion, from a III-player´s perspective, HQs could have (had).

 

[vonhavoc]

I honestly dont think, i´d be able to quote one post, or name one forumite, who´d say that the OOB-system of III should have made it to IV 1:1, as is. It was a prime example of a lot of complexity buying little depth. But i dont think that is an inherent property of any OOB-system and i do think, that one could be devised, that adds a lot of depth (apart from its mere organizational/immersional purposes) for just a little extra-complexity.

To get rid of divisional leaders was definetaly a step in the direction of killing complexity that added close to zero depth (simply because of the sheer numbers of commanders to assign). With that, half of the horrendous start-game tedium is out.

There´s so many things that could have been done with the OOB-system, i could fill pages upon pages with it (and probably did over the course of the past few years, here on this forum). It could (and imho should) be one of the central pillars of the entire game. The conveyed boni of III arent even the tip of the iceberg here really, for an iceberg has to have a tip - while the OOB-system could do without such boni. HQs could:
- store and distribute supplies and fuel to subordinates
- hold support brigades that can get called upon by subordinated divs in battle (corps only)
- have air support (and cover) attached to them, so that you dont have to order your airforce around but it instead support the ground troops under the same HQ automatically.
- influence (if not wholly define) doctrinal research, with its commanders

That´s four meaningful functions, aside from organizing your forces and immersion, from a III-player´s perspective, HQs could have (had).

So. Much. This.

 

[fabius]

I honestly dont think, i´d be able to quote one post, or name one forumite, who´d say that the OOB-system of III should have made it to IV 1:1, as is. It was a prime example of a lot of complexity buying little depth. But i dont think that is an inherent property of any OOB-system and i do think, that one could be devised, that adds a lot of depth (apart from its mere organizational/immersional purposes) for just a little extra-complexity.

To get rid of divisional leaders was definetaly a step in the direction of killing complexity that added close to zero depth (simply because of the sheer numbers of commanders to assign). With that, half of the horrendous start-game tedium is out.

There´s so many things that could have been done with the OOB-system, i could fill pages upon pages with it (and probably did over the course of the past few years, here on this forum). It could (and imho should) be one of the central pillars of the entire game. The conveyed boni of III arent even the tip of the iceberg here really, for an iceberg has to have a tip - while the OOB-system could do without such boni. HQs could:
- store and distribute supplies and fuel to subordinates
- hold support brigades that can get called upon by subordinated divs in battle (corps only)
- have air support (and cover) attached to them, so that you dont have to order your airforce around but it instead support the ground troops under the same HQ automatically.
- influence (if not wholly define) doctrinal research, with its commanders

That´s four meaningful functions, aside from organizing your forces and immersion, from a III-player´s perspective, HQs could have (had).

Yes, if they could find a way to do it without the micro

 

[fabius]

The necessity for some kind of oob is somewhat analogous to how divisions and their components are handled. You create a division recipe of certain components (artillery regiment, infantry regiment, engineer regiment etc.), and you want this product to be consistent and always easily accessible. You don't want the engineer regiments of a division to accidentally end up 300 km from the rest of the division, but always work with the other parts. Moreover you want to be able to not only have the regiments persistently grouped, but the divisions themselves as well.

Imagine a battle plan involving 9 divisions of 4 regiments each, where the regiments were the smallest unit and not persistently locked to their divisions. You have grouped the divisions into three groups of three, and want to assign one division to a battle plan vector. To do this you have to manually sort the twelve regiments inside one of these three division groups for even such a simple task as assigning one division to a vector. Assigning three divisions to a vector would be easy here, but anything else would include unnecessary micromanagement. Luckily this is not the case, and instead you can easily select all regiments of a division at once (as they are in fact one solid unit), as well as easily assign two or three divisions without having to worry about your recipe.

Now scale this up and you have the current situation. For a large battle plan you would want a persistent effective unit larger than a division, tailored according to a recipe of yours (e.g. corps-sized units, perhaps 2x Inf, 1x Inf-eng, 1x Int-AT) to easily allocate onto your battle plan vectors during an operation - analogous to the one division in the above hypothetical. This without having to constantly sort and mess around with the individual divisions in a large group of loose divisions, and effectively having to re-create and organize your great recipes all the time.

Without some kind of oob you can't efficiently create custom groups to act as the effective unit depending on operation size. You can't have three groups of three perfectly tailored corps, where you can easily allocate either one, two, three, six or nine of those corps recipes to a vector then when the plan change or the vector splits, allocate either one, two, three, six of those perfect corps to other orders. Doing so would include a lot of sorting and digging around of loose piles of divisions to get the right recipes back. Furthermore you can't have these three groups of three corps bundled up in one yet larger group, and have several of those, at dedicated parts of a front to make sure you know what type of corps recipe you have where for effective planning and overview of large operations.

The brigades to division analogy is a good one.

The thing is guys at this point in development nothing new is going to get added for release version.

That said:

1. As somebody said- getting rid of Div commander already cuts a huge chunk od micro, possibly over 50%
2. Corps, Army and Amry Group HQs could have a lot of gameplay function.
3. They already do templtes for divsions to manage too many brigades.

so
4. Why not have templates for Corps.

The player makes or choses the template and the build AI assigns new divisions to the available slot in the Corps template.

The player can also mark divisions to be independent. And they auto-attach themselves to Corps HQ based on proximity on the map.

 

[Jazumir]

#xpost
Actually, a good OOB-system would, as its realistic counterpart, reduce micro. It´s its central purpose to do just that.

- the supply system riding on the OOB´s back could be entirely automatic and only open a way for players to influence the routes taken - which is sort of less micro than figuring out a way of doing this, when the need arises, with ´freeflowing´ supplies/fuel.

- once a support brigade would be attached to a corps-HQ, the HQs takes over its deployment within the Corps - less micro, than doing it manually from case to case (by, say, having an arti-div - 1xinf, 3-4art, and shuffling it around)

- i cannot even count the times i wished for this simple and elegant way to automate my ground based airforces - so much less micro! I mean do i really have to tell my StuKas not to bomb over at 4th army´s front or just sit idle, when the third army, they are attached to, is being pushed hard? Why is this fighter Squad sitting on their asses, when their corps is being bombed? What? I really have to tell them to sortie? And when the Corps moves, i have to find a new base for it, too, and actually make sure it comes along? Well, that´s what i call micro.

- Okay, this one does actually add ´micro´, but only because it would be a whole new feature - hence ´micro´ is a bit of a misnomer, in my book, here.

 

[Modestus]

There are very good reasons to have some means to group divisions into smaller groupings, it facilitates the movement of specific groupings such as a PZ Corps to where you want them but it should also make the process of creating a battle plan much easier.

I would point out though that as it stands (unless there is a limit) it would appear that the player could if they wished create any amount of armies, for example in the demonstration video there appears to be no reason why the player could not create 10 armies with 10 generals.

Of course there is a limited amount of space on the screen for the portraits of Generals and also the fact that armies are colour coded including the attack vectors could mean that the intention is not to have a large amount of armies.

 

[Kesselschlacht]

- the supply system riding on the OOB´s back could be entirely automatic and only open a way for players to influence the routes taken - which is sort of less micro than figuring out a way of doing this, when the need arises, with ´freeflowing´ supplies/fuel.

This is actually something that worries me a lot about the lack of OOB in HOI4; what it implies about the supply system. Could it be that rather than fixing the problems in HOI3, like the hours of HR moving generals around or the unpredictability of the supply system, they've just cut OOB and supply altogether?

We'll just have to wait for the relevant DDs.

 

[vonhavoc]

This is actually something that worries me a lot about the lack of OOB in HOI4; what it implies about the supply system. Could it be that rather than fixing the problems in HOI3, like the hours of HR moving generals around or the unpredictability of the supply system, they've just cut OOB and supply altogether?

We'll just have to wait for the relevant DDs.

Supply system DD was at least hinted a bit by Podcat. Maybe it'll even be the next one.

I just sincerely wish they would reverse this scrapping of CoC/OOB. It's like fighting a war with huge independent kampfgruppes the way Paradox has shown it.

I don't like it, and I'm really worried there will not be enough flexibility in the system for the modders to implement CoC with some sort of HQ system and maybe even general staff.

 

[FOARP]

I feel a good way to implement HQs would be to simply have them provide a bonus to any units within their range, period. Same effect, just less tedious micro-management.

Sounds like you would still have the same positioning/keeping them out of trouble micro though.

[edit - xpost]

Ach - they just lacked function, that´s all. They could have acted as supply hubs, could have held automatically dolled out (to closeby subordinate divs in battle) reserve brigades, have air units attached to them automatically support their ground units, etc. I hated divisional commanders and am glad they will be gone, but the HQs were something i hoped to see improved, not cut. To me, it´s like they had cut culture going from civ3 to civ4.

Pretty much. If they had kept army/theatre HQ but made them supply dumps that you wouldn't have to move too often, that could have been something worth having in-game.

The necessity for some kind of oob is somewhat analogous to how divisions and their components are handled. You create a division recipe of certain components (artillery regiment, infantry regiment, engineer regiment etc.), and you want this product to be consistent and always easily accessible. You don't want the engineer regiments of a division to accidentally end up 300 km from the rest of the division, but always work with the other parts. Moreover you want to be able to not only have the regiments persistently grouped, but the divisions themselves as well.

Imagine a battle plan involving 9 divisions of 4 regiments each, where the regiments were the smallest unit and not persistently locked to their divisions. You have grouped the divisions into three groups of three, and want to assign one division to a battle plan vector. To do this you have to manually sort the twelve regiments inside one of these three division groups for even such a simple task as assigning one division to a vector. Assigning three divisions to a vector would be easy here, but anything else would include unnecessary micromanagement. Luckily this is not the case, and instead you can easily select all regiments of a division at once (as they are in fact one solid unit), as well as easily assign two or three divisions without having to worry about your recipe.

Now scale this up and you have the current situation. For a large battle plan you would want a persistent effective unit larger than a division, tailored according to a recipe of yours (e.g. corps-sized units, perhaps 2x Inf, 1x Inf-eng, 1x Int-AT) to easily allocate onto your battle plan vectors during an operation - analogous to the one division in the above hypothetical. This without having to constantly sort and mess around with the individual divisions in a large group of loose divisions, and effectively having to re-create and organize your great recipes all the time.

Without some kind of oob you can't efficiently create custom groups to act as the effective unit depending on operation size. You can't have three groups of three perfectly tailored corps, where you can easily allocate either one, two, three, six or nine of those corps recipes to a vector then when the plan change or the vector splits, allocate either one, two, three, six of those perfect corps to other orders. Doing so would include a lot of sorting and digging around of loose piles of divisions to get the right recipes back. Furthermore you can't have these three groups of three corps bundled up in one yet larger group, and have several of those, at dedicated parts of a front to make sure you know what type of corps recipe you have where for effective planning and overview of large operations.

You played HOI2, right? Why does the OOB need to be any more complicated than that?

 

[fabius]

Sounds like you would still have the same positioning/keeping them out of trouble micro though.

I would not categorise having army HQs for areas and Corps HQs as micro.

Manually attaching un-attaching and reattaching was pain in ass mirco.

Anyway, presuming most will now use the plan and let the AI move to the plans as that's going to be incentivised- the AI would position HQs.

If not, well then the player will be moving divisions manually anyway.

 

[lizardo]

What they did in HoI3 would have been wonderful if it had been implemented competently. But the tradition of the 'automate' button being in reality the 'Kevorkian' switch has been duly preserved.

The game desperately needs automation that is helpful to the player so he isn't bogged down in constantly directing every unit, or rescuing runaway autonomous ones.

The automated armies didn't even follow their own rules for staying near their own HQs, and they were shut off from player intervention.

This is what kills the concept.

Don't throw it away, make it work. And for naval and air structures too.

I hated how the automation would ruin my fleet structures and get them decimated.

The other thing that needs a hybrid of automation is army recruitment. Let the player design what an army, or smaller division, looks like and allow production to automatically fill it with the required units.

 

[Joppos]

You played HOI2, right? Why does the OOB need to be any more complicated than that?

Because in hoi4, just like in hoi3, divisions are forcibly individual units on map. This is a good thing for various reasons, but does very much warrant optional oob mechanics.

In hoi2, you could make those effective units i am talking about by turning a group of divisions into one solid larger unit. These stacks could then themselves be grouped up, just like i discussed.

 

[FOARP]

This is what kills the concept.

Don't throw it away, make it work. And for naval and air structures too.

I hated how the automation would ruin my fleet structures and get them decimated.

Auto-control was always going to be an un-workable concept, and in reality was just a poorly-applied band-aid for HOI3's runaway micro-management. Better to get rid of the micro-management and bring the game back under the player's control.

 

[Stenner]

I DO NOT GET, what the big deal is with this OOB fascination.

Even if there isn't an OOB?

Did you see how easy they can select the different units?
Zoom-out, boom, here's all your army. Click the one you want, done.

Yet there are people that elaborate on how an OOB is central.

Tops.. TOPS, you're going to have.. What. 6 different land units to go through? Maybe a little more?

We build divisions with the division templates and they all match that template now, it's not like it was where you can throw x many mixed divisions together and their location on the map matters.

So, what.. Infantry, Marine, Mt, Heavy Tank, Med tank, light tank, I'm missing a few inf types, and then of course you can have variants of those types, which would have different names (unless you're a fool and you don't give them different names for the template).

So you zoom out, select all your light tanks, tell them what to do, zoom out, all your marines, etc. The total number of clicks to do things seems to have gone waaay down, and I'm waaaay for it.

Edit: Also? There is still that grouping thing for plans, one assumes that they could be grouped even without plans. Want patton's army, give patton his allotment of trooms, same with Rommel. You just can't call it the Afrika Corp. Which I'll admit, is a little sad.

 

[Jazumir]

Yeah, why have drawers? Piles are fine! You still can find stuff in them! And you dont have to spend time sorting s***.

 

[Jazumir]

This is actually something that worries me a lot about the lack of OOB in HOI4; what it implies about the supply system. Could it be that rather than fixing the problems in HOI3, like the hours of HR moving generals around or the unpredictability of the supply system, they've just cut OOB and supply altogether?

We'll just have to wait for the relevant DDs.

I think we´ll simply get a supply limit based on infra, with a cap being passed down the chain (based on region, not province, probably), meaning you cant supply more in the next region out than you can in this one, no matter what infra the former has.

 

[Chaffers]

"I DO NOT GET, what the big deal is with this OOB fascination."

Because they mattered a great deal in the war itself!? Because at least 25% of the forces deployed were rear echelon units? Because the different doctrines are utterly pointless without the mirroring command structures and logistics which underpinned them? Because the German strength at divisional and Corps level was utterly beaten by the Soviet's focus at Army Group or operational level? Because without them the concepts of intel, logistics, communications, and efficiency wouldn't make sense? Because there are thousands of games where you can just group your archers under hotkey 3 and control them that way? Because without them you might as well just turn the clocks back a few hundred years and have militia armies.

"We build divisions with the division templates and they all match that template now, it's not like it was where you can throw x many mixed divisions together and their location on the map matters."

Location on the map always matters. Say my template was for very light foot infantry with no artillery support. They are sitting in front of a river with fortifications on the other side. You want them to attack then you know you'll need heavy artillery, which is what the Corps level could provide. What you describe ( select all your tanks etc) is RTS not strategy.