The goal is to make the player inteligence the less valuable as possible and to tip the AI of your movments (...) Also doing a battle plan introduces latency so latter the picture might be different therefore not an optimal plan/move anymore and you can't rearrange divisions on the fly for an oportunistic job anymore; these are all nerfs to the player and clutches for the AI to appear to be better when in fact it still has the intelligence of a ~rock. I am sure there are more implications and variables but you get the idea.
You know that's just made-up, right? There is no evidence that the battle plan you create for your country would be automatically available to the AI enemy. If that was going to the case, then there would be uproar about "cheating" AI.
My understanding is that there is a chance that Intel can discover a plan, and that would apply both ways. You should be able to discover the AI's plans.
Of course there is latency. Like real life. It was one of the "immersion" aspects which HOI2 and 3 (and therefore probably HOI1, though I never played it) got completely wrong - that without any pre-planning, you could pause and give orders to all your units to start advancing immediately, and within an hour they would be in combat with the enemy, because movement is attack, and units are deemed to always face each other directly over the province borders.
Nevertheless, the devs were clear that if you want, then you can still do it that way. For some Divs or all of them. If you want to micro all of your forces, then you can. But they said that there will be a bonus if you have a battle plan. We don't know how that will work, but it seems reasonable that it will be linked to logistics. If you have a battle plan, then the Divs covered by the plan get to draw extra supplies to sustain them through a major offensive, and to be able to carry out a preparation artillery barrage for instance (that gives you a bonus in the first day of an offensive for instance). And the longer you create the battle plan before you launch the attack, the more supplies can be drawn. But there should be a limit - where after a certain amount of time, you can't draw more supplies or you can't get much of a bonus from them.
So if you pause the game, then give dozens of Divs orders to attack immediately then they should have only minimal supplies, and should not be able to sustain a long offensive. The sort of effect in HOI3 where following combat you can't attack again for several days, but make this directly an effect related to logistics, rather than the artificial way it was in HOI3. This could be done by making an attacking unit use 5 - 10 times the normal daily supply use. In that sense there is not direct penalty to the people who don't want to use a battle plan, and small scale attacks can still be effective with no pre-planning.
For a Panzer Corps with a battle plan located behind the lines, a couple of weeks of game time for example might give them enough supplies to allow them to sustain an attack three provinces deep, before they start to run short of supplies, and the attack takes place with minimal or no attack delays between each province.
My suggestion that El Alamein was broke down into just a battle between two personalities - Rommel and Monty, like EU or CK. Sorry, but it is the reality of a province based system, if the whole of the Commonwealth forces are located in a single province. Only one man can be the leader who is commanding the battle. And in HOI3 that would have been one of the Div commanders on the front line - ridiculous! Now Monty and Rommel's own stats affect the outcome of the battle by not having Div and Corps commanders. But they are not the only thing, so even in this situation there is strategy. You can do what Montgomery did IRL, and postpone his attack for months while supplies were built up, new equipment/tanks were brought in, and attrition and two unsuccessful attacks by Rommel had weakened Rommel's forces. With Monty knowing that Rommel couldn't replace his losses of men, equipment and supplies.
Someone (lmao) suggested that Rommel was a great commander but the UK was "cheating" by listening into his messages with the General Staff, so they knew his supply situation. Hopefully, the game also covers this situation - that Rommel has his offensive battle plans in his first two attacks, which would be visible to a UK player, and then his defensive plan in the final stages. And the Intel should show how bad his supply situation is, with an estimate that he would be unable to hold a defensive line more than a week.
