Enforcement of attack delays for planned orders in 1.1

[Lordban]

Of course, but with a very long queue of orders, the distance between your faster and slower units keeps spreading, your flanks keep getting more and more open, and your forces get more and more disorganized - a bit the way your divisions used to lose ORG as they advanced, but on a much larger scale.

Sure, you save some time on attack delays that way, and you get opportunities to attack more provinces - in a disorderly and inefficient fashion. Beyond a certain point, you should actively seek a pause in your forces' advance, and only pursue local or opportunistic advances while your armies get reorganized.

If you don't seek that pause, you run the risk of forgetting to cancel orders, and it can lead you into big trouble, as you're already aware. But this is also something we've got to take into account when planning: we are human beings, we can't possibly notice every single detail of what's happening, and certainly not now we are giving 150+ divisions individual orders to advance. Our brains not being capable to follow are also a part of the calculation.

In the end, either we accept we're human, fallible, and try to minimize chances of failure, or we go gamey and keep saving and reloading when bad things happen. The latter seems to be your way of playing - to each his own. But in real life planning there is no save & reload.

You're saying the absence of attack delays for planned orders is unrealistic - but to argue your point, you explain how it raises problems with a completely unrealistic way of planning. I'm sorry, but in warfare you can't min/max delays and advances the way you do in a game. This is one of the reasons plan don't survive contact with the enemy, and this is why you shouldn't argue the interference of attack delays on your gameplay is unrealistic.

 

[unmerged(54182)]

I read a few pages of the thread and agree, i am not 100% sure but if you could set objectives at the corp lvl (not under AI control) say a province behind the lines (in range of say radio range, to prevent unrealistic settings like stalingrad on day one) and the penalty delay is only appied once the objective is attained, would at least give some chance of local encirlements.

However you would need some stiffer penalty for not reaching the objective to prevent misuse, perhaps double delay after one week of fighting to show the higher rate of fatigue incurred in the (supposed) constant fighting and the moral effect of failure if the objectives are not taken.

 

[HelmuthM]

You're saying the absence of attack delays for planned orders is unrealistic - but to argue your point, you explain how it raises problems with a completely unrealistic way of planning. I'm sorry, but in warfare you can't min/max delays and advances the way you do in a game. This is one of the reasons plan don't survive contact with the enemy, and this is why you shouldn't argue the interference of attack delays on your gameplay is unrealistic.

No, those were actually my objections from the gameplay perspective.

This is what is unrealistic with the absence of attack delays:

Guderian's Panzerkorps gets orders to attack from Aachen to Calais.
Time spent when attacks are queued: 10 days
Time spent when each attack is ordered individually: 24 days

In reality, setting faraway attack objectives was not some magic trick which totally cures the division of the disorganization following an attack.

 

[Lordban]

I never said it was, but since we're talking about Guderian, it had been his intention from the start to keep pushing his divisions to the Channel - an objective that's several times closer to his start line than Moscow is from the Curzon Line, by the way, and one which was reasonable as a short-term goal. He was prepared to do so, he had all the supplies he needed to do so, and his subordinates also knew of his intentions. What they didn't know were only the specifics, and those are mostly below the level of detail of Hearts of Iron III.

And Guderian reached the Atlantic in 9 days, counting one day during which he was held up by OKW and almost resigned from his position as XIX Army Corps Commander.

Why should he arbitrarily take 24?

This is, by the way, the reason why I've been interested in the idea of making attacks possible or impossible depending on ORG levels instead of on time increments.

 

[HelmuthM]

Why should he arbitrarily take 24?

In HOI3 there are 7 provinces along the way, so 14 days would be wasted with attack delays if the tech level sets a 48 h delay.

This is, by the way, the reason why I've been interested in the idea of making attacks possible or impossible depending on ORG levels instead of on time increments.

I agree with that idea.

 

[Lordban]

In HOI3 there are 7 provinces along the way, so 14 days would be wasted with attack delays if the tech level sets a 48 h delay.

The question was about the existence of the attack delays making it take 24 days being relevant, I had not broken down that number into specifics


In practice it does depend on the presence of more enemies on the way. You can also save time by "leap-frogging" divisions or changing direction to pass through adjacent empty provinces (I'm assuming the forces employed have higher mobility than those they need to bypass). That solution is, of course, not what happened in the French campaign.

 

[Moogel]

I researched that tech until next one was 1944. This was before my invasion of poland. I dont have any problem with the attack delay, usually i punch through with my infantry and then my panzer flow behind enemy lines. And as the delay starts from the start of the attack, not the victory, its run of time when the battle is done so i can launch a new attack right after.

I say keep it. It help to create more difference between countries and with good planning(not shift-clicking) you can advance as fast your tanks roll.

 

[unmerged(129995)]

That's why I usually in HOI2, I prepared attack orders from the border all the way to Moscow and Leningrad although I had to cancel those orders later for the great majority of the armies.

You know what that reminds me of? All the massive timetables that Grand Battle Plan is known for. Hell, there was even a subtech for a Grand Battle Plan tech in HOI2 called 'War by Timetable mentality'. We all know how well that worked out.

 

[supra807]

This is, by the way, the reason why I've been interested in the idea of making attacks possible or impossible depending on ORG levels instead of on time increments.

Fully second you.And this is a more "near real life way" of handling the problem

 

[unmerged(113253)]

Fully second you.And this is a more "near real life way" of handling the problem

I wouldn't make them impossible. There were plenty of times German divisions were order to attack when shot up and disorganized. If combat values scaled with org in some fashion (either by lowering the effective strength and defense/toughness or something else) the player would have plenty of incentive to not attack with a band of stragglers.

 

[unmerged(146225)]

Was this combat delay the reason for Dunkirk evacuation and german stop order?
Rommel and Guderian waiting with perfect org troops doing nothing...

 

[Tharkun]

No, Dunkirk was a result of orders given by the High Command, which in the game is...you.

 

[Tharkun]

An amalgamation of my posts from other threads on this serious matter:

"Based on historic facts, I would think that the need to change cannot be argued. A simple comparison between the time need for a panzer force to get from point A to B and what you can do in the game in similar circumstances is enough. Take for instance, the dash to the channel coast I mentioned before or Manstein's drive to the river Dvina or Guderian's advance from Brest-Litovsk to Minsk in 5 days and from the Dniepr to Smolensk in 4 days.

All of these advancing spearheads encountered forces on their path varying from mere retreating companies to full divisions. The decision to halt and regain org was not made until after the Battle in Ukraine was over. Naturally, as the operation progressed the spearheads lost org, having to traverse difficult terrain and most importantly having to fight enemy formations. It reached a point when the spearhead could not effectively fight anymore without a rest. In game terms, their org was so low that the player decided to give the halt order.

All in all, I believe that the 6 day attack delay imposed on the player by the system is unrealistic, at least for Germany and late war Allies. Now, France, sure, they didn't even have the doctrine or mentality to effectively build a tank arm, let alone use it to blitz enemy defenses. Yes, for the French a 6 day delay is realistic, because their timetables were those of WWI."

"he only restriction I see as viable is the attack delay when you have not pre-planned an operation (shift+click). An order takes time to travel through the command hierarchy, but when you set oerder for an entire operation, there shouldn't be a delay, since lower units already have their orders. If the high command decides to issue new orders, then that should be because of operational concerns (the need to regain org n this instance) and not because of a pre-set delay."

"The point is that all these things are operational matters. And HoI3 is not only a grand strategy game, it has moved to the operational level, because of the small provinces and the smallest units being the division. If you want to play grand strategy only, you just give orders to the theater or the army group HQ. But if you want to give orders to the army or corps HQ (as I do) then the game becomes operational in nature. It's in this level that this attack delay becomes highly unrealistic."

"Whether or not Blitzkrieg as a term describes an operational doctrine is not the point. The point is exploitation of success, a term known to generals since the classical times. The aim has not changed since then, except in WWI. The reason was that the breakthrough could not be exploited faster than the defender could plug the gap. The appearance of the tank did not amend this on its own. It was the creation of the panzer division, an independent, combined-arms unit, capable of creating a breakthrough and then exploiting the success, by delivering its firepower deeper in the enemy lines, in the second and third line of defense, faster than the defender's reserves could plug the gap. This was possible before and after WWI (the western front). There wasn't a German blitzkrieg doctrine. The command and control paralysis, the logistics disruption, the panic, the will to fight etc were merely by-products of extraordinary success.

The point here is that it was the Germans who did it first not because they invented anything like a blitzkrieg doctrine, but because Guderian was clever enough to organize the formation of the German Panzer arm, faster than the Allies. And this is not represented in the game. You simply can't exploit a breakthrough in the game. And this is the real issue here."


P.S. I think all discussions relating to this dubious feature should be made in this thread. I understand that the decision was made because the AI could not handle it? I am sure there is another way to keep everyone happy. At least make it moddable, so all of us who don't like playing in WWI terms can mod it.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I oposted this in the bug forum, but I might as well post it here...

OK, I have experimented with this and as a human player you can sadly break this system many times over and the AI will never have a chance to combat it. Here are my reasons... and I will also conclude with giving you an optional system that should work within the current game system framework.

As a player you can always create one brigade or small mobile division on the offense to act as the initial attack, it is also possible to detach a brigade from a division who initiate the attack (they are also useful to open up new wider combat fronts). This would preferably be a light armor, motorized or mechanized brigade. Only this brigade will get the attack delay when finished, all the rest are support attack and will not move until the attack is concluded. The fast brigade will make sure that it probably will arrive once the attack are finished, the rest use strategic redeploy to quickly move into the new province. this can be repeated over and over as much as you like and the AI can simply not cope with it and will never take advantage of it as a player will.

The same hold true when you defend. You could potentially delay the entire Russian army front for months with just a couple of militia divisions divided up in brigade size. They engage and a couple of hours later you disengage and retreat one province. With just a few Militia divisions (with brigades you can have a two or three deep defense line where the brigade leapfrog and retreat and each time it will take the opponent a week (for some slightly less, depending on technology) to wait until they can attack again. I'm pretty sure any multiplayer game would result in a grudge-match. Imagine how easy it will be for the Russian player to spam every province at least five provinces deep with Militia brigades. In the meant time you could have your killer army of panzer punching through somewhere and easily encircling the enemy and destroy then in force.

Granted that single brigades will be easy meat by bombers, but when you have a two hundred militia brigades spread over two hundred provinces this will not make much of a difference anyway and they will be quickly reinforced anyway. Even if the Militia brigades are destroyed it will matter quite little to your industry.

This could all be fixed by a very simple solution. Make unit organization directly tie into the units movement capabilities. If a unit has lost 10% ORG it moves 10% slower and have a 10% slower attack speed. This should solve this whole issue completely.
Also make it so that both strategic and movement give some small ORG loss to units. Where movement into unopposed enemy territory give you at least twice as much ORG loss as it does when moving in friendly territory.
Partisan movement could perhaps also give a slightly higher ORG loss if it is high enough. This would make MP more valuable in bottlenecks and along important movement routes.
Embarking and disembarking a unit from ships should give a considerable ORG loss, somewhere around 10 would be appropriate in my opinion (marine maybe half that) and double that if they disembark into a province without a port.

The conclusion are that the current system can be broken in so many ways it is not funny. And once people realizes this they will be really annoyed in multiplayer unless they agree not to employ these horrible tactics. Me personally would never use such gamy tactics even against the AI.
In HoI2 the system worked somewhat better, but only because the number of provinces were so few in comparison.

I currently play that I can't strategically deploy into newly conquered provinces and I would never use the horrible stalling tactic. I never disengage my divisions until they lost at least 50-75% of it's ORG. But I should not have to play with these house rules to overcome a design flaw in the game.

Overall this game have the real potential to become one of the exceptional classics on my gaming shelf. I just hope you will be able to iron out some of these problems for me and all the other players out there.

 

[Laurwin]

I oposted this in the bug forum, but I might as well post it here...

I think you can even slow down all defending and defending RESERVES (combat reserves I mean) with the attack delay if you counter attack with a militia brigade against a panzer army for example. IIRC something like this happened to my panzer corps when I was playing HoI3 a while ago (the game crashed though and I hadn't saved )

I mean, I was attacking with a panzer corps against republican Spain positions as Germany, once my panzer divisions had finally finished their attack move into the Spanish province, a nearby Spanish infantry brigade's move order turned into an attack order. Sure enough, the defensive combat was short indeed, Spanish took around 200 casualties and I didn't lose a single man! Yet I get delayed again. :wacko:

but I suppose someone could doublecheck this in game as well, and verify if this is indeed what happens.

 

[Lordban]

One thing to remember about the uses of Strat-Redeploy: it will give an attack delay in 1.2.

As to counterattacks, I suspect they stop the decay of the running attack delay.

 

[Tharkun]

This could all be fixed by a very simple solution. Make unit organization directly tie into the units movement capabilities. If a unit has lost 10% ORG it moves 10% slower and have a 10% slower attack speed. This should solve this whole issue completely.
Also make it so that both strategic and movement give some small ORG loss to units. Where movement into unopposed enemy territory give you at least twice as much ORG loss as it does when moving in friendly territory.
Partisan movement could perhaps also give a slightly higher ORG loss if it is high enough. This would make MP more valuable in bottlenecks and along important movement routes.
Embarking and disembarking a unit from ships should give a considerable ORG loss, somewhere around 10 would be appropriate in my opinion (marine maybe half that) and double that if they disembark into a province without a port.

I love your ideas! I had something similar in my mind. This solution is so simple and elegant, I will be surprised if Paradox does not introduce it in the next patch. It solves both gamey exploits and AI ineptness.

 

[Gregorovitch]

So glad I found this thread - I've been going mad for a week trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with my Arm divs stuck for days after each attack. I've spent hours trying to find an explanation in the manual to no avail - now, finally, I know why.

I completely agree with the OP and most all of the supporting comments in this thread, so i won't reiterate them all. There are a couple of additional points I can't recall being made in the thread as whole:

This rule seriously interferes with the new command structure system IMO. I have struggled for days to find a way to keep an attack moving, and the only way I can find is to team up corps roughly in pairs, so one attacks and advances, then it's buddy moves up and attacks the next province while the first one waits out this enforced rest etc. Unfortunately I found in practice that any semblance of organization (in the command structure sense) dissolves pretty quickly as you disparately search round for a division, *any* division, that is not sitting moribund and available to maintain an attack momentum. The game just becomes a juggling act between generic counters on the board, since the only thing that really matters is managing this waiting time problem.

I'm not an expert on HoI2 (I only came to these games 6 months ago), but as I understand the HoI2 rules, the ability of armoured divisions to run riot in shift-click multiple attacks was restricted not only by unit organisation level but also by Transport Capacity which effectively limited the number of armoured divs you could realistically support and gave you a sort of limited "movement budget" at any one time. HoI3 does not appear to have a TC system.

There has only ever been one mildly successful WW1 computer war game IIRC (History Line 1914-1918) and that, although fun, was really an arcade game not a proper war game. There is a reason for this. Playing out huge grinding wars of attrition on long fronts is BORING. We like WW2 because of tanks and planes and mobile armoured warfare. This rule has taken all the fun out of the game.

I am actually quite angry about this. Playing my first 1936 Germany game, I spent all the time necessary to figure out the new tech systems, replay the whole thing when I discovered there was no gearing bonuses for serial production etc, struggled for hours to figure out the new HQ organization system and experiment a bit with the AI assistance features and worked hard to understand how the new front size rules would impact deployment policy and battle tactics.

Having done all that I carefully deployed my forces for the Poland attack for Guderian, Rommel et al in their shiny new Panzer divisions (that I had painstakingly researched and built) to break the Polish lines in selected places and slice up the country in a few days. It took weeks and neither Rommel or Guderain could ever get more than one province or so ahead of the infantry. Since I had tried this on version 1.0 earlier from the 1939 start where it did work properly, I though I had just made a mistake.

Moved everyone over for France, and the same thing happened and I retried several times. I became increasingly frustrated, and eventually found this thread that explained what's going on. So I experimented with various systems but, as I say, they all revolve around treating units as generic counters that are either "on" or "off" according to this rule as that is far more important than the composition, leadership or experience of any individual unit in pressing an attack under this system. Which is very unsatisfying.

I appreciate that the new command structure and AI assistance mechanisms in HoI3 are groundbreaking innovations in war gaming that may make this a landmark game, but please, Paradox, can you respond to this issue and tell us what you are going to do about it? My enthusiasm for HoI3 has taken a severe beating over this, and the fact that the problem is undocumented makes me a little angry as well.

 

[Tharkun]

I completely agree. At least someone from Paradox should tell us what the company is doing or intends to do about it in the next patch. Several suggestions for resolving this weird design decision have been made in this thread and others.

 

[AlanC9]

I'm not an expert on HoI2 (I only came to these games 6 months ago), but as I understand the HoI2 rules, the ability of armoured divisions to run riot in shift-click multiple attacks was restricted not only by unit organisation level but also by Transport Capacity which effectively limited the number of armoured divs you could realistically support and gave you a sort of limited "movement budget" at any one time. HoI3 does not appear to have a TC system.

It's now called the supply system.

Playing my first 1936 Germany game, I spent all the time necessary to figure out the new tech systems, replay the whole thing when I discovered there was no gearing bonuses for serial production etc.

Gosh, think of all the time you would have saved had you only looked at page 28 of the manual.